Wedberg on positivism and logical empircism

The collection of misreadings of Popper will be supplemented by a some examples where Popper is not mentioned at all (where he should be).

The Swede Anders Wedberg wrote three volumes on the history of philosophy with the third covering the period from Bolzano to Wittgenstein. It was published in 1966 and translated into English in 1984. The book opens with an account of the past 150 years to the mid 20^th century  to provide the background of ideas for more intensive scrutiny of 20^th century developments focused on Frege, George Moore, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein (first phase), Rudolf Carnap and logical empiricism, and the linguistic philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.

Taking up the problem situation after Kant and Hegel he addressed what he called the empiricist critique of science which focused on two questions:

(a)  What is natural science about, or what should be construed as talking about? That is close to what Popper called Kant’s problem of demarcation of the field of science.

(b)  How, and to what extent can theories of physics be verified or falsified by experience? That could be regarded as a form  of  Hume’s problem of induction.

Wedberg noted that the second problem became increasingly pressing at the turn of the century and eventually became a major issue for the logical positivists and logical empiricists. (9)  He also suggested that the efforts of the logical empiricists to give more precise and systematic shape to that idea and others closely related to it, using the resources of mathematical logic “has not led as yet to any even remotely satisfactory result. No real clarity has yet been reached even on the fundamental distinction between what is observable and what is not.” (11)

There is a chapter Experience and Language: Rudolf Carnap and Logical Empiricism

He  listed the figures who gathered around Moritz Schlich: the mathematician Hans Hahn (he should have added Karl Menger, son of Carl the economist), sociologist Otto Neurath, physicist Philipp Frank, historian Victor Kraft, jurist Felix Kaufman, and many others. “The most systematic philosophical talent of the circle was Rudolf Carnap, who gradually became its indubitable leader.” (198). There was a Berlin group led by Reichenback and Hempel,  the Polish “Lwow-Warsaw group” including Lukasiewicaz, Kotarbinksi and Tarski, plus Arne Naess in Norway, Jorgen Jorgensen in Denmark, A J Ayer in England, Nagel and Quine in the US. There is no mention of Popper despite his status as the “official opposition” to the Circle and the influence that he exerted on Carnap when the latter decided that testability rather than verification might be used as  a criterion of meaning.

From Wittgenstein the Circle members took the idea that metaphysics is nonsense and the verification principle became their great weapon. Their respect for science was extreme, as Wedberg put it:

The word science became a term of approbation surrounded by a nimbus of authority, and also a world that was used in the intellectual game as though it were a well-defined ches-man. Venerable and obscure concepts like ‘the scientific language’, ‘the fundamental scientific theory’, ‘the basic postulates of science’ and so on, are constantly encountered in Carnap. The step from respect for authority to a claim for authority is not long. (200)

After setting the scene the remainder of the long chapter is devoted the Carnap’s progress through various stages, including his attempt to construct a formalized language of science that might stand in for natural languages to add precision and rigor. Little is said about his theory of inductive confirmation, which might have prompted a reference to the long-running dispute between Carnap and Popper. This chapter is followed by an equally long chapter on formalization, concluding that the use of formalized languages as theoretical models of natural languages  has very little application (294). As for the long-running concern with meaning, Wedberg noted “budding awareness of nuances” around 1937 when Carnap flirted with different notions of cognitive meaningfulness but “In fact Carnap never abandoned his conviction that one can draw a sharp boundary between the meaningful and the meaningless; as late as 1956 he proposed what he supposed to be such a boundary”. (208)

It is interesting to see how much effort Wedberg devoted to Carnap, compared with no reference at all to Popper.  A  truly remarkable situation developed where it was apparently regarded as quite normal for philosophers of science to proceed independently of the world of science as it is actually practiced and to apparently have no  interest in the value of their activities for working scientists.

Wedberg noted that logical empiricists rarely studied empirical questions empirically, following what he called the Platonistic view of Wittgenstein  that empirical science is the concern of “the sciences”, not of “philosophy”. (202)

At the centre of the logical empiricists’ interest stands the separation of the scientific use of language from other uses, for example the metaphysical use, and the analysis of the languages of science. When reading, for example, Carnap’s discussions of such questions, we often find ourselves in an abstract combinatorial space far above the confused voices of the human crowd. The contact between the abstract arguments and what they are supposed to illuminate is often obscure. (202)

The obscurity of some passages of Carnap is legendary and it is amusing (but sad at the same time) that so much time (and paper) were wasted on a program that never delivered on its initial hopes and expectations. Conceived as an antidote to nonsense, it became a special kind of nonsense of its own.