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Background to Verificationism
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Verificationism
In this course, Dr Arif Ahmed (University of Cambridge) explores the empirical verification principle. In the first module, we introduce the philosophical context in which verificationism arose. In the second module, we review the impact of verificationism on metaphysics, ethics, and mathematics. In the third module, we examine Ayer’s modifications of the verification principle, before turning to further criticisms of verificationism in the fourth module. In the fifth module, we go beyond the syllabus to look at Quine’s two dogmas of empiricism, and examine how much of logical positivism survives Quine’s critique.
Background to Verificationism
In this module, we introduce the background to verificationism in philosophy, focusing in particular on (i) Kant’s views on the limits of reason, and the effect of mental categories on our perception of reality (ii) Gottlob Frege’s inauguration of the analysis of language and thought in analytic philosophy (iii) Bertrand Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions (iv) Wittgenstein’s contributions to the philosophy of language (v) the development of verificationism by logical positivists in the Vienna Circle, and A.J. Ayer.
Hello.
00:00:06My name is Aref Ahmed,
00:00:06and I'm professor of philosophy here at the University of Cambridge.
00:00:07I'll be talking to you today about verification is, um, and logical positivism.
00:00:11When you think about the problems of philosophy, for instance,
00:00:16the problems of metaphysics,
00:00:19you very quickly notice something rather strange about them.
00:00:20If you can contrast them with, for instance, problems of history or geography,
00:00:24we can see that in that case,
00:00:28these questions can be settled in a recently straightforward way.
00:00:30Not that they're always easy to settle,
00:00:33but we know the sorts of inquiry that would tell us, for instance,
00:00:35the answer to some question of history. Like which monarch succeeded which one?
00:00:37Or you know what certain coastal features have as their cause.
00:00:41On the other hand, there are questions of mathematics and logic,
00:00:45which we can also settle in a way that we understand well.
00:00:47So they are well understood formal methods
00:00:50for settling mathematical and logical questions.
00:00:52But then think about the questions that philosophy
00:00:56traditionally attacks problems like is their free will.
00:00:58Does God exist? Is the brain is the mind material, or is it just the brain?
00:01:02These are questions which on the one hand seemed to be very deep and
00:01:08go to the heart of what it means to be a human being.
00:01:12But on the other hand,
00:01:15it's hard to tell how exactly we should even begin to approach them.
00:01:16And is this dichotomy that's led to a certain dissatisfaction with philosophy,
00:01:21as well as explaining why people have been
00:01:26studying the problems for thousands of years?
00:01:28It's important to understand this is the background when we see what it is that made.
00:01:31Verification is, um,
00:01:35an attractive philosophical movement and also the lines of thought
00:01:36that led up to it in the preceding few centuries.
00:01:39Of those eyes of thought,
00:01:43I really only mentioned one that's one that begins with
00:01:44the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century.
00:01:47Can't wrote that It's a feature of human reason that when
00:01:51it thinks about matters concerning history or geography or mathematics,
00:01:55it always has a tendency to become more and more abstract and more and more general.
00:02:00And at some point it reaches beyond itself and starts to generate questions
00:02:05that in themselves cannot be answered
00:02:08and at some point actually become meaningless
00:02:10and cans great work for critique of pure reason was about setting the bands to
00:02:13what reason can and can't reasonably accomplish and
00:02:17what it can and can't reasonably address.
00:02:21That work,
00:02:25which was perhaps the most controversial important
00:02:26work in the history of the subject,
00:02:28came to the earth shattering conclusion that in fact,
00:02:31there are features of the world, if you might,
00:02:34philosophical features of the world that are
00:02:36not actually there in the world itself,
00:02:38but it put there by our own mental categories.
00:02:40We have, as can said,
00:02:43mental equipment that imposes on experience around
00:02:45us certain features like cause and effect,
00:02:48time space and so on.
00:02:50That means that we're inevitably going to see
00:02:52reality as being ordered according to those categories,
00:02:55but they are in fact side effects of our method of representation.
00:03:00They're not really features of reality as it is in itself,
00:03:03if you want to put it in those terms
00:03:06following hand.
00:03:10There was a great revolution in the understanding of logic, which took place in 18 79
00:03:12and this is at the hands of the philosopher Gotland Frager.
00:03:17Why am I mentioning this? What?
00:03:21It's important because what Frager gave us was the instruments,
00:03:23logical instruments for analysing language and through the
00:03:27analysis of language to the analysis of thought.
00:03:30And that, in turn,
00:03:34allowed us to do what camp was doing with an unprecedented degree of precision.
00:03:35We could now logically analyse what thoughts were and work out
00:03:40from that exactly where the limits of legitimate thought lay.
00:03:44Or at least that's what philosophers thought.
00:03:48And that was the background that gave rise to the movement that became logical.
00:03:51Positivism and verification is, um,
00:03:54in the late 19th and early 20th century.
00:03:56Now of the philosophers who were involved in that,
00:04:00perhaps the most important precursors after fragrant
00:04:03can't were the two Cambridge philosophers,
00:04:05Bertrand Russell and
00:04:07Wittgenstein.
00:04:09Russell is well known for a number of things,
00:04:11but one of his great contributions to the philosophy of language
00:04:13was understanding that we can analyse ordinary English using logical instruments
00:04:16the instruments that Frazier had developed so that we can work
00:04:21out exactly what something is and what something isn't saying.
00:04:24You might have come across this analysis of what are called definite descriptions,
00:04:28for instance, so when he has an analysis of a sentence like the King of France is bold,
00:04:31Russell says.
00:04:36We can understand that in logical terms,
00:04:36it's not actually referring to some fictional entity.
00:04:38The King of France. As you know, France doesn't have. King hasn't had one since 17 92
00:04:40but rather is making general assertion about all persons.
00:04:45What it's saying is that amongst the group of people
00:04:50you'll find one person who is the king of France,
00:04:52nobody else's, and whoever is that person is bold.
00:04:54So here we have a logical analysis of water sentences saying,
00:04:59and that's a model for the sort of approach that
00:05:02Russell student little bit Liechtenstein adopted in his great work,
00:05:04the track status Logical philosophic Asse, which was published in English in 1922.
00:05:09In that work,
00:05:14Wittgenstein thought he'd solved all the problems of philosophy for him.
00:05:15He thought that when we try to analyse our language using logical instruments,
00:05:18we work out exactly what our sentences are saying.
00:05:22And then it turns out that philosophical claims end
00:05:26up as meaningless when you try and even say,
00:05:29the biggest Chinese language that every cause has every effect
00:05:32has a cause or that time has a certain direction,
00:05:36or that the mind is not material
00:05:39you end up either
00:05:43making a claim of pure logic
00:05:44or making an empirical claim that is one that can
00:05:47be tested by well known techniques of observation and experiment
00:05:50or saying nothing at all.
00:05:54And it was in that latter category that Wittgenstein
00:05:58put most of the main points of philosophy.
00:06:00They were, he said, in the track status, things that cannot be said in a language,
00:06:03but they are somehow shown by the form of our language.
00:06:07The form of our language, he says, reveals a kind of philosophical contour.
00:06:10But it isn't something that can never literally be said,
00:06:15nor given the equation between thought and language that
00:06:18was common and had been common since Vegas.
00:06:21Time
00:06:23are these things that can even be thought.
00:06:24The solution to the problems of philosophy of Wittgenstein said,
00:06:27can be seen in the vanishing of those very problems.
00:06:30All of this was the background to verification is, um,
00:06:34which was principally the work of two groups.
00:06:38One of them, which I'll talk about a little bit later, was the Vienna Circle.
00:06:42This is a group of great philosophers, mathematicians, physicists and so on,
00:06:46who lived and worked in Vienna in the 19
00:06:50twenties they were deeply instruments by Lichtenstein's track status.
00:06:52They also had contact with great scientists
00:06:56and philosophers like Einstein and proper.
00:06:59But before talking about the logical positivism,
00:07:03I'm going to say something about probably the
00:07:05most famous English exponents of verification is,
00:07:07um,
00:07:10and that was the philosopher A. J. Ayer.
00:07:10The work on which is famed principally rests actually came on somewhat later,
00:07:14and this is the book called Language, Truth and Logic, which was published in 1936.
00:07:17That book, however, is in many ways the furthest that one could go along.
00:07:23The line of logical analysis and the elimination of the problems of philosophy,
00:07:28as we can see, had been begun by can't and refined by Frager and brought,
00:07:32as we had thought to its conclusion by Russell and Wittgenstein.
00:07:37A.
00:07:41I haven't went further,
00:07:41and we'll be looking at various ways in which
00:07:42Air thought that the techniques of his principal,
00:07:44called verification, is, um could be used to solve the problems of philosophy,
00:07:47or rather, as a Lichtenstein's mode could be used to show that those problems,
00:07:50in fact don't exist
00:07:55
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ahmed, A. (2022, June 13). Verificationism - Background to Verificationism [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/verificationism
MLA style
Ahmed, A. "Verificationism – Background to Verificationism." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 13 Jun 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/verificationism