Obsolete Philosophy: The Problem of Verification Within Logical Positivism

As I mentioned in the kickoff post, I wrote a lot of papers in college.

This one is mostly gibberish but it seems to be talking about the verification problem. I really disliked the Positivists. I thought that they were undermining a lot of important work. Heck, the antithesis to the Positivists struck me as being the Post-Modernists and they were even more destructive. And it’s with that background that I’ll tell you that I, personally, thought that the Sokal Affair was the best prank ever. While Sokal happened right around the time I was getting out, the whole positivism about Positivism inspired me to start incorporating Rocky & Bullwinkle style title pages to my papers. “(Real Title) or (Silly Title)”.

SMH, as the kids say. I’m glad we’ve all got this sort of thing out of our systems.

The Problem of Verification within Logical Positivism
or
Jaybird Beats a Dead Horse

by Jaybird

Logical Positivism is perhaps the most influential branch of philosophy to spring from the 20th Century. The movement made a valiant attempt to create a perfect philosophical language: a language with no emotive content whatsoever. It would be the perfect language for a desert ontology. There would be no talk of such things as aesthetics, religion, ethics, or those other more “metaphysical” aspects of philosophy, as statements that included them would be meaningless. At first glance, it seems impossible to render such statements as “God is everywhere” and “What a lovely sunset” as cognitively meaningless with one fell swoop, but the positivists pulled it off with one simple device: The Verifiability Principle.

Michael Martin defines the logical positivists theory of meaning this way:

(1) A statement has factual meaning if and only if it is empirically verifiable.
(2) A statement has formal meaning if and only if it is analytic or self-contradictory.
(3) A statement has cognitive or literal meaning if and only if it has either formal meaning or factual meaning.
(4) A statement has cognitive or literal meaning if and only if it is either true or false.

The verification principle is a scythe, and it has been (and is sometimes now) used to cut down any and all metaphysical arguments with the simple phrase “That argument has no cognitive content.” At first glance, this principle seems indestructible, but there are several tacks that one might take to defuse the positivist bomb. The first is, of course, to claim that the principle is too strong, that it excludes many things that the positivists would want to include. According to the verification theory of meaning, those statements that are unverifiable in principle are meaningless (It is not meaningless to speak of things that may be verifiable, but we are just without the technology to do so). So “God is a member of the trinity along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit” is a meaningless statement as it is unverifiable in principle. The positivists would conclude that most, if not all, talk of God is a waste of time since any statement made regarding a deity is unverifiable in principle. But there are scientific principles that contain attributes that, according to the positivists, would make them meaningless. For example: One could ask the positivist if, at a time T, an object X had a particular position in space and a particular velocity. Of course, the positivist would respond in the affirmative. But then, when we quantify over X to mean electrons, the positivist is in a bit of a pickle. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it is impossible in principle, to know both the position in space and the velocity of an electron. It seems that the positivist, according to his own principles, must see talk regarding the velocity and position of electrons as nonsense, as they are in principle unverifiable at a time T.

The positivist may respond to this “Well, at this point in time we do not have a technology capable of finding out both velocity and position at a particular time, but that does not mean that in the future there will be no technology that can do that. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a good theory for its time, much like a scientist of the Ancient Greeks who claimed that it was impossible to go to the moon.” Of course, the response to this argument is to turn it upon the verification principle. “Of course the verification principle was good for its time, but now we have additional insight into the nature of the world and we now know that meaning can be ascribed to sentences that cannot be empirically verified or are logical tautologies.”

Another argument against the verification principle being too strong is that one should turn it against itself. “A statement has cognitive meaning if and only if it is empirically verifiable or a logical tautology.” Is this principle a logical tautology? No, it is not. Then, for it to have cognitive meaning, it must be empirically verifiable. Unfortunately, it is not. So, again, we see that the principle is too strong. The positivists could make the claim that this is a sentence regarding the framework of a theoretical position and framework propositions and statements do not have to follow the same analytic rules as propositions and statements within the framework. The obvious response to this argument is to give in to it, and claim that one’s own statements regarding God, or aesthetics, or ethics are framework propositions, and, as such also do not have to meet the criterion set up by the positivists.

Just when it might seem that the positivists are sunk, along comes Rudolf Carnap with a new verification principle, that injected new life into the positivist camp. His article “Testability and Meaning” made a distinction between the testing of a principle and the confirmability of a principle. The distinction between testability and conformability is this: if a sentence is testable, then one may move closer to saying whether the sentence is confirmed. The example that Carnap uses is the sentence “There is a white thing on the table.” Through use of our eyes, we see that the degree of confirmability is rather high, and so we are moved closer to complete verification of that sentence. Sentences of the sort that the original positivists claimed had true cognitive meaning have, of course, the highest degree of confirmability. But, not all cognitively meaningful sentences need have a degree as high as the original positivists wanted. The earlier example of the electron, when Carnap’s principle is applied to it, is no longer cognitively meaningless. There is merely a much lower degree of confirmability.

This weaker version of the principle is much more easily applied to the world than the principle espoused by the early positivists, but it is not without its own problems. One could easily claim that a Christian making a claim about experiencing Jesus as being the Son of God. While this is not terrible testable, the Christian would concede that while the degree of confirmability is low, a mystical experience provided him or her with the necessary information. Carnap would respond to this claim that metaphysical sentences were still cognitively meaningless, especially religious ones, as there is no level of testability possible, let alone confirmability.
The problem with this is that Carnap seems to use his degree of confirmability as a portmanteau. He expands it to contain whatever he wants it to contain, and shrinks it back down again when someone suggests something (like metaphysics) that he doesn’t want in his theory. This seems to be a dogmatic response, for, under Carnap, one can speak of such things as the cardinality of indenumerably infinite worlds in order to make a point, while one cannot talk about ethics.

It seems that even by weakening the verification principle, it still is too strong to let in such things as ethics, aesthetics, and religion as they are cognitively meaningless. Perhaps it is time to truly analyize this claim of the cognitive meaninglessness of the metaphysical. Can one really claim that there is no information expressed in the statement “As a general rule, people shouldn’t hit each other”? It is a statement of ethics, one that is practically universal. It is a rule taught to all children, and they seem to assimilate it (some of course, better than others). Can the positivists really claim that all of the rules for social interaction taught to children are cognitively meaningless? They do, and it seems that this is the weakest link of their argument. If such things as ethics are cognitively meaningless, children do a remarkable job of taking these empty rules and learning to interact with each other with them.

When it comes to religion, a person who claims to have had a mystical experience would be said by a positivist to be spouting nonsense, but there seem to be a great many people who understand what the mystic is saying. Is the claim that any talk at all about religion contains no cognitive meaning really accurate? I cannot see that it is. If the sentence “I believe in God” carries no cognitive content, its negation must have no content as well.

When it comes to aesthetics, can it really be said that the phrase “That is a lovely sunset” contains no real meaning? Are the epic poems of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton totally devoid of cognitive content? To make this claim the positivist show how absurd their position really is. The one saving grace can be found in the position that even if these things do exist, they transcend our ability to talk about them. But even that is obviously not the case, it is simple to talk about such things as beauty, aesthetics, and religion.

The search for a pure language that would facilitate scientific discovery is an admirable goal. However, the scientists should have thought about what the world would have been like without the things that metaphysics gives. A science without ethics would be a terrifying thing, however many useful things it gives, there would always be the spectre of things going out of control because of a lack of discussion regarding the what-ifs of the new discovery. A world without religion would lose not only a great deal of beautiful literature, but also the social benefits that religion brings. Most importantly, a world where talk of beauty was impossible would be one where I, for my part, would not want to live. If the positivists are right, they would be rendering cognitively meaningless most of that which gives pleasure in the world, that which causes one to marvel. Even if it had succeeded within analytic philosophy, it would have died from a lack of those metaphysical properties that it tried so hard to eliminate.

Bibliography:
Ammerman, Robert R. (ed.) Classics of Analytic Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 1990.

Martin, Michael. Atheism: A philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.