Seminar Paper - Logical Positivism and Karl Popper

Logical Positivism and Karl Popper

Logical positivism began when philosophers formed a group called The Vienna Circle. Their most notable proposition was the Verification Principle, which in simple terms means if something cannot be verified it is meaningless. For instance metaphysical statements have no meaning because they cannot be verified, we cannot prove notions that help us understand the world such as existence, cause and effect and space and time, e.g. in the past every time we have turned the tap on water has come out, but no one can prove that custard won't come out in the future, until it happens. This is the same for Aristotle’s syllogism: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, and therefore all men are mortal. But how can you be for certain that in the future a man won't be born immortal? Only statements that are based on fact and are proven to be true will be considered meaningful. Wittgenstein, a key philosopher that was part of the Vienna Circle said “of that we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” This meant that any statement that could not be verified was just “gibberish” and therefore if it’s not true we should not talk about it.

The thinkers in the Vienna circle believed that the method of clarification was to show how empirical statements were truths derived from protocol statements; those that describe immediate experience or perception. Experiences recorded by protocol appear to be private to each individual, but this carried the question how can we ever understand anyone else’s meaning? If meaning depends on verification, which is a process carried out privately, then no one else has access to this.

Schlick answered this problem by distinguishing content and form. He described the content of experience as private and incommunicable, these are things we enjoy and live through such as ‘I see something red’. Whereas the form or structure of experience is common between us, even though we cannot be certain that others are experiencing the same thing as us, if we agree on it, for example that trees are green, then we can communicate and construct the language of science.

Karl Popper did not support the Logical positivists; he was against it and was given the nickname ‘The official opposition’. Popper believed that the verification theory could not be verified itself, moreover that scientific theories couldn't be proven to be true because of the theory of induction. Science helped us make a logical guess, but because it is based on experimentation and not pure logic, it cannot be proven true. Popper was a thinker that criticised Induction as these propositions are conclusions that are probable and based on educated predictions, meaning that it has the potential to be falsified. Everything we may see to be true could potentially be falsified and therefore untrue. This is why he thought logical positivists were on the wrong track, because similarly to Hume, he believed that even if you had all the data in the world you still could not predict what is going to happen in the future based on what you know from the past. Popper suggested that we assume that everything we have now is incomplete or is as close to the truth as we can possibly get, we still have to try to improve it. For example, if I wanted to cut exactly 2m of wood, we would never get it exactly spot on but we will strive to get as close as possible. For the simple reason that all our knowledge is fallible, we as humans can never work out what needs correcting, and therefore always torn between: what is right? and what is wrong?

Open Society and it's Enemies  

At the time of the Second World War, Karl popper developed upon political philosophy in the production of ‘The open society and its Enemies’. This outlined two important things; firstly that the ruled should have freedom to discuss and criticise polices proposed by their rulers, and secondly that it should be possible to change the rulers without violence, if they fail to promote citizens’ welfare. With these two factors put into practise we would be living in an open society. Popper did not rule out a government completely, he believed we needed a government that worried about problems and tried to fix them, in order to help protect the economically weak from the economically strong. The idea of Utilitarianism, to maximise happiness in the absence of pain, is what Popper agreed on, instead of making people suffer, give them enough freedom to be happy.

Popper attacked Plato and Marx because he considered these two philosophers as enemies of the open society. He attacks Plato’s Republic, he stated how knowledge was often seen as a justification for having a ruling authority, but why should we trust these experts? We only have because it’s been passed down to us that the expert should be in charge. In an open society there would be no secrets, and instead of an authority figure with knowledge of all, we would all have equal rights and be trusted with knowledge too. Popper’s target on Marx’s was his belief that he had discovered scientific laws that determined the future of the human race. Popper is anti-teleological and therefore strongly believes that we cannot predict the future, until it has happened and is therefore present.

Conspiracy Theories

Popper thought we were all vulnerable to conspiracy theories, naturally humans what to know everything therefore he believed we would be easily won over by theories that do explain everything.

David Ickes held a conspiracy theory that there was a secret society that controlled the world, an illuminati of shadowed elites ruling the world. He believed there was a big secret scam where elites manipulated the way we think and feel so we could perceive the world and behave in a certain way the agenda wanted us to. To begin with Icke was a public figure of ridicule; he was laughed at after claiming he was the Son of God. However, his audience soon grew and people started to listen to what he believed was Lizards ruling the world. There was a problem with this though because people started to think that his philosophy was anti-Semite, and that lizard was a coded word for Jews. But, Icke claimed it was not the case, and when he says lizards he does not refer to any human race.  He considered this accusation as an attempt to push him away from getting closer to the truth, he stood by the fact that people were controlling what we could think, because people stopped him broadcasting radio interviews, cancelled his book signings, and ruled out opportunities for him to voice his thoughts.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

Wittgenstein showed that private experience was something that itself presupposed a shared public world. He suggested we do justice to the private in the context of the social, rather then construct the public from private. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein believed that the connection between language and the world consisted of two features, firstly linking names to objects and secondly the match or mismatch of proposition to facts. However, he now considers this to be a mistake; he now believes that language is interwoven with the world in many different ways which he expressed as ‘language games’. Language games is a point of speaking whether its expressing sensations, reporting an event, making up stories, telling jokes etc, by ‘game’ he does not mean it’s trivial, they are simply linguistic activities. The meaning of the word is its use in a language game, if you want to give an explanation for the meaning of a word we must look for the part it plays in our life. For example, the meaning of a chair: in my life I use it to sit down on and rest.

After Wittgenstein’s death many people regarded Quine as the most respected analytic philosopher. Quine’s aim in philosophy was to provide a naturalistic explanation of the world through science. He offered to analyse language that is both empiricist and behaviourist, he said that all the theories that we use to explain the world were based on the input to our sense-receptors.

Finally, I found Popper a useful and intriguing figure for the journalistic world,  it is our job to tell people the ultimate truth, but this makes it very hard if everything we think to be true is potentially false. This is an eye opener to the lies we may face, we must always question the truth, so we can report it in a way that is fast, accurate and fair.