Wittgenstein and Poppers- Logical Positivism

Logical positivism

In 1929, Wittgenstein went to Cambridge to work on a philosophical manuscript.  Whilst he was away a discussion group developed into a self– conscious philosophical movement and issued a manifesto that launched a campaign against meta-physics as an outdated system that must give way to a scientific  world- view. The anti-metaphysical program proclaimed that necessary truths were necessary only because they were tautologies. They accepted that mathematical truths were necessary whilst denying that they told us anything about the world. Knowledge from the world could be gained by experience and propositions had meaning only if they could be verified or falsified by experience.

Disputes broke out over the status and formation of the verification principle and it was questioned as to weather it should be replaced with a falsification principle.  Wittgenstein gave only qualified assent to the verification principle but at this time he frequently defended it’s a priori analogue that the sense of mathematical proposition is the method of its proof.

The positivists thought that the true task of philosophy was to not concentrate so much on universal philosophical propositions, but to clarify non- philosophical statements. Their chosen method of clarification was to show how empirical statements were built up from elementary or ‘protocol’ statements that were directly from experience. However this program contained a few problems as it was evident that the experiences recorded by protocols were private to each individual. If meaning depends on verification and each of our process of verification differs, how can anyone understand someone else’s meaning?

Schlick tried to answer this by explaining the difference between form and content. The content of experience is what someone enjoys or lives through. His example was that he sees something red or something green but it is private and incommunicable. Whereas the form or structure of experience may be common amongst many people. This is strictly true and highlights the difference between them both however an experience can be different for people depending on their interests and emotions.

Wittgenstein was not satisfied with this solution and strove to give an account of meaning that didn’t oppose threat to solipsism. He distanced himself from the Vienna Circle and returned permanently to Cambridge. By 1939 the Circle ceased to exist with some of its most prominent members forced into exile. The circle’s most distinguished legacy to posterity was its publication in 1935, The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper who was never a fully paid member of the group. This was his first book and it attacked empiricism and Logical Positivists.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had oversimplified the relation between language and the world. The only connection between the two was two features only: the linking of names to objects and the match or mismatch of propositions to facts. He decided this was a mistake as words look like each other but differ by their function. He emphasised that language was interwoven with the world in many different ways and to refer to these he used the expression ‘language- game.’ Examples of language games include, giving orders, describing the appearance of objects, telling jokes, acting plays and praying etc. Language games are a reminder that if we want to give an account of the meaning of a word, we must look for the part it plays in our life.

Wittgenstein never abandoned his early view that philosophy is an activity, not a theory.  Philosophy doesn’t discover any new truths, and philosophical problems are solved not by gaining new information but by the rearrangement of what we already know. The function of philosophy Wittgenstein once said was to ‘untie the knots in our thinking.’

He also suggested that language was meaningless to us when it comes to understanding. To some extent I agree with this suggestion as when people from different nationalities and language meet they cant understand each other by the way that they speak. Our associated meanings and the similarities in what we know help us along to understanding each other.  However my argument is that even in our own language people don’t always understand each other. For example if we try and speak to someone about philosophy they wouldn’t necessary understand us as the language and ideas would be too complicated if you haven’t been taught about it. Therefore I wouldn’t say that language is meaningless as there is always a point to it, but I would say the word invalid would be suitable to explain it in some situations.

Like the positivists, Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics. Along with the verification principle he attacked metaphysics to try and unravel the mixture of nonsense within the systems. He said ‘what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.’ Whilst teaching at Cambridge, Wittgenstein didn’t publish anything. However he did produce hand-outs among his pupils who also took detailed notes of his lectures which they preserved. None of this material was published until after his death in 1951 at the age of 62 but his ideas still circulated often in garbled form by word of mouth.

Analytic philosophy after Wittgenstein

In 1949 Gilbert Ryle, professor of metaphysics at Oxford published a book called ‘The concept of mind’. The ideas presented in his book were similar to those of Wittgenstein. Ryle was strongly anti- Cartesian and the first chapter of his book was entitled ‘Descartes Myth.’ However his discussion was based on sensation, imagination and intellect and was to heavy in the direction of behaviourism to win general acceptance.

Wittgenstein left his copyright to three of his former pupils who corresponded to different ideas of Wittgenstein’s own personality and work. Von Wright resembled Wittgenstein the logician of the ‘Tractatus’; the books that first made his reputation on induction, probability and modal logic. Elizabeth Anscombe carried forward Wittgenstein’s later work on philosophy of mind, and with her book ‘Intention’ created a discussion of practical reasoning and the theory of action. Rush Rhees was the most sympathetic to the mystical side of Wittgenstein’s temperament.

After Wittgenstein’s death many people regarded Quine as the doyen of Anglophone philosophy. Having early established a reputation as a formal logician, Quine spent time with the Vienna Circle and in Prague and Warsaw. His aim in philosophy was to provide a framework for a naturalistic explanation of the world in the terms of science and especially physical science. He offered to do this by analysis of language that is both empiricist and behaviourist. In spite of his pursuit of a radically empiricist program, Quine made his first major impact on philosophy with ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ written in 1951.

Quine did not deny that there are logically true statements, statements that remain true under any interpretation of their non-logical terms. But he also stated that we cannot move from a logically true statement to the allegedly analytic statement. Science as a whole does depend both on language and experience but this cant be traced in individual sentences.

Quine insisted that there are no such things as meanings that have to be interpreted to intentional concepts such as belief or understanding. Meaning must be explained in extensionalist terms by mapping sensory stimuli on to verbal behaviour.  In his early essay ‘On what there is’, Quine famously said, ‘To be is to be the value of a bound variable.’ When he said this he was following in the footsteps of Frege and Russell, who insisted that in a scientific theory no names should be allowed that lacked a definite reference.

Wittgenstein and Quine are often regarded as the two leading exponents of analytical philosophy. In fact their philosophies are very different from one another. In particular they both disagreed about the nature of philosophy. Quine didn’t believe in analytic- synthetic distinction so didn’t see a boundary between philosophy and empirical science. Wittgenstein continued to believe what he wrote in the ‘Tractatus’. ‘Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. The word “philosophy” must mean something that stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences.’

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) chose the method of short paper but many of his essays were collected into volumes. In the philosophy of mind and action Davidson denied that there was a divide between philosophy and psychology; in the philosophy it took the form of an empirical and extensional theory of meaning. He argued that every individual mental event is also an individual physical event, and this event is related by physical laws to the individual physical events that are identical with the actions. No psychophysiological laws can be stated however you can relate them to physiological events of certain kinds.

In England philosophers continued to believe that there was a gulf and not just a fuzzy border, between science and philosophy. They maintained like Ryle and Wittgenstein that the aim of philosophy was not information but understanding.  To some extent this is true but slightly contradicts its-self as the information is needed to be able to understand anything. If there was no previous information we would have no understanding of anything anyway.

  Peter Strawson (1919-2006) to some extent modelled his work on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. At a time when metaphysics was disregarded by many Strawson gave the subtitle, ‘An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics’ to his most important work, Individuals (1959). It aims to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, with no pretencion to improve that structure (such pretencion is the mark of revisionary metaphysics). Strawson’s own death in 2006, marked the end of an era in English philosophy.

Political Philosophy- Closed and Open Societies

The Second World War produced one classic of political philosophy: The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper. Popper maintained in his book that if a political organisation is to flourish then its institutions must leave maximum room for self- correction. He decided that two things were important: that the ruled should have freedom to discuss and criticise policies proposed by their rulers; and that it should be possible without violence to change the rulers, if they fail to promote their citizens welfare. He also believed that it was right to protect free institutions against attack and that democracy can destroy itself known as ‘the paradox of democracy’.  To some extent this relates to our society today as we have elections that enable society to decide weather to get rid of the rulers without violence if they aren’t doing a good enough job.

In the 2 volumes of his book, Popper attacked Plato and Marx as he saw them as enemies of the open society. Poppers principle target was Marx’s belief that he had discovered scientific laws that determined the future of the human race. Popper came up with the single argument that what form the future will take will depend on what form the scientific progress will take. If we are to predict the future of society, we must predict the future of science.  But it is logically impossible to predict the nature of a scientific discovery; as you would have to actually make the discovery.

Popper had a new superstition that people could easily be won over by theories that appear to explain everything. A Marxist could not open the paper without finding evidence confirmed for this interpretation of history. Whereas a Freudian could explain away any human behaviour by using the reason that you were repressed. To some extent this represents our society today as the media broadcast what they think is news and everyone in society accepts it and believe what is reported. Even if people disagree with something in the news, its not often they do something about it.

Popper was also important for journalists specifically the ‘Innocence Project’ as he said we should question anything including ourselves. This is important for a journalist as we know not to believe everything we are told and keep an impartial opinion until there is evidence to do otherwise.

Popper decided on stating the obvious that ‘if GOD proved his presence then you wouldn’t need to believe’. However it is a good quote to think about as if everyone knew about GOD and saw that he existed it would give us a different perspective on life as we would understand a lot more about the world and wouldn’t rely on the existence of  ‘GOD’ to explain the world and the way it is.