Carnap claims that many apparently deep philosophical problems—such as metaphysical ones—are meaningless, because they cannot be proved or disproved through experience. He adds that they are also in fact pseudo-problems caused by logical confusions in the way we use language.
Logical language
Logical positivism accepts as true only strictly logical statements that can be empirically verified. For Carnap, philosophy’s real task is therefore the logical analysis of language (in order to discover and rule out those questions that are, strictly speaking, meaningless), and to find ways of talking clearly and unambiguously about the sciences.
Some philosophers, such as Willard Quine and Karl Popper, have argued that Carnap’s standards for what can be said meaningfully are too exacting and present an idealized view of how science operates, which is not reflected in practice. Nevertheless, Carnap’s reminder that language can fool us into seeing problems that are not really there is an important one.
"In logic, there are no morals."
Rudolf Carnap
See also: Gottlob Frege • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Karl Popper • Willard Van Orman Quine • Thomas Kuhn
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Frankfurt School
BEFORE
c.380 BCE Plato writes his Symposium, considered the first sustained philosophical account of love.
1863 The French writer Charles Baudelaire explores the idea of the flâneur, the “person who walks the city to experience it.”
AFTER
1955 Guy Debord establishes psychogeography, the study of the effects of geography on an individual’s emotions and behavior.
1972 Italian novelist Italo Calvino explores the relationships between cities and signs in his book Invisible Cities.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin was an affiliate of the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist social theorists who explored the significance of mass culture and communication. Benjamin was also fascinated by the techniques of film and literature, and his 1926 essay One-Way Street is an experiment in literary construction. It is a collection of observations—intellectual and empirical—that apparently occur to him as he walks down an imaginary city street.
In the essay Benjamin does not set out a grand theory. Instead he wants to surprise us with ideas, in the same way that we might be surprised by something catching our eye while on a walk. Toward the end of the essay, he says that “Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, brandishing weapons, and relieve the idler of his certainty.”
"The construction of life currently lies far more in the hands of facts than of convictions."
Walter Benjamin
Illuminating love
The idea that the only way of knowing a person is to love them hopelessly appears in the middle of the essay, under the heading “Arc Lamp.” In a flare of light, Benjamin pauses and thinks just this, and no more—the essay moves immediately afterward to a new section. We are forced to guess what he means. Is he saying that knowledge arises out of love? Or that it is only when we stop hoping for some outcome that we can clearly see the beloved? We cannot know. All we can do is walk down the street alongside Benjamin, experiencing the flare of light of these passing thoughts.
See also: Plato • Karl Marx • Theodor Adorno • Roland Barthes
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Frankfurt School
BEFORE
1821 Georg Hegel writes in his Philosophy of Right that what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual.
1867 Karl Marx publishes the first volume of Das Kapital, setting out his view of the “laws of motion” within capitalist societies, and asserting that capitalism is guilty of exploiting humans.
1940s Martin Heidegger begins to explore the problems of technology.
AFTER
2000 Slavoj Žižek explores the relationship between technology, capitalist society, and totalitarianism.
At first glance, nothing seems to be more irrational than Marcuse’s claim that “that which is” cannot be true, which appears in his 1941 book, Reason and Revolution. If that which is cannot be true, the reader is tempted to ask, then what is? But Marcuse’s idea is partly an attempt to overturn the claim made by the German philosopher Hegel that what is rational is actual, and also that what is actual is rational.
Marcuse believes this is a dangerous idea because it leads us to think that what is actually the case—such as our existing political system—is necessarily rational. He reminds us that those things we take as reasonable may be far more unreasonable than we like to admit. He also wants to shake us up into realizing the irrational nature of many of the things that we -take for granted.
Subversive reason
In particular, Marcuse is deeply uneasy with capitalist societies and with what he calls their “terrifying harmony of freedom and oppression, productivity and destruction, growth and regression.” We assume that the societies we live in are based upon reason and justice, but when we look more closely, we may find that they are neither as just nor as reasonable as we believe.
Marcuse is not discounting reason, but trying to point out that reason is subversive, and that we can use it to call into question the society in which we live. The aim of philosophy, for Marcuse, is a “rationalist theory of society.”
Fast cars are the kind of consumables that Marcuse accuses us of using to recognize ourselves; he says we find “our soul” in these items, becoming mere extensions of the things we create.
See also: Georg Hegel • Karl Marx • Martin Heidegger • Slavoj Žižek
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of history
APPROACH
Hermeneutics
BEFORE
Early 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher lays the groundwork for hermeneutics.
1890s Wilhelm Dilthey, a German philosopher, describes interpretation as taking place in the “hermeneutic circle.”
1927 Martin Heidegger explores the interpretation of being, in Being and Time.
AFTER
1979 Richard Rorty uses a hermeneutic approach in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
1983–85 French philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes Time and Narrative, examining the capacity of narrative to represent our feeling of time.
Gadamer is associated in particular with one form of philosophy: “hermeneutics.” Derived from the Greek word hermeneuo, meaning “interpret”, this is the study of how humans interpret the world.
Gadamer studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger, who said that the task of philosophy is to interpret our existence. This interpretation is always a process of deepening our understanding by starting from what we already know. The process is similar to how we might interpret a poem. We start by reading it carefully in the light of our present understanding. If we come to a line that seems strange or particularly striking, we might need to reach for a deeper level of understanding. As we interpret individual lines, our sense of the poem as a whole might begin to change; and as our sense of the poem as a whole changes, so might our understanding of individual lines. This is known as the “hermeneutic circle.”
Heidegger’s approach to philosophy moved in this circular fashion, and this was the approach that Gadamer later explored in his book Truth and Method. Gadamer goes on to point out that our understanding is always from the point of view of a particular point in history. Our prejudices and beliefs, the kinds of questions that we think are worth asking, and the
kinds of answers with which we are satisfied are all the product of our history. We cannot stand outside of history and culture, so we can never reach an absolutely objective perspective.
But these prejudices should not be seen as a bad thing. They are, after all, our starting point, and our current understanding and sense of meaning are based upon these prejudices and biases. Even if it were possible to get rid of all our prejudices, we would not find that we would then see things clearly. Without any given framework for interpretation, we would not be able to see anything at all.
When viewing historical objects we should not view time as a gulf to be bridged, says Gadamer. Its distance is filled with the continuity of tradition, which sheds light on our understanding.
Conversing with history
Gadamer sees the process of understanding our lives and our selves as similar to having a “conversation with history.” As we read historical texts that have existed for centuries, the differences in their traditions and assumptions reveal our own cultural norms and prejudices, leading us to broaden and deepen our understanding of our own lives in the present. For instance, if I pick up a book by Plato, and read it carefully, I might find not only that I am deepening my understanding of Plato, but also that my own prejudices and biases become clear, and perhaps begin to shift. Not only am I reading Plato, but Plato is reading me. Through this dialogue, or what Gadamer calls “the fusion of horizons”, my understanding of the world reaches a deeper, richer level.
"Because an experience is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too."
Hans-Georg Gadamer
HANS-GEORG GADAMER
Gadamer was born in Marburg in 1900, but grew up in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). He studied philosophy first in Breslau and then in Marburg, where he wrote a second doctoral dissertation under the tutelage of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was an enormous influence on his work. He became an associate professor at Marburg, beginning a long academic career which eventually included succeeding the philosopher Karl Jaspers as Professor of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1949. His most important book, Truth and Method, was published when he was 60. It attacked the idea that science offered the only route to truth and its publication brought him wider international fame. A sociable and lively man, Gadamer remained active right up until his death in Heidelberg at the age of 102.
Key works
1960 Truth and Method
1976 Philosophical Hermeneutics
1980 Dialogue and Dialectic
1981 Reason in the Age of Science
See also: Immanuel Kant • Georg Hegel • Martin Heidegger • Jürgen Habermas • Jacques Derrida • Richard Rorty
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of science
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle stresses the importance of observation and measurement to understanding the world.
1620 Francis Bacon sets out the inductive methods of science in Novum Organum.
1748 David Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding raises the problem of induction.
AFTER
1962 Thomas Kuhn criticizes Popper in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
1978 Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method, questions the very idea of scientific method.
We often think that science works by “proving” truths about the world. We might imagine that a good scientific theory is one that we can prove conclusively to be true. The philosopher Karl Popper, however, insists that this is not the case. Instead, he says that what makes a theory scientific is that it is capable of being falsified, or being shown to be wrong by experience.
Popper is interested in the method by which science finds out about the world. Science depends on experiment and experience, and if we want to do science well, we need to pay close attention to what philosopher David Hume called the “regularities” of nature—the fact that events unfold in the world in particular patterns and sequences that can be systematically explored. Science, in other words, is empirical, or based on experience, and to understand how it works we need to understand how experience in general leads to knowledge.
Consider the following statement: “If you drop a tennis ball from a second-floor window, it will fall to the ground.” Leaving aside any chance events (such as the ball being snatched away by a passing eagle), we can be fairly sure that this claim is a reasonable one. It would be a strange person who said, “Hold on, are you sure it will fall to the ground?” But how do we know that this is what will happen when we drop the tennis ball? What kind of knowledge is this?
The short answer is that we know it will fall because that is what it always does. Leaving aside chance events, no-one has ever found that a tennis ball hovers or rises upward when it is released. We know it falls to the ground because experience has shown us that this will happen. And not only can we be sure that the ball will fall to the ground, we can also be sure about how it will fall to the ground. For example, if we know the force of gravity, and how high the window is above the ground, we can calculate the speed at which the ball will fall. Nothing about the event is even remotely mysterious.
Nevertheless, the question remains: can we be certain that the next time we drop the ball it will fall to the ground? No matter how often we conduct the experiment, and no matter how confident we become about its outcome, we can never prove that the result will be the same in the future.
Black swans were first encountered by Europeans in the 17th century. This falsified the idea that all swans are white, which at the time was held to be universally true.
Inductive reasoning
This inability to speak with any certainty about the future is called the problem of induction, and it was first recognized by Hume in the 18th century. So what is inductive reasoning?
Induction is the process of moving from a set of observed facts about the world to more general conclusions about the world. We expect that if we drop the ball it will fall to the ground because, at least according to Hume, we are generalizing from innumerable experiences of similar occasions on which we have found things like balls to fall to the ground when we release them.
Deductive reasoning
Another form of reasoning, which philosophers contrast with induction, is deductive reasoning. While induction moves from the particular case to the general, deduction moves from the general case to the particular. For instance, a piece of deductive reasoning might start from two premises, such as: “If it is an apple, then it is a fruit (since all apples are fruit)” and “This is an apple.” Given the nature of these premises, the statement “This is an apple” leads inescapably to the conclusion “It is a fruit.”
Philosophers like to simplify deductive arguments by writing them out in notation. So the general form of the argument above would be “If P then Q; since P, therefore Q.” In our example, “P” stands for “It is an apple”, and “Q” stands for “It is a fruit.” Given the starting points “If P then Q” and “P”, then the conclusion “Q” is necessary, or unavoidably true. Another example would be: “If it is raining, the cat will meow (since all cats meow in the rain). It is raining, therefore the cat will meow.”
All arguments of this kind are considered by philosophers to be valid arguments, because their conclusions follow inevitably from their premises. However, the fact that an argument is valid does not mean that its conclusions are true. For example, the argument “If it is a cat, then it is banana-flavored; this is a cat, therefore it is banana-flavored” is valid, because it follows a valid form. But most pe
ople would agree that the conclusion is false. And a closer look shows that there is a problem, from an empirical perspective, with the premise “If it is a cat, then it is banana-flavored”, because cats, in our world at least, are not banana-flavored. In other words, because the premise is untrue, even though the argument itself is valid, the conclusion is also untrue. Other worlds can be imagined in which cats are in fact banana-flavored, and for this reason the statement that cats are not banana-flavored is said to be contingently true, rather than logically or necessarily true, which would demand that it be true in all possible worlds. Nevertheless, arguments that are valid and have true premises are called “sound” arguments. The banana-flavored cat argument, as we have seen, is valid but not sound—whereas the argument about apples and fruit is both valid and sound.
"Every solution to a problem creates new unsolved problems."
Karl Popper
An example of the problem of induction is that no matter how reliably a tennis ball behaves in the present, we can never know for certain how it will behave in the future.
"Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification."
Karl Popper
Falsifiability
Deductive arguments could be said to be like computer programs—the conclusions they reach are only as good as the data that is fed into them. Deductive reasoning has an important role to play in the sciences, but on its own, it cannot say anything about the world. It can only say “If this is the case, then that is the case.” And if we want to use such arguments in the sciences, we still have to rely on induction for our premises, and so science is lumbered with the problem of induction.
The Philosophy Book Page 33