Questions tagged [logical-positivism]
The philosophical view that only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful.
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Is there such a thing as a moral statement?
Logical positivists, notably A.J. Ayer, have stated that there is no such thing as a moral statement. In his example, saying the words "you acted wrongly in stealing that money" are ...
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According to Logical Positivism, why is it that for a statement to be meaningful, its contradiction must also be meaningful?
I am trying to understand the argument for the supposedly paradoxical nature of the verifiability criterion. The argument goes as follows:
Suppose that the principle of verifiability is itself ...
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Did logical positivists consider subjective statements verifiable?
Did logical positivists consider subjective statements such as "I like this cake" verifiable and therefore meaningful? Or did they consider that verificationism doesn't apply to claims of ...
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The relationship between Rationalism and logic
Here is an excerpt from the book An Introduction to Philosophy by Russ W. Payne (2015) which is causing me some confusion.
Mathematics had long served as the rationalist’s paradigm case of knowledge ...
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Confidence margin for logical verification
I'm starting to read Wittgenstein and I keep circling around a problem, which I'll lay out with the following ideas:
a. Logical space is the totality of external reality.
b. A proposition is logical ...
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What are the "Simples" Wittgenstein discusses in Philosophical Investigations?
I first came across this term in §39 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, wherein he writes
[O]ne is tempted to make an objection against what is ordinarily called a name. It can be put ...
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What's the role of logic in logical positivism?
I'm reading up on a bit of the ideas of logical positivism. It seems that the main components were the distinction of synthetic and analytic statements, and the verification principle. Without giving ...
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Deductive reasoning & conditionals
What would be a good example of explicit deductive reasoning that doesn't seem to be possibly interpreted correctly as a conditional (If A, then B)?
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Collaborative work between Linguists and Computer Language designers to help fix the English Language
Is there work being done to help remove all the ambiguities and loose meaning of the English language by using low to mid level computer programming languages (avoiding more recent "high level" ...
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Is Karl Popper a logical positivist?
Logical positivism is an important Western philosophy with a central idea of verification; the doctrine that all knowledge about matters of fact stems from and relies on sensory experience and remains ...
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Wittgenstein on Mechanics
Can someone explain what Wittgenstein was trying to say in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ? Specifically propositions 6.341-6.343. What does he mean when he says that a system like Newtonian Mechanics ...
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How exactly Wittgenstein "inspired two schools of thought [logical positivism/logical empiricism and analytic/linguistic movement/Cambridge School]"?
In the page 527 of von Wright's Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Biographical Sketch in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Oct., 1955), he tells:
It has been said that Wittgenstein inspired two ...
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What are the accomplishments of critical theory vs. logical positivism
Coming from a natural science viewpoint, I find that logical positivism is much more important for scientific research than is critical theory.
I've read the critics/flaws of logical positivism, and ...
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In what way did the "Logical Positivist' movement influence contemporary Analytical Academic Philosophy? [closed]
Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle made a concerted effort to 'move' Philosophy away from its traditional focus on 'speculative' metaphysics by establishing a regimen of scientific rigor within the ...
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Hilary Putnam's criticism of Carnap's 'Principle of Tolerance'
I am left quite confused at how Hilary Putnam showed that Carnap's response to the self-defeating objection of the verification principle was circular and hence unviable. Can anybody help explain it ...
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What does it mean to say that the relation between evidence and hypotheses is "syntactic"?
Positivists construe the relation between evidence and hypotheses to
be syntactic (L1990, 23). Consequently, "what would count as evidence
for a hypothesis is determined by the form of the ...
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A question on logical positivism and pragmatism with regards to meaning of a statement
‘Despite all its weaknesses, democracy is still the best form of
government compared with all other forms of government that have been
tried in human history.’ Which of the following is False ...
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Why can we not reduce necessity to analyticity?
Why can’t we eliminate talk of necessity and possible worlds, for talk of analyticity and (non-modal) logical consistency? Has there been any attempt in recent times to do this? I'm not 100% sure, but ...
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How can I use logical positivism in the philosophy of education?
Logical Positivism is a teacher centered philosophy that rejects intuition, matters of mind, essences, and inner causes. This philosophy relies on laws of matter and motion as valid, and bases truth ...
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How can I apply logical positivism in the philosophy of education?
How can I apply logical positivism in the philosophy of education?
How would I use logical positivism to explore why teachers teach (objectives), what should be taught (curriculum) and how should ...
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Do logically incoherent statements still have meaning?
My reading of Carnap's "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" suggests to me that it is possible to form sentences in a language that are grammatically correct but ...
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What is the distinction between positivism and logical positivism?
I've heard that positivism aimed to be purely empirical, while logical positivism recognised that empiricism needed to be combined with logic in order to actually be able to figure out anything. Is ...
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The effect of logical empiricism in research and education?
My teacher told to me that "logical empiricism" aborted the research and science. logical empiricism want to remove metaphysics from the science and built a "pure science". But that was an mistake and ...
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Logical positivism on religious language
I was searching for an essay on logical positivists’ view of religious language but I can't seem to find any good one.
Can someone point out to me some links related to this?
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Sufficient & necessary conditions for singular and general statements
In David Rynin's 1956 address to the American Philosophical Association, "Vindication of L*G*C*L P*S*T*V*SM", he remarks upon the "tenuous logical relationship" between a general statement, "For any ...
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What is the relationship between Scientism and Logical Positivism?
I always assumed that Scientism was just the layman's version of Logical Positivism. Scientism is the view that the natural sciences are the only source of factual knowledge about the world, ...
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What does later Wittgenstein and earlier Wittgenstein have in common?
Wittgenstein, while previously advocating a picture theory of semantics, later came to revoke his support of this position.
But did Wittgenstein still hold on to certain ideas of his old school?
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Rudolf Carnap's opinion about free will
I know that the logical positivists thought that many old philosophical questions are meaningless, but I never found a source on the internet about their position on free will. So what was their ...
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Who/what was Horkheimer referring to when he said that "Reason, in destroying conceptual fetishes, ultimately destroyed itself."?
In his 1941 Paper "The End of Reason", Max Horkheimer states the following:
Reason, in destroying conceptual fetishes, ultimately destroyed itself.
On one hand, he seems to be referring the ...
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Why do old theories take priority over new ones?
Given two scientific theories that both agree with experiment, it seems that unless the new one is much simpler, the older one is accepted. Why is this so?
Examples:
Special Relativity wasn't ...
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Is existentialism philosophy?
I believe that philosophy is defined by its method, which is based on logical analysis. It is not merely any discipline that investigates the world's conditions and the meaning of life. To be a ...
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Did Gödel oppose or agree with the Logical Positivists?
Gödel was a member of the Vienna Circle, whose philosophical position as a group was Logical Positivism, or Logical Empiricism.
The SEP article on him states that among his philosophical views were ...
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Can something "count" as TRUE without support by logic and empirical data?
I was in an online debate and had this statement presented to me.
I would note further that your apparent positivism rests on what is
logically a faith claim - specifically, the unproveble claim ...
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Does logical positivism necessarily entail reductionism?
I always assumed that Logical Positivism and reductionism went hand in hand, and that refutations of LP automatically made the case for reductionism weaker.
My reasoning was: if only empirically ...
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In idealism, how can you prove that God is the One who created the Universe?
In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that
reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental,
mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. ...
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Carl Hempel's covering law model of explanation in history
According to Carl Hempel in "The Function of General Laws in History" (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 39, No. 2, 1942, pp. 35-48), explanation in history consists of the "derivation of the ...
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How did the logical positivists respond to Gödel's incompleteness theorem?
In a lecture on philosophy of science I recently listened to, it was stated that Quine was the one who decisively refuted the logical positivist program.
I've also read that Quine and Popper were ...
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What is the difference between the illogical and the nonsensical?
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein mentions the following:
"3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically."
"3.032 It is as impossible to ...
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Did the Logical Positivists accept synthetic a priori knowledge?
My understanding of Logical Positivists is that, following Wittgenstein, they accepted only 2 types of proposition as meaningful:
Propositions based on formal logic (i.e. tautologies)
Empirically ...
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Normativity in Science
According to the description of language and norms in Analytic Philosophy (and especially in the way Rorty talks about it in Contingency Irony and Solidarity) we cannot judge one vocabulary using our ...
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A proposition is non-falsifiable. So what?
Does Karl Popper argue that non-falsifiable theories are not true/have no truth value, or simply that they are not provable? Put another way: according to Popper, could a non-falsifiable theory ...
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Does anyone argue that Karl Popper's theory of critical rationalism does not meet its own conditions?
I am a huge fan of Dr. Popper's work, and particularly his theory that the property of falsifiability separates the scientific from the non-scientific.
However, it struck me that this theory does not ...
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Would a logical positivist consider a proposition about objects outside of the earth's light cone to be meaningful?
The logical positivists' basic premise was that for any statement to be meaningful, one had to be able to confirm its truth or falsehood using formal logic and empirical observation. Any statement ...
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Logical Positivism, Linguistic Philosophy, then came what?
In this interview with philosopher Bernard Williams interviewer Bryan Magee suggests:
Logical Positivism was the prevailing orthodoxy of one generation, Linguistic Philosophy of the next.
Is ...
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Is homeopathy verifiable?
Would homeopathy be verifiable according to the logic positivists (and thus science)?
On the one hand, one could, in principle, observe patients recovering after being given a homeopathic medicine. ...
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Reference suggestions - Contemporary Western Philosophy
I want to read following topics
Moore, Russell and Early Wittgenstein: Defence of Commonsense; Refutation of Idealism; Logical Atomism; Logical Constructions; Incomplete Symbols; ...
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Dialectic vs Logical positivism
Dialectic is opposite to Metaphysic.
Also Logical positivism criticizes Metaphysic since in Logical positivism only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively ...
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How do Logical Positivists respond to the "Positivism is self-defeating" argument
Positivism asserts that any statement that cannot be empirically tested is meaningless. But obviously, this is a self-refuting statement, because it can't be empirically verified as well.
How do the ...
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How might a modern defender of positivism classify a "speech act"?
A few people here have wondered whether positivism is really dead. I was under the impression that it was for a long time; but there seem to be some sympathizers with positivism here, and I'd be ...
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Help me understand Logical Positivists points
I am studying Logical Positivism on my own, and though I get the most of it, I am confused about some points, and I will be really grateful if you can help me here. I am studying it from here.
In the ...
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