Your opinion? — jasonm

Logical positivism is a metaphysical position, not an empirical fact. It represents what R.G. Collingwood called an "absolute presupposition." According to Collingwood, absolute presuppositions are not true or false. They have no truth value. They are more or less useful in particular situations at particular times. This makes sense to me.

I recognize this is not the discussion you are interested in having, so we can leave it there.

All other kinds of truth are 'meaningless.' — jasonm

Is 'meaningless' quite right? I've never been a big Truth guy (things work or they don't) but in life human beings create truths together which help build community and culture. Few really care if history, literature or morality do not build their 'truths' from verifiable constituents.

I recall an infamous Richard Rorty quote:

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.

If you doff your hat in the direction of empiricism do you think it is true that human beings can know the world and that our observations map directly on to reality? If you do, can you demonstrate this?

Logical positivism is, I'm told, self-refuting as it can't be verified. It puts verification first and foremost and subscribes to an obvious theory of truth based on matching an element in one set with that of another.

B = The cat is black

How do you determine the truth value of B? By checking (if the cat is in fact black). If the cat is black, B is true and if the cat isn't black, B is false. It couldn't get simpler or more profound than that in me humble opinion mes amies.

IIRC, logical positivism's 'verificationist criterion of meaning' is itself unverifiable and therefore is, in its own terms, meaningless (i.e. self-refuting).

I think it was part of an anti-metaphysical/quietist movement which continues to this day, and in that sense remains relevant.

I think that the "Refutation" is unfounded or anyway incorrect. Why should Logical positivism be itself justified? It's a method or system, not a statement or argument. Only the latter can be justified and proved to be circular, i.e. fallacies.
Likewise about "Caveat": Criteria are not statements or arguments to be justified etc.

So. as I see it, there's no case here.

Verificationism (i.e. Logical Positivism) doesn't make such distinctions and designates as "cognitively meaningless" all statements – utterances – which cannot be verified empirically (e.g. philosophical statements) such as ... "verificationisn". :eyes:

Isn't it that we find evidence for things and wonder about things and use reason to connect ideas? All manner of thoughts relate to all the others. One does not need to prove something an infinite number of times

Magnifique!

Why should Logical positivism be itself justified? It's a method or system, not a statement or argument. Only the latter can be justified and prove to be circular, — Alkis Piskas

I agree with this.

Logical positvism: the only truths are either mathematical or empirical. All other kinds of truth are 'meaningless.' — jasonm

Empirical or logical proof, rather than mathematics, which has a narrower scope.

Why do you ask if you don't really care about replies?

Logical positvism: the only truths are either mathematical or empirical. All other kinds of truth are 'meaningless.' — jasonm

That's not quite it, though- this is just a rewording of Hume's fork, whereas the LPs went quite a bit further than this. their contention was not just about truths, but about meaning: the meaning of a proposition just is the empirical conditions under which it could be verified.

But that's a demonstrably empirically untenable criterion of meaning, because its just a patent matter of fact that people do other things with language other than assert empirical propositions: we ask questions, we greet, we tell jokes, we curse, we demand, and so on. So LP and the verification criterion fail due to their analysis of language failing to be consistent with how people actually use language... not because the verification principle is itself unverifiable (I agree with you that this is a problem for criteria of meaning and nothing peculiar to LP/the verification principle, and so is NOT why LP or verificationism failed).

I have a different answer: don't good verbal arguments exist? I.e., as in law, politics, or philosophy? Positivism assumes that the only sound arguments are either mathematical or empirical, but have they never experienced a convincing verbal argument? And if it's all just 'metaphysics' or 'language games,' then what separates such reasoning from astrology or shear pseudoscience? Surely there is a difference...

LP is correspondence gone wrong. Astrology is coherentism gone wrong.