Failing to get off the ground

Hi Doc. Thanks for your comment. Attempting to define right and wrong, as you mention, goes right to the heart of the matter. Ethics is preoccupied with such things indeed.

But before answering you at length, I will first attempt, as promised in my previous post, to cover some of the technical reasons that prompted most philosophers to pronounce LP dead. When something of import happens, it is alomst invariably for a combination of good and bad reasons. I am myself under the impression that the urge to defend their intellectual turf played a part in some philosophers efforts to defend metaphisycs against the attacks it was receiving on the parts of the Logical Positivists (and other schools as well) in the first half of the XXth century.

Some of the material I just found seem to support this view. One article, from the 1970s, starts like this : "The counter-revolution against the logical empiricist philosophy of science seems to have triumphed: I have the impression that it is now almost as widely agreed that metaphysical ideas are important in science as it is that mathematics is." One can almost hear the author's sigh of relief : we are useful after all; science needs us !

Well, granted, professional turf wars payed a part. But to win a war you need weapons. So the very fact that LP was defeated shows that its oponents must have had some pretty powerful amunition in the form of "technical" arguments. One of them I just found goes like this : In a broadcast debate with F. C. Copleston, A. J. Ayer introduced the word `drogulus' to stand for `a disembodied thing' whose presence could not be verified in any way. He put it to Copleston: `Does that make sense?' But Copleston replied that it did make sense. He claimed that he could form an idea of such a thing and that this was enough to give it meaning. (O. Hanfling "Logical Positivism" in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 9). Well yes, I suppose, a 'drogulus' may not be very useful but it is not meaningless : I see perfectly well what you mean when you define such a thing. I may be utterly certain that it does not exist but that is another matter; it is not a case of meaninglessness.

This argument, and I will try to find others in the coming days, sets a pattern for all the other criticism that was levelled against LP : results not matching ambitions. Everyone plainly sees what they are attempting to do, but the actual solutions LP proposes to reach those goals do no quite seem to make it : LP aims for the stars but fails to get off the ground.