I think this post suffers from severe overconfidence and also strawmans views like logical positivism. For example, the logical positivist appear to have believed that it was meaningful to talk of things that you can’t experience as long as they could be experienced in principal, so it’s perfectly fine to suggest that the universe is billions of years old. Similarly, it’s not at all obvious dogs are conscious. It’s not as if they talk about being conscious and response to pain and other harmful stimulus is found even among single cell organisms. Same goes for your belief in moral realism, it might be true, but it’s definitely not obviously true. Honestly, while even I agree that academics often believe stupid things, I think this post is a good illustration of making the opposite mistake of not realising that people who are as intelligent as you disagreeing with you in large numbers is strong evidence that you are mistaken, and therefore, you should not be too confident in such opinions. It also shows a problem with your inductive counter argument because very often the people who are arguing that things not explained by science that appear obviously unscientific are often actually non-existent disagree with you about these issues and would regard supernatural morality is one of those things. You can’t use beliefs that the other party does not share to persuade them that they are mistaken because they reject your premises in the first place. As an exercise in persuasion, this post just isn’t very convincing because the majority of your examples just aren’t obvious mistakes but views that people with strong scientific inclinations regard as reasonable.
There's a study showing mathematicians are more likely to get a math question about gun control wrong if the correct answer doesn't support their personal views on the topic. It seems to be the smarter you are the more susceptible to confirmation bias and the better you are at convincing yourself and others of untrue things. You basically become so smart you can justify anything.
I believe studies also show (though it's been a while since I looked) the best solutions come from groups of mixed expert academics and amateurs. I think that's the solution—we need academics, but they shouldn't be held above the common person—they need to be accountable to normies and need to be ideologically diverse.
Careful - people often interpret questions differently from the most formalist view depending on the topic. It's really easy to set up traps that way, with questions that are supposedly mathematically identical, but won't be read as identical in terms of normal language.
("Pres any key to continue." "Which key is the any key?").
Ik positivism is not in style, but is it really as dead as you say? I know of at least two philosophers (Liam Bright and Kenny Easwaran) who describe themselves as sympathetic to positivism.
Like others have said, I don't think this post is fair to logical positivism. Heumer writes engagingly, creatively, and persuasively, but charity to views he thinks are wrong (not just positivism but also expressivism, physicalism, determinism) is not his strong suit.
Read Carnap or Hempel (not Ayer) and I think it will be easier to see how positivism attracted so many. The self defeat argument doesn't get very far. When they grappled with it, they tended to settle on understanding the verification principle as a proposal for how to use language--"let's talk like this"--rather than a statement that's supposed to already be true. "Let's go to the movies" is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable, but that doesn't mean that positivists couldn't suggest a matinee.
In Carnap talk, the question whether to adopt the verification criterion as a kind of definition of "meaningful" is an external question that can only be settled on pragmatic grounds (like with other metaphysical questions, for example, about the ontology of abstract objects) They said there was a good pragmatic argument for doing so, and that's not absurd on it's face. Basically, it *could* be analytically true if we adopted certain conventions about how to use the word "meaningful", and we have good practical reason to adopt those conventions. Not too different from what Amos says about "trans women are women"; it's no coincidence contemporary conceptual engineers recognize positivists like Carnap as their main historical antecedents (not for the whole worldview, but for the conceptual engineering.)
That's not to say I think there's a way to make it work. Hempel's "Problems and challenges for the empiricist criterion of meaning" is a master work by someone writing in the positivist tradition making a powerful case that there's no way to define verifiability that can do the work positivists wanted it to. A good analogy
might be Frege's version of set theory. As russell pointed out, it leads to paradox. But it's subtle and nobody thinks Frege's was a fool for taking it seriously.
This makes me want to read Carnap and Hempel! (I’ve had Carnap’s intro to phil of science sitting on my bookshelf for forever now - wasn’t aware of Hempel tho)
"Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" is a good place to start with Carnap. It's certainly the most widely read work of his today, and it's pretty accessible. "Testability and Meaning", let alone the Aufbau, are much less accessible, but if you have a lot of time and patience, maybe worth the investment.
With Hempel, that paper I mentioned I think is a good place to see the internal problems for veritificationism that really were fatal (more than the idea that the verification criterion isn't verifiable). Most of what Hempel is known for today is general philosophy of science that's separable from positivism per se--the ravens paradox, the deductive/nomological conception of explanation, the symmetry between explanation and prediction--and that's all worth getting a feel for.
Hempel had an account of scientific explanations which I think is cool, because the formalism he uses yields genuine insight:
He said that explanations in the physical sciences can be represented as deductive arguments whose conclusion is the physical phenomenon being explained.
So you have the conclusion “The apple hits Isaac Newton on the head,” and you have premises that include propositions like “The apple has mass,” “The earth has mass,” some suitable formulation of the laws of motion, etc. And the argument that all of that forms constitutes a scientific explanation for the observed fact “The apple hits Isaac Newton on the head”
I’m pretty sure anyway. This is me doing my best to remember a treatment of Hempel’s thought from Wesley Salmon’s magnificent Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, which I skimmed as an undergraduate.
As someone who has extensively read Ayer, Skinner, and Chomsky, this article is proof that you haven’t bothered to read much, if at all, of any of them. If you had, you could not in good faith make the claims you make here about Positivism, Behaviorism, or Chomsky’s supposed take down of Skinner.
Oh, and there are both bonafide positivists and behaviorists today working within academia. Another fact you didn’t bother to check. In fact, the behaviorist program continued to develop without interruption within both Psychology and Neuroscience after Chomsky’s essay. The only ones who cheered for Chomsky and hailed it as a takedown were the generative linguists and the computer scientists who relied on the theories developed by Chomsky.
Hi! I thought I'd let you know that Alex shouted you out in a recent podcast episode! Maybe another proof of concept to add to your EA forum post regarding the daily show :) - https://youtu.be/hVQIrVPkEM8?si=_PWfrnvyKE-DPv23
The term "meaningful" is polysemous: it has multiple meanings, their differences are sometimes subtle, and people miscommunicate and misunderstand due to those subtle differences. Positivists knew that religious claims, for instance, were "meaningful" in all sorts of ordinary ways--the ways that are totally obvious. There was no simple "But this is silly!" refutation of the view. You're displaying your ignorance of the basics here.
Also, think about it. There were many positivists who spent many years developing and evaluating the view. Do you think they just missed out on the obvious refutation? When accusing *a great many* people who are *obviously very intelligent* and who *endorsed a "silly" view for many years* of obvious error, the accuser has most likely misunderstood what's going on.
The problem isn’t that they believe insane things. The problem is that their status gives those insane ideas a false legitimacy and the hoi polloi mustn’t question the oracles
The trouble with arguments like this is that what one man finds incredible another finds totally normal.
Sure, these views seem insane to you. That might even be enough for you to believe they are insane. But it isn’t enough to justify a consensus about what is and is not sane.
Asking the question, “Why does [insert group] believe insane things?” merely bypasses the more important question of whether they are right.
These seem like cases where a useful paradigm shift was happening, and the theory was just a more formal (albeit incorrect) manner of expressing it. Logical positivism was the popularized the move to the heavy use of formal logic in analytic philosophy; behaviorism was popularized the move to an empirical approach to psychology. What made them compelling was that the perspectives they embodied were correct, even if the more rigorous theories used to represent those perspectives were wrong.
Let's get something straight - they got consciousness wrong, because they had an anti-religious animus? Because yes that did happen. When geologists stopped believing in The Flood, they by extension believed that no truly big disasters ever happened. So convincing them that a disaster caused by a huge asteroid made dinosaurs extinct was actually hard. To them it just sounded too much like The Flood all over.
I think pride has a lot to do with it. You grow up a human among other regular humans. At some point, you realize you're a Smart Person. This gives you an unexpected cachet. You move in among other Smart People, and you realize that they all believe certain things that the dummies you grew up around don't believe. Of course you're going to believe them too! It's what gives you your privilege!
This is just ordinary groupthink, but with the vicious kick of elitism and power added.
I think the answer to “what should we do” is quite clear: we should give more money but no more prestige to academics. Academics are wrong all the time, just like everyone else; but academia is one of the very few places in which it is possible to shift to better answers without killing people over it. (I think a well-managed free market is another such place, and they are equally precious.) So we should give academics as much money as they can use to figure things out; but not prestige, because that would give them the opportunity to turn intellectual questions political, which would reduce the chances of right answers emerging, I think.
With all the errors made, you would think there would be some sort of academic discipline dedicated to tracking and accounting for them. We essentially have learned nothing from our mistakes.
The outcome of logical positivism was poor, but the intention was not absurd. Although the statement, ‘logical positivism is true’ is not backed by empirical evidence, it is not conclusively contradicted either. Logical positivism would aim to ground its own truth in empirical evidence, just like its wider ambition to ground all aimless arguments in something that can observed to be true or false.
While it has some bearing on the recent history of philosophical thought, and it was a movement that obviously some important philosophers took on board, like Wittgenstein, it was also a movement that died. But that doesn’t mean it was crazy to begin with. It just had this high scientific criteria for truth that it couldn’t satisfy itself. Yet the intention of logical positivism to eliminate meaningless debate is admirable, and its failure to do so is just the norm for the world we live in.
Is your confidence that dogs are conscious derived from their similarity to humans, or simply from observing them? I'm curious if it's just the latter, cos I'd struggle to be super confident just from that, given how weird consciousness is, and how fallible emotions are, etc
I think this post suffers from severe overconfidence and also strawmans views like logical positivism. For example, the logical positivist appear to have believed that it was meaningful to talk of things that you can’t experience as long as they could be experienced in principal, so it’s perfectly fine to suggest that the universe is billions of years old. Similarly, it’s not at all obvious dogs are conscious. It’s not as if they talk about being conscious and response to pain and other harmful stimulus is found even among single cell organisms. Same goes for your belief in moral realism, it might be true, but it’s definitely not obviously true. Honestly, while even I agree that academics often believe stupid things, I think this post is a good illustration of making the opposite mistake of not realising that people who are as intelligent as you disagreeing with you in large numbers is strong evidence that you are mistaken, and therefore, you should not be too confident in such opinions. It also shows a problem with your inductive counter argument because very often the people who are arguing that things not explained by science that appear obviously unscientific are often actually non-existent disagree with you about these issues and would regard supernatural morality is one of those things. You can’t use beliefs that the other party does not share to persuade them that they are mistaken because they reject your premises in the first place. As an exercise in persuasion, this post just isn’t very convincing because the majority of your examples just aren’t obvious mistakes but views that people with strong scientific inclinations regard as reasonable.
There's a study showing mathematicians are more likely to get a math question about gun control wrong if the correct answer doesn't support their personal views on the topic. It seems to be the smarter you are the more susceptible to confirmation bias and the better you are at convincing yourself and others of untrue things. You basically become so smart you can justify anything.
I believe studies also show (though it's been a while since I looked) the best solutions come from groups of mixed expert academics and amateurs. I think that's the solution—we need academics, but they shouldn't be held above the common person—they need to be accountable to normies and need to be ideologically diverse.
Careful - people often interpret questions differently from the most formalist view depending on the topic. It's really easy to set up traps that way, with questions that are supposedly mathematically identical, but won't be read as identical in terms of normal language.
("Pres any key to continue." "Which key is the any key?").
Ik positivism is not in style, but is it really as dead as you say? I know of at least two philosophers (Liam Bright and Kenny Easwaran) who describe themselves as sympathetic to positivism.
Like others have said, I don't think this post is fair to logical positivism. Heumer writes engagingly, creatively, and persuasively, but charity to views he thinks are wrong (not just positivism but also expressivism, physicalism, determinism) is not his strong suit.
Read Carnap or Hempel (not Ayer) and I think it will be easier to see how positivism attracted so many. The self defeat argument doesn't get very far. When they grappled with it, they tended to settle on understanding the verification principle as a proposal for how to use language--"let's talk like this"--rather than a statement that's supposed to already be true. "Let's go to the movies" is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable, but that doesn't mean that positivists couldn't suggest a matinee.
In Carnap talk, the question whether to adopt the verification criterion as a kind of definition of "meaningful" is an external question that can only be settled on pragmatic grounds (like with other metaphysical questions, for example, about the ontology of abstract objects) They said there was a good pragmatic argument for doing so, and that's not absurd on it's face. Basically, it *could* be analytically true if we adopted certain conventions about how to use the word "meaningful", and we have good practical reason to adopt those conventions. Not too different from what Amos says about "trans women are women"; it's no coincidence contemporary conceptual engineers recognize positivists like Carnap as their main historical antecedents (not for the whole worldview, but for the conceptual engineering.)
That's not to say I think there's a way to make it work. Hempel's "Problems and challenges for the empiricist criterion of meaning" is a master work by someone writing in the positivist tradition making a powerful case that there's no way to define verifiability that can do the work positivists wanted it to. A good analogy
might be Frege's version of set theory. As russell pointed out, it leads to paradox. But it's subtle and nobody thinks Frege's was a fool for taking it seriously.
This makes me want to read Carnap and Hempel! (I’ve had Carnap’s intro to phil of science sitting on my bookshelf for forever now - wasn’t aware of Hempel tho)
"Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" is a good place to start with Carnap. It's certainly the most widely read work of his today, and it's pretty accessible. "Testability and Meaning", let alone the Aufbau, are much less accessible, but if you have a lot of time and patience, maybe worth the investment.
With Hempel, that paper I mentioned I think is a good place to see the internal problems for veritificationism that really were fatal (more than the idea that the verification criterion isn't verifiable). Most of what Hempel is known for today is general philosophy of science that's separable from positivism per se--the ravens paradox, the deductive/nomological conception of explanation, the symmetry between explanation and prediction--and that's all worth getting a feel for.
Hempel had an account of scientific explanations which I think is cool, because the formalism he uses yields genuine insight:
He said that explanations in the physical sciences can be represented as deductive arguments whose conclusion is the physical phenomenon being explained.
So you have the conclusion “The apple hits Isaac Newton on the head,” and you have premises that include propositions like “The apple has mass,” “The earth has mass,” some suitable formulation of the laws of motion, etc. And the argument that all of that forms constitutes a scientific explanation for the observed fact “The apple hits Isaac Newton on the head”
I’m pretty sure anyway. This is me doing my best to remember a treatment of Hempel’s thought from Wesley Salmon’s magnificent Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, which I skimmed as an undergraduate.
As someone who has extensively read Ayer, Skinner, and Chomsky, this article is proof that you haven’t bothered to read much, if at all, of any of them. If you had, you could not in good faith make the claims you make here about Positivism, Behaviorism, or Chomsky’s supposed take down of Skinner.
Oh, and there are both bonafide positivists and behaviorists today working within academia. Another fact you didn’t bother to check. In fact, the behaviorist program continued to develop without interruption within both Psychology and Neuroscience after Chomsky’s essay. The only ones who cheered for Chomsky and hailed it as a takedown were the generative linguists and the computer scientists who relied on the theories developed by Chomsky.
Hi! I thought I'd let you know that Alex shouted you out in a recent podcast episode! Maybe another proof of concept to add to your EA forum post regarding the daily show :) - https://youtu.be/hVQIrVPkEM8?si=_PWfrnvyKE-DPv23
The term "meaningful" is polysemous: it has multiple meanings, their differences are sometimes subtle, and people miscommunicate and misunderstand due to those subtle differences. Positivists knew that religious claims, for instance, were "meaningful" in all sorts of ordinary ways--the ways that are totally obvious. There was no simple "But this is silly!" refutation of the view. You're displaying your ignorance of the basics here.
Also, think about it. There were many positivists who spent many years developing and evaluating the view. Do you think they just missed out on the obvious refutation? When accusing *a great many* people who are *obviously very intelligent* and who *endorsed a "silly" view for many years* of obvious error, the accuser has most likely misunderstood what's going on.
The problem isn’t that they believe insane things. The problem is that their status gives those insane ideas a false legitimacy and the hoi polloi mustn’t question the oracles
The trouble with arguments like this is that what one man finds incredible another finds totally normal.
Sure, these views seem insane to you. That might even be enough for you to believe they are insane. But it isn’t enough to justify a consensus about what is and is not sane.
Asking the question, “Why does [insert group] believe insane things?” merely bypasses the more important question of whether they are right.
These seem like cases where a useful paradigm shift was happening, and the theory was just a more formal (albeit incorrect) manner of expressing it. Logical positivism was the popularized the move to the heavy use of formal logic in analytic philosophy; behaviorism was popularized the move to an empirical approach to psychology. What made them compelling was that the perspectives they embodied were correct, even if the more rigorous theories used to represent those perspectives were wrong.
Let's get something straight - they got consciousness wrong, because they had an anti-religious animus? Because yes that did happen. When geologists stopped believing in The Flood, they by extension believed that no truly big disasters ever happened. So convincing them that a disaster caused by a huge asteroid made dinosaurs extinct was actually hard. To them it just sounded too much like The Flood all over.
I think pride has a lot to do with it. You grow up a human among other regular humans. At some point, you realize you're a Smart Person. This gives you an unexpected cachet. You move in among other Smart People, and you realize that they all believe certain things that the dummies you grew up around don't believe. Of course you're going to believe them too! It's what gives you your privilege!
This is just ordinary groupthink, but with the vicious kick of elitism and power added.
I think the answer to “what should we do” is quite clear: we should give more money but no more prestige to academics. Academics are wrong all the time, just like everyone else; but academia is one of the very few places in which it is possible to shift to better answers without killing people over it. (I think a well-managed free market is another such place, and they are equally precious.) So we should give academics as much money as they can use to figure things out; but not prestige, because that would give them the opportunity to turn intellectual questions political, which would reduce the chances of right answers emerging, I think.
Murder is wrong is true by definition. Bad example.
With all the errors made, you would think there would be some sort of academic discipline dedicated to tracking and accounting for them. We essentially have learned nothing from our mistakes.
The outcome of logical positivism was poor, but the intention was not absurd. Although the statement, ‘logical positivism is true’ is not backed by empirical evidence, it is not conclusively contradicted either. Logical positivism would aim to ground its own truth in empirical evidence, just like its wider ambition to ground all aimless arguments in something that can observed to be true or false.
While it has some bearing on the recent history of philosophical thought, and it was a movement that obviously some important philosophers took on board, like Wittgenstein, it was also a movement that died. But that doesn’t mean it was crazy to begin with. It just had this high scientific criteria for truth that it couldn’t satisfy itself. Yet the intention of logical positivism to eliminate meaningless debate is admirable, and its failure to do so is just the norm for the world we live in.
Is your confidence that dogs are conscious derived from their similarity to humans, or simply from observing them? I'm curious if it's just the latter, cos I'd struggle to be super confident just from that, given how weird consciousness is, and how fallible emotions are, etc
(overall though I'm probably >75%)