Logical positivism was a philosophical school of thought
that was hot during the 1920s. The bedrock of this philosophy was the explicit
rejection of metaphysics as a valid mode of inquiry into the nature of reality.
The positivists believed that metaphysics was essentially meaningless, and that
the only statements that harbored meaning were statements that could be, at
least in principle, empirically verifiable. The first fruits of this philosophy
could even be seen in the writings of David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract
reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any
experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No.
Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and
illusion.
While logical positivism as an organized philosophy has died
out, there still remain many who, along with Hume, would affirm a death
sentence to metaphysics. This contemporary school of thought still takes
metaphysics as essentially ambiguous and superfluous.
I myself, as a
Scholastic, would disagree with this. The Scholastics—a school of philosophy
which is actually increasing in
adherents—would claim that not only should
metaphysics be utilized, but that it must.
It would be claimed by them that metaphysical concepts like identity, essence,
form, substance, and act/potency etc., describe fundamental properties of
reality, and therefore that such concepts are necessary for a sound framework regarding
the nature of reality in the first place.
However, the contemporary positivist scoffs at such
assertions. They would claim that concepts like the ones mentioned above are,
even if remotely accurate—of which the positivist would most likely claim they
are not—completely superfluous for describing reality. Physics already tells us
how one event can, and does, follow another, and thus the need for a
description riddled with the act/potency distinction is not necessary.
Likewise, physics and chemistry already enlighten us regarding what physically
composes and makes up a certain empirical object, so that to add descriptive
concepts like identity and essence on top of these physical explanations and
descriptions is to upset the principle of parsimony. Science, it is seen by
contemporary positivists, already tells us (or will eventually tell us) all we
need to know about the objects and phenomena that make up our observable
universe. Hence, the need for any metaphysical description is seen as completely
superfluous.
While such a position might seem rational, especially since
science has been extremely successful
in a pragmatic and predictive sense, I maintain that said position is not only
false, but demonstrably so--and for
multiple reasons at that. First, the picture that science provides of the
material world can only be seen as comprehensively descriptive if one assumes
ahead of time that reality can only be described in scientific terms and
concepts. Theologian David Bentley Hart, in his amazing book The Experience of God, articulates such
fallacious thinking:
And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely
material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of
verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking:
physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot
explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be
explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. (p. 77)
The problem here should be obvious. Moreover, the claim that
science gives us an exhaustive portrait of reality is itself a claim that only metaphysics, and not science, can make. So,
even ignoring the question begging nature of positivism alluded to above, the
positivist still has the problem of utilizing the very method they’re
attempting to overthrow. They’re basically claiming the following: all
metaphysics is meaningless, except for the metaphysical statement I’m making
currently.
The second problem that positivism runs into—as if being
subject to question-begging and self-refutation weren’t bad enough—is that the
scientific method already a priori rules out the kinds of descriptions that
could be considered metaphysical in the first place. You see, the objective of
science was to be able to control and predict the world around us using the
language of mathematics. This means, and this is crucial here, that science is,
already at the outset, only looking for a quantitative
description of reality—thereby paying no attention to anything qualitative or
metaphysical. This is to say, the scientific method already stipulates what
kind of answers and descriptions it’s looking for. It’s not as if science,
looking for the quantitative, will somehow stumble upon the metaphysical,
because it’s not looking for the metaphysical. To use an example, science will
not stumble upon the ‘essence’ of a substance, because science is not looking
for ‘essences’ in the first place--precisely because a thing’s essence cannot be
modeled by the language of mathematics and prediction. Philosopher Edward Feser,
in his (also) amazing book Scholastic
Metaphysics, further articulates my point:
The reason qualitative features don’t show up is not that
the method has allowed us to discover that they aren’t there but rather that
the method has essentially stipulated that they be left out of the description
whether they are there or not. (p. 14)
And again, David Bentley Hart reinforces the point:
If we look exclusively for material and efficient processes,
then indeed we find them, precisely where everyone, of nearly any metaphysical
persuasion, expects them to be found. All this shows is that we can coherently
describe physical events in mechanical terms, at least for certain limited practical
purposes; it certaintly does not prove that they cannot also be described
otherwise with as much or more accuracy. To paraphrase Heisenberg, the sorts of
answers that nature provides are determined by the sorts of questions we pose
of her. (p.65)
Moreover, there is a third problem for positivism. You see,
science, and physics most importantly, only enlightens us regarding how nature
tends to behave, or how certain events produce or tend to be produced by
others. Atheist Bertrand Russell articulates:
[Physics] lays down certain fundamental equations which
enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it
completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the
structure[…] All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract
properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it
changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent.
Now, the reader might be inclined to part ways with Russell
here. “Surely” one might claim, “physics does
tell us the intrinsic nature of things. Physics give us comprehensive knowledge
of the physical characteristics of certain objects, and describes how it is
possible for these objects to behave the way they do.” But this is only half
true. No matter what explanations and descriptions that physics gives of
certain characteristics of an object or event, these descriptions themselves
will still only boil down to abstract mathematical equations and functions. For
example, for physics to describe the behavior of object (x), physics will posit
the description that A events follow B events, of which object (x) is a part
of. But, A events and B events will also only be subject to further
descriptions of certain other objects following certain other sequential
events. So, no matter how many layers of
physics one traverses to explain a certain object or event, one will invariably
run into nothing but abstract behavioral descriptions dancing to the tune of
mathematics—and this, again, only gives structure,
and does not enlighten us regarding any sort of intrinsic nature that these objects or events have themselves. I’ll
pass the baton once more to Feser:
By the very fact that physics tells us that an abstract
structure of such-and-such a mathematically describable character exists, then,
physics implies that there is more to reality than structure itself, and thus
more to reality than what physics can reveal. (p.18)
These three problems (there are others) articulated above
suffice to show that positivism is, quite frankly, vacuous. Nowhere have we
uncovered any cogent reason to believe that metaphysical descriptions are
superfluous, nor have we seen any reason to believe that science gives an
exhaustive description of reality. On the contrary, we’ve seen that
metaphysical explanations and concepts are completely necessary, and are required, even in light of, and because
of, science. Metaphysics, then, is here to stay. Thus stated, we shouldn’t be
worried about utilizing metaphysical inquiry, but rather we should be worried
about utilizing it fallaciously, and
I think the positivist position is a good example of how this can be done.
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