The Rise of Logical Positivism (Part 4-2)

The second section (of three) of the fourth part of my series on the philosophy of science. In this video I cover the rise of logical positivism. I describe the basic concepts and ideas that constitute logical positivism. Up next: the fall of logical positivism.

[cariboux]

Thank you. I took HPS several decades ago, but recently had my interest rekindled and was looking for a refresher. Your lectures are excellent! You are to be commended for your ability to present complicated subject matter with such clarity. Your students are very fortunate!

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@LordSlag Thanks for the feedback. I actually have been trying to edit out the stuttering, and while I got a large chunk, I obviously haven't gotten it all. Glad you're liking it.

[nobadragoon]

This series is SO good. Thanks for getting me started on my philosophy of science module

[ThePeaceableKingdom]

Hegel "doesn't do himself any favors in the clarity department..."
Understatement of the year...

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@BionicDance I don't think any serious intellectuals want to rule out 'indirect' observations wholesale. The debate is over their exact nature, their limitations and so forth. When I said 'get a better handle' I wasn't referring to 'getting a better handle on physical reality' but rather 'getting a better handle on what exactly we're doing when we observe and theorize about physical reality.'

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@bananabread119 I'll be getting to that in the next vid, with Quine's critique of positivism.

[crimsonking]

Thank you for this series. Clear, concise content, great delivery at a good pace (I find a lot of lectures to be unbearably slow). I had a blast following along taking notes and now feel like I have a reasonable overview on the philosophy of science. I found this sort of big picture analysis very helpful, mainly since it tied together a lot of disjointed pieces of information I had gathered over the years. Once again, thank you very much!

[beriukay]

Like you said earlier, our senses pretty much eliminate "direct observation." It's not like you're seeing chair. You're seeing light bounced off of chair and into your eye hole, which means you're really just seeing the consequences of chair in kinda the same way as you see black hole or electron.

[threeofwands]

Really good review of the whole business. The Vienna circle tends to get slagged for being slavishly endeared to the natural sciences, but they really did a lot of philosophy and they went into significant depth, although as you allude to their background reading more or less begins with Kant. Great vid.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@ebaltrace Probably the two biggest post-positivist schools are Popperean falsificationism and Kuhnian paradigm science. I'll be talking about both later on.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@BionicDance Well, one of the issues I'll bring up in the next video is the realism/anti-realism dispute: is science describing the real, hidden structure of reality? Realists say yes, anti-realists say no, science just a way of organizing our experiences. Positivism entails anti-realism, since there is no 'reality' beyond what see; to postulate further than that is to go beyond the evidence. Yet many people want to say that science is telling us what's REAL, not just our perceptions of it.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@ScepticalAgnostic I try to make that distinction in the third part, although it's not as clear as I probably could have made it.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@michalchik You're welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@Igotnogod It may be a point upon which one could build an argument, but it's not immediately obvious that such an argument would work. And however the argument is articulated, it would certainly face considerable objections.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@fight4th3truth Glad you like it, thank you for saying so.

[jpl]

I completely agree with your opinion of the Logical Positivists' rejection of exterior and interior experience dichotomies. The problem with the Rationalists... as opposed to the Empiricists -- is that "consciousness" is merely a system of sensations, among them a feed-back sense which, in combination with the mere sense experiences, structures the experience of identity. Since all cognition takes place in that structure, it all necessarily takes place a posteriori to sense experience.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@BionicDance It certainly does do a lot of heavy lifting, and such pragmatic value is a point in its favor. But at the same time, there are lots of 'useful fictions' in science. You can use Ptolemaic astronomy to navigate from Portugal to New York with incredible accuracy, for example. It's definitely better than faith, that's for sure, but it would be nice if we could get an even better handle on the nature of what we're doing when we use scientific theories to frame our observations.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@johncrwarner Yeah, it would have been nice to have given Mach more praise, but I was already pushing it for time. I figured mentioning that fact that they named their society after him would have been a good indication of the esteem in which they held him, and since the speed of sound is the only touch-stone most people have for him, I threw that in there.

[SisyphusRedeemed]

@zarkoff45 They're similar, in that they both believe that 'ideas' or 'spirit' or some such is real, but idealism differs in that it rejects the idea of a 'material world' independent of our ideas, perceptions, spirit and so forth.

[Censeo]

Thank you for this series. It is perfect for me, who have no philosophy major, but am eager to learn more about our history of philosophy as well as doing some philosophical thinking on my own (or see which philosopher answers things adequately to my wonder).