Thirty-Four

NEOPOSITIVISM AT WAR WITH METAPHYSICS

Scolars customarily divide Positivism into three phases. The first phase comprises the professional careeer of Positivism’s founder, Auguste Comte. The second phase is the empirio-critical phase in the late nineteenth century as represented by Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) and Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) led the third phase, that of the Vienna Circle. Schlick held a chair at the University of Vienna after Mach, Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). These schools shared a minimalistic conception of science and a negative attitude toward metaphysics. In some sense we may even say that the Positivist and new conception of science has a negative purpose: to eliminate metaphysics from among the sciences. Comte tried to eliminate metaphysics by changing the guiding question in science from inquiry about causes to descriptions that do not refer to causes. This allowed him to banish metaphysical questions from science. Followers of Comte such as Mach and Avenarius held that “how,” not “why,” is the question that should guide science. Science answers the question “how?” by resorting to “pure experience” expressed with the help of “pure description.”1 Pure experience is the foundation of science and contains no elements borrowed from ordinary, or naïve, experience. It contains no elements that are the result of human projection. Pure experience concerns only facts, which we can describe, not explain. Our description must be economical. We must express as simply as possible and must include as many facts as possible. Such a description of facts provides the basis for formulating general laws, although each fact occurs only once and is different from all other facts. Laws are abbreviated accounts of facts. In science a single concept replaces many mental images, and a single law replaces many particular statements.2 The purpose Comte assigned is unchanged: the task of science is to enable the prediction of the sequential occurrence of facts to gain the greatest number of practical benefits. Easy to see that the Neopositivist conception of science borrowed some elements from the nominalist tradition and British empiricism. Nominalism emphasizes the individuality of facts. Empiricism focuses on an exposition of the role of experience and how we progress from experience to concepts and laws. This approach in science goes farther than eliminating those metaphysical questions regarded as false: it eliminates all metaphysical questions, which it regards as being useless for the purposes of scientific research. 206 SCIENCE IN CULTURE

Hanna BuczyĔska-Garewicz maintains:

The term metaphysics was applied to all knowledge that was not a description of facts and which went beyond a description of facts. The ambition of the critical empiricists was the development of that conception of science and the liquidation of metaphysics. They wanted to liberate science from metaphysics. Critical empiricism was strongly connected with the development at that time of the natural sciences, and with its anti- metaphysical tendency it created a favorable climate for the development of modern knowledge. In the period when a series of generalizations and non- empirical and vague concepts were being eliminated from the natural sciences as being useless ballast, the philosophy of “pure experience” was a reflection of this state of affairs and, at the same time, gave support to these processes.3

In this view, only the natural sciences meet the criteria for science and provide positive knowledge about the world.4 The natural sciences alone provide the paradigm for all science. Logic and empirical verifiability are specific features of scientific knowl- edge. The Neopositivists identified the meaning of a proposition with the principles of its verification: only verifiable propositions are meaningful. In logical verification the Neopositivist considers the structure of propositions: empirical verifiablity depends on the degree to which experimental methods have advanced.5 We may verify scientific propositions by comparison with facts. They are descriptive propositions. The theses of metaphysics are not subject to empirical verification. So, they have no scientific status. The Neopositivists also regard metaphysical propositions as unscientific and logically meaningless. Meaningless expressions such as “being in itself” and “the question of all being” appear in such propositions. We cannot empirically verify the meaning of such expressions. Metaphysical propositions also break the rules of logic that govern the construction of propositions. An example would be a metaphysical proposition in which “is” occurs in a metaphysical sense. The Neopositivists held that the verb “is” can only occur in a structure of predication and that use of “is” in a proposition without a predicate violates the rules of language.6 In this way the Neopositivists dealt a death-blow to any metaphysics that speaks of a being as something that exists: real being, which can only be being as that which exists, must vanish from our picture of the world. Hard to imagine a more radical kind of idealism than the elimination of existence from being. Neopositivist methodology appears to allow elimination of metaphysics as unscientific and meaningless. Carnap writes: “The supposed propositions of metaphysics, the philosophy of values, and ethics, are merely expressions of feelings that in turn evoke in the listener feelings and dispositions of the will.”7