Is positivism really dead?Saturday. A good beginning of the weekend. Got to spend some time playing with lego bricks (and my daughter). Also an enjoyable jog in the forest of falling leaves. Autumn at its best. OK, the morning was a bit drab - standing in the rain at the playground.
In the sauna after the jog, I immersed myself to an article in the London Review of Books (Sept, 21 issue, pp. 9-10). Jerry Fodor, one of my early philosophical heroes, had reviewed a book in which the author tried to do an anti-Copernican turn from a positivist standpoint, along the following lines (I will do a gross simplification):
1. What exists must be perceivable
2. Stars and quasars have (meaningful) existence only because we have the ability to perceive them
3. Maybe we are after all the center of the universe.
Fodor does not seem to have a stomach for this kind of an argument. He notes that:
The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren’t astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren’t chemists to analyse it. And water would still run downhill, and there would still be hills for it to run down, even if none of us were here to take note of its doing so. You can’t pin the natural order on me, Frayn; I’m not guilty. I didn’t make the universe; I wasn’t even there at the time.
Fodor argues that Fray (the author whose book he critiques) makes the same mistake that he takes as a mistake being made by positivists: confusing epistemology with metaphysics, that is, to make arguments regarding what exists (or can/must exist), based on what we can know.
Frayn’s discussion of perception offers a clear case of his general tendency to confuse epistemology with metaphysics. I have ten toes, I can see that from here (I like to type with my shoes and socks off). Now, there’s a lot we don’t know about seeing.
One of the key arguments against phenomenalism (all meaningful statements must be reducible to primitive or pure perceptions) is that there really is not primitive perception. Perception is filtered through all sorts of conceptual things, or directed by them. Touché, I would say. However, Fodor makes references to 'common sense' and ' neo-pragmatism that is as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus ' which sound curious:
How on earth can anyone seriously suppose otherwise? That’s a long story, and it comes in a lot of versions. There is, however, a gaggle of fallacies that generally get committed when a philosopher tells it, and Frayn’s book is no exception.
In a sense, this sounds like Fodor's argument boils down to his being 'as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus'. Sounds a bit unphilosophical to me.
This reminds me of an interview I did with Fodor long ago to Niin & Näin, a philosophical journal (link to the interview). I asked him about the Language of thought hypothesis, which is one of his key theoretical foundations, that is, that there exists a symbolic language for human cognition. I was interested in understanding his ontological position:
JF: I take it that the way you find about ontology is to find out which explanations work. I'm a fervent believer in arguments to the best explanation. I don't know how else you do science. So I assume that if we can show that given the available data the mind seems to work the way it would work if it employed a sentential means of representation, then that's a pretty good reason to think that it employs a sentential means of representation.
SM: This brings us nicely toYour ontology. Did I just detect a pragmatist flair?
JF: No. Pragmatism says "whatever works is ipso facto true". I was saying only that if a theory works, then, all else equal, the best hypothesis is that that's the true theory. So I was endorsing a kind of realism, not a kind of pragmatism.