LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Law:
Legal Positivism teaching
law not as it should be but as it was, consistent in its own logic and free of
history, politics, sociology, or ideas of right and wrong
Source: http://online.sfsu.edu/~psych601/unit7/671.htm
Second only to functionalism was the support which behaviorism received from a philosophical school known as logical positivism, a form of positivism popular at the turn of the century. There were three forms of positivism. The first form was known as social positivism and promoted primarily by Auguste Comte (1798-1857). It was a point of view about nature which advocated a kind of phenomenology. Comte maintained that the basic data in science is social. A science can investigate "us" but not "me." Introspection is impossible, and one takes as reality the immediately observable, the preinferential, the undebatable, the nonspeculative.
A second form of positivism maintained that sensations constitute the real world. One can only affirm sensations. There is no mind body division problem in this point of view (Turner, 1967), which was advanced by Mach (1838-1916). ". . . the world is not composed of 'things' as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures. . . what we ordinarily call individual sensations (Mach, 1883, p. 55)."
The third form of positivism,called logical positivism, was a point of view about what should be the nature of science. Statements in science should be based on concrete sensations rather than upon abstract words. This meant that only the past was a certainty. The future was only probable. Therefore, statements of science, i.e. generalizations and predictions about the universe should be probability statements rather than statements of fact. The major impetus for the logical positivists was a group called the Vienna Circle, a world-wide philosophical movement of scientists-philosophers who met at the University of Vienna.
The Vienna Circle had its origins in a 1907 group composed of Hahn, Neurath, and Frank who met to discuss questions in the philosophy of science. In 1922, this Vienna group invited Schlick to become a professor at the University of Vienna. A seminar conducted by Schlick in 1923 led to what became known as the Vienna Circle (White, 1955, p. 204). During the 1920's the group was very active. The group met as a Thursday night meeting group. Three members of this group became well known. These three were Schlick, a physics student writing on the topic of theoretical optics under Max Planck at Berlin; Philipp Frank, a physicist from Prague who showed up later at Harvard; and Gustav Bergman, who went to Iowa and later to the University of California at Berkeley. Carnap (1891- ) arrived at the University of Vienna in 1926 and an influential book was published by Wittenstein, though he was not a member of this group. By 1931 the group had disbanded. Carnap went to Prague, Feigl went to Iowa and Schlick was shot.* (Rossmore, 1967, p. 52-53).
Logical positivism was an outgrowth of this group. There were really several groups relating to logical positivism. Joergenson (1951) identifies six different groups -- the Berlin group; the Lwow-Warsaw group, interested primarily in symbolic logic; the Cambridge analysts; the Pragmatists; the Operationists; and the Muenster group.
In the Berlin group were such persons as: Reichenbach, Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Kohler, and Carl Gustav Hempel. Reichenbach was one of the leaders and it was his contention (Joergenson, 1951) that Kantian space/ time was untenable. Probability statements were the only possible statements in science. Statements about the future were neither true nor false. There were, then, a priori principles but these were not eternal or deducible. One had to discover them through scientific analysis. They did not exist separate from analysis or from thought. Scientific principles did not exist as absolutes and as separate from individuals. This resembled Platonic idealism where ideas were relative to the existence and thought of individuals.
Charles Pierce, Wittgenstein, Percy Bridgman, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Morris Cohen were the pragmatists and operationists. Knowledge had to work, it had to be useful. There could be no absolutes in knowledge, it emerged in reference to and relevant to a particular time.
The long past of logical positivism is back through those precursors who were anti-metaphysical or antispeculative; they were the realists or the materialists. The central position in positivism is that one can acquire truth without knowing the ultimate nature of things. One can have "correct knowledge of the part without knowing the nature of the whole (Burt, 1954, p. 227)." In essence, metaphysics can be dispensed with. In antiquity, the positivists were those of Epicurean philosophy. During the middle or scholastic period, they were the nominalists. In the modern period of philosophy, they were Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Spencer, Descartes, Comte, Mach, and Leibnitz. But logical positivism was especially represented by three men: Mach, Bertrand Russell, and by Wittgenstein. (Joergensen, 1951, p. 6).
From 1923 on, the development of logical positivism could be traced by the national and international conferences which were held. The first one was in 1929, at Prague, at which Frank, Reichenbach, Carnap and others attended. In 1930 it was held at Koenigsberg, with von Neuman and Heisenberg. In 1934, at Prague, Ernst Nagel, Charles Morris, and Carnap were there. In 1935, at Paris, there was a joint meeting with the Philosophy of Science group, which included Feigel, Brunswick, Bergmann, Frank and the others.In 1936, in Copenhagen, at the 2nd international congress, Neils Bohr and Popper joined the group. At the Paris conference in 1937, they met as the Unity of Science Congress. In 1938 it was in Cambridge. In 1939 at Harvard, a much larger complement of American philosophers joined the group, including Pratt, Sarton, and Church. This conference was held two days after the war began and so attention and anxiety were directed towards international tensions.