The Power of Positivist Thinking

So... first of all, I'd like someone to look up the logical positivists and say what it is they actually believed. My impression is that so far as their verbal description of their philosophy went, if not its actual use, they claimed that the meaning of any phrase consisted entirely in its impact on experience, and that no other aspect of it is meaningful. This implies that a theory of photons which had photons vanishing as soon as they crossed the horizon of the expanding universe, and a theory which had the photons continuing undetectably onward, had the same meaning.

If this is not logical positivism, then let me be corrected.

The position you're describing sounds to me like what I would call reductionism, and I would agree with the caveat that certain meaningful entities can have logical elements - for example, I am willing to consider "the sum of 2 + 2" apart from any particular calculator that calculates it; its meaning is distinct from the meaning of "the result of calculator X" where calculator X is any physical thing I can point to including my own brain. I have no idea if this reflects reality, but I am unable to make my map work without logical as well as physical elements. I am, however, entirely willing to reduce every meaning to some mixture of physical stuffs and abstract computations.

Is there any point in arguing over whether we are "logical positivists" apart from the particulars of the stance? :)

It remains one of the least lamented theories in the history of philosophy, because if there is one thing philosophers hate it's people telling them they can't argue about meaningless stuff.

Hah! I would have voted you up just for this. And also for:

But if we've learned anything from fantasy books, it is that any cabal of ancient wise men destroyed by their own hubris at the height of their glory must leave behind a single ridiculously powerful artifact, which in the right hands gains the power to dispel darkness and annihilate the forces of evil.

Ooh, this is good too:

But the entire point of caring about the "Islam is a religion of peace" issue is so you can misuse it as much as possible.

The "is a religion of peace" example shows one reason to avoid the word "is".

This is a great post that illustrates an important point. Whenever you make a statement, you're bringing a large number of beliefs along with you.

Stating that "the car is red" brings along your beliefs of red, car, and possibly is. Its a good bet that most people have very similar beliefs about the meaning of 'red' and 'car', so it's immediately clear what your meaning is.

But with a statement like "God exists" or "Islam is a religion of peace", you're dragging along with you a huge number of beliefs, many of which you might not be aware of. And so an argument like that will go round and round until its made explicit what beliefs you're talking about.

One of the main strengths of rationality, in my mind, is that it forces you to consider that hierarchy of belief that sits below every thought and statement.

"All men are created equal" is false insofar as looking at the atom configurations: every human is unique (by Quantum Indistinguishability, any non-unique humans are the same human). On the other hand it is probably true insofar as the CEV Morality Computation says.

"The lottery is a waste of hope" is true by an expected capital gain calculation (net loss) and putting mental energy into something that is a net loss is worse by utilitarianism than something that is a net gain (working hard and hoping you get rich) because at the very least, having money allows you to donate more to charity.

"Religious people are intolerant," largely depends on the religion how much of the scripture is "boo for unbelievers," but it seems to almost always incite ingroup-outgroup dichotomies in the psychology of the believers, and that I think is pretty much what intolerance springs from.

"Government is not the solution; government is the problem" is false, because humans generally need more than 'fairness' to avoid defection on the iterated prisoners dilemma. Many don't realise that bureaucracy is fair, if often slow and bloated. A real chance of punishment decided by fair trial is very effective at deterring defectors.

"George Washington was a better president than James Buchanan," depends solely on the criterion. Peoples opinion? Historical attitude? GDP growth rates? Precentage of votes won at election? Your own boo/yay rating? Mix and match as you like.

"The economy is doing worse today than it was ten years ago," depends on whether you look at GDP growth or GDP, global economic crisis means lower growth, but we are still richer than ten years ago.

"God exists," very unlikely, courtesy of Solomonoff Induction.

"One impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can," bluh? Is this some sort of pop culture reference? Depends on what vernal wood is: if it is something akin to the Akashic record granting omniscience, then it is true. If it is anything else, probably not.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge," false, the more knowledge you have, the more your lawful creativity can search, the better your imagination, the better you can use what you have gained with the eleventh virtue. Both are roughly equally important.

"Rationalists should win," mathematical tautology. Perfectly rational bayesian expected utility maximizers do just that. As humans, it is a good heuristic to avoid privileged rituals of thought.

Btw, an excellent book on this topic (which I have just read) is Robert F. Mager's "Goal Analysis" -- it gives a rather detailed procedure for reducing "fuzzies" to testable statements, and even goes a bit more into some of the ramifications you mention here, though the emphasis is on reducing business and education concepts like "we want people to take pride in their work" and "we want students to be serious about their education".

I would like to give an example that I think fits here. (Do you think it fits?) It has to do with the common practice of summarizing the whole abortion debate with whether or not "life begins at conception". Putting the debate entirely aside (of course!) this is my favorite example of words that have no meaning outside of identifying yourself with this group or that group, and thus is the beginning and the end of terribly sloppy thinking.

Does life begin at conception? We need to define "life" first. OK, anything that is composed of cells and metabolizes is some sort of common definition. For simplicity, let's call the unit of life an "organism". So we are asking if an organism first begins living at conception. Sort of obviously "yes" and totally irrelevant when you think about what the words actually mean, yet somehow this frames the debate for many people.

I'm also sympathetic to logical positivism. I mentioned in the OB thread on behaviorism that inclined toward the theory being scoffed at, but the experiments regarding mental rotation that Pinker has written about show it to be an inferior theory of cognitive science to a computational one. Still better than psychoanalyses though!

Eliezer's post on entangled lies and the pebble make me skeptical of whether the cake-in-sun example qualifies. The photons-outside-light-cone example is better. Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism convinced a number of people that pragmatism was better than positivism, and on a pragmatic level we could say we just don't care about those photons.

I'm not sure that epistemic 'verifiability' is really a helpful notion here, so I wouldn't call this any kind of 'positivism'. Better, I think, to define your thesis directly in terms of metaphysical reduction. For example, it seems a bit of a stretch when you write:

any statement corresponding to a state of the material universe, reducible in theory to things like quarks and photons, testable by a being who has access to the machine running the universe and who can check the logs at will - such a statement is meaningful

It's a vivid heuristic, I guess, but it looks like the underlying idea you're really getting at here is simply the conjunctive claim that (i) there is a privileged class of fundamental "base facts" that specify the contingent state of the universe, and (ii) any meaningful statement must supervene on (or be reducible to) said base facts.

I discuss this more in my old post, 'Verification and Base Facts'.

One point worth noting is that, although most folks here happen to be physicalists, there's no principled reason why a "soft positivist" couldn't be a Chalmers-style property dualist, i.e. including phenomenal properties next to physical properties in the "base facts" to which all else reduces. After all, we can imagine our hypothetical observer "checking the logs" of the universe, and seeing -- not only that chocolate cake briefly appeared in the center of the sun (being instantly consumed in a way that nobody inside the universe had any way to detect), but also that Eliezer became a phenomenal zombie for a day (in a way that nobody inside the universe had any way to detect).

Of course, you might have other reasons to reject property dualism -- I don't want to get into the zombie debate here. My point is simply that it seems compatible with the core reductionist idea behind Yvain's so-called "soft positivism". This demonstrates just how far this view is from old-fashioned positivism and its concerns about (intra-world) verifiability.

P.S. Html doesn't work. What's the comment markup code (blockquotes, hyperlinks, etc.) for this site?

Eliezer, in No Logical Positivist I, condemns the positivist notion of verifiability for excluding some perfectly meaningful propositions. For example, he says, it may be that a chocolate cake formed in the center of the sun on 8/1/2008, then disappeared after one second. ... But there's no way to test it ... so the logical positivists would dismiss it as nonsense.

As I recall, this interpretation was disputed in the comments on that post. In addition to referring readers there, let me also direct those interested in learning more about logical positivism to this interview with A.J. Ayer. If memory serves, he mentions espousing a view of ethical and aesthetic statements similar to Yvain's interpretation of statements like "Islam is a religion of peace" (often called emotivism, or the "boo-hurray theory").

This is a terrific post! It begins to arrive at what is really crucially wrong with the majority of thinking. As someone who only feels comfortable with statements when terms are well-defined and verifiable, I must be a natural positivist. Granted, it's a bit bizarre that the question ,"How are you?" throws me through a loop unless the context is very clear (the doctor's office is OK), but I wish that such concepts would catch on with the media -- I mean those who really design to report the news, so I could tell them apart from those that babble lots of impressions and other nonsense.

My instinct is that basically everything real humans talk about in practice is reducible, with the exception of ought-statements, and even ought-statements are reducible if there is some clear goal in the context that all parties will agree with. When people talk, they are usually talking about something.

So, 137 are clearly just claims about reality. Reducing them should pose no difficulty. 10 is also a claim about reality, using "should" not in the sense of "ought", but rather in the sense of "would be expected to". 2 and 6 are technically-speaking value claims, but it should be pretty easy to agree on a shared basis for determining value that would let us evaluate them. 459 are value claims where the basis for determining value is likely to be more controversial. Eliezer believes in a fundamental human value system, but I'm more cynical. 459 strike me as unresolveable, even though they are not in principle meaningless. 8 is poetry, which violates the condition that it should be something "real humans talk about in practice". Much poetry is not meaningful in an ordinary sense, any more than a melody is meaningful.

But there's no way to test it (at least without time machines and sundiver ships, which we can't prove are possible) so the logical positivists would dismiss it as nonsense.

Objection! We don't know that there's no way to test it. And if we do presume that to be the case, then there are no differences between cake-formed-in-sun and cake-didn't-form-in-sun - no differences whatsoever, since even a single one would permit a test to distinguish between the two.

If "X happened" and "X didn't happen" have exactly the same consequences, they describe exactly the same thing, and thus "X" is meaningless. If we imagine that "X happened" really does have consequences if something else also happened, and that thing didn't occur, talking about X is now pointless.

Going off on a tangent here about the 'religion of peace.'

When discussing migration to Europe the relative crime rates of muslim immigrants often pop up, so once I decided to sit down and look them over. In Denmark, which keep pretty meticulous statistics, migrants from muslim countries have a roughly 2.5x higher violent crime rate than the mean. This might sound like a lot but then I started comparing it with other countries:

If we just look at homicides (the crime statistic that most people care about and which is hardest to fake), Denmark has a very low level (1 pr 100 000 inhabitants pr year), and most middle eastern countries have one of 2 to 3 if we exclude the ones currently engaged in civil war. So the rate of migrants was actually exactly what you should expect if people kept to their cultural norms.

Now compare this to places like the US ( 6 pr 100 000), or mexico (almost 30). Even if we look at the state of Minnesota which was mainly settled by Scandinavians we find a rate of 3, higher than most peaceful middle eastern countries.

If you look further east to Malaysia and Indonesia you will find even lower homicide rates. Malaysia has around 1/5th the rate of neighboring Thailand. 

Though there might be more reasons for these statistics, it does strike me that Islam might be a religion of peace in as far as it has found a simple 'peace heuristic' that make people less likely to kill each other than in other comparatively wealthy or well functioning places.

2. The lottery is a waste of hope. [I'd say that statement reduces to: the odds of winning the lottery are lower than the odds of the average person getting millions dollars by some (any) other process. Is there any other concrete action that the average human can perform; ie, any other concrete scenario that the average human can focus on, and feel hope about actually occurring, that is more likely than winning the lottery after buying a lottery ticket? Maybe starting their own company? The odds of getting rich doing that are small too, though no doubt much larger than the odds of getting rich winning the lottery. But the effort required is much larger too.

But the statement codes for 'hope' not increasing actual average wealth.

So, I'd have to say the average lottery ticket buyer is perhaps not irrational if he is buying hope. (ie, if what he wants to buy is hope, something to get him through the depression of knowing he's never going to be able to quit his shit job, or live in a great house, or do all the fun stuff that rich people do, or have lots of girls chasing him cause he's rich...
On that basis, I'd say the statement is demonstrably untrue... hope is a valuable commodity, since it makes you feel good, even if it doesn't pan out, and thus, perhaps very much worth buying.

The statement says that the lottery is a waste of hope. I say that hope is very often not a waste even if what you are hoping for never pans out. ]

I don't think you have positivism right. It sounds like you're talking about something related to positivism (or its neighbor, pragmatism) but I doubt most positivists would agree with you.

For example, there is no reason 'Google is a successful company" can't be empirically verified, so long as you fix the meaning of the proposition in a way that it can. If you have a clear definition of 'successful' and 'company' (and the other words, of course) then it will be clear when Google does that.

I'm not sure that epistemic 'verifiability' is really a helpful notion here, so I wouldn't call this any kind of 'positivism'. Better, I think, to define your thesis directly in terms of metaphysical reduction. For example, it seems a bit of a stretch when you write:

"any statement corresponding to a state of the material universe, reducible in theory to things like quarks and photons, testable by a being who has access to the machine running the universe and who can check the logs at will - such a statement is meaningful"

It's a vivid heuristic, I guess, but it looks like the underlying idea you're really getting at here is simply the conjunctive claim that (i) there is a privileged class of fundamental "base facts" that specify the contingent state of the universe, and (ii) any meaningful statement must supervene on (or be reducible to) said base facts.

I discuss this more in my old post, 'Verification and Base Facts': http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/05/verification-and-base-facts.html

One point worth noting is that, although most folks here happen to be physicalists, there's no principled reason why a "soft positivist" couldn't be a Chalmers-style property dualist, i.e. including phenomenal properties next to physical properties in the "base facts" to which all else reduces. After all, we can imagine our hypothetical observer "checking the logs" of the universe, and seeing -- not only that chocolate cake briefly appeared in the center of the sun (being instantly consumed in a way that nobody inside the universe had any way to detect), but also that Eliezer became a phenomenal zombie for a day (in a way that nobody inside the universe had any way to detect).

Of course, you might have other reasons to reject property dualism -- I don't want to get into the zombie debate here. My point is simply that it seems compatible with the core reductionist idea behind Yvain's so-called "soft positivism". This demonstrates just how far this view is from old-fashioned positivism and its concerns about (intra-world) verifiability.

P.S. Html doesn't work. What's the comment markup code (blockquotes, hyperlinks, etc.) for this site?

Great post! Here is how I reduce your examples to statements about the territory.

("Too ambiguous" means "Different humans who say this refer to different statements about the territory, and the different reductions immediately split off in contradictory directions.")

1. All men are created equal. "It is only right to craft the law such that one's actions screen off the parameters of one's birth."

2. The lottery is a waste of hope. "Presumably you think it is right and proper for there to exist a correlation between your emotion of hope, your actions, and your rational expectation of future wealth. Feeling hopeful after buying a lottery ticket seems to weaken the desired correlation."

3. Religious people are intolerant. Too ambiguous.

4. Government is not the solution; government is the problem. Too ambiguous.

5. George Washington was a better president than James Buchanan. "If James Buchanan had been the first president instead of George Washington, commonly agreed upon metrics of national quality would be lower."

6. The economy is doing worse today than it was ten years ago. "The economy is doing worse today according to agreed-upon metrics."

7. God exists. Too ambiguous.

8. One impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can. Not sure the degree to which humans will share a dereferencing of this pointer. I don't understand the "one impulse from a vernal wood" part myself.

9. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Too ambiguous

10. Rationalists should win. This statement actually captures a unique thought about what "rationality" means, and it's meaningful because it proposes this fact about the universe: We in this community are motivated when we think the thought that you thought when you read that statement.

Oddly, when I tried to reduce #10 to show its relationship to the territory, I had to stop at the level of human minds processing the statement. I couldn't follow through and describe what referent the readers' minds should point to.

It is written:

Perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.

So #10 reduces to a pretty unambiguous thought, but exactly how that thought relates to the territory is what the LW community is trying to work out.

Great post! Here is how I reduce your examples to statements about the territory.

("Too ambiguous" means "Different humans who say this refer to different statements about the territory, and the different reductions immediately split off in contradictory directions.")

1. All men are created equal. "It is only right to craft the law such that one's actions screen off the parameters of one's birth."

2. The lottery is a waste of hope. "Presumably you think it is right and proper for there to exist a correlation between your emotion of hope, your actions, and your rational expectation of future wealth. Feeling hopeful after buying a lottery ticket seems to weaken the desired correlation."

3. Religious people are intolerant. Too ambiguous.

4. Government is not the solution; government is the problem. Too ambiguous.

5. George Washington was a better president than James Buchanan. "If James Buchanan had been the first president instead of George Washington, commonly agreed upon metrics of national quality would be lower."

6. The economy is doing worse today than it was ten years ago. "The economy is doing worse today according to agreed-upon metrics."

7. God exists. Too ambiguous.

8. One impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can. Not sure the degree to which humans will share a dereferencing of this pointer. I don't understand the "one impulse from a vernal wood" part myself.

9. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Too ambiguous

10. Rationalists should win. This statement actually captures a unique thought about what "rationality" means, and it's meaningful because it proposes this fact about the universe: We in this community are motivated when we think the thought that you thought when you read that statement.

Oddly, when I tried to reduce #10 to show its relationship to the territory, I had to stop at the level of human minds processing the statement. I couldn't follow through and describe what referent the readers' minds should point to.

It is written:

Perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.

So #10 reduces to a pretty unambiguous thought, but exactly how that thought relates to the territory is what the LW community is trying to work out.

1. All men are created equal.

• has multiple interpretations. The commonly intended one is an axiological statement about what rights we ought to give to people, so is not something you can argue about.

1. The lottery is a waste of hope.

• is a complex mixture of empirical statements and axiological statements. The axiological statements are things like "it is better for people to improve their lives than delude themselves into thinking that their lives are good"

1. Religious people are intolerant.

• is empirically testable and true

1. Government is not the solution; government is the problem.

• mostly testable and mostly false, though it does include some axiological component

1. God exists.

• is either testable and false, or complete nonsense, religious apologists tend to switch interpretations

1. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

• not well defined enough to be testable, though there are strict interpretations involving the balance between creativity and rigor and knowledge in science that could be tested.

1. Rationalists should win.

• is a definition, not a claim.

No, no; one can never forget that 'can teach' is a two-place word. It would be sad to be able to learn more from one impulse of a vernal wood, but I, for one, can imagine a situationwhere it is strictly, if trivially, true. It would involve lack of time and a desperate need for introspection.

[H]ow much money Google made each year [...] can be easily and objectively determined by anyone with the universe's logs.

I don't know about easily, given their accounting practices...

The pint about democratic presidents correlating with a good economy could have inverse causality to what you were assuming: it is known that people are more inclined to vote conservatively when times are hard.

I believe this post would benefit from some trimming.

I usually choose to avoid debates about whether something is meaningful or meaningless. The point is, thinking and communication are usually more productive when people strive to focus on claims which are verifiable.

1 All men are created equal.

I would first argue on the term "created". If we take it out, some possible reductions include:

• Each men is identical.
• Two quantum particles of the same type taken from two different human beings are undistinguishable. The same holds for Pluto.
• Our society should aim at giving each of its member an equal chance in life.
• All men are dumb.

2 The lottery is a waste of hope.

• If you keep playing lottery (with a finite initial investment), it is certain that you will loose on the long run.

3 Religious people are intolerant.

• People that claim to be religious are on average more intolerant than the rest of the population (intolerance level is measured by a hidden jury during a role playing situation).

4 Government is not the solution; government is the problem.

• The current implementation of government is imperfect.

5 George Washington was a better president than James Buchanan.

• In March 2009, a majority of Americans claim that GW was a better president than JB.
• Specialists of fields A, B and C judge that GW was a better president than JB while those of fields D, E and F think the converse.

7 God exists.

• The God described by religion X exists and most of the claims of that religion are true.
• There is an entity that created the universe and that can still interact with it. This is experimentally verified using X.
• There is an entity that created the universe and that no longer have any interactions with it (not testable).

9 Imagination is more important than knowledge.

• Of the participants showing the minimal knowledge requirement X (evaluated by test A), those that are more imaginative (evaluated by test B) were significantly better at task Y. No such correlation is observed for test A (as long as requirement X is met).

10 Rationalists should win.

• When given the same amount of information, rational agents fare better on average at any specified task than all other kind of agents. (Add some restrictions for physical strength etc.)