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Introduction | History of Logical Positivism | Criticisms of Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism (later also known as Logical Empiricism) is a theory in Epistemology and Logic that developed out of Positivism and the early Analytic Philosophy movement, and which campaigned for a systematic reduction of all human knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. Thus, a statement is meaningful only if it is either purely formal (essentially, mathematics and logic) or capable of empirical verification.

This effectively resulted in an almost complete rejection by Logical Positivists of Metaphysics (and to a large extent Ethics) on the grounds that it is unverifiable. Its influence in 20th Century Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, however, has been profound.

Most early Logical Positivists asserted that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. They supported forms of Materialism, Naturalism and Empiricism, and, in particular, they strongly supported the verifiability criterion of meaning ( Verificationism), the doctrine that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false.

Logical Positivism was also committed to the idea of "Unified Science", or the development of a common language in which all scientific propositions can be expressed, usually by means of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one science to the terms of another (putatively more fundamental) one.

The main tenets of the doctrine include:

The opposition to all Metaphysics, especially ontology (the study of reality and the nature of being), not as necessarily wrong but as having no meaning.

The rejection of synthetic a priori propositions (e.g. "All bachelors are happy"), which are, by their nature, unverifiable (as opposed to analytic statements, which are true simply by virtue of their meanings e.g. "All bachelors are unmarried").

A criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work, (essentially, that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and that thoughts, and the language used to express those thoughts, are pictures or representations of how things are in the world).

The idea that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science, and the associated ongoing project of "rational reconstruction", in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language.

The most important early figures in Logical Positivism were the Bohemian-Austrian Positivist philosopher Ernst Mach (1838 - 1916) and the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (especially his "Tractatus" of 1921, a text of great importance for Logical Positivists).

Logical Positivism in Germany rose in response to the Metaphysics of Georg Hegel, which was the dominant philosophical view in Germany at the time, particularly the rejection of his concept of metaphysical entities that did not have any empirical basis.

It grew from the discussions of the so-called "Vienna Circle" of Moritz Schlick (1882 - 1936) in the early 20th Century. A 1929 pamphlet jointly written by Otto Neurath (1882 - 1945), Hans Hahn (1979 - 1934) and Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970) brought together some of the major proponents of the movement and summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that time. The contemporaneous Berlin Circle of Hans Reichenbach (1891 - 1953) also propagated the new doctrines more widely in the 1920s and early 1930s.

A. J. Ayer is considered responsible for the spread of Logical Positivism to Britain, and his 1936 book "Language, Truth and Logic" was very influential. Developments in logic and the foundations of mathematics, especially in the "Principia Mathematica" by the British philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, particularly impressed the more mathematically-minded Logical Positivists.

The movement dispersed in the late 1930's, mainly because of political upheaval and the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. Logical Positivism was essential to the development of early Analytic Philosophy, with which it effectively merged.

There were many internal arguments within the Logical Positivism movement, which in reality was only ever a loose collective of philosophers holding a wide range of beliefs on many matters, although with certain principles in common.

Critics have argued that Logical Positivism's insistence on the strict adoption of the verifiability criterion of meaning (the requirement for a non-analytic, meaningful sentence to be either verifiable or falsifiable) is problematic, as the criterion itself is unverifiable, especially for negative existential claims and positive universal claims.

Karl Popper (1902 - 1994) disagreed with the logical positivist position that metaphysical statements must be meaningless, and further argued that a metaphysical statement can change its unfalsifiable status over time - what may be "unfalsifiable" in one century may become "falsifiable" (and thus "scientific") in another.

A. J. Ayer responded to the charge of unverifiability by claiming that, although almost any statement (except a tautology or logical truth) is unverifiable in the strong sense, there is a weak sense of verifiability in which a proposition is verifiable if it is possible for experience to render it probable. This defense, however, was controversial among Logical Positivists, some of whom stuck to strong verification, and insisted that general propositions were indeed nonsense.

Hilary Putnam (1926 - ) has argued that making a distinction between "observational" and "theoretical" is meaningless. W. V. O. Quine has criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and the reduction of meaningful statements to immediate experience. Thomas Kuhn (1922 - 1996) has argued that it is just not possible to provide truth conditions for science, independent of its historical paradigm.

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Logical Positivism - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy

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Philosophy: Epistemology > Logical Positivism

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(This summary was produced for my introductory classes)
Logical Positivism, A. J. Ayer - Summary
©Peter Sjöstedt-H

- Logical Positivism, also known as Logical Empiricism, is a philosophy developed in the early 20th Century, notably by Moritz Schlick. It was also, amongst others, influenced by the work of Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951).

- One of the most important Logical Positivists was A. J. Ayer who, in 1936, released his groundbreaking book, ' Language, Truth and Logic '.

- The other leading Logical Positivist, Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) was called to Vienna University in 1922. Other logical positivists gathered around him here, something which led to 'the Vienna Circle': a group associated with logical positivism.

- The philosophy that is Logical Positivism has many far-reaching implications regarding ethics, aesthetics and theology.

- The main tenet of logical positivism is that language causes many illusions. When we properly analyze a proposition, we find that some are literally nonsense.

They can be neither true nor false, and are thus grammatical trickery.

This too applies to questions: some are meaningless (e.g. "Does God exist?")

Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
- Ayer begins his book by accusing metaphysicians of making sentences which have no meaning.

- He says that for a sentence to be literally significant, meaningful, it must conform to certain criteria.

Ayer goes on to formulate this criteria, he calls it the criterion of verifiability:

- 'We say that a sentence is factually significant [meaningful] ... if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.' (p.16)

i.e. a sentence only has meaning if it can be proved true or false by observation.

- Thus, a question is genuine only if it can be observed true or false.

- It is important to note that a sentence's observation should at least be possible in principle. This gives it genuiness: verifiable in principle.

Ayer's example is the proposition 'that there are mountains on the farther side of the moon.' (p.17)

Although (at the time) that proposition was not observed/verified, it was still verifiable in principle: it was a possibility that the farther side of the moon could be observed.
Therefore the proposition was meaningful: it was in principle able to give a truth or falsity, even though it had not done so at the time. It was verifiable in principle, if not in practice.

- An example of a proposition that is meaningless would be, say, " God works in mysterious ways."

This proposition is not verifiable even in principle.

What observations could prove it either true or false? None. It is therefore a meaningless proposition.

- Further qualifying his verification principle, Ayer distinguishes between strong and weak verifiability.

'A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable.' (p. 18)

- Schlick adopted the strong sense.

- Ayer adopts the weaker sense for the following reasons:

Universal Propositions ("all")

Scientific laws, i.e. propositions such as 'arsenic is poisonous', 'all men are mortal', 'a body tends to expand when heated', all are true only by induction.
We could never observe every incident of arsenic intake; it cannot be verified conclusively to be true but only probable.

Some logical positivists have therefore said that such proposition are, in fact, nonsense (albeit an important type of nonsense!)

But Ayer, adopting weak verification, does not consider them nonsense because they are in principle possible to observe to be true or false to a high probability.

Historical Propositions

Another reason Ayer adopts the weaker sense is because of propositions about the past.

How could one verify that England was conquered in 1066 by the Normans, through observation?!

Ayer states that through historical records, archeological finds, geological studies, historical events can be at least rendered highly probable (but never certain).
Propositions about the past are thus verifiable through records, etc., and although this is weak verifiability, it is not nonsense.

- 'Accordingly, we fall back on the weaker sense of verification. We say that the question that must be asked about any putative statement of fact is not, Would any observation make its truth or falsehood logically certain? But simply, Would any observations be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood? And it is only if a negative answer is given to this second question that we conclude that the statement under consideration is nonsensical.' (p. 20)

- Ayer calls verifiable propositions experiential propositions.

- There is another type of proposition that is also meaningful, however, but not experiential, and that is a tautology.

A tautology is where the predicate is already in the subject. It is thus an analysis of the subject and therefore also known as an analytic proposition.

E.g. "All bachelors are unmarried", "A square has four sides."

I.e. true by definition.

- ' Tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions' (p. 24)

- Ayer's next task, he says, is to show why nonsensical propositions come to be made.

- He says that language creates illusions which give people metaphysical beliefs.

He gives the example of the metaphysical term, 'substance'.

In our language we cannot speak about the properties of 'something' without introducing a word which appears to stand for thing itself (as opposed to anything that may be said about it).

I.e. when I speak about something, I can give all 'its' properties: (It is blue, hot, round, soft, etc.), but because our language must use the word 'its', one is led to believe that if one takes away all properties of that something, a kind of pure substance remains. The 'thing-in'itself'.

'It is true that in talking of "its" appearances we appear to distinguish the thing from the appearances, but that is simply an accident of linguistic usage ... the metaphysician fails to see this because he is misled by a superficial grammatical feature of his language.' (p. 25)

- So a proposition such as "Things-in-themselves have a noumenal existence" is nonsensical (as it is not verifiable in principle, nor tautological) and this is understandable because the metaphysician has been duped by grammar.

Nietzsche expounded this grammatical delusion 30 years before (1880s).

- Another example is that of 'being' or 'existence'

There have been many philosophical conjectures about the nature of existence.

Existential propositions have the same grammatical structure as attributive propositions:
"Martyrs exist" (e p) & "Martyrs suffer" (a p)

But, as Kant showed, existence is not an attribute. Existence is a covert assertion in an attributive proposition (it must exist to have an attribute).

If existence were an attribute it would mean that all existential propositions were tautologies (whose truth were not touched upon: anything could be asserted as existent: "spaghetti monsters exist"), and all negative existential properties would be self-contradictory ("The spaghetti monster doesn't exist" = contradiction if existence is an attribute of the subject.) This is not the case: the last proposition is not self-contradictory.

- [This grammatical point also does way with the famous 'ontological argument' for the necessary existence of God as propounded by St Anselm & Descartes.]

- 'The postulation of real non-existent entities results from the superstition ... that to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must somewhere be a real entity corresponding. For as there is no place in the empirical world for many of these "entities", a special non-empirical world is invoked to house them.' (p.27)

- This can apply to both theological propositions and ethical propositions.
Chapter 6: Critique of Ethics and Theology
- A. J. Ayer's Logical Positivism endorses a meta-ethic called Emotivism (developed later by C.L. Stevenson).

- His is a critique against normative ethics, prescriptive ethics. As such his account of ethics is also know as descriptive. It is a non-cognitive ethic.

I.e. his criticism of ethics leads to emotivism.

- Ayer begins by saying that there is a common supposition that our knowledge is of two kinds:

- Questions of value are questions about the value of actions (ethical value) and the value of art, beauty (things of aesthetic value).

- But this latter set of questions surely undermines the whole philosophy of logical positivism because a value proposition cannot be verified in principle (or by definition/analytically).

- Therefore, Ayer says he must give an account of propositions of value.

- He begins this account by generalizing that ethical (& aesthetic) propositions are not literally meaningful but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.

- As such, ethical philosophy only compromises meta-ethics - normative & practical ethics is an illusion.

- But the question now to be answered is: why are moral propositions not experiential propositions, propositions verifiable in principle?

Examples of moral propositions are, 'Murder is wrong,' 'Intolerance is a vice,' 'Humility is a virtue,' 'Meat-eating is evil,' etc.

- Of course, many philosophers and theologians believe that moral propositions are verifiable propositions. These philosophers are generally called moral realists, or cognitivists.

- I.e. they believe that morals are real, not merely expressions of emotion.

- Utilitarianism and deontology are both types of moral realism, both normative ethics.

- Ayer also rejects subjectivism.

Subjectivism states that an action is morally right, or a thing is good, if it is generally approved of. Therefore a moral proposition is verifiable: is it true or false that it is generally approved of.

E.g. "Theft is wrong"

I could verify that most people approve that proposition.

But that would actually be verifying the proposition, '"Theft is wrong" is a belief generally disapproved of.' -This is not a moral proposition, but a statistical proposition.

"Theft is wrong" by itself could not be verified true or false by any observation. It is therefore nonsense.

- Likewise Utilitarian Propositions, such as "democracy is good", cannot be verified and are not tautologies; they are therefore meaningless as well.

They do not propose facts that can be verified.

- Ayer makes it clear that he is only concerned with normative, prescriptive, ethical propositions; not descriptive ethical propositions.

"x is wrong" could describe the beliefs of a particular society and therefore be a verifiable proposition. Maybe "x is wrong" is not a belief in the society.

But if one takes "x is wrong" as a prescription, a normative ethic, it is not verifiable and therefore nonsense.

Ayer is therefore concerned with properly refuting normative ethics.

- Intuitionism is a normative ethic Ayer criticizes.

Intuitionism states that we know what is 'good' or 'moral' or 'wrong' because we have a feeling, an intuition, that it is. "I just know it's wrong"

But that is obviously unverifiable because what one persons 'knows' to be right may be 'known' to be wrong to another person.
E.g. the right to an abortion (good or bad?).

- Furthermore, it is impossible to verify whether one intuition is 'true' thereby validating that belief over another with a conflicting belief.

I could never verify that my belief - that the right to an abortion is good - is true or false.

It is simply a nonsensical proposition.

- 'the fundamental ethical concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur.' (pp109/110)

- So the question now emerges as to why we in fact do express prescriptive moral propositions if they are all nonsense.

- The addition of an ethical word in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content.

Thus when one says "You acted wrongly in stealing that money" you are not saying anything more than "You stole that money".

The word "Wrongly" adds nothing to the proposition in terms of factual content.

- The addition of the word "wrongly" simply emphasizes one's disapproval of it.

It would be exactly the same as saying "You stole that money" in a peculiar tone of horror, or writing it with many exclamation marks.

The tone, or exclamation marks, add nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence.

- The moral word, the tone, or the exclamation marks serve to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker/writer.

'[By saying] "stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning - that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "stealing money!!" ... Another man may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing ... but he cannot, strictly speaking, contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement ... So that there is plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is asserting a genuine proposition.' (pp.110-111)

- Because a moral proposition is not a factual statement, no morals can be right or wrong. Right and wrong are not things that can be experienced.

- What is said of the words wrong and right can be applied to every moral word: good, evil, virtue, vice, sin, moral, ought, should, ethical, etc.

- 'In every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgement, the function of the relevant ethical word is purely "emotive". ' (p111)

Therefore Ayer's meta-ethics is known as emotivism.

- Ayer moves on to say that an emotional function is not only to express feeling.

Ethical terms also can have the emotional function of arousing feeling, rather than just expressing one's own.
E.g. "It was so evil of him to do that" ("evil" used to arouse anger in other person as well)

Moreover, some ethical terms are used in order to command.
E.g. "It is your duty to tell the truth" acts as an expression of the command "tell the truth" (Deontology).

- Indeed, the ethical words we use are used to convey the strength of the command.

"You ought to tell the truth" is a less emphatic command.

"It is good to tell the truth" is even less emphatic.

- 'we may define the meaning of the various ethical words in terms both of the different feelings they are ordinarily to express, and also the different responses which they are calculated to provoke.' (p111)

- - One must be careful not to confuse the expression of feeling and the valuative assertion of feeling.

It can be verifiable that one actually has a feeling. Therefore this would be a meaningful proposition.

But is that feeling cannot be verified to be 'good' or 'bad', or whatever moral term one chooses.

E.g. It is a fact that someone has an aggressive feeling. However, this cannot be factually proved to be good or bad. It may be deemed good in some warrior societies but deemed bad in civilized societies.

When Richard Dawkins asserts that we have altruism due to evolution, he makes the erroneous logical leap in positing altruism as therefore being 'good'. But this is not a proposition that has any meaning. It just reflects his feelings about altruism. We have aggression due to evolution as well - is that therefore necessarily also a 'good' thing?! Dawkins uses a hidden morality behind his own.

- We often feel that our own social morality is superior to others; but this is merely an expression of feeling never fact.

'We feel that our own system of values is superior ... But we cannot bring forward any arguments to show that our system is superior ... we finally resort to mere abuse.' (p. 115)

- Why we have these differing feelings about our values is a question for psychologists and sociologists, not philosophers.

- Having said this, Ayer presents a brief psychology of the matter.

One of the main causes of moral behaviour is fear (conscious or subconscious).
Fear of God, of the law, of the enmity of society, etc.

Another cause is a society's belief in the cause of its own happiness.

It encourages behaviour conducive to its believed happiness

This is why altruism is recommended in most moral codes, and egotism condemned.

- However, any proposition that stated altruism to be good, or egotism to be bad, would be committing an error. The propositions could never be verified.

- All morality is therefore emotions/desires expressed as facts: Emotivism.

- [I.e. Morality can therefore be seen as a power system, used to control people according to one's, or a society's, will.]

[cf. Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, etc]

Critique of Theology (Ch. 6 continued)

- Ayer continues his chapter by claiming that religious propositions are also insignificant/meaningless/nonsense because they neither can be verified as true or false.

- He begins this section by refuting Kant's claim that God can be inferred to exist because of the existence of a world of morals.

As morals are not facts, one cannot prove God exists from them.

- Ayer then refutes the ontological argument by saying that, as an a priori argument, any uncertainty about the premise must be shared by the conclusion, as the latter is deduced solely from the former.

Descartes: God is perfect; God is perfect; a perfect being must have existence; therefore God exists.

'God is perfect' is unverifiable thus nonsense. Therefore the rest of the argument fails as its basis is withdrawn.

- Ayer then states that although it is generally acknowledged that the ontological argument fails, many people believe that it is at least possible to prove that God probably, if not definitely, exists.

But Ayer says that it is not possible to prove that God probably exists, because the proposition 'God exists' is unverifiable. Therefore, there is no probability that this alleged proposition of fact can be verified true.

The proposition, 'Aliens exist,' is verifiable. We could, in principle discover alien life. Therefore, when people say that aliens probably exist, though we cannot be certain, they are still making a meaningful statement.

There is thus a vast difference between the validity of the propositions, 'God exists' and 'Aliens exist'. The latter is verifiable in principle.

- Ayer moves on to the teleological argument.

'It is sometimes claimed, indeed, that the existence of a certain regularity in nature constitutes sufficient evidence for the existence of a god.' (p. 120)

This belief is often called creationism, or intelligent design. That, because of the complexities of life, organisms, a God, designer, must exist to have created it.

This belief is shared by 45% of the USA's population (in 2006).

But, Ayer indicates that this belief, proposition, is unverifiable. It is verifiable that there is order in nature. But it is not verifiable in principle to prove that an ordered world was designed by a god. Let alone a particular religion's god.

- Interestingly, Ayer goes on to say that 'It is important not to confuse this [his] view of religious assertions with the view that is adopted by atheists, or agnostics.' (p.120)

- So, it would be wrong to say that logical positivism is necessarily atheistic, even though it claims religious assertions are all nonsense...

- If the theist's assertion/proposition that God exists is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion, that there is no God, is also nonsensical.

God's existence can neither be proved nor disproved, therefore the atheist's proposition (there is no God) is also meaningless: what could be used to verify the proposition as true or false? - Nothing.

Bertrand Russell acknowledged this fact and subsequently called himself a

'tea-pot agnostic':

We cannot prove that God does not exist, but neither can we not prove that a tea-pot does not orbit the earth.

(Richard Dawkins follows by saying that we cannot prove that the spaghetti monster exists, or that tooth-fairies do not exist. He calls himself a 'tooth-fairy agnostic'.)

- Ayer however criticizes agnostics because,

"although he refrains from saying either that there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that the question whether a transcendent god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two sentences 'There is a transcendent god' and 'There is o transcendent god' express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false ... this means that agnosticism is also ruled out." (p. 121)

i.e. An agnostic believes it is possible to one day prove God does or does not exist. Therefore he sits on the fence until that day! Ayer says the proposition is unverifiable in principle and so the agnostic will be sitting there forever.

- So the beliefs of moralists, theists, atheists and agnostics are all meaningless.

- Ayer shows that, as with the moralists, their assertions are all expressions of feeling. They do not offer meaningful knowledge about the world, only about their psychological and sociological make-up.

- Although Ayer says that logical positivism is not atheism, he nonetheless directs his attack against religion. His point is that religion does not give knowledge about the universe, but neither does atheism. In fact, the very name, 'atheism,' really means lack of belief, a non-belief rather than a positive new belief.

'The point which we wish to establish is that there cannot be any transcendent [non-empirical] truths of religion.'(p. 123)

- But then, Ayer writes, ' An interesting feature of this conclusion is that it accords with what many theists are accustomed to say themselves. For we are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends the human understanding.' (p.123/4)

- Ayer talks about 'mystical intuition', a view held by people such as William James, and Swedenborg. That they have mystical experiences about, say, God; but that their experience is unintelligible, incomprehensible: beyond normal understanding and thus indescribable.

But, 'If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then we must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.' (p.124)

- Now, a mystical intuitionist may object that he himself, through his intuition, has verified that his experience is real, and therefore that his assertions are not nonsense, but meaningful.

- Ayer responds by saying that no-one is denying that the intuitionist has had some unusual 'mystical' experience. This can arguably be verified (nowadays) through brain scans, etc. But the man who says that he is seeing God is saying not merely that he is experiencing a religious emotion, but also that there exists a transcendent being who is the object of this emotion. This latter assertion of veridicality cannot be verified, and so is nonsense.

Someone may assert that he sees a blue patch and also assert that this seeing corresponds to a real blue patch in the world. So his proposition that the blue patch exists is verifiable.

Someone may assert that he sees God and also that this seeing corresponds to a real God that exists. Although the first part may be verifiable, the second is not verifiable.
There are two assertions: having a sensation & that the sensation corresponds a to a real object.

The point is that although someone may actually have strange mystical visions of God, angels, or whatever; this vision does not prove that it is actually a vision of something real. It could simply be a hallucination, a dream, or a brain malfunction.

Nobody contends that the experiences we have in dreams correspond to real things. Someone having a 'mystical experience' may as well say that they are having a strong dream.

- 'The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge, any more than our having moral experiences implies that there is such a thing as moral knowledge.' (p. 126)

When asked later in life, in 1978, what the main shortcomings of Logical Positivism were, Ayer replied that except for the Emotivism part,
"nearly all of it is false!"
(Ayer on Logical Positivism, Men of Ideas, Bryan Magee. BBC. 1978)

---

©Peter Sjöstedt-H

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Logical Positivism

(Also known as logical empiricism, logical neopositivism, neopositivism). A school of philosophy which arose in Austria and Germany during 1920s, primarily concerned with the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. Among its members were Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, the leading figure of logical positivism, Hans Reichenbach, founder of the Berlin Circle, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Grelling, Hans Hahn, Carl Gustav Hempel, Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann.

Logical positivists denied the soundness of metaphysics and traditional philosophy; they asserted that many philosophical problems are indeed meaningless. During 1930s the most important representatives of logical positivism emigrated to USA, where they influenced American philosophy. Until 1950s logical positivism was the leading philosophy of science; today its influence persists especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention given to the analysis of scientific thought and in the definitely acquired results of the technical researches on formal logic and the theory of probability.

THE MAIN PHILOSOPHICAL TENETS OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM.

According to logical positivism, there are only two sources of knowledge: logical reasoning and empirical experience. The former is analytic a priori, while the latter is synthetic a posteriori; hence synthetic a priori does not exist.

The fundamental thesis of modern empiricism [i.e. logical positivism] consists in denying the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge.
(H. Hahn, O. Neurath, R. Carnap, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, 1929).
Logical knowledge includes mathematics, which is reducible to formal logic. Empirical knowledge includes physics, biology, psychology, etc. Experience is the only judge of scientific theories; however, logical positivists were aware that scientific knowledge does not exclusively rise from the experience: scientific theories are genuine hypotheses that go beyond the limits of finite human experience.
It is not possible to establish a logically durable building on verifications [a verification is an observational statement about immediate perception], for they are already vanished when the building begins. If they were, with respect to time, at the beginning of the knowledge, then they would be logically useless. On the contrary, there is a great difference when they are at the end of the process: with their help the test is performed... From a logical point of view, nothing depends on them: they are not premises but a firm end point.
(M. Schlick, '&Uumlber das Fundament der Erkenntnis', inErkenntnis, 4, 1934).
A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in principle, by means of the experience -- this assertion is called the verifiability principle [aka the "verifiability criterion of meanng"] . The meaning of a statement is its method of verification; that is we know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false.
When are we sure that the meaning of a question is clear? Obviously if and only if we are able to exactly describe the conditions in which it is possible to answer yes, or, respectively, the conditions in which it is necessary to answer with a no. The meaning of a question is thus defined only through the specification of those conditions...
The definition of the circumstances under which a statement is true is perfectlyequivalent to the definition of its meaning.
... a statement has a meaning if and only if the fact that it is true makes a verifiable difference.
(M. Schlick, 'Positivismus und Realismus' in Erkenntnis, 3, 1932).
Metaphysical statements are not empirically verifiable and are thus forbidden: they are meaningless. The only role of philosophy is the clarification of the meaning of statements and their logical interrelationships. There is no distinct "philosophical knowledge" over and above the analytic knowledge provided by the formal disciplines of logic and mathematics and the empirical knowledge provided by the sciences.
Philosophy is the activity by means of which the meaning of statements is clarified and defined.
(M. Schlick, 'Die Wende der Philosophie' in Erkenntnis, 1, 1930).
A scientific theory is an axiomatic system that obtains an empirical interpretation through appropriate statements called rules of correspondence, which establish a correlation between real objects (or real processes) and the abstract concepts of the theory. The language of a theory includes two kinds of terms: observational and theoretical. The statements of a theory are divided in two groups: analytic and synthetic. Observational terms denote objects or properties that can be directly observed or measured, while theoretical terms denote objects or properties we cannot observe or measure but we can only infer from direct observations. Analytic statements are a priori and their truth is based on the rules of the language; on the contrary, synthetic statements depend on experience, and their truth can be acknowledged only by means of the experience. This conception about the structure of scientific theories is perhaps the most durable philosophical principle of the logical positivism.
Its main points are:

the distinction between observational and theoretical terms

the distinction between synthetic and analytic statements

the distinction between theoretical axioms and rules of correspondence

the deductive nature of scientific theories

These four points are linked together. Rules of correspondence give an empirical meaning to theoretical terms and are analytic, while theoretical axioms express the observational portion of the theory and are synthetic. A theory must be a deductive system; otherwise, a formal distinction between the various kinds of sentences and terms is impossible.
The distinction between observational and theoretical terms depends on the verifiability criterion of meaning. A statement is meaningful only if it is verifiable; but, in scientific theories, there are many statements which are not verifiable -- for example, assertions dealing with quantum particles or relativistic gravitational fields. These statements are too "theoretical" for a direct test; strictly speaking, they are meaningless.

To avoid such a consequence, one could either deny that these were statements, or one could try to "reduce" the "theoretical terms" to "observational terms." The theoretical terms which belong to the abstract language of a scientific theory are explicitly definable in a restricted language whose terms describe only that which is directly observable. So a distinction between observational and theoretical terms arose. But soon Carnap realized that theoretical terms are not definable by observational ones. In a first time, he proposed a partial reducibility of theoretical to observational terms ('Testability and meaning', in Philosophy of science, 3, 1936 and 4, 1937). Later, it was supposed that all theoretical terms were removable from a scientific theory. This hypothesis was supported by two outcomes of formal logic: Craig's theorem and Ramsey statements.

Craig's theorem is an unquestionable result of formal logic. According to this theorem, it is possible to translate a scientific theory in a purely observational language without any loss of deductive power. Ramsey sentences, named after English philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930), were used by Carnap for dividing the axioms of a theory in two sets, say A and R. Set R contains only statements which contain purely observational terms and expresses the empirical portion of the theory, the "observational data." Set A consists of analytic statements and defines the meaning of theoretical terms. Given a typical scientific theory T containing both observational and theoretical terms, it is thus possible to rationally reconstruct that theory as theory T* which contains no theoretical terms, such that T and T* are equivalent with respect to all observational statements that can be deduced from the avxioms of T*.

[While the analysis of relationships between the two kinds of terms began the object of many logical and philosophical studies, the distinction itself was criticized. According to Popper all scientific concepts are theoretical, for every assertion not only entails hypotheses but also is hypothetical, that is not sure and always falsifiable. Quine ('Two dogmas of empiricism' in The Philosophical Review, 60, 1951) criticized both observational-theoretical and analytic-synthetic distinction. Hempel ('The theoretician's dilemma' in Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, II, 1958) noted that the theory T* without theoretical terms, in spite of the equivalence (with respect to the observational language) to the original theory T, is not useful as T. In fact, from an inductive point of view, T and T* are very different. Usually the original theory T suggests certain relations between its concepts, while in T* these concepts are forbidden. The discovery of laws is almost impossible in T*, while it is a natural consequence in T. Moreover, while the number of the axioms of T usually is finite, Craig's theorem does not assure us of the existence of a theory T* with a finite number of axioms. So T* is almost useless. Theoretical terms are thus necessary in science.]

In Philosophical foundations of physics, 1966, Carnap proposed a slightly different approach to observational-theoretical distinction. Now the starting-point is the difference between empirical and theoretical laws. It is possible to directly confirm (or disprove) an empirical law, while a theoretical law can be tested only through the empirical laws that are among its consequences. Moreover, an empirical law explains facts while a theoretical law explains empirical laws. Thus there are three levels:

a) Empirical facts: these are expressed by direct "observation reports"
b) Empirical laws: Simple generalizations we can directly confirm by observation. They explain facts and are employed to predict empirical facts by deducing observation statements from laws and statements of initial conditions..
c) Theoretical laws: General principles we can use to explain empirical laws:al laws by deducing the empirical laws from such theoretical statements.
Empirical laws include only observational terms, while theoretical terms occur in theoretical laws.
The distinction between analytic and synthetic statements is another consequence of the verifiability principle and it is linked with the observational-theoretical as well as axioms-rules of correspondence distinction. According to the verifiability principle, an alleged synthetic a priori statement does not have a meaning; thus there are only two kinds of assertions: synthetic a posteriori and analytic a priori. What is the role of analytic sentences in a scientific theory? Only two possibilities are allowed: an analytic statement is a logical-mathematical theorem (thus it has no empirical significance) or it is a convention that defines the meaning of theoretical terms.

There is an explicit assumption in logical positivism's analysis of science: a theory is a deductive system. This means that pragmatic aspects are not considered. Moreover, neopositivism was not interested in the real process of discovering, but it was concerned with the rational reconstruction of scientific knowledge, that is it dealt withlogical (formal) relationships between statements in a given theory.

According to logical positivism, there is not any method of discovering a hypothesis prior to its test by deducing empirical consequences, and therefore a scientist can propose any hypothesis he prefers; only logical relationships between the hypothesis and the given empirical evidence are relevant. But there were some problems with this conception of science. First of all, the relation between empirical experience and theoretical principles is not a deductive one: observational statements do not imply theoretical axioms. Carnap argues that the relation is explicable with the help of the inductive logic.

Subsequent History of Logical Positivism:

The spread of logical positivism in USA came in the early 1930s. In 1929 and in 1932 Schlick was Visiting Professor at Stanford, while Feigl emigrated to USA in 1930, where he became lecturer (1931) and professor (1933) at the University of Iowa and afterwards at the University of Minnesota (1940). In 1932 the American Philosophical Association organized a discussion on the philosophy of logical positivism. In the same years several articles about logical positivism were published in American philosophical journals. In 1936 Schlick was murdered by a Nazi student at the University of Vienna. Between 1936 and 1940 several German and Austrian philosophers emigrated to USA: Carnap moved in 1936 to the University of Chicago, Reichenbach in 1938 to UCLA, Frank in 1938 (he became professor at Harvard University in 1939), Hempel in 1939 (City College of New York and in 1940 Queens College). Logical positivists found a favourable terrain in USA. They established solid relationships with American pragmatism; particularly Charles Morris took part to several neopositivist's projects. One of them was the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, primarily promoted by Neurath. Although the original project was never fully realized, many works were indeed published.

The English philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) played an important role in spreading logical positivism. His work Language, Truth and Logic, 1936, gained an immediate success. In that book, Ayer completely accepted both the verifiability principle and the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; hence he asserted that metaphysical sentences are meaningless. A direct influence was exerted by Waismann and Neurath who emigrated in England in 1937 and 1940 respectively.

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Logical Positivism (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Logical Positivism (Also known as logical empiricism, logical neopositivism, neopositivism). A school of philosophy which arose in Austria and Germany during 1920s, primarily concerned with the logical analysis of scientific knowledge.

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Social Research Methods - Knowledge Base - Positivism & Post-Positivism

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Let's start our very brief discussion of philosophy of science with a simple distinction between epistemology and methodology . The term epistemology comes from the Greek word epistêmê, their term for knowledge. In simple terms, epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge or of how we come to know.

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This is a personal site of Keith S. Taber to support teaching of educational research methods.

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Constructivism is a learning theory found in psychology which explains how people might acquire knowledge and learn. It therefore has direct application to education. The theory suggests that humans construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences. Constructivism is not a specific pedagogy. Piaget's theory of Constructivist learning has had wide ranging impact on learning theories and teaching methods in education and is an underlying theme of many education reform movements. Research support for constructivist teaching techniques has been mixed, with some research supporting these techniques and other research contradicting those results.

Resources

What is constructivism?

How does a constructivist approach differ from a traditional approach?

How to design student-centered constructivist learning activities

Examples & case studies

ICT for constructivist learning - K-12

ICT for constructivist learning - Teacher learning

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Constructivism is a learning theory found in psychology which explains how people might acquire knowledge and learn. It therefore has direct application to education. The theory suggests that humans construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences. Constructivism is not a specific pedagogy.

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Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

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Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

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In 1909, Taylor published " The Principles of Scientific Management." [1] In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand. A factory manager at that time had very little contact with the workers, and he left them on their own to produce the necessary product. There was no standardization, and a worker's main motivation was often continued employment, so there was no incentive to work as quickly or as efficiently as possible.

Taylor believed that all workers were motivated by money, so he promoted the idea of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." In other words, if a worker didn't achieve enough in a day, he didn't deserve to be paid as much as another worker who was highly productive.

With a background in mechanical engineering, Taylor was very interested in efficiency. While advancing his career at a U.S. steel manufacturer, he designed workplace experiments to determine optimal performance levels. In one, he experimented with shovel design until he had a design that would allow workers to shovel for several hours straight. With bricklayers, he experimented with the various motions required and developed an efficient way to lay bricks. And he applied the scientific method to study the optimal way to do any type of workplace task. As such, he found that by calculating the time needed for the various elements of a task, he could develop the "best" way to complete that task.

These "time and motion" studies also led Taylor to conclude that certain people could work more efficiently than others. These were the people whom managers should seek to hire where possible. Therefore, selecting the right people for the job was another important part of workplace efficiency. Taking what he learned from these workplace experiments, Taylor developed four principles of scientific management. These principles are also known simply as "Taylorism".

Four Principles of Scientific Management

Taylor's four principles are as follows:

1. Replace working by "rule of thumb," or simple habit and common sense, and instead use the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.

2. Rather than simply assign workers to just any job, match workers to their jobs based on capability and motivation, and train them to work at maximum efficiency.

3. Monitor worker performance, and provide instructions and supervision to ensure that they're using the most efficient ways of working.

4. Allocate the work between managers and workers so that the managers spend their time planning and training, allowing the workers to perform their tasks efficiently.

Critiques of Taylorism

Taylor's Scientific Management Theory promotes the idea that there is "one right way" to do something. As such, it is at odds with current approaches such as MBO (Management By Objectives), Continuous Improvement initiatives, BPR (Business Process Reengineering), and other tools like them. These promote individual responsibility, and seek to push decision making through all levels of the organization.

The idea here is that workers are given as much autonomy as practically possible, so that they can use the most appropriate approaches for the situation at hand. (Reflect here on your own experience - are you happier and more motivated when you're following tightly controlled procedures, or when you're working using your own judgment?) What's more, front line workers need to show this sort of flexibility in a rapidly-changing environment. Rigid, rules-driven organizations really struggle to adapt in these situations.

Teamwork is another area where pure Taylorism is in opposition to current practice. Essentially, Taylorism breaks tasks down into tiny steps, and focuses on how each person can do his or her specific series of steps best. Modern methodologies prefer to examine work systems more holistically in order to evaluate efficiency and maximize productivity. The extreme specialization that Taylorism promotes is contrary to modern ideals of how to provide a motivating and satisfying workplace.

Where Taylorism separates manual from mental work, modern productivity enhancement practices seek to incorporate worker's ideas, experience and knowledge into best practice. Scientific management in its pure form focuses too much on the mechanics, and fails to value the people side of work, whereby motivation and workplace satisfaction are key elements in an efficient and productive organization.

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Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management - Understanding Taylorism and Early Management Theory

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In 1909, Taylor published " The Principles of Scientific Management." [1] In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand.

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Management > Scientific Management

Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he described how the application of the scientific method to the management of workers greatly could improve productivity. Scientific management methods called for optimizing the way that tasks were performed and simplifying the jobs enough so that workers could be trained to perform their specialized sequence of motions in the one "best" way.

Prior to scientific management, work was performed by skilled craftsmen who had learned their jobs in lengthy apprenticeships. They made their own decisions about how their job was to be performed. Scientific management took away much of this autonomy and converted skilled crafts into a series of simplified jobs that could be performed by unskilled workers who easily could be trained for the tasks.

Taylor became interested in improving worker productivity early in his career when he observed gross inefficiencies during his contact with steel workers.

Soldiering

Working in the steel industry, Taylor had observed the phenomenon of workers' purposely operating well below their capacity, that is, soldiering. He attributed soldiering to three causes:

1. The almost universally held belief among workers that if they became more productive, fewer of them would be needed and jobs would be eliminated.

2. Non-incentive wage systems encourage low productivity if the employee will receive the same pay regardless of how much is produced, assuming the employee can convince the employer that the slow pace really is a good pace for the job. Employees take great care never to work at a good pace for fear that this faster pace would become the new standard. If employees are paid by the quantity they produce, they fear that management will decrease their per-unit pay if the quantity increases.

3. Workers waste much of their effort by relying on rule-of-thumb methods rather than on optimal work methods that can be determined by scientific study of the task.

To counter soldiering and to improve efficiency, Taylor began to conduct experiments to determine the best level of performance for certain jobs, and what was necessary to achieve this performance.

Time Studies

Taylor argued that even the most basic, mindless tasks could be planned in a way that dramatically would increase productivity, and that scientific management of the work was more effective than the "initiative and incentive" method of motivating workers. The initiative and incentive method offered an incentive to increase productivity but placed the responsibility on the worker to figure out how to do it.

To scientifically determine the optimal way to perform a job, Taylor performed experiments that he called time studies, (also known as time and motion studies). These studies were characterized by the use of a stopwatch to time a worker's sequence of motions, with the goal of determining the one best way to perform a job.

The following are examples of some of the time-and-motion studies that were performed by Taylor and others in the era of scientific management.

Pig Iron

If workers were moving 12 1/2 tons of pig iron per day and they could be incentivized to try to move 47 1/2 tons per day, left to their own wits they probably would become exhausted after a few hours and fail to reach their goal. However, by first conducting experiments to determine the amount of resting that was necessary, the worker's manager could determine the optimal timing of lifting and resting so that the worker could move the 47 1/2 tons per day without tiring.

Not all workers were physically capable of moving 47 1/2 tons per day; perhaps only 1/8 of the pig iron handlers were capable of doing so. While these 1/8 were not extraordinary people who were highly prized by society, their physical capabilities were well-suited to moving pig iron. This example suggests that workers should be selected according to how well they are suited for a particular job.

The Science of Shoveling

In another study of the "science of shoveling", Taylor ran time studies to determine that the optimal weight that a worker should lift in a shovel was 21 pounds. Since there is a wide range of densities of materials, the shovel should be sized so that it would hold 21 pounds of the substance being shoveled. The firm provided the workers with optimal shovels. The result was a three to four fold increase in productivity and workers were rewarded with pay increases. Prior to scientific management, workers used their own shovels and rarely had the optimal one for the job.

Bricklaying

Others performed experiments that focused on specific motions, such as Gilbreth's bricklaying experiments that resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of motions required to lay bricks. The husband and wife Gilbreth team used motion picture technology to study the motions of the workers in some of their experiments.

Taylor's 4 Principles of Scientific Management

After years of various experiments to determine optimal work methods, Taylor proposed the following four principles of scientific management:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

These principles were implemented in many factories, often increasing productivity by a factor of three or more. Henry Ford applied Taylor's principles in his automobile factories, and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and motion studies.

Drawbacks of Scientific Management

While scientific management principles improved productivity and had a substantial impact on industry, they also increased the monotony of work. The core job dimensions of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback all were missing from the picture of scientific management.

While in many cases the new ways of working were accepted by the workers, in some cases they were not. The use of stopwatches often was a protested issue and led to a strike at one factory where "Taylorism" was being tested. Complaints that Taylorism was dehumanizing led to an investigation by the United States Congress. Despite its controversy, scientific management changed the way that work was done, and forms of it continue to be used today.

Management > Scientific Management

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Frederick Taylor & Scientific Management

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Management > Scientific Management In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he described how the application of the scientific method to the management of workers greatly could improve productivity.

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Frederick W. Taylor and Scientific Management: Efficiency or Dehumanization?

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Frederick Taylor's innovations in industrial engineering, particularly in time and motion studies, paid off in dramatic improvements in productivity.