American and British philosophy during the first half of the 20th century has been dominated by a movement known as logical positivism or logical empiricism. The name of this movement indicates its temper. Empiricism, with Locke and Hume, was an 18th-century reaction against the rationalism of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; and, in the late 19th century, Auguste Comte, the high priest of positivism, led an even more violent revolt against the speculative excursions of such post-Kantians as Fichte, Schelling, and (at times) Hegel. Empiricism argued that philosophy should start with the world observed by the senses, and positivism added that it should stay in that world.
This same concern to restrict the role of philosophy marks the more modern positivists. Their approach, however, is distinguished by an emphasis on the importance of language; hence the adjective “logical” in their name. For the logical positivist, the proper task of philosophy is the logical analysis of language. Empirical investigation, it is held, is the province of the various branches of science; philosophy has no empirical subject matter. But science has to express its findings in language, which is a tricky instrument full of dangers for the unwary; it is the philosopher’s job, therefore, to clarify language in order to make science more intelligible and useful.
Logical positivism began in a self-conscious way in Vienna in 1922. Among the more prominent people associated with the original “Vienna Circle” were Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath; outstanding positivists of more recent date have been Hans Reichenbach, Edgar Zilsel, and, in England, A. J. Ayer. Where in this array, one may ask, are such famous names of latter-day philosophy as Russell, Whitehead, Santayana, Sartre, Croce, James, and Dewey? The first two, in their monumental Principia Mathematica, published in 1910, gave a big impetus to the later positivism. Then each went his own way, unencumbered by the doctrines of any school. The last two, leaders of American pragmatism, pursued a different road from the positivists, as we shall see.
As for Croce, Sartre, Santayana, and the more theologically oriented Tillich, Niebuhr, Maritain—all these thinkers evolved personal philosophies more or less tangential to what might be thought of as a historical line of philosophical development. Such thinkers are often the more famous men—at least in their own lifetimes—because their appeal is more personal and less technical. The Europeans among them seem to share the philosophical eclecticism that has marked the thought of the Continent in this century. It may be personal bias, but it seems to me that only in England and America has philosophy really been getting anywhere recently. And it has been getting “there” by two main roads: positivism and pragmatism. It is these two philosophies that Morton White seeks to reunite in his book, Toward Reunion in Philosophy.
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The positivists’ view of the true function of philosophy departs so far from tradition that both its partisans and its critics have sometimes believed that logical empiricism is alien to the mainstream of Western philosophy. Brand Blanshard, a modern idealist, complains that the logical positivist expects us to believe “that what Plato and Plotinus, Spinoza and Hegel, Bradley “and Royce, considered the most important part of their thought is literally nonsense, and that traditional ethics, aesthetics and theology have all been following will-o’-the-wisps.” To such complaints Rudolf Camap answers sternly: “The method of logical syntax, that is, the analysis of the formal structure of language as a system of rules, is the only method of philosophy.”
In Toward Reunion in Philosophy Professor White, who is chairman of Harvard’s philosophy department, seeks to show that neither extreme is inevitable. A close student of both pragmatism and positivism, he examines the brief history of logical empiricism, shows that many of its excesses were born of over-enthusiasm and are essentially irrelevant to its genuine contribution, and argues that, stripped of these, its conclusions reinforce those of pragmatism, which has itself been considerably developed and refined in the hundred years since its inception.
White’s argument is compact, closely reasoned, and lucid. Most of it is devoted to an analysis of the basic beliefs of the logical positivists about the nature of existence, necessity, and value, although he does not examine specific men or works, but rather what he calls an idealized essence of the positivistic creed. Nor does Professor White offer an extended treatment of modern pragmatism, since he seems to believe that, in the prospective reunion, it is the positivists who will need to do most of the accommodating, and that it is their ideas therefore that need the most explaining. I should like to sketch the central problem involved here, and indicate what I find to be White’s convincing answer to it.
The Greeks early discovered that knowing consists in identifying and formulating the relatively stable elements that lie behind the myriad changes in the universe. We see things, men, and states move and stop, grow and die, but we do not know these things and changes until we formulate laws of physics and physiology, psychology and society, that isolate the permanence behind the change. All change is structured and it is the permanent structure—or structures—that makes knowing possible. Plato’s eternal, unchanging Ideas celebrate the fact of stability amid the flux.
Different principles or laws govern different sciences. But there also seem to be, as Aristotle found, some permanent traits that apply to all existence, that cut across the subject matters of all the sciences. The matter of a rock is other than the matter of a poem, but both have matter. Both stars and states are shaped. A river, an argument, and a tragedy are different things, but all have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Matter, shape, and structure characterize everything that is; they are traits of existence as such, and cannot be dealt with, therefore, by any of the special sciences.
Over the centuries, as the various sciences have broken off from the mother discipline of philosophy—logic is the latest to go, and ethics and aesthetics do not seem far behind—it has devolved upon philosophy itself to deal with those traits which the subject matters of all the special disciplines share. Philosophy formulates those universal traits which make up the structure of existence, just as the special sciences formulate the principles peculiar to their own subject matters. So long as philosophers believed, with the Greeks, that language, despite the difficulties that it involved, was ultimately a natural phenomenon which expressed—or could express—all the distinctions and connections that inquiry disclosed, the role of philosophy raised no questions.
But the difficulties posed by language were persistent, for language could apparently express not only truth (and thus picture or represent the world), but it could also express falsehood and talk about things that had no existence. “Centaurs have four legs” is a sentence that makes an apparently intelligible statement about something that has no existence. Zeno discovered that language could express perfectly consistent paradoxes that were at evident variance with the testimony of both sense and reason. It is no wonder, then, that there remained a gnawing doubt about the reliability of language in disclosing the structure of existence.
The gnawing doubt became a devouring one when, in the 19th century, it was discovered that language was like mathematics, and that it did not automatically picture or represent the nature of the world.
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Mathematics is an axiomatic discipline; its theorems are dependent on its axioms for validity. The mathematician investigates the formal relations among the postulates of a system and the statements they imply; he is not concerned with truth in any empirical sense. You do not show that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles by drawing and measuring, but by deriving the theorem from Euclid’s axioms. Change the axioms and the proposition no longer holds.
The burden of all the non-syllogistic systems of logic since Aristotle is that the relations among the sentences in a language are like theorems in mathematics. They can all be derived logically from two or three propositions so related that they can function as the postulates of a linguistic system. The modern logician is no more concerned than the mathematician with the empirical truth of his propositions; he is interested only in their formal relationships. The familiar conclusion that Socrates is mortal if he is a man and all men are mortal is true necessarily, not because of the way the world happens to be, but because the syllogism is consistent with the postulates of Aristotelian logic. Change the postulates and you get a different logic governing a new language to which syllogistic reasoning may be entirely irrelevant.
There are, then, as many different languages as there are possible sets of postulates. Most of these different logical languages, of course, are “languages” only in a technical sense, whose “words” may have no recognizable meaning. But this does not matter, for the very fact that they can exist deals a mortal blow to the traditional belief in one “natural” language. Even ordinary spoken language, after all, can be meaningless and paradoxical. And since there is no knowledge independent of some language, there is no way to decide whether everyday language is more “real” or more “authentic” than a language that can be constructed at will by the free act of postulation. A technical language may better express some scientific truths that are not easily accessible to spoken language. Hence one cannot naively assume that the distinctions present in ordinary language reflect configurations of the real world, or that the meanings in language formulate “meanings” in nature; or ordinary language is so cluttered and unsystematized that many of its “expressions” express nothing at all.
It was this conviction about the inherent sloppiness of ordinary language that led the positivists to characterize most of the statements of traditional philosophy as meaningless. They denied scientific standing to all statements that could not be tested through observation, and embraced experimental verification as the only source of certainty. Armed with the powerful tool of the new logic, they turned their backs on traditional philosophical concerns and devoted themselves to the logical analysis of scientific language.
Henceforth, in their view, statements had meaning only when their truth or falsity could be publicly ascertained in the laboratory. Because the statements of traditional philosophy are not confirmable through observation, they are meaningless. Experimental science tells us about the matter, shape, or structure of particular things, but it says nothing, for example, about the nature of matter, shape, or structure generally. Propositions dealing with the latter kind of question—as well as, the positivists add, the propositions of traditional theology—are not scientific statements, but linguistic constructions with no empirical content. They do not state truths, but express attitudes, so that they fall within the domain of ethics or aesthetics, not of science. Thus the positivists, like an over-intellectual Little Jack Horner, put their thumb into the theory of language and pulled out a dichotomy between fact and value.
The reason they did so, as Professor White shows, is that they did not free themselves—as they freed language—from commitment to the view that there are invariant structures in the world which experiment discloses, and which serve to warrant the truth of scientific propositions. Though they saw that language was not necessarily a reflection of pre-existent “meanings,” they did not question the existence of the meanings themselves.
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I have not followed White in stating the nature of the problem, but can return now to his analysis of its source. The positivistic belief that experimental science reveals structures in existence which support the “factual” character of “scientific” language, in contrast to the “emotive” language of poetry, ethics, and philosophy, is skillfully traced to some of the doctrines about the nature of existence and knowledge held by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of the century. Professor White shows that the existence of such “meanings” or structures is at least as dubious as that of the “metaphysical” objects or philosophical constructions which the positivists condemn so violently. Both are figments of language. Were it not so, the positivists’ insistence that antecedent invariants in nature support the meaningfulness and truth of scientific statements would open the theoretical way to some privileged language made up, I suppose, entirely of “observation” statements, and therefore somehow more “real” than other languages.
But the criterion is usefulness, not “reality.” The positivists’ distinction between “scientific” and “metaphysical” statements is based on a decision to use language in a way that serves their purposes. “They elect to call terms meaningful which are observable, and they indirectly elect to call others like ‘thing-in-itself’ [which is not observable] meaningless,” Professor White writes. Such a decision may be necessary f or the advancement of science; but the point is that it is a decision, not a prescription imposed by the nature of nature. Ironically, the champions of free postulation in language fail to see the postulational character of their own philosophy.
The pragmatists have avoided this pitfall. When the view that truth meant correspondence between language and an antecedent structure of existence became untenable, pragmatism argued that the test of truth was adequacy to the cognitive enterprise. That is what William James meant when he defined truth as that which “works” (though this unfortunate phrase led to all sorts of misinterpretations, most of them unflattering). The pragmatists substituted the criterion of usefulness for that of a dubious pre-existent “reality” as the test of truth. A scientific theory is true if it helps us understand, just as conduct is good if it helps us live well. (I hope that I may be excused from discussing here what constitutes living well.) If we act in a way that turns out badly, we alter our behavior. Similarly, if the language used by science does not yield knowledge, we are free to re-examine language in order to make it more efficient.
Language is the instrument of knowledge and, as eve do with other instruments, we give it the shape that will enable it to do its job best. Scientists will use the language that best serves the ends of science; they are not concerned with whether it is “meaningful” in some pre-ordained sense.
This view of language as a tool whose efficiency is judged by how well it does the job it is designed to do is part of a general view of human endeavor which is characteristic of a refined variant of pragmatism known as “instrumentalism,” a philosophy articulated and named by John Dewey. When language is viewed as an instrument, one decides on the basis of the evidence Which language best serves the cause of science. But choice among alternatives—judgment—is the essence also of moral behavior. In choice of language, as in choice of conduct, the various possibilities are weighed, and that one is chosen which will achieve the desired end at the least cost to other desirable ends. Just as language is not wedded to antecedently existing meanings, so conduct cannot be intelligent if it is uncritically dependent on some previously articulated code of behavior. Neither language nor conduct, in that case, could be freely shaped by the demands of human experience.
Because the positivists still believe in pre-existent meanings, they are forced into a separation of science and ethics which deprives science of the freedom to shape its instrument—language—according to its ends. Here the positivistic philosophy has denied to science the fulfillment of the promise which the positivistic logic offered it. Pragmatism, which has refused to recognize a difference in kind between scientific and ethical judgment, can provide the philosophical context that will help science know what it is about.
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The reader who has followed the argument thus far may perceive that the positivists’ philosophical doctrines—the meaninglessness of traditional philosophy, the belief in antecedently existent meanings, the sundering of science and ethics, and other tenets that Professor White discusses—are not necessary consequences of the new discoveries about the nature of language, and that there seems to be no fundamental opposition between positivism and pragmatism on the question of the relation of language to knowledge. That is precisely the conclusion of White’s analysis. Having shown that most of the specific doctrines of logical positivism are arbitrary conventions rather than necessities required by the structure of existence, he devotes the last part of his book to a discussion of the methods and criteria that will yield reliable judgments about what kinds of conventions will best serve both science and philosophy. The theme that runs through his consideration of the principles of value judgment is that a logical empiricism freed of dogmatic irrelevancy can join with pragmatism in giving the support to science that, by tradition, science has a right to expect from philosophy: “Today these originally diverging streams of post-idealistic philosophy show signs of converging through the efforts of those who are seriously occupied with the living problems of philosophy, and in spite of the scholastics in all camps who are bound by formula and prejudice.”
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