Positivism

Richard von Mises, Positivism notes:

"Presumably the reader knows what he would regard as a reasonable or judicious attitude in most situations of life. No doubt a major component of such an attitude is, in the first place, to judge on the grounds of experience, that is, the rememberance of the contingencies of one's own life and the knowledge of those of others. Furthermore, such an attitude requires a continual readiness to give up a judgment once made or to change it if new experiences require. It also implies a lack of prejudice, superstition, obstinacy, blind trust in authority, mystical thinking, fanaticism."

"As a first tentative and quite rough approach to the definition of positivism, we may say that whoever, when confronted with any practical or theoretical problem, acts as we have just described it, is a positivist."

"No procedure based on systematic observations from which conclusions may be drawn is declined to positivism . . . Even less than the method are the subject matter and the aim of research subject to limitations from the standpoint of positivism."

On things antipositivistic: "First of all is the idea that there exists an area of problems in which the intellect is not 'competent,' in which one cannot think or must not think. Next is the conception that there exists a realm of 'truth' which cannot be shaken by any experience, previous or future." [Cf. Wittgenstein: "Things which cannot be said we must pass over in silence."]

"It is the aim of positivistic theory to review and to sum up the stock of experience acquired by men in a uniform picture so that mutually consistent judgments are possible in all situations in life." [Me: Positivism is the correct approach to the intersubjective Weltanschauung, the shared theory of Ourworld.]

"The first and greatest difficulty in striving for reasonable judgments and in constructing a consistent world picture lies in language."

"All school philosophers from Plato through Kant and Hegel to Jusserl and Heidegger have tried to solve the unsolvable problem of deriving a consistent world image by using (and slightly modifying) the stock of ready-made expressions in their language. Present-day logical positivism (which has had rather early predecessors, too) starts from the fact that the 'logic' stored in our language represents a primitive stage of science. The positivist, like everybody else, has to use colloquial language in order to make himself understood; but he uses it critically. He knows that all terms in use are conventions which refer to a limited area of experience and beyond that mean nothing."

"For the positivist, ever word, every phrase, of colloquial language means a dissection of the world into three classes. The first class consists of things or situations to which the word, according to the existing linguistic conventions, applies without any doubt. The second class comprises those things for which the word in question is definitely not meant; and the third is formed by all those phenomena for which the linguistic conventions are not sufficient to enable one to decide whether or not the given expression applies." [Me: Core + Periphery]"

"The metaphysicians attitude toward language is entirely different. He thinks that a word, e.g., the word 'justice,' corresponds, independently of all conventions, to some specific entity, and he seeks to discover this entity, i.e., to find the 'true' and correct definition of justice. To the positivist the question 'What is justice?' can mean only one of two things. Either one wants to find out what in the course of time was denoted by this word within different cultural areas (historical semantics), or one seeks, with a specific aim in mind, to fix a new concept of justice, that is to say, to suggest a new linguistic convention for use within some limited field of action or of science."

"Wittgenstein shows that the theorems of pure mathematics or of logic say absolutely nothing about reality (about the experienceable, observable world), but are, in a specific sense of the word, tautologies . . . Theorems of logic or pure mathematics are said to be 'correct' if they are in agreement with the system of accepted definitions and rules, just as in chess only those moves are accepted which are in accordance with the rules of the game."

"The symbols and transformation rules of logic correspond as an approximation to certain facts and relations of everyday life." [Me: Their appearance of accuracy is scale-dependent. See also "Detection and Emergence": "Emergence can then be defined with respect to the same tools used to define the complexity of a system. It occurs when an object or phenomenon cannot be detected or understood with a given set of tools but can be detected or understood by allowing some additional tools. For some reason (dynamic evolution of the system or changes in the set of observational tools) a new apprehension of the system becomes possible that offers a shorter overall description, and hence a smaller relative complexity. Emergence is thus associated with a decrease of the relative complexity.]

"Our answer to the Kantian problem of epistemology is therefore this: One can construct in many ways tautological systems in which there exist -- according to fixed rules -- absolutely correct statements; but if one wants to state anything about relations between observable phenomena, e.g., in astronomy, then one is subject to control by future experiences. The application of mathematical methods can never guarantee the correctness of a nonmathematical proposition."

"But we [positivists] also observe that metaphysicians make propositions which are framed in such a way that they neither form parts of an established tautological system nor are testable in experience."

"We do not claim that a scientific theory, either in physics, or in economics, or in any other field, is uniquely determined by the observable facts. Theories are inventions, constructions. A theory is useful if it predicts the phenomena correctly. Different theories may make the same predictions with respect to large areas of facts. Under otherwise equal circumstances one will prefer that theory which covers a larger field of phenomena or which from some point of view appears to be 'simpler.'" [me: prefer one whose terms are definitionally connected to all other theories.]

"Experience teaches that all theories are constantly subject to larger or smaller modifications and that, as Ernst Mach expressed it, science consists of a continually progressing adaptation of ideas to facts."

"Since the time of Ernst Mach, natural scientists have known that the explanation or the theory of a group of phenomena is only a description of the facts on a higher level."

"It is always the search for, and the exposition of, typical and recurring elements within the unique course of the world that is the subject of science."

"The aim of intellectual endeavor of man may in the last analysis consist in the attempt to arrive, for all phenomena that are of some interest, at a description that is connectible across the boundaries of all fields . . . In the meantime, the gaps are filled by nonscientific theories, i.e., theories that are not connectible with the language of science. They appear in the form of metaphysics or of religious systems or of poetry."

"If an engineer computes the relation between the dimensions of the girders of a bridge and the load that the bridge can stand, he can phrase the result in the form: The bridge must have these dimensions . . . the connection between statements of fact and the ought-sentences derived from them is evident. We can formulate it thus: Ought-sentences are elliptic statements; they suppress one part of the implication."

"A justification of a prescription can only consist of statements that express the relation between the prescribed conduct and certain consequences . . . no useful purpose is served if one tries to mislead oneself or others about the fact that all moral systems, including their justifications, are creations of the human intellect of a similar kind to scientific theories."

"Positivism does not claim that all questions can be answered rationally, just as medicine is not based on the premise that all diseases are curable, or physics does not start out with the postulate that all phenomena are explicable. But the mere possibility that there may be no answers to some questions is no sufficient reason for not looking for answers or for not using those that are attainable."