Philosophy

How was logical positivism largely proven wrong by philosophers in the 1950s and 60s? Do you think that the "New Atheists" largely make the same mistakes when it comes to metaphysics and emotive claims?

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Great question. The logical positivists (A.J. Ayer is the most well known in this camp or movement) advanced a principle of meaning according to which for a statement to be meaningful it had to be (in principle) verifiable. There were a number of variations of this principle, including the thesis that a statement is meaningful if and only if it was falsifiable. They also allowed that analytic statements (squares are rectangles) statements are meaningful. The verification or falsification was presumed to involve empirical experience and, for many logical positivists like Moritz Schlick, this meant essentially scientific observations and inference. Logical positivists claimed that theistic religious language (God created and sustains the cosmos in being) do not meet this test of meaningfulness. Several problems arose: first it seems that some apparently meaningful scientific statements about cosmology and unobservable particles would not meet this test of meaningfulness. Second, it was not clear that the statement of meaningfulness would meet its own standards: it is not an analytic statement (arguably) and it would be hard to see how it might be verified or falsified, especially when it seems to beg the question in terms of a broader account of experience involving phenomenology in which persons might claim to experience the presence of the divine. It further seems that there are meaningful philosophical views of the world that can be consistently described and yet are unverifiable or unfalsifiable by us: e.g. radical skepticism. It also left us with a highly critical view of morality: Ayer thought ethical statements were merely the expression of emotions, so that a statement like "I believe capital punishment is wrong" would mean something like "I disapprove of capital punishment." Some philosophers thought that this did not do justice either to the experience and judgement of matters of morality, and it created a special problem for Ayer, as in his epistemology he seemed to invoke ethics in his account of certainty. He held that when you are certain of X you have "a right to be certain of X." Hempel also argued that the logical positivists approach was too simplistic, and that the meaning of statements is a function (in part) of a whole network of assumption or theories of the cosmos, experience, causation, and so on.

I might add just one more response to logical positivists, namely the claim that theistic claims about God's power and goodness do entail empirical experiences. For example, if the cosmos was filled with organisms that only suffered horribly and with no good at all, this would count against there being an all good, all powerful God.

Some, but not all, New Atheists run into similar problems. Just as it was charged that the criterion of verifiability was meaningful is self-refuting, I think Alex Rosenberg's claim that meaning and thoughts are without meaning is self-refuting. I am also somewhat of an old fashioned Cartesian who thinks that the claim "I do not exist" uttered by what appears to be a person is self-refuting, and so New Atheists that do not accept the substantial reality of the self (Rosenberg, Dennett) are in a position that is self-refuting. In particular, I believe there is an outright contradiction or tension between Dennett's philosophy of mind and his critique of religious experience. I adopt the view that Dennett is, at the end of the day, a behaviorist who denies the existence of qualia (conscious experiential states) or is at least deeply suspicious about them (unless they can be established as likely to exist based on behavioral grounds). But in Dennett's book Breaking the Spell he seems to acknowledge first person experiences as being even more reliable than behavioral testing (this is in the book when he describes what he thinks is the bewildering phenomena of experiences which others encourage us to think of religious and when Dennett uses an anecdote involving relieving his daughter's pain to make some other point). Some new atheists, like Dawkins, may make (what I believe to be an error) in treating theism as a scientific hypothesis, and this is somewhat akin to the scientific-orientation of many logical positivists. But this seems unreasonable, because, for example, most forms of the cosmological argument do not rest on particular scientific theories and no theist would claim that God can be discovered the way we discovered sub-atomic particles and the like. Check out the free online Stanford Encyclopedia for a good overview of how the cosmological argument works. But one can be an atheist and believe that theism is meaningful but implausible due (for example) to the problem of evil. And there are abundant theistic replies to this charge. Again, see the entry "Philosophy of Religion" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for an overview of the state of play on such matters.

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