From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 03:06:52 GMT
On evidence (Struan will see this in archives or Glenn will send it to him),
I hadn't tried digging for evidence of positivism degrading art until now
because I thought it a pretty untenable position to hold for anybody who's
read any 20th century surveys of philosophy. The call for evidence,
though, is certainly a legitimate claim and Struan has led the way with a
possibly telling piece: the generally acknowledged originator of
positivism, Comte. However, to be more specific, the position that Pirsig
is attacking is _logical_ positivism. And here the evidence is pretty much
in Pirsig favor. From the Oxford Companion to Philosophy:
"This twentieth-century movement is sometimes also called logical (or
linguistic) empiricism. In a narrower sense it also carries the name of
the Vienna Circle since such thinkers in this tradition as Rudolph Carnap,
Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and Friedrich Waisman formed
an influential study group in Vienna in the early 1920s to articulate and
propagate the group's positivist ideas. In the broader sense, however,
Logical Positivism includes such non-Viennese thinkers as A.J. Ayer, C.W.
Morris, Arne Naess, and Ernest Nagel.
"Central to the movement's doctrines is the principle of verifiability,
often called the verification principle, the notion that individual
sentences gain their meaning by some specification of the actual steps we
take for determining their truth and falsity.
...
"Famously, some say infamously, many positivists classed metaphysical,
religious, aesthetic, and ethical claims as meaningless. For them, as an
example, an ethical claim would have meaning only in so far as it purported
to say something empirical. ... Instead, they claim that the primary
'meaning' of such sentences is emotive or evocative.
"Given the role that the verifiability principle plays in their thinking,
it is not surprising that the Logical Positivists were admirers of science.
One might say they were science-intoxicated. For them it was almost as if
philosophy were synonymous with the philosophy of science, which in turn
was synonymous with the study of the logic (language) of science.
...
"By the late 1960s it became obvious that the movement had pretty much run
its course."
The entry was written by Prof. Nicholas G. Fotion (of Emory University).
I take this to be where Pirsig's attack is directed. Particularly when he
says, "Phaedrus had taken a course in symbolic logic from a member of
logical positivism's famed Vienna circle, Herbert Feigl.... But ... the
assertion that metaphysics is meaningless sounded false to him." (Ch. 5)
Now, granted, logical positivism had pretty much run its course before ZMM
even came out, so one might be inclined to say that Pirsig's beating a dead
horse. But I don't quite think so. The preoccupation with science that
the logical positivists had still exists in some philosophers. Take Quine,
for example. It is widely regarded that he landed one of the most powerful
blows that leveled the logical positivists (in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"),
but he still thought that science was the way for philosophy to go.
Now, I happen to disagree with the route Pirsig took after rebounding off
the logical positivists (towards metaphysics), but I simply hoped to
establish that his enemy was not imaginary.
To sum up what the evidence means:
Paragraph one: 1) Shows that actual people are associated with the position
that Pirsig's attacking. 2) Shows Pirsig referencing one of them.
Paragraph two: The central logical positivist claim is introduced: the
principle of verification.
Paragraph three: Shows them degrading art (contingent upon us accepting the
idea that calling something "meaningless" is a degradation): "many
positivists classed ... aesthetic ... claims as meaningless."
Paragraph four: Shows the logical positivists love of (preoccupation with)
science.
Paragraph five: Shows that logical postivism isn't really defended anymore
(in its former incarnation).
Now, Stuan may point out that he said, "Usually this insult derives from a
misunderstanding of the function of terms such as 'truth' and
'meaningless', the latter of which does NOT, in its technical application,
mean rubbish or pointless, but 'unable to be interpreted by the system at
hand' - in this case, science. Thus, to say that a moral pronouncement
(for example) is meaningless is simply to say that it cannot be subjected
to scientific analysis - a perfectly reasonable claim." The problem is
that the logical positivists tend to belie their position by their
infatuation with science, the inference being that most historical logical
positivists do think that the meaningless disciplines are pointless. But
that inference isn't necessary. The fact that the logical positivists
tried for many years to bring ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and religion
under scientific rule, and its subsequent failure to do so, is enough to
think that, to continue to call ethics meaningless, is a disparaging remark.
Matt
p.s. My apologies for no direct quotes of any of the logical positivists,
but I have other duties that require my time.
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