Logical positivism

Philosophy
Alternative titles: logical empiricism; Neopositivism; Scientific Empiricism
Written by The Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica
Last Updated4-28-2015
logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, a philosophical movement that arose in
Vienna in the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only
kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as
meaningless. A brief treatment of logical positivism follows. For full treatment, see
positivism: Logical positivism and logical empiricism.
Logical positivism differs from earlier forms of empiricism and positivism (e.g., that of
David Hume and Ernst Mach) in holding that the ultimate basis of knowledge rests upon
public experimental verification or confirmation rather than upon personal experience. It
differs from the philosophies of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in holding that
metaphysical doctrines are not false but meaninglessthat the great unanswerable
questions about substance, causality, freedom, and God are unanswerable just because they
are not genuine questions at all. This last is a thesis about language, not about nature, and is
based upon a general account of meaning and of meaninglessness. All genuine philosophy
(according to the group that came to be called the Vienna Circle) is a critique of language,
and (according to some of its leading members) its result is to show the unity of sciencethat
all genuine knowledge about nature can be expressed in a single language common to all the
sciences.
Wittgenstein, LudwigThe Granger Collection, New YorkThe Vienna Circle, which produced
its first manifesto in 1929, had its origin in discussions among physicists and mathematicians
before World War I. The general conclusion was reached that the empiricism of Mill and
Mach was inadequate, because it failed to explain mathematical and logical truths and
because it did not account satisfactorily for the apparently a priori element in natural science.
In 1922 Hans Hahn, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, laid before his students at the
University of Vienna the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921; Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 1922) of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This work introduced a new general theory of
meaningderived in part from the logical inquiries of Giuseppe Peano, Gottlob Frege,
Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whiteheadand gave the Vienna group its logical
foundation. Most of the groups members moved to the United States at the outset of World
War II. In the meantime, disciples had arisen in many other countries: in Poland, among the
mathematical logicians; and in England, where A.J. Ayers Language, Truth, and Logic
(1936) provided an excellent introduction to the views of the group. Interest in logical
positivism began to wane in the 1950s, and by 1970 it had ceased to exist as a distinct
philosophical movement.

Axiology
Alternative title: theory of value

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axiology, (from Greek axios, worthy; logos, science), also called THEORY OF VALUE, the
philosophical study of goodness, or value, in the widest sense of these terms. Its significance lies (1) in the
considerable expansion that it has given to the meaning of the term value and (2) in the unification that it
has provided for the study of a variety of questionseconomic, moral, aesthetic, and even logicalthat
had often been considered in relative isolation.
The term value originally meant the worth of something, chiefly in the economic sense of exchange
value, as in the work of the 18th-century political economist Adam Smith. A broad extension of the
meaning of value to wider areas of philosophical interest occurred during the 19th century under the
influence of a variety of thinkers and schools: the Neo-Kantians Rudolf Hermann Lotze and Albrecht
Ritschl; Friedrich Nietzsche, author of a theory of the transvaluation of all values; Alexius Meinong and
Christian von Ehrenfels; and Eduard von Hartmann, philosopher of the unconscious, whose Grundriss der
Axiologie (1909; Outline of Axiology) first used the term in a title. Hugo Mnsterberg, often regarded as
the founder of applied psychology, and Wilbur Marshall Urban, whose Valuation, Its Nature and Laws
(1909) was the first treatise on this topic in English, introduced the movement to the United States. Ralph
Barton Perrys book General Theory of Value (1926) has been called the magnum opus of the new
approach. A value, he theorized, is any object of any interest. Later, he explored eight realms of value:
morality, religion, art, science, economics, politics, law, and custom.
Dewey, JohnEncyclopdia Britannica, Inc.A distinction is commonly made between instrumental and
intrinsic valuebetween what is good as a means and what is good as an end. John Dewey, in Human
Nature and Conduct (1922) and Theory of Valuation (1939), presented a pragmatic interpretation and tried
to break down this distinction between means and ends, though the latter effort was more likely a way of
emphasizing the point that many actual things in human lifesuch as health, knowledge, and virtueare
good in both senses. Other philosophers, such as C.I. Lewis, Georg Henrik von Wright, and W.K.
Frankena, have multiplied the distinctionsdifferentiating, for example, between instrumental value
(being good for some purpose) and technical value (being good at doing something) or between
contributory value (being good as part of a whole) and final value (being good as a whole).
Moore, G. E.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, LondonMany different answers are given to the
question What is intrinsically good? Hedonists say it is pleasure; Pragmatists, satisfaction, growth, or
adjustment; Kantians, a good will; Humanists, harmonious self-realization; Christians, the love of God.
Pluralists, such as G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, Max Scheler, and Ralph Barton Perry, argue that there are any
number of intrinsically good things. Moore, a founding father of Analytic philosophy, developed a theory
of organic wholes, holding that the value of an aggregate of things depends upon how they are combined.
Because fact symbolizes objectivity and value suggests subjectivity, the relationship of value to fact is
of fundamental importance in developing any theory of the objectivity of value and of value judgments.
Whereas such descriptive sciences as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and comparative religion all
attempt to give a factual description of what is actually valued, as well as causal explanations of
similarities and differences between the valuations, it remains the philosophers task to ask about their
objective validity. The philosopher asks whether something is of value because it is desired, as
subjectivists such as Perry hold, or whether it is desired because it has value, as objectivists such as Moore
and Nicolai Hartmann claim. In both approaches, value judgments are assumed to have a cognitive status,
and the approaches differ only on whether a value exists as a property of something independently of
human interest in it or desire for it. Noncognitivists, on the other hand, deny the cognitive status of value
judgments, holding that their main function is either emotive, as the positivist A.J. Ayer maintains, or
prescriptive, as the analyst R.M. Hare holds. Existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasizing
freedom, decision, and choice of ones values, also appear to reject any logical or ontological connection
between value and fact.

Ontology

Metaphysics
Written by Peter+M. Simons

ontology, the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies neutrally to everything that is real.
It was called first philosophy by Aristotle in Book IV of his Metaphysics. The Latin term ontologia

(science of being) was felicitously invented by the German philosopher Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and
first appeared in his work Ogdoas Scholastica (1st ed.) in 1606. It entered general circulation after being
popularized by the German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff in his Latin writings, especially
Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1730; First Philosophy or Ontology).

History and scope

History and scope
Wolff contrasted ontology, or general metaphysics, which applied to all things, with special metaphysical
theories such as those of the soul, of bodies, or of God. Wolff claimed that ontology was an a priori
discipline that could reveal the essences of things, a view strongly criticized later in the 18th century by
David Hume and Immanuel Kant. In the early 20th century the term was adopted by the German founder
of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who called Wolffs general metaphysics formal ontology and
contrasted it with special regional ontologies, such as the ontologies of nature, mathematics, mind,
culture, and religion. After renewed criticism and eclipse under the antimetaphysical movement known as
logical positivism, ontology was revived in the mid-20th century by the American philosopher W.V.O.
Quine. By the end of the century, largely as the result of Quines work, it had regained its status as a central
discipline of philosophy.
The history of ontology has consisted largely of a set of fundamental, often long-running and implacable
disputes about what there is, accompanied by reflections about the disciplines own methods, status, and
fundamental conceptse.g., being, existence, identity, essence, possibility, part, one, object, property,
relation, fact, and world. In a typical ontological dispute, one group of philosophers affirms the existence
of some category of object (realists), while another group denies that there are such things (antirealists).
Such categories have included abstract or ideal Forms, universals, immaterial minds, a mind-independent
world, possible but not actual objects, essences, free will, and God. Much of the history of philosophy is in
fact a history of ontological disputes.
Once they have been brought into the open, ontological disputes tend to concentrate on questions of
several recurrent kinds. The fundamental question, of course, has the form, Are there Xs? or Do Xs
exist? Negative answers to the fundamental question are accompanied by attempts to explain away any
appearances to the effect that there are such things. If the question is answered affirmatively, there are
subsequent questions. Do Xs exist independently of minds and languages (objectively), or do they depend
on them in some way (subjectively or intersubjectively)? Are they discovered or created? Are they basic,
irreducible constituents of reality, or can they be reduced to others? For example, in the millennia-long
dispute about universals, realists have affirmed mind-independent universals, whether existing apart or
only in things; conceptualists have taken universals to be mental or mind-created entities; moderate
nominalists such as Thomas Hobbes (15881679) have taken them to be words or linguistic entities; and
extreme nominalists have denied that there are any universals at all. Among modern Platonists, some take
universals to be basic or sui generis, while others take them to be reducible to sets.
In general, a philosopher who believes in many fundamentally different kinds of object has a rich ontology,
and one who believes in only a few kinds of object has a sparse ontology. Rich ontologists include Plato,
who recognized immaterial Forms as well as material bodies, and the Austrian philosopher Alexius
Meinong (18531920), who embraced merely possible and even impossible objects alongside actual
objects. Sparse ontologists include William of Ockham (c. 12851347), who accepted only qualities, or
properties, and the substances in which they inhere, as well as a few relations; and Quine, who accepted
only things (material bodies) and mathematical sets, professing an ontological taste for desert
landscapes.

Methods
Methods
The methods of ontology vary according to the extent to which the ontologist wishes to rely upon other
disciplines and the nature of the disciplines he wishes to rely upon. The most common method since the
20th century, the logical or linguistic method, relied upon theories of meaning or referenceas applied to
either artificial logical languages or to natural languagesto dictate the kinds of entity that exist.
Typically, lists of basic categories reflecting this method tended to correspond closely to broad linguistic
(or syntactic) categoriese.g., substance (noun), property (adjective), relation (transitive verb), and state
of affairs (sentence). A shortcoming of the logico-linguistic method, however, is that it is generally possible
to change the ontology it produces by varying the semantic analysis of the natural or formal language in
question.

Other ontological methods have been based on phenomenology (Husserl, Meinong), on the analysis of
human existence, or Dasein (Martin Heidegger), and on epistemology. Husserl and Meinong contended
that the basic categories of objects mirror the various kinds of mental activity by which they are grasped.
Thus, there must be four basic kinds of objects corresponding to the mental activities of ideation,
judgment, feeling, and desire. Heidegger held that it is a mistake to base the ontology of human existence
on Aristotelian concepts such as matter and form, which are suitable only for artifacts.
The most widely used linguistic criterion of existence is due to Quine, who coined the slogan To be is to
be the value of a variable. According to Quine, the propositions of a scientific theory should first be
expressed in terms of predicate logic, or the predicate calculus, a logical language consisting of names,
variables (which may be substituted for names), predicates (or properties), logical connectives (such as
and, or, and ifthen), and quantifiers. (Quantifiers can be combined with predicates and variables to form
sentences equivalent to Everything has such and such a property and There is at least one thing that has
such and such a property.) The scientific theory is then ontologically committed to those classes of
entity whose members must be capable of replacing variables (i.e., capable of being the value of a variable)
if the sentences of the theory are to be true.
Quine rejected any primacy for ontology, claiming that ontological categories should be suggested by
natural science. Yet this did not prevent him from sometimes intervening on an apparently ad hoc basis to
reduce the ontological commitments of classes of scientific theories to those of his minimal ontology of
things and sets. His streamlining of scientific ontology to the minimum needed to keep the structure of
scientific discourse intact led him to the doctrine of ontological relativity, according to which there is no
privileged category of objects to which a given scientific theory is ontologically committed.
In contrast to Quine, philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead (18611947) in England and David
Armstrong in Australia regarded ontology as a core philosophical discipline that cannot depend to such a
decisive extent on any other philosophical or scientific study. Its results can be evaluated only in terms of
the adequacy of the overall system in the light of experience.