Quote:The project failed on its own terms. The verification principle itself is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable. It is a metaphysical claim about what counts as meaningful — precisely the kind of claim it sought to exclude. This self-refutation was recognized relatively quickly, and logical positivism as an explicit program collapsed by mid-century.

But here is the crucial irony: the philosophical failure was a cultural success. The explicit doctrine was abandoned, but its effects persisted. The attitude of logical positivism—that metaphysics is meaningless speculation, that serious inquiry concerns only what can be empirically tested, that philosophy’s job is to clean up after science rather than to ask foundational questions—this attitude survived the refutation of its official justification.

Physicalism ceased to require defense because it ceased to appear as a thesis. It became the background against which theses were evaluated. To propose an alternative was not to enter a debate; it was to reveal that one had not understood what serious inquiry looked like.

The positivists had failed to eliminate metaphysics. They had succeeded in making one metaphysics invisible.

phenomenalism: "The idea of some logical positivists, such as A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap, was to apply phenomenalism in linguistic terms, enabling reliable discourse of physical objects, such as tables, in strict terms of either actual or possible sensory experiences."

EDWARD S. REED: Thomas H. Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group -- and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time -- was not a materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones.

But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world. This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890.

[...] Positivism was not only agnostic with respect to religion, it was also antimaterialist. This antimaterialism was expressed in a very novel way -- with reference to the new Erkenntnislehre -- mental states or behavior. Matter for Huxley was just what is was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.

The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations. --From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James

(Today 02:01 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: If they're the same thing, then ofcourse that's true.