Debunk Logical Positivism

[Anonymous No.15783109]

Protip: You can't.
If it isn't a tautology and it isn't empirical, it isn't meaningful. (tautology)
If it's empirical you must provide justification or it isn't justified.
If you think something is good, define good, midwit. You're just babbling a subjective tautology.
/lit/ can't cope just like post-1950 "philosophy" departments.

[Anonymous No.15783113]

>>15783109
Looks plastic

[Anonymous No.15783132]

>>15783109
It's a good starting point, but needs some refinements.

[Anonymous No.15783135]

>>15783132
Like?

[Anonymous No.15783137]

>>15783109
The Uncanny Valley of legs

[Anonymous No.15783141]

>>15783109
Coffee is good for you in moderation.

[Anonymous No.15783157]

>>15783109
>If it isn't a tautology and it isn't empirical, it isn't meaningful.
Prove this statement.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15783169]

>>15783113
Probably shooped

[Anonymous No.15783170]

Basic propositions can never touch upon empiricism

[Anonymous No.15783187]

>>15783157
It proves itself.
Disprove it.

[Anonymous No.15783213]

>>15783135
The semantic model needs to be overhauled, for one. And their understanding of the scientific method was too simplistic. See the work of Quine, Putnam, Carl Hempel, Wesley Salmon, and Wilfrid Sellars. Check out the Carnap-Quine letters for discussion of some of the key issues.

[Anonymous No.15783235]

>>15783213
Summary? Sounds like kvetching

[Anonymous No.15783240]

>>15783109
>If it isn't a tautology and it isn't empirical, it isn't meaningful. (tautology)
Justify this statement without using a form of argument which is based on "tautology," per your definition.
>If it's empirical you must provide justification or it isn't justified.
Justify this statement with empirical evidence.
>If you think something is good, define good, midwit.
>You're just babbling a subjective tautology.
>>15783187
>It proves itself.
No it doesn't. It's self contradictory. It says that only the empirical argument is valid, without presenting an empirical justification for its existence.
And there are many concepts which we use to make sense of reality which are not empirical. The most valuable being mathematics and logic, by which we make rules and categories.

This simple argument has been made thousands of times against logical positivism of this kind, and other variants. And never once can you faggots rebuke it. You just restate your first argument in a circular fashion.

[Anonymous No.15783267]

>>15783169
Shut up you have diarrhea fantasies

[Anonymous No.15783268]

>>15783240
>No it doesn't. It's self contradictory. It says that only the empirical argument is valid, without presenting an empirical justification for its existence.
Because the verification principle is a claim about what sort of statements we ought to treat as meaningful, it’s not supposed to require an empirical justification. It’s a sort of external statement. Verificationism was discussed and critiqued by the logical positivist as well, and they believed it proved its superiority by the expediency of the scientific method and ordinary language for describing the world we experience.

[Anonymous No.15783272]

>>15783109
>debunk my little pet ideology that I use to feel intelligent

[Anonymous No.15783303]

>>15783268
Cute claim but can you back it up?
>pro tip: you can't

[Anonymous No.15783311]

>>15783109
knowing ill never be able to dive into that exquisite buffet and dine till im stuffed kinda makes me want to cease existing

[Anonymous No.15783314]

>>15783303
What? Read Empricism, Semantics and Ontology by Carnap.

[Anonymous No.15783336]

>>15783268
But it's a self contradicting principle. And one which misunderstood many of the great scientific advancements when science came of age during the Renaissance. For example, years before many direct empirical evidential insights into atomic theory, there was Corpuscularianism. These things are put together through higher order rational thinking making sense of the empirical world. Another example: before science, there was Roger Bacon. You can say "common sense and ordinary language" but logical positivists are kidding themselves if they think that's how modern science developed. Because the presocratics had common sense and ordinary language, and so did Aristotle. And so did ancient Chinese thinkers. Not to denigrate those men, but it just shows those things aren't sufficient.
> It’s a sort of external statement.
It's an arbitrary distinction. It basically says all rationally derived principles are false or meaningless, when it's a rationally derived principle, as opposed to an empirical one. Merely making up a philosophical system around it with some degree of literature and complexity doesn't render it from anything but simply wrong.

[Anonymous No.15783442]

>>15783109
Logical positivism fell out of favor ages ago because it can't prove itself under its own axioms. Our culture has pushed people towards empirical thought and that's why it comes across as common sense, but modern positivists typically just presuppose major epistemological facts to justify a materialistic worldview which then, circularly, validates empiricism.

[Anonymous No.15783528]

Why did you make 3 threads about it on /lit/ and more on /sci/

[Anonymous No.15783562]

>>15783240
>>15783240
>Justify this statement without using a form of argument which is based on "tautology," per your definition.
It's a tautology based on the definition of "meaningful"
>Justify this statement with empirical evidence.
It's tautological based off the definition of justified, which in turn is derived from a hypothetical imperative which is "if we want to know/predict things about the external world"
>No it doesn't. It's self contradictory. It says that only the empirical argument is valid, without presenting an empirical justification for its existence.
It doesn't say only empirical arguments are valid.
>And there are many concepts which we use to make sense of reality which are not empirical. The most valuable being mathematics and logic
Wrong; math and logic are empirical, or mostly are. Those parts that are not are worthless.

[Anonymous No.15783575]

>>15783135
+2000kcal a day(GOMAD)
sleeping 10h+ a day
only doing ass workouts
light cardio

[Anonymous No.15783577]

>>15783442
Empiricism is the null hypothesis; I'd like to see you attempt to justify anything outside of empiricism.
You can't so empiricism is correct.

[Anonymous No.15783603]

>>15783169
envy

[Anonymous No.15783668]

>>15783577
>Empiricism is the null hypothesis
>modern positivists typically just presuppose major epistemological facts to justify a materialistic worldview which then, circularly, validates empiricism.

[Anonymous No.15783692]

>>15783668
Still haven't seen you justify anything outside of empiricisim

[Anonymous No.15783702]

>>15783157
>>15783240
/thread
I can't believe there are still imbeciles like OP. Logical positivism is a self-refuting stance and one of the most retarded views ever to exist.

[Anonymous No.15783833]

>>15783169
stfu fattie
s-sorry, just trying to be cool

[Anonymous No.15784230]

>>15783109
Logical positivism is unable to prove its own premise and so it is rarely heard. That premise is: "Logical positivism is valid." Logical positivists are typically wholly unwilling to articulate its premise, but there it is. It is able to pervade and appear superior to alternatives due to its skeptical appearance, but it never casts skepticism on itself.

Exclusive subscription to logical positivism is dogmatic.

[Anonymous No.15784252]

>>15784230
Wow, you are a class-a moron.

[Anonymous No.15784254]

>>15784252
Based retard

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15784255]

>>15783603
I just don’t see them like this much at all.
Original probably looks just as good

[Anonymous No.15784257]

>>15783109
YOU CALL THIS BIG????

[Anonymous No.15784263]

>>15783692
First chapter from Penrose' Road to Reality

[Anonymous No.15784267]

>>15784252
why's that?

[Anonymous No.15784270]

>>15783109

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15784272]

>>15784257
This too would get deleted from /s/ shoo shoo.

[Anonymous No.15784276]

>>15783577
>Empiricism is the null hypothesis
how?

[Anonymous No.15784298]

>>15783575
GOMAD is expensive though. you can expect to spend about $2000 dollars a year on milk.

[Anonymous No.15784532]

>>15784298
and ridiculously bad for your body. Just eat more chicken

[Anonymous No.15784694]

>>15784532
This. Also, no matter how much chicken we eat, it will never compensate for the holocaust that their ancestors, the dinosaurs, inflicted upon the mammalian race.

[Anonymous No.15784715]

>>15783109
Your post is nether a tautology or an empirical observation though

[Anonymous No.15784787]

>>15783109
>If you think something is good, define good, midwit.
That which is both useful and good.

[Anonymous No.15785047]

>>15784298
>you can expect to spend about $2000 dollars a year on milk.
Which is nothing. If you're worried about spending a fraction of a normal food spend on GOMAD then you don't understand why people get told to do GOMAD (it's because they don't eat enough to begin with).

[Anonymous No.15785160]

>>15783109

[Anonymous No.15785165]

BRRRAAAAAAAAP
Snf SNFFF

[Anonymous No.15785388]

>>15785160
I like where this meme is going, but the "is coffee good for you" phrase is gay. Nobody asks that. Taylor it to the board more. Make "which Harry Potter book is the best?"

[Anonymous No.15785396]

>>15785388
fucking newfag

[Anonymous No.15785427]

>>15783240
>which are not empirical. The most valuable being mathematics and logic
Anon, I...

You realize those things are abstracted from observed consistencies in our experience (i.e. they are empirically grounded) right? Empiricism is the conduit of all knowledge, and abstractions works within that conduit, not parallel to it.

[Anonymous No.15785570]

>>15785427
>You realize those things are abstracted from observed consistencies in our experience (i.e. they are empirically grounded) right? Empiricism is the conduit of all knowledge, and abstractions works within that conduit, not parallel to it.
>>15785427
No, he wants to believe in retarded bullshit that makes him feel good

[Anonymous No.15785582]

>>15783113
Like that would stop anyone.

[Anonymous No.15785586]

>>15784257
Danii Banks. Mmmm, I want to squeeze her and her fabulous big booty.

[Anonymous No.15786015]

>>15783336
Again it’s not self contradicting principle because it’s a claim about what sort of statements we ought to take as meaningful. That’s why I called it an external statement, making use of Carnap’s internal/external distinction. Its not arbitrary. An external question is outside a system of meaning, an internal within. An example would be mathematics. Within mathematics if you ask “are numbers real”, the answer is of course because we use them all the time. Whether numbers really exist outside their use in mathematics is an external question, because it goes beyond their expedient use in maths to whether they exist on some sort of abstract ontological level. Whether to adopt or not adopt the verification principle is an external question, not an internal one. You’re free to not do so, but the logical positivist didn’t think that was advisable. Asking to verify it empirically is like asking Kant if the transcendental subject is an object of experience. This objection is really weak and it’s why it wasn’t a big deal to LP at the time. Quine’s Two Dogmas and Kuhn’s sociology of science were more serious critiques of logical positivism than the allegedly self contradictory nature of the verification principle. I’m not sure what your statement about science is supposed to mean. No logical positivist was against higher order thinking, they were against metaphysics divorced from verifiable reality. You can whine all you want but it doesn’t make Newtonian physics the same as Platonism.

[Anonymous No.15786067]

>>15784263
Summarize it

[Anonymous No.15786082]

>>15784276
For the same reason that you won't jump off your roof

[Anonymous No.15786138]

>>15783109
I came for the picture.

[Anonymous No.15786275]

>>15786015
>it's outside the system of meaning that the principle applies to

Then isn't it necessary to rephrase the verification principle to apply to claims only contained in its pertinent system of meaning? What, exactly, is the system of meaning it applies to? Would other disciplines that LP attempts to critique escape the system of meaning the VP applies to? It raises more questions than it answers.

Also, whats your stance on universal statements being empirically unverifiable and thus meaningless according to VP?

[Anonymous No.15787139]

>>15784230
Sounds like it's the judaism of philosophy.

[Anonymous No.15787245]

>>15783109
consider the oligofactoy qualities

[Anonymous No.15787328]

What is empirical? A biological system with innate perception/comprehension that parses data.

Also, how do you explain subtle emotional/social meaning? It seems like a retarded attempt to simplify thought that would neuter explanatory power because you like simple logical forms so much.

[Anonymous No.15787334]

I don't know what positivism is but it sounds pozzed.

[Anonymous No.15787338]

>>15783169
lmao that ass is absolute candy, fuck off degenerate

[Anonymous No.15787392]

>>15783109
Consider the following proposition: Fuck you and suck my cheesy cock, faggot.
It is non-tautological and makes perfect sense, so fuck you and suck my cheesy cock, faggot.

[Anonymous No.15787394]

>>15783109
What do you mean by "a tautology"?

[Anonymous No.15787511]

>>15783109
And what, for that matter, is an empirical proposition?

[Anonymous No.15787649]

you can't distinct between synthetic and analytic; because everything is empirical in the end

[Anonymous No.15787658]

To be honest logical positivism was improved by Quine and Popper. You should read later 20th century philosophy.

[Anonymous No.15788513]

>>15784257
U U U A A A A AAA

[Anonymous No.15788539]

>>15787658
>determinism
What does that mean?

[Anonymous No.15788545]

>>15787658
prove that you're conscious

[Anonymous No.15789163]

>>15783169
dilate

[Anonymous No.15789188]

>>15785388
i would prefer it if you sad little fucks just fucked off
this is 4chan not a fucking monastery

[Anonymous No.15789251]

>>15788545
Cogito, ergo sum. QED

[Anonymous No.15789269]

>>15787649
based. OP here, I agree but the distinction is more for retards who think logic and math aren't empirical. Tautological statements are really just definitions which in turn are just telling us which empirical phenomenon a signifier points to

[Anonymous No.15789278]

>>15787392
>It is non-tautological and makes perfect sense, so fuck you and suck my cheesy cock, faggot.
It's empirical in that it is actually describing your childish emotional state and the nasty condition of your penile organ. Retard

[Anonymous No.15789293]

>>15787328
>how do you explain subtle emotional/social meaning?
Obvious: emotional states are empirical facts about organisms
> It seems like a retarded attempt to simplify thought that would neuter explanatory power because you like simple logical forms so much.
Nah, really it's an attempt to tell tards like you: "USE CLEAR LANGUAGE AND CITE YOUR SOURCES." Yet in 2020 we still have retards not doing either of those things and therefore producing meaningless or almost meaningless text

[Anonymous No.15789298]

>>15787139
Says the poststructuralist as he shrinks back while the mask slips...

[Anonymous No.15789678]

>>15785427
Treating math and logic as empirical does even more to undermine positivism: it makes them into mere interpretations of experience, like any other empirical generalization. Positivism only has the weight its adherents want if math and logic are metaphysical, otherwise you're talking about something more like an aesthetic preference.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15789690]

>>15787338
I’m saying it’s an illustration of candy.

[Anonymous No.15789718]

>>15789678
>Treating math and logic as empirical does even more to undermine positivism
It undermines it in the sense that it risks turning it into a completely anodyne view of very little interest.

[Anonymous No.15789721]

>implying anyone outside of your academic circlejerk gives a fuck or a shit about rational justifications
>implying that consequences aren’t the real currency of right and wrong

How much of a brainlet peanut brain can you possibly be

[Anonymous No.15790326]

>>15783109
If you read Carnap you'll see that for Carnap, a framework consists in a base domain (of individuals) and primitive predicates that are picked by yourself. Since Carnap also believes truth and existence are meaningful internally to a framework (there is no external notion of truth or existence) you have to realize that Carnap was a conventionalist. And indeed, when we follow the positivists closely, analytic truths aren't merely true by synonymy, but rather by convention, which goes further. I can say P = Q by a less-problematic sense of 'convention', but the conventionalism the positivists accepted amounted to saying P (or Q by synonymy with P) was true by fiat, by me deciding it was true from here on forward. That's best captured by the whole framework-internal notion of truth and existence that Carnap developed. Quine criticizes the very idea of conventionalist truth in his paper "Truth by Convention" but you don't even have to go that far to see that the notion of truth-by-convention needs support. Why exactly are things true just because I say they are? It's rather bogus.

What's funny is that you might be wondering, if we pick the individuals and the primitive predicates of our theories by convention, where does observation (syntheticity) come into all of this? You might be under the impression, mainly from critics of positivism, that the logical positivists were foundationalists grounding all knowledge in observation, but you would be wrong. Observation is not theory-neutral for them. Carnap says as much. He admits he could start from a phenomenalist base of elementary experiences, but also that a physicalist base was okay. Ayer also sort of notes that observation isn't exactly theory-neutral, and to my knowledge Neurath didn't even like phenomenalism. The only one who accepted a sort of theory-neutrality to observation was Schlick at the very beginning, before the Nazis killed him. So what do we mean by saying observation is theory-laden? Well for one, observation never establishes what exists (what individuals to put in your domain) or what your primitive predicates are. That's all established by convention. Likewise for the relations between predicates that you also establish by convention, and the construction of non-basic derived domains/predicates, also by convention. Observation instead settles interpretations. It somehow informs you that some sentences which your framework can assemble from your predicates and domain, are true (or false). That is a very limited role, and observation will 'settle' sentences differently according to the framework you begin from. To give an example, a phenomenalist and physicalist will 'see' different things from the same exact observation content. Carnap recognizes this. Since convention is suspect and observation is theory-laden, positivism has problems.

Godel's incompleteness proofs and Fitch's paradox also prove verificationism wrong.

[Anonymous No.15791460]

bump

[Anonymous No.15792008]

>>15789678
Not really, it rather improves it. Logic is recognized as an extension of observation, allowing us to dissolve the dubious analytic/synthetic distinction, and to accept that no abstract frameworks are fully self-referential. Add to that the move towards weak verificationism (which respects the necessary concession that most knowledge is technically and inescapably provisional), and positivism becomes difficult to reject. I'd also note that positivism is generally biased against the notion of the 'metaphysical'.

>>15790326
Observation precedes interpretation and convention — it's fundamental (this is an apodictic truth, not a convention). You can't construct a theory or establish anything without the mechanisms/conistent relations of observation.

[Anonymous No.15792027]

>>15783109
looks like it smells like canola and strawberries

[Anonymous No.15792052]

>>15792008
bro this is fucking gay you are fucking gay you are both fucking and being fucked by another man who are each both being fucked by and fucking other men in a long train of faggots

[Anonymous No.15792097]

>>15792008
>Observation precedes interpretation and convention — it's fundamental (this is an apodictic truth, not a convention). You can't construct a theory or establish anything without the mechanisms/conistent relations of observation.
I don't disagree with you. But you have to understand that logical positivists' take on observation is not as simple as Hume's fork despite what people think. Those people are unfamiliar with the deeper complexity. The logical positivists, barring Schlick, believed observation to be theory-laden given the framework you possessed, and they believed the framework you possessed to be a matter of convention. Thus you see Carnap say that it is meaningless to ask about existence or truth external to a framework.

[Anonymous No.15792130]

>>15792097
Any recommendations for this reading of the positivists? Sounds really neat

[Anonymous No.15792139]

>>15789278
>childish emotional state
>nasty condition
uh oh, those happen to be normative statements! guillotine yuh
still, no logical form of my prior statement, yet completely comprehensible
checkmate r/atheism

[Anonymous No.15792151]

>>15785047
>being this new

[Anonymous No.15792229]

>>15784694
Based

[Anonymous No.15792330]

>>15792097
Sure, but any sensible framework is still constructed on fundamental relations common to them all. I think the core of positivism is the recognition that these primitive relations (from which logic is abstracted) are both the necessary condition for any meaningful statement and for the standards by which competing statements can be evaluated for probability.

One hand it is true that to speak meaningfully of moral truth, we must first define the framework of morality. On other hand, the possibility of defining morality admits of a fundamental observational matrix which precedes any particular framework (apodictic truths being the prime example).

[Anonymous No.15792333]

>>15786082
Not a proof

[Anonymous No.15792363]

>>15792333
Do a flip

[Anonymous No.15792570]

>>15792130
You should read Carnap's Aufbau (The Logical Structure of the World) and "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology." In the latter he makes clear why truth and existence are internal not external. In the former he lays out how we pick our base of primitive predicates and a domain, mentions that he had the liberty to pick a different base than the phenomenalist base he ends up picking (and it's a sort of liberty where nothing about the 'external world' determines what way to go, but entirely choice), and briefly goes over the way observation works. Carnap, from what I remember, doesn't specify that observation merely settles the interpretation of sentences constructible from your base, but in effect that's what it does. The people who discuss the theory-ladenness of observation include people like Goodman, Sellars, Kuhn, Churchland, it's all scattered around, but you can find it implicit in Carnap already.
>>15792330
Carnap never says this from what I know. In the Aufbau he discusses how much it matters determining the primitive relations of your system for simplicity's sake or whatever but never argues that they're somehow fundamental to all systems, quite the contrary, each system has different primitive relations. I'd be interested to hear where you are getting your claim from.

[Anonymous No.15792590]

>>15792570
>I'd be interested to hear where you are getting your claim from.
From my own assessment of the logic. I wasn't aware Carnap had the final word on positivism and that any further refinement is disallowed.

[Anonymous No.15792701]

>>15792590
Well he doesn't, but to my knowledge, having read him, Ayer says more or less the same. Neurath as far as I'm aware criticized was a physicalist. Similar physicalism was present in other verificationists like Reichenbach, Hempel, and Feigl. If you accept physicalism it's especially hard to say the given is theory-neutral. The only phenomenalist logical positivist who believed the given was theory-neutral was Schlick. The idea that logical positivism was committed to the theory-neutrality of the given, and thus to a rigid notion of what isn't given in observation like you're saying, is a misrepresentation I feel.

[Anonymous No.15792980]

>>15792701
I get what you're saying, but it appears to me that the given is necessarily theory-neutral. There are basic relations and apodictic truths that prefigure any possible statement. The issue then, is how ambitious we are in supposing the scope of what is given.

I'm not arging that positivism was comitted to theory-neutrality of the given, I'm arguing that it should be... Albeit with a conservative estimation of what is given, and an acceptance of the technically provisional nature of knowledge beyond those bounds (weak verificationism).

I think that the crux of positivism is the recognition that meaningful statements are only possible because they constructed upon necessary relations (the theory-preceding given) common to our experience. For example: It is nonsensical to argue against logic as a fundamental standard, as doing so necessarily entails the use of logic (and this can't be circumvented by any interpretation).

[Anonymous No.15793068]

>>15792980
>common to our experience
positivism is a religion

[Anonymous No.15793088]

>>15783562
>Wrong; math and logic are empirical, or mostly are

That's wrong, you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.15793118]

>>15786082
My desire to survive can be understood as a means of keeping the “simulation” going on for longer

[Anonymous No.15793460]

>>15793068
>>15793088

[Anonymous No.15793492]

Positivists getting assfucked ITT

[Anonymous No.15793610]

>>15792980
I accept a theory-neutral given as you do, but I personally reject the verificationist theory of meaning. If you're interested some things must be necessarily true because of their indispensability on pain of contradiction otherwise, I recommend looking into Fitch's paradox of knowability. It suggests that the verification principle is wrong, on pain of accepting something patently false (namely, that everything knowable is already known). The conclusion that follows is that some things can be true but not knowable, which is very similar to what Godel's incompleteness proofs show about mathematics, that some theorems are true but not provable.

[Anonymous No.15794740]

>>15793610
Yes, I concede that verificationism has problems, which is why I brought up weak verificationism. Ayer suggested distinguishing between what is verifiable in theory vs. in practice, which I think leads to essentially the same conclusion you've detailed there.

My reluctance to discard verificationism entirely is due to my observance that all statements purporting to convey a truth value always relate to empirical matters when reduced (so-called normative statements for instance, always contain an implicit element of intended empirical outcomes and measures to achieve them). Furthermore, our only means of evaluating such statements for truth value are empirical (including logic, which again I argue is an extension of empirical observation).

There's also the observation that the methods and pragmatic thinking of scientists and logicians tends to resemble de facto verificationism, which while not definitive suggests that it can not be so casually shrugged off.

[Anonymous No.15794751]

>>15783109
Logical positivism has no justification.

[Anonymous No.15794863]

>>15794751
So how do you propose we evaluate the truth value of:
>Logical positivism has no justification.
vs.
>Logical positivism has justification.
How have you arrived at the former?

>>15793118
This is still an empirical assessment. Your understanding of what a 'simulation' is has been entirely informed by the empirical and — whether you think this is a simulation or not — the default mode of empiricism has informed you that jumping off your roof is likely to terminate whatever this is. Then of course there's the infinite regression problem.

[Anonymous No.15795342]

>>15784270

[Anonymous No.15795351]

>>15785388
But IS coffee good for you?

[Anonymous No.15795361]

>>15787392
>cheesey cock

[Anonymous No.15796040]

>didnt even read op
>just saw the pic
>came in expecting more ass pics
>nothing
fuck you all