Thank you, John (again) for clearing up the issue with utmost clarity!
Gratefully,
Kirsti
John F Sowa kirjoitti 18.6.2017 16:39:
On 6/17/2017 5:45 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
The term "positive" is the word that Peirce uses to describe
the character of the philosophical sciences--as well as the
special sciences. They are positive (and not merely ideal)
in that they study real things and not idealizations.
In the 19th century, the term 'positive' was popularized by
Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach. In the 20th c, it was adopted
by the Vienna Circle in the form of logical positivism.
As Peirce used the term, it was part of a much richer system.
But the 20th c version was an extreme nominalism that lost
all the subtlety of Peirce's use.
The most extreme was Carnap, the most brilliant of the Circlers.
To the end of his life, he claimed that the laws of physics were
just summaries of observation data.
The following remark by Clarence Irving Lewis (in a letter to Hao Wang
in 1960) is an excellent summary of Carnap's philosophical method:
It is so easy... to get impressive 'results' by replacing the vaguer
concepts which convey real meaning by virtue of common usage by pseudo
precise concepts which are manipulable by 'exact' methods — the
trouble
being that nobody any longer knows whether anything actual or of
practical import is being discussed.
Wang earned his PhD at Harvard with Quine as his thesis adviser, but
he found Lewis more congenial. He quoted that excerpt on page 116 of
Wang, Hao (1986) Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to What
We Know, MIT Press.
Wittgenstein visited the Vienna Circle a few times, but he found
Carnap's attitude so abhorrent that he refused to attend if Carnap
was there. Peirce would have found it equally repulsive. If he had
known that the word 'positive' would be "hijacked" by Carnap, Peirce
would have disowned it.
John
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