Is Logical Positivism a Church or a Method ?

Doc, as I assumed, you knew that I knew. But did you knew that my trap had a double action mechanism ?

Let us come back to your definition of a 'complete' statement.

(D) A proposition is complete if it contains all the necessary assumptions and definitions that will make it a falsifiable model.

What is the purpose of (D) ? Ist it a method for determinig what statements are commplete from those that are not or is it just a metaphor giving a broad idea of what a complete statement is. What I tried in my previous post was to use (D) as a method. Since I noticed (D) contained the phrase 'all [...] definitions' I tried to see if my test statement contained all the definitions required to test it in practice. It obviously does not contain them (it refers to them). So I tried to see if I could make use of your definition of 'completable' to turn it into a complete statement that would meet criterion (D) by replacing the names of notions by their definitions. If you reject this way of using (D), it means you do not consider (D) as a method. And indeed it would be ridiculous to call it such, as my absurd use of it shows.

But if (D) is not a method, in what sense is it still Logical Positivism ? What differentiates LP from other philosophical currents is precisely that it wanted to provide a method to discriminate between valid and invalid (meaningless) statements. Says Ayer :

A complete philosophical elucidation of any language would consist in enumerating the types of sentence significant in that language, and then displaying the relations of equivalence that held between sentences of various types [...] [T]he deduction of relations of equivalence from the rules of language is a purely logical activity; and it is in this logical activity that philosophical analysis consists.

If 'logical activity' is not synonymous with 'method' I really do not see what it is supposed to mean. So Logical Positivism says it is an effort to provide us with a method to tell the 'significant' sentences from those that are not. And this method will take the form of rules of equivalence between statements (what I tried to do with (D)). Carnap genuinely tried to deliver on that promise (Aufbau). And, so far, we have assumed that your theory of 'completeness' is another such attempt.

Now consider what happens if LP cannot, or will not, come forward with such a method but still lays a claim to existence, to be something ? What kind of thing will it be ? When I read your last post and some of your earlier comments, I have the impression that whether a given statement will count as complete or not is always ultimately decided by you. I propose various statements and high priest Doc of the LP church decides whether they will be accepted or rejected. Well you can do that. But this is probably not the way you see things.

Actually, it was not the way LP saw them either. They wanted to reject certain propostions (the title of the first chapter of Ayer's book Language, Truth and Logic reads : 'THE ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS') but did not want to use the methods of a church to reach that goal. So they had to say that they would do it by providing a method. Indeed, when it became clear that doing so would be so much more difficult than anticipated that it looked an extremely remote prospect, at best, all honest Logical Positivists retreated. Hence Ayer's admission that it had been 'all wrong'.

Now the question I lay before you, Doc, is this : are you going to be an honest Logical Positivist or not ? If you are, you must provide us with a method fast; or accept that you have no reason to reject statements like 'God exists, he will show up in 10^{1.000.000.000} years' other than because you do not like them or do not believe in them (that is fine with me, I do not either). Failing which, you will have to put up with my saying that you belong to a church, and a dishonest one at that, because it pretends not to be one. There is nothing new here. LP attracted a lot of flak along these lines in the 1950s and 60s and it is what ultimately undid it : no one (especially not a british gentleman like A.J. Ayer) wants to be seen to belong to a dishonest cult.

A last remark : contrast this with science. Science is honest because it is coherent with its own ethos. It never says that a statement is to be believed without providing you with a method to test that statement. 'The mass of the proton at rest is 0.938 +/- 0.001 GeV' is indeed a statement of science in that sense because I can learn what it means from books and courses and test it on my own. But when science cannot provide you with a method, it just stops; it does not say anything. But scientism does. It says many (negative) things about metaphysical statements, religion, traditions, etc. Does it have a method one can use to test these claims on his own ? No.