Week 9 - Science and Technology/Logical Positivism

Wittgenstein was a key figure in the ideas of Logical Positivism and heavily believed that everything was logical and factual. He believed that language was everything and that it infected people – nothing else mattered. Language described everything therefore without it there was nothing. His thought was that language was broader than just speech – there were such things as “speech acts”, that take place within “language games”. He saw language as a game, i.e. a situation bound by certain rules. An example of this discussed in the lecture was the Clangers, whereby you can understand what they mean purely without talking – therefore according to Wittgenstein they would have been performing a speech act. Another example would be monkeys and apes; you can understand what they are doing by analysing their stances and actions as opposed to speech.

The idea of logic was modernised by Freud and psychoanalysis, and in politics the use of logic was applied to attempt to solve social problems with examples such as state planning and the bureaucracy. However following World War II, many reacted against this ‘solution’. Unlike the romanticism movement, and aesthetics, logic was powerfully anti-metaphysical. Science was seen as the only valid way to analyse and solve any problem, social or otherwise.

Logical Positivists generally admired Hume, who was also a Logical Positivist, i.e. very sceptical about any truths that are not scientific truths. For example referring to Inference, and the idea that smoking causes cancer, when in fact it cannot be 100% proven, but is just inferred through the statistic.

The lecture also included the Verification Principle (Freddy Ayer – Language, Truth and Logic), which basically said that what has been decided as true or false up to now can all be ignored and is a waste of time, as there are statements that can be verified as provisionally true, definitely false, or cannot be verified at all. He paraphrased the Principle saying, “The method of verification is the truth of a statement.” However a state can be deemed “unfalsifiable”, such as “All men are mortal”, because the number of men being born is questionable, therefore there is always a chance the next to be born could be immortal.