Lecture 4: Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The lecture that never was... following the lecturer's strike in week 7, i have done some reading of my own into what it would have been on, and here will combine this reading with the brief overview that Chris has subsequently given on what he would have lectured. SO here goes...

Logical Positivism is a movement of philosophical thought concerned with the truth or falsivity of statements. Propositions such as 'i have a pen' must be tested and verified and therefore must be testable. If it cannot be proven, logical positivists would argue that it is meaningless. This is the verification principle. However, this in itself presents a logical problem because the verification principle itself cannot be verified if the statement it is measuring cannot be proven or disproven.

This idea was supplemented by Popper who came up with the falsification principle. All of these philosophical ideas have now resulted in the analysis of every proposition as to whether it passes both the verification principle and the falsification principle before it can be accepted as a true proposition.

This brought about the idea of 'speech acts' which are speeches or propositions that do not follow this logic, but instead have no real content or meaning, only ritual. Everyday speech is like this in that we do not think of the logic behind what we say, language has become less important as we use it so casually without thinking about the real meaning behind it. The idea of speech acts also means that thought takes place in purely linguistic terms, therefore once you control language, you can control people's thoughts and minds by manipulating the language that they can think in. This is an idea which Orwell explored in depth in 1984 which we will be looking at in the next lecture.

Wittgenstein, who worked closely with Bertrand Russel for much of his carreer, was mainly concerned with propositions and their relationship to the world, believing that by studying this, all philosophical problems could be solved. However, later on in his life, his first work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was brought into question and he declared it nonsense.

This was the only philosophical book that he published in his lifetime, however Philosophical Investigations was published after his death in which he explored the idea of language used in a metaphysical world and how this caused problems. He argued that by taking language, words and phrases out of their contexts and trying to analyse them independently, philosophers are causing their own philosophical problems which arise from the misguided attempts to analyse every single word.

I agree wholeheartedly with this and feel that often, when you become to rolled up in precise meanings, you lose the point that you are trying to make altogether. Therefore philosophers are basically rambling on but making no real difference to the world or how life is lived. In this way, it is a very inward-focus which excludes cultural meanings and the rest of society.