Is Logical Positivism Ethical ?

Moritz schlick died violently, assasinated on the steps of the university of Vienna by one of its postgrad students. Gödel, associated with the Vienna circle at the start of his career, and proccupied with philosophical questions for all his life, in parallel with his mathematical activity, suffered from severe depression and other mental disorders that ultimately destroyed him. L. Wittgenstein, whose early treatise, the Tractatus, was regarded as foundational by the Vienna Circle, quit philosophy in the early 20s, to spend 10 years as a school teacher in the rural Alps. He resumed his career, after that period, only to methodically condemn the very ideas that were central to the Tractatus and to the philosophy of his erstwhile mentor, Bertrand Russell. When asked about his motives, he once mentioned "ethical reasons".

Associating logical positivism with death, mental illness and unethical behaviours seems odd, even far fetched. This philosophical doctrime, wholly geared, as it was, towards mathematical logic and the natural sciences, seems entirely innocuous. With Its emphasis on proper verification criteria and painstaking, meticulous reconstruction efforts of language on basic sense data, it even seems to subscribe to the most exacting of ethical standards. My point is that there may be more, here, than meets the eye at first.

Most attacks on Logical Positivism from professional philosophers have been on technical grounds, along the lines of "it leads to contradictions" or "it cannot account for such and such". Logical Positivism was ostensibly a philosophy of science. It aimed at building a new epistemology in which metaphysics would have dissolved. In philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics are traditionally linked but ethics is generally considered as another, quite independent, matter. Logical positivism was technicaly relevant to epistemology so philosophers felt they had to defeat it on its own grounds. But they may have had, or at least some of them may have had, other, unstated, motives. Epistemology is about what you know, or what you believe you know. What you believe influences what you do and so having wrong beliefs may prompt you to do bad things, and the stronger the belief the more severe the outcome, generally. Thus it is not inconcievable that having a wrong theory about what we know may lead to wrong ethics. The Logical Positivists conviction of being right was strongly held (the were even quite arrogant about it) so what conclusion can we draw ?

But I have to watch my steps, since following an argument along those lines may soon lead me in the company of unpalatable bed-fellows. It happens that an ethical attack on Logical Positivism has ALREADY been mounted : by austrian reactionary and anti-semite contemporary oponents of the Vienna Circle. At the time of Moritz Schlick's assasination, a tract appeard stating that Schlick's "radical destructive philosophy" was responsible for the mental instability of his killer. The author had Nazi sympathies and the many insults and crude invective that surrounds the above statement seem to rob it of any claim to relevance.

So what to do ? What if that nazi leaning anonymous austrian reactionary had been right ? Or, more precisely, what if he had been wrong on almost all counts but had had some right intuition just in this case ? It is said that a lie is all the more dangerous if it contains a high dose of truth. Should'nt we, conversely, try to salvage an interesting thought when we see one, even if it is surrounded by mounds of rubbish ?

I will leave it at that for the time being, and tackle the technical stuff first. But I will try to come back to the ethical point of view later on since I feel it is the one that will shed the more light on the question, ultimately.

Getting started

Logical positivists basic tenet seems quite uncontreversial : "The meaning of a statement is its method of verification". It even seems better than just uncontroversial. At first one is tempted (seduced ?). It really seems they are on to something.

Historically, it seems to have happened like that : for a time, people were interested, excited. This new theory looked so promising. Then the whole project collapsed and was torn to pieces in the mainstream philosophical comunity.

The purpose of this blog is to lead and inquiry into why this happened and how it happened : who said what and why did they won. But, above all, I would like to capture what in logical positivism's origins, aims and outlook led it to failure. No one is interested in logical positivism any longer, as such, but the deep undercurrent in our culture of which it was a manifestation is not dead. Understanding logical positivism's demise may help us, I think, to better understand some our deepest intellectual roots and thus help us be wiser.