70. Hume's Fork, Logical Positivism, & Quine | THUNK

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Logical positivism ran with Hume's analytic/synthetic distinction...turns out running with forks is a bad idea.

-Links for the Curious-

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Wow. I was looking for something on the Quine paper, and this was beyond my expectations. WELL DONE!

BillHustonPodcast

No way! I just started one of my essays on logical positivism and humes fork. This video came in perfect timing, well done 😄

ashersoryl

I was actually reading about this in the metaphysics chapter of the book The Love of Wisdom. The section was talking about possible roadblocks to undertaking metaphysics, but instead of talking about Hume, the book talks about Kant's epistemology. Then it talks about logical positivism.

sciencmath

Very happy you put this in. ☺ It's the long winded approach to my often-used saying that even science and mathematics "floats in mid-air". Now I have a link I can point to instead. Thank you! ☺

This is something I wish technologists, scientists and mathematicians would consider more often, if purely for the exercise.

Well done. I have a feeling this one didn't come easy at first. But you persevered through, regardless of any predispositions. Absolutely commendable! And very well said. ☺

seatek

this was the first episode for which I noticed that the gibberish you tell us to not forget is "blah blah subscribe"

yevgeniygorbachev

I'm a fan of Hume. His views on the synthetic world are as true today as ever and completely compatible with modern thought such as postmodernism. The is no delusion of truth in empiricism. We know our senses can only observe part of reality and not even an objective one. We don't see all the colours or hear all sounds and we see reality as solids not space with atoms floating around in it. This can't be said for the analytic which has an underlying belief it is searching for universal truth. So we have the important half of Hume's fork the observation of the physical world accepting it is a relative view and its sidekick logic and reason claiming to be producing universal Somewhat of an imbalance, delusions of grandeur even by the analytic.

Logical Positivism's flaw to me is falling for this and putting too much emphasis on using the analytic to find a truth. They needed to abandon logic and just be empirical. Saying that I do have a soft spot for any philosophy that when someone asks you are you an atheist or theist, you reply neither, they're both gobbledygook.

Fiddling_while_Rome_burns

You need to find a way to shoehorn the AJ Ayer Mike Tyson confrontation

ewstaeger

I’m going to gently suggest that Quine’s Two Dogmas is not the last nail in the coffin of Logical Positivism and that his abolition of the Fact Value dichotomy is itself a greater obstacle to pragmatic knowledge than Positivism.

With the Fact Value dichotomy, one could examine any proposition according to Whitehead’s speculative schema. I could examine whether it was “rational”; this would tell me whether it was logical and coherent. Alternately, I could examine whether it was Factual meaning applicable or adequate. After Quine, this distinction between what is rationally true and what is empirically true disappears.

The result of this in practical terms is the emergence and dominance of some theories which are neither rational nor factual. The weaknesses in rationality are justified by the promise of observable results and the lack of observable results are justified by the mathematical beauty of the model. Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math addresses this issue.

Hilary Putnam makes this deficiency abundantly clear in his The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy. He argues that the Roman emperors were evil because they committed evil acts. The acts were evil because they were committed by the Roman emperors whose we all know to be evil. Putnam attempts the escape this circle by an appeal to reasonable authority. The reasonableness of any authority, however, appears to be the result of an arbitrary choice as Putnam himself admits.

The viciousness of this circle is demonstrated when Quine’s wholistic approach to truth came to be applied to criminal justice. There have been a number of wrongful convictions due to the confounding of Fact and Value.

randalltilander

Hume's fork is already a regression behind Plato's Divided Line model. How much positivist nonsense we would have been spared had he started with it instead!

christofeles

You can argue about the weather all day or you can look out the window.

But what if your eyes or your mind are objectively unreliable?

sean..L

Yeah. Hume totally does it for me. My only "guilty pleasure" is 'liking' Rudolph Carnap. There, you dragged it outta me. And yes, I have looked into Logical Positivism via Dr. Burton Dreben (teaching the Tractatus). But the very notion that ANY modern philosopher could ask (as some do) "Is there such a thing as the synthetic a priori?" strikes my as sad, well... pathetic actually, notwithstanding Emmanuel Kant. It's just like physicists asking the question (with a straight face I might add) "What came BEFORE the big bang?" I mean, isn't anybody NOTICING this shit? "...and darkness lay on the face of the deep. And God said, 'Let there be light. and there was light." Really? There was darkness before there was light? Where exactly is the "definitional co-ordinate system" (my words)? As in Wittgenstein's "logical space(?)" Sometimes it's like I'm talkin' to myself. Which is a long-winded way of saying, thank you for a very stimulating discussion.

philipdubuque

Are there any philosophical models (am I using the term correctly?) that fully stand up to scrutiny? Anything I've seen on philosophy always seems to have a - and this is why it's wrong - tacked on to the end of it.

PaddyMacNasty

this really helped me understand logical positivism, thank you!

EmmaCarrillo

Hume awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and Kant got up and stuck a fork in him. Causality is just a bad mental habit we have and so is the idea there is a mind to even have habits, good or bad? How are ideas possible for Hume?

robertmontgomery