English empiricism repeats this logical
movements but does not save itself from its own conclusions. We can see
the empiricist method steadily marching from Locke to Berkeley to Hume.
Berkeley denied matter, and Hume denied everything except impressions and
ideas. Reid, summing up the English empiricist movement, states that
ideas, first introduced for explaining the operations of the human
understanding, undermined everything but themselves, pitifully naked and
destitute, �set adrift without a rag to cover them.� Knowledge
became impossible and philosophy could go on further without a radical
reconsideration of its fundamental position.
But the Humean tendency has
been recently revived, by the Cambridge philosophers who brought
philosophy to the brink of extinction. Wittgenstein�s Tractates discusses
problems of meaning, the nature of logic, facts and propositions and the
task of philosophy. It states: �What can ve said at all can be said
clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent�. �The
world is the totality of facts not of things�. There must be simple
entities called objects because there are names, and there must be names
because propositions have a definite sense. Names have no sense expect in
the context of propositions; and propositions are related to facts as
�picture of facts�. He states that all the truths of logic are
tautologies, and logical proofs are only mechanical devices for
recognising categories. Mathematics consists of equations, and the
propositions of mathematics are also without sense. The metaphysician
talks nonsense in the fullest sense of the world, as he does not
understand �the logic of our language�. Metaphysical suggestion is like
the composition of a new song. We are told that he made no essential
change in his attitude towards the aim of philosophy. Russell writes that
the influence of the Tractates on him �was not wholly good�, and that the
philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations remains to him completely
unintelligible .
Logical Positivism ia a
philosophical movement emanating from �The Vienna Circle�. It was a
thorough going empiricism backed by the resources of modern logic and
tempered by exaggerated respect for the achievements of Science. Ayer�s
Philosophy is the logical outcome of Hume�s empiricism. Like Hume, he
divides all genuine propositions into two classes: i) a priori
propositions of logic and pure mathematics, which are analytic and
therefore necessary and certain; and ii) propositions concerning empirical
matters of fact which may be probable but never certain and need to be
tested by the verification principle. No statement which refers to a
reality transcending the limits of all possible sense experience can
possibly have any literal significance. Ayer shows that the Logical
Positivist charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to
employ the understanding in a fields where it cannot probably venture, but
that he produces sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under
which alone a sentence can be literally significant. A metaphysician
talks nonsense because he is deceived by grammar. Thus, Logical
Positivists, claim that they have completely overthrown speculative
philosophy. Philosophy, to them, is only logical analysis; not a theory,
but an activity. Its function is analysis. Logical clarification of
concepts, propositions and theories proper to empirical science. Thus,
philosophy is identified with logical syntax, the higher-level discussion
of languages, and the perennial problems of philosophy are dismissed as
nonsense. Philosophy classes are, accordingly, converted into
super-grammar classes.
However, Logical positivism has
ceased to become a fashionable philosophy today, because I) its attack on
metaphysics has damped the vigor and chastened the style of its remaining
adherents, and ii) its approach to language is unnecessarily rigid and
doctrinaire. Even Ayer is doubtful about carrying through the program of
phenomenalism and uneasy about the verification principle.
