70. Hume's Fork, Logical Positivism, & Quine | THUNK

[@BillHustonPodcast]

Wow. I was looking for something on the Quine paper, and this was beyond my expectations. WELL DONE!

[@JulsieMusic]

This was very helpful for my exam! thank you :)

[@malcolmgraham8319]

I was just talking about this yesterday at work. Thanks for the post.

[@ashersoryl]

No way! I just started one of my essays on logical positivism and humes fork. This video came in perfect timing, well done 😄

[@thebabyjonjoneshit2429]

Asher Soryl how is a triangle has 3 sides a relation of ideas? I'd figure it was a matter of fact.....

[@THUNKShow]

It's a definitional thing: "triangle" is a word that means "2D shape with 3 sides," so saying "a triangle has 3 sides" is like saying "a 2D shape with 3 sides has 3 sides." It's a matter of fact, sure, but it doesn't require you to make any observations to confirm that it's true/false.

[@thebabyjonjoneshit2429]

Therefore making it Analytic. A necessary truth....got it....thank you :)

[@seatek]

Very happy you put this in. ☺ It's the long winded approach to my often-used saying that even science and mathematics "floats in mid-air". Now I have a link I can point to instead. Thank you! ☺ This is something I wish technologists, scientists and mathematicians would consider more often, if purely for the exercise. Well done. I have a feeling this one didn't come easy at first. But you persevered through, regardless of any predispositions. Absolutely commendable! And very well said. ☺

[@THUNKShow]

Mark Rushing Thank you so much!

[@ThinkTank255]

The invocation of "Gödel's incompleteness theorem" is (as usual) incorrect. Many mathematicians misunderstood, and continue to misunderstand, Gödel's work. In fact, Gödel's theorems only apply to mathematics that invoke "..." (continue in the manner) symbol, which is *exactly* the type of nonsense that Logical Positivism rejects. In other words, Gödel's incompleteness theorems actually confirm the *correctness* of Logical Positivism and in no way refute it. Rather, RELIGIONS started an all out assult on Logical Positivism when they realized that it is almost trivial to refute religious claims with the philosophy of Logical Positivism.

[@sayaks12]

Dapdoi Ardon isn't it no formal system which contains basic arithmetic?

[@randalltilander6684]

I’m going to gently suggest that Quine’s Two Dogmas is not the last nail in the coffin of Logical Positivism and that his abolition of the Fact Value dichotomy is itself a greater obstacle to pragmatic knowledge than Positivism. With the Fact Value dichotomy, one could examine any proposition according to Whitehead’s speculative schema. I could examine whether it was “rational”; this would tell me whether it was logical and coherent. Alternately, I could examine whether it was Factual meaning applicable or adequate. After Quine, this distinction between what is rationally true and what is empirically true disappears. The result of this in practical terms is the emergence and dominance of some theories which are neither rational nor factual. The weaknesses in rationality are justified by the promise of observable results and the lack of observable results are justified by the mathematical beauty of the model. Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math addresses this issue. Hilary Putnam makes this deficiency abundantly clear in his The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy. He argues that the Roman emperors were evil because they committed evil acts. The acts were evil because they were committed by the Roman emperors whose we all know to be evil. Putnam attempts the escape this circle by an appeal to reasonable authority. The reasonableness of any authority, however, appears to be the result of an arbitrary choice as Putnam himself admits. The viciousness of this circle is demonstrated when Quine’s wholistic approach to truth came to be applied to criminal justice. There have been a number of wrongful convictions due to the confounding of Fact and Value.

[@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

I'm a fan of Hume. His views on the synthetic world are as true today as ever and completely compatible with modern thought such as postmodernism. The is no delusion of truth in empiricism. We know our senses can only observe part of reality and not even an objective one. We don't see all the colours or hear all sounds and we see reality as solids not space with atoms floating around in it. This can't be said for the analytic which has an underlying belief it is searching for universal truth. So we have the important half of Hume's fork the observation of the physical world accepting it is a relative view and its sidekick logic and reason claiming to be producing universal truths....... Somewhat of an imbalance,delusions of grandeur even by the analytic. Logical Positivism's flaw to me is falling for this and putting too much emphasis on using the analytic to find a truth. They needed to abandon logic and just be empirical. Saying that I do have a soft spot for any philosophy that when someone asks you are you an atheist or theist, you reply neither, they're both gobbledygook.

[@THUNKShow]

jaocheu I also have a soft spot for what they were trying to achieve; it'd certainly save me some reading. ;) I really like the idea of the malformed question/statement as a basis for meaningless debate, & I try to keep an eye out for it. It'd be much easier to dismiss analytic stuff as simply being too big for its britches if mathematicians would stop figuring out truths about the universe before the physicists. (I mean, a whole lot of the predictions of supersymmetry are essentially based on the fact that the math is much cleaner in certain situations! Crazy!)

[@marcelalied1805]

Very helpful, thanks!

[@EmmaCarrillo]

this really helped me understand logical positivism, thank you!

[@THUNKShow]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! I highly recommend Ayer's book!

[@mikkelmller-srensen3727]

very well explained

[@sciencmath]

I was actually reading about this in the metaphysics chapter of the book The Love of Wisdom. The section was talking about possible roadblocks to undertaking metaphysics, but instead of talking about Hume, the book talks about Kant's epistemology. Then it talks about logical positivism.

[@THUNKShow]

sciencmath Kant is actually a pretty important in this whole discussion; I mean he *did* develop the terms "a priori" & "a posteriori." One of his primary motivations in developing his epistemology was to "save" science from Hume's skepticism, creating a (pretty brilliant) proof for a priori synthetic truths that never really caught on fire the way Hume's interpretation did.

[@evilcman]

+THUNK Every time I ask for an example of a priori synthetic truth, I get none. As far as I know none of Kant's actual examples (universal causality, mathematical laws, Newtonian mechanics etc.) stand up, either because they are not true, not a prori, or not synthetic. I see no reason to believe such things exist. I don't see how his theory "never really caught on fire". Reminds me of the story about a mathematican who proves a lot of interesting theorems about a group with particular properties, only find that an other mathematician has already proven that no nontrivial groups satisfying such properties exists. Seems to me that the epistemology of Kant is only popular because otherwise the problem of induction by Hume would be true depressing. So while it is true that the analytic and synthetic distinction is not easy to make, it is still better than talking about something which does not seem to exist at all (synthetic a priori).

[@gamzeozata4554]

I love it when you react as I do :D I go back and watched your reaction to Hume :D

[@THUNKShow]

Gotta love Hume's work - dude could write!

[@yevgeniygorbachev5152]

this was the first episode for which I noticed that the gibberish you tell us to not forget is "blah blah subscribe"

[@nyamburakagwanja7679]

This was amazing! Thank you

[@THUNKShow]

Glad you enjoyed it! :D

[@saeed9999]

A+ ; nicely done!

[@THUNKShow]

Thanks!

[@ewstaeger]

You need to find a way to shoehorn the AJ Ayer Mike Tyson confrontation

[@briefmentalkaleidoscope1964]

Only thing missing from the video!* Was very well put together. *Maybe also the interesting story of Schlick's murder at Vienna.

[@sean..L]

You can argue about the weather all day or you can look out the window. But what if your eyes or your mind are objectively unreliable?

[@account2871]

We have no choice but to trust our senses, because you use your senses to clear doubt about your senses. Imagine you see a man in your hallway and think to yourself "that man shouldn't be in my house, I didn't invite him," so you investigate. Your sense of sight was unreliable until you used your sense of sight again by turning on the light realizing the man was actually a coat rack your wife bought.

[@babelfish9948]

2:22 Name of the book? pls. Doesn't appear on the quotation.

[@THUNKShow]

"An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." :)

[@mitchelvrouwe]

Really great video's. I have a question about the bachleors are unmarried man comparrison. Is it that they are synonyms and thats why its true, and its true because they are synonyms?

[@THUNKShow]

Mitchel Vrouwe Close! I'd recommend taking a look at Quine's actual paper (I linked it in the video description), he does a much better job than I could. The statement "A is B" is (supposedly) analytic because I can swap them, I can swap them because A is (supposedly) a synonym of B, and we (supposedly) know they're synonyms because they're (supposedly) necessarily equivalent. But saying they're necessarily equivalent is *exactly* the same thing as saying that "A is B" is analytic!

[@christofeles63]

Hume's fork is already a regression behind Plato's Divided Line model. How much positivist nonsense we would have been spared had he started with it instead!

[@PaddyMacNasty]

Are there any philosophical models (am I using the term correctly?) that fully stand up to scrutiny? Anything I've seen on philosophy always seems to have a - and this is why it's wrong - tacked on to the end of it.

[@THUNKShow]

PaddyMacNasty It's really difficult, IMO, to classify any philosophy as "fully standing up to scrutiny," but that's not a failing on its part! It's the result of the impossibly high standards of proof necessary for that to happen! Positing *anything* beyond pure solipsism requires some assumptions that are, ultimately, arbitrary, & will fall apart in certain situations. (This is probably why people who study a lot of philosophy are generally patient & slow to judge when it comes to evaluating new ideas, at least they are in my experience.) But there certainly seem to be some bits that are useful in more places than others. Advancing philosophy is sort of a matter of keeping the good bits & recognizing when they're not applicable. tl;dr: Not apart from solipsism, but that doesn't mean you should dismiss it. :)

[@Onehundredpounds]

That’s the point of philosophy lol

[@bobbyrne9697]

Pretty impressive, dude!

[@THUNKShow]

Thanks! I felt pretty good about it! 😁

[@SB-mt2bc]

link to the reddit thread please?

[@THUNKShow]

matthew stanton KZbin swallows link embedding sometimes; check out the video description. :)

[@philipdubuque9596]

Yeah. Hume totally does it for me. My only "guilty pleasure" is 'liking' Rudolph Carnap. There, you dragged it outta me. And yes, I have looked into Logical Positivism via Dr. Burton Dreben (teaching the Tractatus). But the very notion that ANY modern philosopher could ask (as some do) "Is there such a thing as the synthetic a priori?" strikes my as sad, well... pathetic actually, notwithstanding Emmanuel Kant. It's just like physicists asking the question (with a straight face I might add) "What came BEFORE the big bang?" I mean, isn't anybody NOTICING this shit? "...and darkness lay on the face of the deep. And God said, 'Let there be light. and there was light." Really? There was darkness before there was light? Where exactly is the "definitional co-ordinate system" (my words)? As in Wittgenstein's "logical space(?)" Sometimes it's like I'm talkin' to myself. Which is a long-winded way of saying, thank you for a very stimulating discussion.

[@dharmadefender3932]

I recommend Bas Van Frassenn if you want Logical Positivism without the bullshit.

[@ghiribizzi]

because logic is transcendental and for the distinction of synthesis vs analytic. process involves an apropriositic synthesis

[@koffeeblack5717]

muh kant

[@abdulkader7104]

as far as i know verification means that a term is meaningful only if it has empirical content (i.e observable or partially interpreted)

[@THUNKShow]

Does that statement have empirical content? :P

[@abdulkader7104]

@@THUNKShow i am not defending the position mt friend I am just saying it before what u said about verification didn't imply that

[@shodanxx]

2:50 This idea that hard to pin down stuff is worthless, where is it from ? I see it all the time where I work. Whenever something is hard to measure or observe or find out if it's important, it's often assumed that it doesn't matter.

[@THUNKShow]

shodanxx I think it's mainly an assumption of the efficiency & efficacy of addressing such things; if it doesn't affect anything enough to be measured or quantified, it's often OK to ignore.

[@shodanxx]

But how do you know it doesn't have enough effect if you're having a hard time quantifying it ? Rely on intuition ?

[@emh3533]

4:02 = verification principle

[@account2871]

I'm not sure I understand, will you tell me if this analogy is good? Sugar dissolves in water, meaning you can taste that it's sweet, but it's only because of its definitions that allow you to. Basically, you could say it's a relation of ideas that "sugar is a thing which is sweet and dissolves in water," putting it in the same category as the angels dancing on the head of a pin.

[@THUNKShow]

Hmmm. Which part of the episode are you referring to? Generally "Sugar tastes sweet." would be taken as an empirical statement, not an analytic one. (It refers to some bit of the world you can confirm/refute with your senses.) "Glucose is sugar." would be a sort of analytic statement.

[@robertmontgomery6256]

Hume awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and Kant got up and stuck a fork in him. Causality is just a bad mental habit we have and so is the idea there is a mind to even have habits, good or bad? How are ideas possible for Hume?

[@TheFriendlyjjj]

Hume actually covered all of that. He wrote extensively about all of that.

[@Mandibil]

How do I experience "bachelor" ?

[@THUNKShow]

Well from what I've heard it involves having a messy apartment & poor hygiene.

[@Mandibil]

@@THUNKShow so you have two different terms for the same sensory data. A certain kind of "mess" or certain kind of "bodily odor" is also called "bachelor" ?

[@sunitaviswanath6940]

btw, there's no connection between the roots of "empire" and "empiricism". They are completely different origin and meaning.

[@THUNKShow]

It's just a joke. 😉

[@ryansaura8122]

Lol haha

[@gabbar51ngh]

It was supposed to be a pun.

[@CrabSkin]

Bravo

[@THUNKShow]

Grazie!

[@starrychloe]

6:00 Quine looks like Patrick Stewart.

[@THUNKShow]

***** "A PHILOSOPHER'S FIRST DUTY IS TO THE *TRUTH*!"

[@WarrenLee]

I don't thunk hume would bro fist, but perhaps a glass of scotch!

[@THUNKShow]

Drank my first whiskey in a bar in Edinburgh for exactly this reason. :) 🍻

[@54eopifkg3ehfkj43]

Logical positivism is much like mathematical constructivism

[@Onehundredpounds]

Steven Edelmann wat

[@tourist9862]

cool, but analytic does not mean "necessarily true" . it means true by virtue of the meaning of its terms, or true independently from how the world is

[@MisterTutor2010]

I like Morton's Fork better :)

[@THUNKShow]

This is the first I've heard of this - thanks for teaching me something new (and hilarious)!

[@matthewa6881]

Wait.. didn't Wittgenstein also have major problems with Logical Positivism -- ethics and how we use language specifically. What "school" replaced the positivists? Does it just form part of the analytic tradition? Is the philosophy of language still seen as atomistic in nature? Ethics seems to be fully integrated into the analytic tradition. It seems the philosophy of language has a large cleave between the positivists and Wittgenstein's language games. Also, the philosophy of science seems to have taken its foundations from logical positivism. Now we know that there are degrees of certainty and paradigm shifts that happen in scientific theories, and Feyerabend was the most radical of all the philosophers of science

[@rhythmandacoustics]

Kinda late for me to give a reply but what the heck. Wittgenstein at his latter stage indeed disagreed with the positivist. Things were not clear cut as he wanted to be. No school so far "replaced" the positivists. We still have some of their ideas or beliefs. This is like saying what school replaced Natural Philosophy? Physics, right? Well yes and no depending if you think they are completely different or perhaps maybe latter is the same thing but well polished and improved. Is philosophy of language seen as atomistic in nature? Perhaps, depending on who you talk to. Formalism vs ordinary language. Philosophy is not really a clear cut thing, that is why the main goal of analytic philosophy as opposed to continental philosophy is about clarity and making everything that you can as specific and unambiguous as possible to the best of your abilities. Nothing is perfect but doesn't mean you can't try or even attempt to learn and fail and try again.

[@hongjianwang3456]

"Salva veritate"

[@garchauro]

Let us note that Quine's criticism is incredibly weak, because it assumes the natural language is a clear-cut formal statement system, which it isn't. One has to scrutinize informal speech in order to extract a formal specification, which may not be even unique, because informal speech is... informal. By the way, logical positivism is, in many ways, embedded in Computer Science. For real.

[@stoyanfurdzhev]

However I should expect a reduction of my criticisms, because the content was very well wrapped, the logical positivism was exposed in a rather convenient way, and the closure of the argument didn't pretend anything.

[@TheAtheist22]

Empiricism does not come from the word Empire. It’s from the Greek “empeiria” which means experience.

[@aseeroha]

So you can't use science to prove that science is the only source of knowledge.

[@THUNKShow]

That's part of the idea, yeah. :)

[@stoyanfurdzhev]

Your would have made un excellent factory worker. The efficiency of your representation though, lack the depth of a critical stand towards a given subject.

[@RyanReece]

The "death of logical positivism" is very over-hyped in my opinion. Its practice lives on in the minds of many scientifically minded and particularly computationally-bent naturalists (physicists, computer scientists, engineers,...). The growing science of machine learning, in particular, is playing out the positivist program further than I think the Vienna Circle ever dreamed. See: philosophynow.org/issues/118/Rudolf_Carnap_1891-1970 I think positivism is an example of a word steeped in taboo, and so we continue its thoughts with other words, like: naturalism, science, logic, technology... I would definitely bro-fist Hume, and buy him a drink.

[@account2871]

Does logical positivism produce good technological, scientific advancements? Yes, but to say that those things are equal to "true" is kind of silly. It doesn't matter if something can be empirically verified, what matters is if it's true.

[@dharmadefender3932]

Positivism exists in the minds of the unlearned. Certainly true. Naturalism and science works perfectly well without Positivist nonsense.

[@dharmadefender3932]

@@account2871 Exactly.

[@DerMacDuff]

Log. positivism is a fundational philosophy for sciences like physics. You take it as an axiom, which needs no justification.

[@koffeeblack5717]

Of course you can do that, but that invites anyone to arbitrarily take alternative axioms and no principle by which to adjudicate between various such systems (save logical consistency, perhaps).

[@oztinato4099]

Synthetic claims are just induction. Hume disliked induction but also promotes it under another name ie synthetic claims. Hence isn't that hypocrisy?

[@EdwinMcCravy1]

"God" ("Allah")-talk is devoid of any meaning that I am able to conjure up any concept for.

[@philosophytoday6518]

Hume went completely out of touch with reality

[@THUNKShow]

"Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man." --David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1.6

[@SeanchanOwen]

You are using a ‘Word Game’ in your argument against Humes fork. The word ‘bachelor’ is a human construct, unlike the word ‘bounce’ which is depicting something in the perceivable reality. “During the early decades of the Twentieth Century many philosophers, W.V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein among them, repudiated what they deemed the pretentions of past philosophy, in particular the assumption that there is knowledge about the world deeper than the deliverances of science and common sense.” - link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137472519_14

[@selenagomez8641]

Did anyone else catch that he said all cats have THREE legs.

[@trnvlogs3707]

I did - and went to find my cat to double check I wasn't going loony.

[@THUNKShow]

+trent nissen As stated, these are categories of statements - they don't necessarily have to be true!

[@CarsonZXY]

I'm sure you figured this out already but I'm a self-important prick with nothing better to do with his evening. You said (paraphrase) "bachelor = bachelor but bachelor may not equal unmarried man" without providing positive evidence so here it is: The term "married" requires god(s) or similar metaphysical constant Bachelor =uncommitted man Married = commitment + God Commitment = human + human Therefore Married = (human + human) + God Bachelor = human +0*(human) Unmarried = human + 0*(human) +0*(God) Therefore Married =! Committed Therefor Bachelor =! Unmarried man Without the positive evidence of the existence of a higher power capable of sanctioning the relationship between 2 individuals, being an unmarried man cannot be proven to be the same thing as a bachelor.

[@samus512]

I really dislike this guy. I don't have any specific reason why