The Fall of Logical Positivism (Part 4-3)

The third and final section of the fourth part of my series on the philosophy of science. In this video I cover the downfall of logical positivism. I describe some of the major problems which has lead positivism to be rejected by nearly all philosophers of science today.

My History and Philosophy of Science playlist (so far): http://www.youtube.com/user/SisyphusRedeemed#grid/user/67E2553770A6E39E

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Vienna Circle
• analytic/synthesic distinction
• verifability theory of meaning
• philosophy of language
• observation language
• theoretical language
• context of discovery
• context of justification
• Quine
• Two dogmas of empiricism
• Holism
• web of belief

[certaintythrudoubt]

Thank you for this series. I'm happy that you'll continue it.

I have a problem with your exaples of analytic statements being overturned by experience however. I think the example about Euclidean geometry was always synthetic because it says "these rules of geometry are true for the real universe" which is a statement about how the world is, and therefore a statement that is true or false depending on how the world is.

Do you have any other examples or do you know where I could find any?

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@certaintythrudoubt Check out my recent video 'The Kalam Cosmological fallacy' and/or my earlier video 'Schrodinger's Cat TAG'S Logical Absolutes (In The Nuts)'. Both talk about how things which were once taken as analytically true came to be revised after they conflicted with the empirical world.

[certaintythrudoubt]

@SisyphusRedeemed If those things (except for mathematical completeness) were taken as analytical statements then I'll agree that that's wrong, but that's an argument against how the distinction was used and not the distinction itself.

I'm just going to read the two dogmas and see what he's exactly arguing, but do you know what Quine thought about math and whether he considered that analytic?

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@certaintythrudoubt The analytic/synthetic distinction is one of the dogmas. He argues that it's sloppy and there's no interesting way to hold to it. So I think what he's say is it can be analytic, but it can also be synthetic, depending.

[ThatGuyWithHippyHair]

@ThatGuyWithHippyHair

...proposition about parallel lines.

[ThatGuyWithHippyHair]

@ThatGuyWithHippyHair

...testing, then how can we really call any lines "parallel" at all? Suppose that, keeping in mind our current definition of prime numbers, we discover an example of a "prime number" that has more than two integer factors. How can this number even be called a prime number in the first place? It seems like the same situation with parallel lines to me. Science has not falsified the definition of parallel lines; it has only found a counterexample to a synthetic propositi

[ThatGuyWithHippyHair]

These seem like rather petty attacks on LP to me. Regarding the A-S distinction, isn't an analytic proposition just a definition? If that is the case, then the proposition "parallel lines never cross" can't really be called an analytic proposition, since there are other characteristics that are definitive of parallel lines; e.g. they have infinitely many perpendiculars, the distance between them at any two points is the same, etc. If those definitive truths about parallels are "falsified" by

[DrSpooglemon]

I don't see how "alive" and "dead" can be states that have any meaning in quantum mechanics(qm). I know very little of qm but it strikes me that the particles the cat is ultimately made of can be in a superposition of states but the cat cannot. In anycase, the "aliveness" or "deadness" of the cat pertains to how the chemical components of the cat interact with one another and has nothing to do with the "states" of the subatomic particles that the chemicals are made of...

[qbz32]

Now I am lost.

[Khuno2]

(cont.) Good job simplifying Dr. Church's triviality argument against verificationism, i.e., that using Ayer's heavily amended formulation in language truth and logic (and beyond...), one can verify what the same principle classes gibberish, i.e., any sentence.

[Khuno2]

Ultimately, Quine too had to view scientific realism with no small amount of pessimism despite a palpable desire for its truth. He was, in the end, a instrumentalist. And he did subscribe to holistic verificationism. He did not give up on the verificationist principle, but amended it to be more in keeping with how science actually works. Not that you had said anything that would contradict this, but verificationism, in its Quinean sense, is still alive and well by my measure. (cont.)