Logical Positivism 101
A proposition is meaningful only if it is verifiable.
A proposition is verifiable only if it can be proved or disproved or can be deduced from other propositions which are verifiable.
Statements that are not verifiable are cognitively meaningless although they may possess emotive meaning. – Krus’s summary of Mach’s logical positivism
That’s kind of a neat site if you want to know the ground-level basics of epistemology. Others (e.g., wikipedia) tell you way more than a sensible person would ever want to know about logical positivism and the rest.
I ain’t sayin’ Krus is the ultimate philosopher, and his CV is sound but not earth shattering: — we were doing rotated centroid factor analysis in the 1960s — we weren’t sure it meant anything. Of course I may have misunderstood his research area.
And his faith in visual statistics as a replacement for epistemology is a little starry-eyed for me, since I sometimes get baffled by tag clouds.
I don’t think he he’s a crank. He is a salesman and he’s got a pretty slick looking visualization tool for sale on the site and a little skepticism is always appropriate. I was a psych major, so why would you take my word that he got it mostly right?
I support a far simpler version of logical positivism.
- Although our senses can deceive us, most of the time they don’t: If you see a bus headed for you, there’s probably a bus headed for you, and you’re fixin’ to have a bad day.
- If you don’ t see any pixies under your garden shed, there probably aren’t any pixies under your garden shed
- If you’re unsure about the pixies, let the cat out. If you don’t find pixie viscera on your doorstep, the pixies weren’t there.
- The pixies are pretty much never there.
I don’t think he he’s a crank…. a little skepticism is always appropriate…. why would you take my word that he got it mostly right?
I just did a little quick browsing. The site is slick enough. But to be sure, you’ve got the thing summed up neatly at the end. mostly right
It’s plenty truthy. Suffering from the need to make a neat narrative out of a messy landscape of history. Sampling just a couple of bits I know something about, I find that he has the outline of the thing “mostly right” but the details aren’t always so.
Does it matter? Probably not if you are inclined already toward sympathy with his “greater point.” And probably not if you are inclined already against him. It only really matters, I suppose, if you are new to it all and the truth matters.
There’s something in here, too, that’s an echo of a long and still incomplete entry I started about narrative and knowing. Maybe I’ll try to polish that up, now that the site is stabilizing again. (I miss the old look, but the new look is snazzy. Haven’t tried it on a mobile yet – something to keep you busy, Bob, if you start to feel like this is done.)
April 10th, 2008 at 9:07 pmThanks, Tim.
Actually, the “greater point” is that visual statistics are rhe next big thing in epistemology or perhaps a modern successor to epistemology and you should buy his analysis and visualization tool. I sympathize with the notion of fact-based knowing. And I’m suspicious of two things: (a) no matter how intently you peer through a microscope at a cell, you won’t see a theory of biology written on the organelles; and (b) to what extent is visualization knowing.
As to “ways of knowing,” I’m convinced that “alternative ways of knowing” really are alternatives to knowing in the sense that “alternative medicine” is an alternative to medicine: it doesn’t make you better, bur at best makes you feel better. The old acid test is, if alternative medicine can cure an amputation and stop your bleeding, I might pay attention to it.
So therefore I have great doubts that what you get from visual statistics is actual knowing. You’ll notice that the demo Hans Rosling did at TED was accompanied by a narrative. But visual statistics is a pretty good step toward knowing. The narrative itself (which refers back to the facts and the visual structures derived from the facts) is what you need if you want to make policy and maybe understand the way the world works.
I’m concerned with the extent to which Malcolm X spoke the truth in the link I posted on another topic. Surely it was his perception of truth, but then conservative Christians perceive themselves as besieged and persecuted, while they control all 3 branches of government and much of commerce, and unfactual belief itself is given an unwarranted respect and acceptance by the channels through which most of us perceive political reality.
There really aren’t alternative ways of knowing, but the truth is that actors and their perceptions and interests are part of the data.
You can’t look through a microscope and see policies either. But you need to examine perceptions and constructions of the facts in your data, wholly outside the realm of acknowledging power. Denying that individual and institutionalized racism and sexism and homophobia exist today is mostly a reflection of one’s own belief-based construction of the facts. Well, perhaps Tweety didn’t say “regular people” when he meant white people. And Lawrence King’s parents will be delighted to know he’s still alive. But saying that Christians are being massively persecuted today and that the earth was created 6,000 years ago is just stupid. And (stealing this question from a better writer) if we really do live in a post-feminist society, when was the feminist society? I must have missed it
April 11th, 2008 at 7:56 amCrikey! I think I nicked the idea of pixies from Richard Dawkins!
It’s not like he’s famous or anything!
April 30th, 2008 at 7:03 pm