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Question: What's going on with Logical Positivism!?
Is Logical Positivism still considered to be a viable philosophical system, or has it been supplanted/discredited by subsequent advances in philosophical thought!?Www@QuestionHome@Com


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A combination of empiricism and linguistic foundationalism led to 20th Century "Theories of Meaning" that plagued Philosophy from the "Tractatus," through LOGICAL POSITIVISM, to the Later Wittgenstein!. Philosophers tried to define the meaning of any sentence from the outset basing it on empiricism, or common sense!. These types of epistemologies are the most popular in Philosophy, because they promise more than they actually deliver!. They give us hope that we will find a tidy scientific tool that, once mastered, will allow us to solve all philosophical problems!. Logical Positivism did two things: it continued the empiricism of David Hume, and it brought language (words and sentences) front and center!.

David Hume professed that Knowledge is only that which can be confirmed by sight, touch, etc!. Any idea that is abstract, or that can't be confirmed by the senses, although it may be a useful fiction, is strickly speaking nonsense!. Notice that what Hume is basically saying (construed in a modern way) is that the ONLY thing we can know are specific empirical facts!. Even a statement like 2+2=4 is not strictly true because it can't be directly confirmed by sensation!. [We can confirm that the model '2+2=4' works for some cases empirically, but not that the model itself is true!. Hume called 2+2=4, not a truth, but a relation of ideas!.]

Now, combine this Humean 'empiricist' theory of knowledge with Gottlieb Frege's introduction of the sentence into Philosophy around the turn of the 20th century!. Logical idealism was formed which attempted to discover behind ordinary language an ideal language, which became what we call 'symbolic logic' today!. (Georg Hegel is really the grandfather of this view - the view that logic is the foundation of all Knowledge!.)

This twin-combination of Hume and Frege yields novel semantic foundationalisms - New types of iDeAliStiC theories of meaning, such as LOGICAL POSITIVISM (an empirical idealism), and other semantic reductionisms, such as the "Meaning=Use" theory of the latter Wittgenstein!.

These 20th Century "Theories of Meaning" are all self-contradictory, such is the case for all theorerical idealisms - and they all also assume radical theories (what some people would term either 'radical metaphysics' or 'first-philosophies')!. Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" has an overt behaviorism, and a common-sense reductionism - a radical metaphysics - that is basically Humean in its effect!.

If you are interested in a great book that discusses these issues, read "Words and Things (1959)" by Ernest Gellner!.

Welcome to the Postmodern!Www@QuestionHome@Com