Thursday Translation #6

From the Kratkii filosofskii slovar' [Short Philosophical Dictionary] (Moscow, 1951).

LOGICAL POSITIVISM, or logical empiricism, one of the currents that predominates at present in Anglo-American bourgeois philosophy, is a form of subjective idealism characteristic of the degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism. This reactionary, idealistic school took shape in Austria in the 1920s (the so-called 'Vienna Circle' of Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, and others) as a direct continuation of Machism. At the present time, the members of the 'Vienna Circle' who are still alive have settled in the USA.  In England the main representatives of logical positivism are Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, and Wisdom. In their answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, the logical positivists continue the line of Hume and Mach, denying an objective reality that is independent of sensual experience.  The logical positivists attempt to bolster the traditional opposition of subjective idealism to materialism by means of symbolic logic. The basic functions of logical positivism consist: 1) in the falsification of the conclusions of natural science and in the idealist distortion of their meaning and of their theoretical content; 2) in the empirical limitation of scientific knowledge: in this way logical positivism plays into the hands of religion, justifying its pretense of the possibility of nonscientific, mystical knowledge, and also excluding ethics and aesthetics from the field of competence of science; 3) in the distortion of logic, of its role in scientific knowledge, and in the distortion of its relationship to reality (here the logical positivists show particular zeal). "Analysis" of scientific knowledge and judgments is considered to be the fundamental task of the philosophy of logical positivism. By means of blatant sophistry the logical positivists attempt to tear all material content out of scientific knowledge. Unable to refute the basic materialist principles directly, they decline to consider the most important questions of philosophical science, on the grounds that these questions are only 'pseudoproblems'. The laws and forms of logic look to the logical positivists like the rules of a card game. Such 'logic', of course, affords an unbounded field for Scholastic tricks that serve the interests of imperialist reaction and of the clergy. "We should," writes Wisdom, one of the pillars of logical positivism, "promote philosophy not in the form of a question, but in the form of a prayer." Such is the official role of this 'philosophy': to discredit scientific knowledge and to elevate religion.

Comments

[chaospet]

Why, it all makes sense now. Of COURSE the Logical Positivists were really all about elevating religion and discrediting science.

[Anna Alexandrova]

Whoah! Thanks for translating this! "Tear all material content out of scientific knowledge" - what does that even mean?

[TM]

I'm no friend of Stalinist philosophy. Most of these hacks only got their posts because an entire generation of Soviet philosophers was *murdered* by the Stalinists, who were intent on destroying the authentic Marxists because they represented a threat to their own comfort and security (because they promised no rest in the revolutionary struggle).

HOWEVER, this passage is mostly unobjectionable. If you read what the passage actually says, it notes that the "official role" of this philosophy is to discredit scientific knowledge and elevate religion. It does not say a thing about the subjective intentions of any of the individual logical positivists, many of whom of course were very much partisans of science in a personal way, and atheists or opponents of religion. That does not change the fundamental problem with logical positivism in regard to either science or religion, which is its enforced agnosticism concerning the objective, independent existence of the external world, which mystifies science by rendering absurd the relation between that world and the progressively expanding body of scientific knowledge, and which leaves a door open for religion.

To get a more thoughtful, and much more interesting explanation of the problems with positivism from the Marxist perspective, it is best to read Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (the latter being a form of Russian positivism very much related to the logical positivists).

[anon]

Almost no one in anglo-american philosophy still believes in logical positivism, not since Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."

Also, you don't even come close to understanding the project of logical empiricism. Do your homework..

[Justin E. H. Smith]

To Anon: Are you talking to *me*? Did you notice that this is a *translation* from a Soviet dictionary published in 1951 (the same year, I should add, as the publication of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism")?

Can't one take an academic interest in the history of Soviet ideology? Can't that count as 'doing one's homework'?

*

To Anna: I think what they meant was that LP sought only to provide a formal scaffold to mathematics and natural science, whereas from their point of view Marxist-Leninist philosophy is *itself* a science.

*

To TM: Interesting analysis. Thank you.

[Cédric Eyssette]

Awesome ! I translated it into French : http://blog.philotropes.org/post/2009/10/15/Moscou-1951-la-v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9-sur-le-positivisme-logique

[Jonathan]

To anon: How could a Russian hack in 1951 not have read his Quine? Shocking. I will pass on your criticisms via my time machine.

[Stephen Menn]

Justin--on Anna Alexandrova's question, I don't think that's quite right. They want modern science to tell us about matter, and indeed to support scientific materialism, by showing how the phenomena arise from matter, whereas they see their opponents as trying to detach the successes of science from matter or materialism, e.g. by saying that science consists only of empirical regularities among the phenomena or that matter is only a logical construction out of the phenomena. Lenin in "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" had criticized Mach and Avenarius and Karl Pearson (and various Russian Machians) on these issues, and given the Vienna Circle's inheritance from Machian positivism, and given positions that the logical positivists did at least sometimes take (that everything we can refer to is "constructed" from experiences, that the question of scientific realism is a pseudo-problem, etc.), it was pretty much inevitable that they would regard logical positivism from the perspective of Lenin's critique of Mach. Incidentally, Stcherbatsky (the author of "Buddhist Logic") was a Russian Machian of the kind Lenin was criticizing, and he interprets Dignaga and Dharmakirti--not without some justification--as precursors of Machian positivism. Duhem's interpretation of science is similar, and certainly in his case it's true that he's using his analysis of science to clear a space for religion.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

That's very interesting, thanks Stephen. I had been assuming that the Stalin-era take on logical positivism was a continuation of Lenin's critique of Machism, but what you say fills in some of the details.

I bought Shcherbatskii's book on Buddhist logic years ago, and at the time I was not able to discern his position within any particular current of Russian thought. It would be interesting to go back and look at him again in the light of the history of Machism (particularly since I've just agreed to design a non-western philosophy course at Concordia, and while I really don't know what going to do yet, I am intending to emphasize the materialist and sense-data-empiricist schools of Indian thought).

[Imad Asaalwa]

The very funny point now. that these logical positivists are a very tasted meat for the hungry post-structuralist.

:P

thank you comrades for this conversation
thank u great J. E. H. Smith