Logical Positivism is Sound

By the late 1960s Logical Positivism (LP) had run its course and most philosophers, including its primary advocates from the Vienna Circle, recognized that it had been thoroughly refuted and almost universally rejected. Consequently, I consider my opponent's assertion that it is a sound philosophy to be an extraordinary claim that will require an extraordinary argument. He has accepted the Burden of Proof for this debate, so he must make an argument that proves LP is a sound doctrine. He has chosen to defend the formulation of LP by, in his words, "its most prominent advocate, A. J. Ayer". I must respond by pointing out that in a 1970s interview AJ Ayer was asked to reflect on LP"s demise, and he claimed that LP"s "most important" defect "was that nearly all of it was false". LP admittedly sprang directly from the interpretation of Wittgenstein"s Tractatus, but Wittgenstein rejected LP as a result of grossly misinterpreted the Tractatus, as has my opponent, ShabShoral (Shab), who states that "Wittgenstein makes clear the absurdity of positing things outside logic", follows with an out of context quote, and concludes "And, with that, metaphysics has been removed.". This anti-metaphysic stance was practically the unifying theme of LP, and it was an astounding misread of the Tractatus. It is directly refuted by the entire second half of the book, in which Wittgenstein argues that there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. Wittgenstein protested against just this kind of nonsense throughout the Tractatus, arguing over and over that the propositions of natural science "have nothing to do with philosophy" (6.53); "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences" (4.111); "It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved" (6.4312); "even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all" (6.52); "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical" (6.522). To win this debate, Shab must provide an extraordinary argument to prove that LP is sound, and unfortunately, in his initial attempt to support his claim he has called upon two philosophers who completely disagree with him. Shab will certainly need to do better than summoning the LP advocate who claimed "nearly all of it was false". That said, I will address in detail, why LP is not sound. LPs most fatal flaw is that it is self-refuting, the "Verification Principle" is its central proposition claiming that "only empirically verifiable statements have meaning", and yet, that proposition itself is not empirically verifiable, so by its own criteria, LP is meaningless. It attempted to equate "meaningful" and "empirically verifiable" without showing that they are in any way synonymous, and "meaninglessness" itself certainly isn't an observable property, hence, LP is logically inconsistent at its core. The openly declared goal was to make philosophy and religion subordinate to the natural sciences, and to do so LP attempted to create a scientific language of pure Logic which could be applied to all areas of experience and discourse. It was attempting to establish the consistency and completeness of scientific truth as the "absolute truth" in all arenas. But it is clear that absolute truth is a matter of a particular system of thought, Wittgenstein himself held that all truth is "intersystematic", and one of their own, Kurt Godel, proved that no system of thought can be both consistent and complete, putting a bullet through Hilbert"s formalism as well as the associated formalism of LP. Godel proved that the ideal of LP is therefore impossible, which is to say that it is logically and scientifically impossible to devise a set of axioms from which all the phenomena of the external world can be deduced. If true intelligence involves the ability to view and understanding widely different things from multiple different perspectives, an aptitude for grasping a wide range of truths, relationships, and meanings, and the capacity for abstract and symbolic thought. It follows logically that LP's contention that one can reduce reality to only one of its modes, to know it exhaustively in only one of its forms, is an unintelligent claim. It is from these shaky foundations LP declared the fields of metaphysics and ethics to be meaningless, but scientifically speaking, the observational evidence clearly shows that the vast majority of people do find metaphysics and ethics to be extremely meaningful, LP was just wrong about what is meaningful. LP claimed a proposition is meaningful, and thus capable of being true or false, if and only if, it is verifiable by sensory experiences, making sensory experience the sole measure of truth or certainty. In so doing LP ignores the fact that sensory experience is prone to bias, perceptual errors, that it can be "theory laden" and conceptually organized, making it a bad "starting point for certainty or truth". Even if you remove the imperialistic goal of establishing science as "absolute truth" and consider LP to be nothing more than a demarcation point between science and other areas of knowledge, it still fails miserably. Science is predominantly a matter of inductive reasoning, it fundamentally attempts to infer universal principles or scientific "laws" from specific instances, and yet, LP denies that universal principles are cognitively meaningful, which undermines the entire enterprise of science. Two hundred years before LP was even a thing, Hume showed that induction can never achieve certainty. Nevertheless, LP bypasses the "Problem of Induction" by simply elevating empiricism to the standard of truth and certainty without any logical justification. Historically, Karl Popper successfully denounced LP's Verification Principle and replaced it with a principle of Falsifiability, in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas Kuhn showed science to be "paradigm dependent" rather than objective, and Willard Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" was the final nail in the coffin of LP. LP says we can circumscribe all of reality in a series of statements of empirical fact, clearly an untenable position in light of Quine's key observation that we fit theories holistically to data using various criteria like parsimony, elegance, data fit and so on to find the best theory. The individual statement is almost irrelevant, single statements are not verifiable or falsifiable, only theories as a whole are. In the end, LP's not so hidden agenda is revealed to be nothing more than am unjustified attempt to arbitrarily eliminate from serious discussion entire areas of human experience, thought, and language. Conclusion It is self-evident that Mankind's journey and progress through time isn't over and I simply can't see any system of belief as complete and final, to do so would be to deny the possibility of progress. The very division of knowledge into the distinct disciplines of Science, Philosophy, Religion, and Art implies that they are all incomplete and if we can't reconcile them intellectually, they are all equally false. Our current knowledge is partial, we are progressing towards truth and there is work to be done. The ability to unite the various fields of knowledge so that we may embody the perfect harmony of the universe in both body and soul resides within us. In accordance with my own personal understanding, I believe that is the task at hand. I now challenge Shab to either conclusively refute my conclusion, or concede the debate. References: 1) Logical positivism https://en.wikipedia.org... 2) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus https://en.wikipedia.org... 3) Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism https://philosophynow.org...