Logical positivism was a useful stimulus to
language and logic. Symbolic logic, modal logic and linguistic philosophy may
have its drawbacks, yet it undeniably is exceedingly useful in forming and
verifying meanings of words and language constructions. Who cannot be intrigued
by the logical relations of words and propositions in the abstract, and the way
those relationships may be expressed in various digital ways such as
computational logic? Discovering patterns of communications structures
expressible in some mathematical paradigm and modeled in high-level computer
language was an interesting speculative possibility.
While empiricism and A.J. Ayer were one of the
stronger threads of philosophical thought for a time, the linguistic philosophy
and philosophy of logic also developed along an alternative line in part, and
that led not only to W.V.O. Quine’s The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it led to
many fine works such as Elements of Logic, Word and Object, Individuals and
Ontological Relativity that surpassed the subject-object paradigm so far as one
might in the phenomenon of being with the reef of solipsism and problems of
uncertainty.
Logical positivism was a stage on the way of
understanding the relationship of human being in-the-verse to what can be said
about it. Lexical ontologies were understood and the realism-nominalism issue
clarified by Kripke and Quine. I think it all worked out. Epistemological
analysis was accelerated with linguistic philosophy. It was possible to
consider intentional and extentional expressions comparable to the phenomenal,
a priori and noumenal. One could sort out phrases that were subjective yet made
about the ‘external’ world, and those that were more purely objective though
conditional.
The primary problems of western civilization or
even world civilization of the 20th century were non-rational romanticism
leading to Nazi Germany and simple over-simplified populism with mass-produced,
unnuanced politics and ecospheric relationships. Certainly scientific socialism
of the U.S.S.R. and China were survivors of the fascist populism age with
Marxist realism in its dialectical war against historical aristocrats and
capitalist nephews. Logical positivism’s heirs in linguistic philosophy were
not crass, naïve realists without an awareness of French rationalism and
the challenges presented in language to accurate description of objects
for-themselves.
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