The Status of the Criterion of Significance and the Point of the Project of Explication

We are now in a position to return to a final criticism of the search for a criterion of empiricist significance. Much has been made of the very status of the criterion itself (however it may be put in the end): was it empirically testable? It is common to claim that it is not and therefore to consign it to insignificance in turn, following Putnam (1981a, 1981b). The question arises whether this is to overlook that the criterion of significance was put forward not as an empirical claim but as a meta-theoretical proposal for how to delimit empiricist languages from non-empiricist ones. Again, pursuing this line of inquiry is not to deny that by some members of the Circle the meaning criterion may have been understood in such a way that it became liable to charges of self-refutation. Even if that were the case, the reason for this may be found not in the very idea of a meaning criterion, but in the contradictory status of the Tractarian elucidations to which the criterion was likened. (The legitimacy of these elucidations was at issue already in the debates that divided the Circle in the early 1930s; see, e.g., Neurath 1932a.) Here primarily Carnap’s understanding will be considered, who from 1932 onwards put his philosophical theses in the form of “proposals” for alternative language forms, but how the pragmatist alternative fares will also be considered. Finally, we will consider where this does leave neopositivist anti-metaphysics.
For Carnap, the empiricist criterion of significance was an analytic principle, but in a very special sense. As a convention, the criterion had the standing of an analytic statement, but it was not a formally specifiable framework principle of the language Ln to which it pertained. Properly formulated, it was a semantic principle concerning Ln that was statable only in its meta-languageLn+1. To argue that the criterion itself is meaningless because it has no standing in Ln is to commit a category mistake, for meta-linguistic assertions need not have counterparts in their object languages (Goldfarb 1997, Creath 2004, Richardson 2004). Nor would it be correct to claim that the criterion hides circular reasoning, allegedly because its rejection of the meaningless depends on an unquestioned notion of experiential fact as self-explanatory (when such fact is still to be constituted). Importantly, Carnap’s language constructor does not start with fixed notions of what is empirical (rather than formal) or what is given (rather than assumed or inferred), but from the beginning allows a plurality of perspectives on these distinctions (Ricketts 1994). Carnap’s empiricist criterion of significance is precisely this: an explication, a proposal for how empiricists may wish to speak. It is not an explanation of how meaning arises from what is not meaningful in itself. Unlike theorists who wish to explain how meaning itself is constituted, explicationists can remain untroubled by the regress of formal semantics with Tarskian strictures. For them, the lack of formal closure (the incompleteness of arithmetic and the inapplicability of the truth predicate to its own language) only betokens the fact that our very own home languages cannot ever be fully explicated.
It may be wondered whether such considerations have not become pointless, given the troubles that attempts to provide a criterion of significance ran into. However, as we saw, Carnap’s 1956 criterion for constructed languages remains in play. Moreover, there also remains the informal, pragmatic approach that can be applied even more widely. Thus it is not without importance to see that pragmatic principles delineating empirical significance (like Mach’s or Quine’s Peircean insight) are not ruled out from the start either. The reason for this is different however. For pragmatists, the anti-metaphysical demarcation criterion is not strictly speaking a meaning criterion. The pragmatic criterion of significance is expressly epistemic, not semantic: it speaks of relevance with regard to an established cognitive practice, not in-principle truth-evaluability. This criterion is most easily expressed as a conditional norm, alongside other methodological maxims. (If you want your reasoning to be responsible to evidence, then avoid statements that experience can neither confirm or disconfirm, however indirectly.) So the suggestion that the criterion of empirical significance can be regarded as a proposal for how to treat the language of science cannot be brushed aside but for the persistent neglect of the philosophical projects of Carnap or the non-formalist left Vienna Circle.
Still, some readers may wonder whether in the course of responding to the various counter-criticisms, the Vienna Circle’s position has not shifted considerably. This indeed is true: the attempt to show metaphysics strictly meaningless for once and all did not succeed. For even if Carnap’s 1956 criterion and the pragmatic approach work, they do not achieve that: Carnap’s criterion only works for constructed languages and the pragmatic one does not address the semantic issue and only works case by case. But it can be argued that while this debilitates the Vienna Circle’s most notorious claim (if understood without qualifications), it does not debilitate their entire program. That was, we recall, to defend Enlightenment reason and to counter the abuse of possibly empty but certainly ill-understood deep-sounding language in science and in public life. Their program was, to put it somewhat anachronistically, to promote epistemic empowerment. This program would have been helped by an across-the-board criterion to show metaphysics meaningless, but it can also proceed in its absence.
But now the suspicion may be that if all that is meant to be excluded is speculative reason without due regard to empirical and logico-linguistic evidence, the program’s success appears too easy. Few contemporary philosophers would confess to such reckless practices. Still, even the rejection of speculative reason is by no means uncontroversial, as shown by the unresolved status of the appeal to intuitions that characterizes much of contemporary analytical metaphysics and epistemology. Moreover, much depends on what’s considered to be “due regard”: is merely bad science “metaphysics”? Or only appeals to the supernatural? And what about de re necessities? Or the seeming commitments of existential quantification? The promotion of anti-metaphysics may be applauded in principle as an exercise in intellectual hygiene, the objection goes, but in practice it excludes either too much or too little: it either cripples our understanding of theoretical science or normalizes away the Vienna Circle’s most notorious claim.
In response it is helpful to consider the conception of metaphysics that can be seen to be motivating much of the Circle’s ethical non-cognitivism. What did Carnap (1935) and Neurath (1932a) dismiss when they dismissed normative ethics as metaphysical and cognitively meaningless? One may concede that due to the brusque way in which they put their broadly Humean point, they opened themselves up to significant criticism, but it is very important to see also what they did not do. Most notably, they did not dismiss as meaningless all concern with how to live. Conditional prescriptions remained straight-forwardly truth-evaluable in instrumental terms and so cognitively meaningful. In addition, their own active engagement for Enlightenment values in public life showed that they took these matters very seriously themselves. (In fact, their engagement as public intellectuals compares strikingly with that of most contemporary philosophers of science.) But neither did they fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy nor were they simply inconsistent. In the determination of basic values they rather saw acts of personal self-definition, but, characteristically, Carnap showed a more individualistic and Neurath a more socially oriented approach to the matter. What needs to be borne in mind, then, is the meaning that they attached to the epithet “metaphysical” in this and other areas: the arrogation of unique and fully determined objective insight into matters beyond scientific reason. It was in the ambition of providing such unconditional prescriptions that they saw philosophical ethics being the heir of theology. (Compare Carnap 1935 and 1963b, §32 and Neurath 1932a and 1944, §19.) Needless to say, it remains contentious to claim those types of philosophical ethics to be cognitively meaningless that seek to derive determinate sets of codes from some indisputable principle or other. But the ongoing discussion of non-cognitivism and its persistent defense in analytical ethics suggest that, understood as outlined, the Circle’s non-cognitivism was by no means absurd or contradictory.
It may be noted here that a newly discovered fragment of Carnap’s writing (2016) has given fresh impetus to explorations of the model of ethical reasoning in terms of optatives that Carnap outlined (1963b, §32) in response to A. Kaplan’s criticism (1963) of his earlier position. What emerges is that Carnap was prepared to integrate ethical desiderata among non-ethical ones within the network of means and ends that decision theory as a normative theory of rational action seeks to systematize and regiment. Moral reasoning is assimilated to practical reasoning and no longer suffers from a deficit of significance—albeit at the cost of not being able to bar admission to any intrinsic value (see Carus 2016). Carnap may reasonably respond here that as a theorist of science he is not required to account for normative ethics beyond providing a framework for understanding its undeniable role in a generic theory of human behavior. What was rightly objected against his earlier position was that it made such understanding impossible.
Whatever the details, their non-cognitivism supports the idea that the left wing’s anti-metaphysics was primarily deflationist. As philosophers they opposed all claims to have a categorically deeper insight into reality than either empirical or formal science, such that philosophy would stand in judgement of these sciences as to their reality content or that mere science would stand in need of philosophical interpretations. (Concerned with practical problems, they likewise opposed philosophical claims to stand above the contestations of mere mortals.) Importantly, such deflationism need not remain general and vague, but can be given precise content. For instance, it has been argued (Carus 1999) that Carnap correctly did not understand Tarski’s theory of truth as a traditional correspondence theory such that truth consisted in some kind of agreement of statements or judgements and facts or the world where the latter make true the former. In Carnap’s unchanged opposition to the classical correspondence theory of truth in turn lies not only the continuity between his own syntactic and semantic phases, but also the key to his and the entire left Vienna Circle’s understanding of their anti-metaphysical campaign. (On various occasions in the early 30s, Hahn, Frank and Neurath opposed correspondence truth very explicitly, while, in later years, Neurath resisted Tarskian semantics precisely because he wrongly suspected it of resurrecting correspondentism and Frank continued to castigate correspondentism whenever required. On this tangled issue, see Mormann 1999, Uebel 2004, Mancosu 2008.)
This suggests that a hard core of Viennese anti-metaphysics survives the criticism and subsequent qualifications of early claims made for their criteria of empirical significance, yet retains sufficient philosophical teeth to remain of contemporary interest. The metaphysics which the left wing attacked, besides the everyday supernaturalism and the supra-scientific essentialism of old, was the correspondence conception of truth and associated realist conceptions of knowledge. These notions were deemed attackable directly on epistemological grounds, without any diversion through the theory of meaning: how could such correspondences or likenesses ever be established? As Neurath liked to put it (1930), we cannot step outside of our thinking to see whether a correspondence obtains between what we think and how the world is. (Against defenses of the correspondence theory by arguments from analogy it would likewise be argued that the analogy is overextended.) Against the counter that this is merely an epistemic argument that does not touch the ontological issue Neurath is likely to have argued that doing without an epistemic account is a recipe for uncontrollable metaphysics.
Importantly, the left wing’s deflationary anti-metaphysics was accompanied by a distinctively constructivist attitude. Here one must hasten to add, of course, that what was constructed were not the objects of first-order discourse (tables, chairs, electrons and black holes) but the theoretical terms and concepts needed for reflection about the cognitive enterprise of science (ideas like evidence and its degrees and presuppositions). As meta-theorists of science they developed explications: different types of explications were envisaged, ranging from analytic definitions giving necessary and sufficient conditions in formal languages all the way to pragmatic, exemplar-based criterial delimitations of the central applications of contested concepts or practices. Two branches of the Circle’s constructivist tendency can thus be distinguished: Carnap’s rational reconstructions and formalist explications and Neurath’s and Frank’s empirically informed and practice-oriented reconceptualizations. The difference between these formalist and naturalistic approaches can be understood as a division of labor between the tasks of exploring logico-linguistic possibilities of conceptual reconstruction and considering the efficacy of particular scientific practices. In principle, the constructivist tendency in Vienna Circle philosophy was able to embrace both (compare Carnap 1934/37, §72 and Neurath 1936b). However, in their own day, this two-track approach remained incompletely realized as philosophical relations between Carnap and Neurath soured over disputes stemming ultimately from both parties’ failure to recognize the potential compatibility. Frank’s final paper (1963) was a terse reminder that the logic of science was not the sole successor or replacement of traditional philosophy
Considering the Vienna Circle as a whole in the light of this reading of its anti-metaphysical philosophy, we find the most striking division within it yet. Unlike Carnap and the left wing, Schlick had little problem with a correspondence theory of truth once it was cleansed of psychologistic and intuitive accretions and centered on the idea of unique coordination of statement and fact. In this lay the strongest sense of continuity between his pre-Vienna CircleGeneral Theory of Knowledge (1918/25) and his post-Tractarian epistemology (1935a, 1935b). (Schlick also showed little enthusiasm for the constructivist tendencies which already the manifesto of 1929 had celebrated.) Allowing for some simplification, it must be noted that Schlick’s attack on metaphysics (which gradually weakened anyway) presupposed a non-constructivist reading of the criterion of significance. Whether his conception can escape the charge self-refutation must be left open here.

The Status of the Criterion of Significance and the Point of the Project of Explication

The Status of the Criterion of Significance and the Point of the Project of Explication :: تعاليق

The Status of the Criterion of Significance and the Point of the Project of Explication