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The Positive and the Logical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Arthur F. Bentley
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Extract

One is tempted to look upon the positive and the logical somewhat as one looks upon the quick and the dead. Yet the issue is hardly that sharp. Viability has strange possibilities and varied forms, and must often be appraised with an eye directed as much towards the environment as towards the claimant organism. Stretching the application of the word ‘viable’ to complexes of behavior such as the philosophies and theories of knowledge, we may ask: Is the combination of the positive and the logical in logical positivism viable? And is this logical positivism itself as it stands either positive or logical?

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , October 1936 , pp. 472 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1936

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References

1 Logical Positivism is the name most widely current, and it has been approved by Carnap, although he himself more commonly speaks of Logical Analysis and of Physicalism. Other current namings are The New Positivism, Philosophic Analysis, and Logic of Science.

2 R. Carnap, “On the Character of Philosophic Problems” (I, 5), “Meaning, Assertion and Proposal” (I, 359); H. Feigl, “The Logical Character of the Principle of Induction” (I, 20), “Logical Analysis of the Psychophysical Problem: a Contribution of the New Positivism” (I, 420); A. E. Blumberg, “The Nature of Philosophic Analysis” (II, 1).

3 References in the text are to volume and page of this magazine.

4 ‘Concept,’ of course, may be honorably used. In the present instance it stands for “that which is written about philosophy and science,” while the ‘fundamental’ and the ‘presuppositions’ serve to concentrate attention on those regions of the wide field that seem of greatest significance for purposes of clarification and unification.

5 Carnap gives his distinction between “analytic” and “synthetic” on p. 53 of Philosophy and Logical Syntax, 1935, a small book covering more fully the ground of his two contributions to Philosophy of Science. “The terms,” he says, “have already been used in traditional philosophy; they are especially important in the philosophy of Kant; but up till now they haze not been exactly defined” (italics mine).

6 This manner of hyphenation is not accident or error in hurried magazine publication; it is repeated in the book just cited, p. 61 (table and accompanying text). A typical effort to throw light on the “pseudo-object-sentences” is as follows: “We may call the quality of being a thing-designation a parallel syntactical quality to the quality of being a thing” (Ibid., p. 62). The objection here is not nearly so much to the highly formal terminology Carnap uses, as it is to the heavy burden he imposes on the wholly informal term “quality.”

7 Compare Blumberg's blunt assertion (II, 3): “There are two basic groups: assertions of syntax and assertions of fact. This dichotomy follows from the nature of language.”

8 The “asperities of a marriage between Empiricism and Solipsism” are noted by the translator of Carnap's essay “The Unity of Science,” p. 12.

9 Matter-of-fact examination of Carnap's ‘concepts’ of Inhalt, Gehalt, and Folgerung will give other interesting examples of evasiveness in conceptual procedure. Folgerung, is said to be “quite different” from material implication, since the latter depends only on truth-values while the former “is not quite determined by the truth-values” (I, 11). Gehalt is “a purely formal concept”; nevertheless it “corresponds completely to what we mean when we (in a vague manner) are accustomed to speak of the ‘meaning’ (Inhalt) of a proposition” (I, 12–13). Carnap's creed of conceptual infallibility has been expressed by him as follows: “Die Begriffe sollen aus gewissen Grundbegriffen stufenweise abgeleitet, ‘konstituiert’ werden, so dass sich ein Stammbaum der Begriffe ergibt, in dem jeder Begriff seinen bestimmten Platz findet.”; Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928, p. 1.

10 See Feigl, I, 20; I, 424. Compare also two papers in Journal of Philosophy, 1931, one by Blumberg and Feigl, p. 281, and one by Blumberg and Boaz, p. 544. In the latter we are told that Bridgman calls his theory of meaning “operationalism,” that it is “a technique for building concepts,” and that as such it “can be shown to be a special case” of logical positivism. For these writers it is “definition” which “formulates operations.”

11 Schilpp accuses the logical positivists of refusing to permit any analysis of the concept of the ‘given,’ even though it is fundamental in their construction, and even though the analysis of fundamental concepts is declared by them to be the sole legitimate work of philosophy. “The ‘given’,” he says, “is the point where the logical positivists turn mystics” (II, 129). Weinberg (II, 387) from a different behavioral base, with wholly different objectives, and by the use of professionally logical techniques, attacks a similar problem in the case of Wittgenstein's logical simples; this criticism is pertinent since Wittgenstein's attempted rigor is the historical source from which the degeneracy of logical positivism stems. Stevens (III, 100), speaking for psychologists, finds the dichotomy between data and constructs artificial. Malisoff (II, 339) notes the “black magic” in the “intersubjective” of the positivists (for a case of its use, see Feigl, I, 433 ff). Kattsoff finds Carnap's construction “misleading and doomed to failure” (III, 70) though this is mainly on the ground that it is a two-valued logic. Other comments will be found at I, 325, 331, 482; II, 256, 273, 295, 364; III, 124.

12 Another case in which Feig! deliberately adopts a fiction as a “necessity” for logic is that of “form” and “content” (I, 440). This, he says, is a radical dualism, it is the only radical dualism he acknowledges, and it is a “very important but nevertheless artificial philosophical abstraction.”

13 In another paper Feigl comparably handles “the principle of induction” of which he says “as long as there is knowledge … it will be its inescapable guiding maxim” (I, 28). One may note as characteristic his frequent assertions of what must be, as, pp. 26–7, for the “ground floor of knowledge,” for atomic propositions, and for the possibility of psychology; his certainty that the principle of induction is to be explained by a frequency theory of probability, even though the latter is not yet achieved (I, 25); and his many struggles to reformulate Bridgman's “operations” through un-Bridgmanlike terms such as prescript, prescriptive rule, regulative maxim and the principle of a procedure (I, 20, 27).

14 Blumberg's statement (II, 5) as to what “completely analyzed” would mean in a relativistic sense “at-a-given-level-of-atomicity” makes good collateral reading. Interesting also is the way ‘sign,’ ‘signify,’ and ‘significance’ are used (II, 4).

15 He uses ‘notion’ once, and otherwise distributes the work of the word between ‘term, ‘assertion,’ ‘sign,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘usage’ and ‘definition.‘