Logical Positivism is Sound

On Ayer The only way Ayer would be “uniquely qualified” to establish the truth or falsehood of LP is if he had some unique insight into what LP is. My opponent obviously cannot say what this unique insight is; instead, he must resort to saying “Well, he originated it, so he must be the only one qualified to pass judgement on it!” The absurdity of this is clear. Assume Ayer never renounced LP. Would my opponent accept, as my argument, that fact? After all, he is not privy to the “unique qualifications” that Ayer has – who is he to argue with the theory’s creator! That he is not on the other end of this appeal to authority gives him no more warrant to use it. Voters: If a mathematical theorem is discovered and proven, but the discoverer, after some bizarre change-of-faith, declares that it is, in fact, a mistake, is the proof thereby erased? Can a decree change what is the case? Any reasonable person knows the answer. On Wittgenstein I claimed that, to Wittgenstein, the proposition “The mystical/metaphysical/otherworldly exists” is incoherent. I have given primary source material showing that my opponent’s interpretation of the argument is incorrect. The entire purpose of the Tractatus was to reach the final proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” One cannot speak of the mystical: “and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions” Therefore, one must remain silent. So much for “Wittgenstein the Metaphysician”. In addition, I have not once claimed that Wittgenstein was a logical positivist. What I have claimed is that the Tractatus holds valid arguments for logical positivism, via my use of them. Moreover, this debate is not over the Tractatus, and I never intended to make it so; the debate should be over the arguments I put forth, which just happened to be from the Tractatus. My opponent, again, confuses making historical claims with engaging with the debate’s arguments themselves. These first two points are not even worth consideration by voters due to their irrelevancy. The Verification Principle's "self-destruction" The VP is not something that must be verified. It is a prerequisite for verification, and, therefore, meaning. Why accept it over anything else? Because anything else confounds all practical intuitions. Rufolf Carnap clarifies the principle of weighing systems of thought: “To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself […] For those who want to develop or use semantical methods, the decisive question is not the alleged ontological question of the existence of abstract entities but rather the question whether the rise of abstract linguistic forms or, in technical terms, the use of variables beyond those for things (or phenomenal data), is expedient and fruitful for the purposes for which semantical analyses are made, viz. the analysis, interpretation, clarification, or construction of languages of communication, especially languages of science.” On Sense-Data I have no idea why my opponent believes I responded to an argument he did not make. He said: “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".” My response was a direct counter to his point: “[O]n what basis can you say that a sensation comes, not from the world, but from outside it? If fallibility does not require sense-data to be based in the non-real, and in fact can hold even when sense-data corresponds to the real, the question of its usefulness as a concept is raised.” In other words, either the so-called faulty sense-data is of something non-real, in which case the question that must be answered is “what is sensed?”, or the sense-data is of the real, in which case there is absolutely no reason to call it faulty. Thus, the senses are infallible. On Induction My mistake here.Ayer rejects the problem of induction on positivist grounds; since it has no possible solution (that does not rely on induction), it is not a real problem at all. Given this, induction is free to be held as valid if it works in practice, and science has shown that it does. Language, Truth, and Logic: "Thus is appears that there is no possible way of solving the problem of induction, as it is ordinarily conceived. And this means that it is a fictitious problem, since all genuine problems are at least theoretically capable of being solved: and the credit of natural science is not impaired by the fact that some philosophers continue to be puzzled by it." Historical Refutations The burden of proof is on me to defend LP, but, once I put forth my arguments (and I have), the BOP shifts to my opponent to refute them. He cannot merely give a list of names and expect his BOP to be fulfilled. If he cannot give arguments, not names of arguments in 8,000 characters or less, that is not my problem. As seen in this round, he obviously could have chosen particular arguments to explain in-depth; his opting not to last round should have no effect on my case. Godel, Carnap, Logical Positivism Rudolf Carnap bypassed Godel’s concerns completely by positing that inferences can be drawn from infinite premisses. Given that I cannot reproduce formal logic symbols on DDO, I have taken a picture of Carnap’s proof in Introduction to Symbolic Logic and its Applications: Carnap invented the Omega-Rule (Carnap Rule), as shown above. Here is a short explanation in non-symbolic form: https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org...On LP's "narrowness" This entire section consists of my opponent asserting that there are things knowable beyond science, and LP’s failure to account for them is why it should be rejected. This is question-begging to the highest degree; I have given arguments as to why the “values,” “purpose,” and whatever else my opponent posits are nonsense. My opponent has done nothing to support them. If it is established that 2+2 = 4, it is not a failure of arithmetic for it to label “2+2 = 5” as nonsense. It simply is the case that it is nonsense, regardless of the sentimentality my opponent clings to. Conclusion I have defended Logical Positivism, and this is an empirical truth. Voters must keep in mind that I have demonstrated the primacy of the Verification Principle over certain objections raised, and, in other sections, have shown that the objections are not substantiative at all, but rather merely name-dropping or question-begging.