For years now the philosophy of logical positivism has weighed

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find peace in the philosophy of pragmatism: things should be believed based on how well they predict results. Planes fly, math works.

Truth in the noumenal sense is entirely another matter.

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The historians of future will look back at this post with great astonishment because what they will discover is that it only took one post (a comic, to be exact) to destroy OP's cherished little logical positivism fantasy.

I'll be here when you shed your current identity and facade and adopt something equally ridiculous in its place (but for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, please don't let it be an Analytic Marxist or a theist that churns out arguments in Quantified Modal Logic for the existence of God ala Plantinga).

>>8512835

I am partial to quietism, although I still usually feel led back to Schopenhauer or Parmenides when I try to work with what is available.

Actually, the likelihood I ascribe to metempsychosis or panpsychism has kept me from suicide, seeing as I'll just wake up again as a different mind (though obviously without the experience of continuity).

But I'm afraid this doesn't help clarify my difficulties with logical positivism.

>>8512843

I suspect you didn't read the post.

OT: did you know Alvin Plantinga is an expert on air conditioners?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nDOxLh6AbQ

>>8512892
the point is that you don't need to think about positivism or even ultimate truths. Ultimate truths probably are knowable by the senses

>>8512909

>Ultimate truths probably are knowable by the senses

What did he mean by this?

>>8512935
I meant unknowable

>>8512892
>I suspect you didn't read the post.
Ok, after re-reading your post I'll give you a benefit of a doubt

>makes it compatible with metaphysics
Logical positivism IS a metaphysics because it claims what the world is like (commits to an ontology of such things as sentences and one of their properties of being factually significant)

>so long as we consign metaphysics to abstraction on the tendencies of observed reality.
Large cardinals, quantifiers, negative integers, zero: which empirically observed objects are these four logico-mathematical things modelled by exactly? If the answer is 'none', then the new Logic that emerged out of Frege's work and with it, all of 20th century mathematics, goes straight down the toilet since Ayer and other Logical Positivists embraced it with hands wide open (apart from semantics to be developed later, FOL wouldn't be FOL without the quantifiers). That's one side. The other is that I somewhere read a physicist (Weinberg, I think) saying that Logical Positivism back in the early decades of the 20th century had a negative impact on natural scientists and that since many of them were convinced of its doctrine, many refused to do any new, highly theoretical, work, that would further the field. Such work of course did advance the field later on, but that work was accomplished not by those under the spell of Logical Positivism but by those that weren't bothered by its limitations (if you think about it, the limitation is kind of normative, too: if you truly believe the 'iff' clause you mention in your post, you'll naturally have the "It's nonsense, why even bother" attitude towards highly abstract stuff. You'd also discourage others of doing any abstract theorising).

There are very sophisticated, more refined, and infinitely better frameworks than Logical Positivism these days (though lately I'm out of touch with much of contemporary Philosophy of Science).

But the 'superficial' objection that you speak of is an objection nevertheless; just as Russell's paradox makes one abandon Cantorian Naive Set Theory, so should a Logical Positivist, if he truly is a logical saint, should follow the same route.

>OT: did you know Alvin Plantinga is an expert on air conditioners?
Ah yeah, I saw it some time ago; hilarious stuff.

>>8513009

>Logical positivism IS a metaphysics

I would agree to this.

>There are very sophisticated, more refined, and infinitely better frameworks than Logical Positivism

Perhaps. Embracing logical positivism by itself would appear insufficient; however, I still think the idea of considering what potential observations would verify a proposition is a useful starting point when approaching problems in a theory. Frankly, it pisses me off when I ask someone what the world would like like if they were right or wrong, and they can't or, even worse, won't provide an answer. There are a lot of "social doctrines" in the mainstream milieu which seem to approach observation through the lens of transubstantiation: accidents preserved, the essence unobservable.

So, to follow through to my conclusion: knowing the potential observations which verify a proposition is important, but there is a lot of room for quibbling from the doctrinaire scientism pushed by naive logical positivists circa 1920's.

>>8512843
>Analytic Marxist
But those are based.