Positivism & the loss of meaning

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Asad Zaman
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from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Bog

I recently gave a talk to students of Modern Money and Economics of Sustainability at Torrens University. The video of the talk is here. I have also written up some notes about this talk which clarify some points only sketched briefly in the talk, and provide links to more detailed discussions. 

The following writeup provides some details and background missing from the talk, and also links to related materials:

The transition from a traditional Christianity based society to secular modern society which took place in Europe over the course of the two centuries has been studied by many authors. Radical changes took place in all dimensions: politics, economics, society, education, environment. In this talk, I will focus on a dimension which has not been studied heavily: epistemology, or the theory of knowledge.  An article entitled “Wikipedia: Getting to Philosophy” shows that in 97% of the cases, clicking on the first internal link in any article, and repeating the process, eventually leads to an article categorized as philosophy. That is, all human knowledge is founded on philosophy, even though we are generally unaware of this.

The trigger for change in epistemology was centuries of devastating wars between Christian factions. It became clear to all that Christianity could not provide the basis to build a peaceful society. Hobbes was the first to devise a political science based purely on rational considerations. The Biblical approach of the scholastics was rejected. But this meant that all knowledge had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Two schools of thought emerged. Empiricism sought to build knowledge on the foundation of observations, while Rationalism did so on the basis of logic. In the early twentieth century, the two were combined in a theory of knowledge known as Logical Positivism (LP). To simplify, LP asserted that science led to certain truth. Furthermore, Science, based on observations of external reality, was the only valid source of knowledge. LP became spectacularly successful because it fulfilled a deeply felt need to replace the lost certainties of faith by the certainties of science. However, there were some major flaws in this philosophy which led to an equally spectacular crash in the late 60’s. Because it is central to our story, it is worth explaining this in greater detail. Ever since Christian epistemology was rejected, European philosophers were searching for a way to prove that religion was superstition and error, while science led to certain knowledge. Intuitively, it seemed clear that religion was based centrally on unobservables, while science dealt with what one could touch and see, and be sure of. However, efforts to differentiate between science and religion on this basis had failed because science also posited unobservables like gravity and electrons. Logical Positivists thought they had found a way out of this dilemma. They argued that one could replace unobservables in science by their observable manifestations, and preserve scientific truth. For example, the invisible gravity could be replaced by the observable manifestation of gravity in the elliptical orbits of the planets.  For a more detailed discussion of LP, see blog post The rise and fall of logical positivism and longer article “Logical Positivism and Islamic Economics“.

The work of Thomas Kuhn in his “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was critical to the eventual rejection of Logical Positivism. There was a “Received View of Scientific Theories” which held that science proceeded by accumulation of truths, in ever expanding circles. One could hope that eventually all truths would be discovered by this process. However, Kuhn showed that science proceeded via revolutions. A theory – like Ptolemaic Astronomy – would emerge and become popular. Then, slowly, puzzles and problems would start piling up, in conflict with the dominant theory. Eventually, this would lead to a “revolution” – the old theory would be discarded and a new theory would emerge to take its place.  Kuhn’s work itself was a revolution in the philosophy of science. The received view on theories had been widely believed for centuries, but was now abandoned. The automatic equation of “science” with “truth”, which was the central claim of logical positivism, was also abandoned.

One would think that the rise and fall of an obscure philosophy about scientific knowledge would have no impact on our lives. Surprisingly, LP has been of enormous significance in shaping the modern world. Even though the philosophy has been rejected and abandoned, it reshaped the social sciences and university education in the early 20^th century. In a book entitled “The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality”, Julie Reuben describes the influence of logical positivism on university education. Traditionally, universities had focused on the development of character, leadership skills, civic and social responsibilities, as the central element of education. However, Logical Positivism asserted that these were not scientific and hence not “knowledge”. These aspects of university education were gradually abandoned as universities turned towards a purely technical education, providing job market skills to students, without any attempts at teaching them morality. This continues to be the case today, even though positivism has been rejected by philosophers.

Even more disastrous was the impact of logical positivism on the social sciences. The prestige of the physical sciences soared as a result of amazing technological developments, accelerated by the World Wars. But the Wars had the reverse effect on the prestige of the traditional historical and qualitative approach to the social sciences. If the traditional approach to the study of human societies could not create peace and harmony, a new approach was in order. There was consensus that use of the scientific method to study human society – as signified by the term “social science” – would lead to remarkable progress in this area. But this was an illusion. Methods of great value for studying objective reality fail completely at understanding the complex and hidden forces which drive human behavior.

The idea of ignoring unobservables, and modeling observable behaviors using mathematical equations, led to a grotesque caricature of human behavior embodied in homo economicus. For a survey of the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence against this model, see Behavioral vs Neoclassical Economics. Since the fundamental unit of society is the human being, abandoning the attempt to understand the unobservable sources of human welfare and behavior is tantamount to abandoning the effort to understand human societies. The results of failure to understand human welfare are apparent in the manifold crises in every dimension of human existence, unfolding around the globe today. Defective social science has led to family breakdown, to continuous wars, to enormous cruelty, to extinction of species of flora and fauna, and to environmental crises.

So how can we begin to repair the damage done by a defective theory of knowledge which asserts science to be the only valid source of knowledge? Perhaps we should start with the most fundamental question which life poses to all of us: how to make the best use of these infinitely precious few moments we have been granted on this planet? Logical Positivism holds that this question is meaningless, since it cannot be answered by science. Capitalism teaches us that we should spend all our time chasing after wealth. Both of these answers are absurd, but are widely believed. The third answer is the half-truth of existentialism, which is extremely popular because it is aligned with the individualism and hedonism that is the spirit of the times.

To put it in popular language, Existentialism hold that I must create meaning for my own life; no one else can define it for me. This is certainly true – our lives are unique, and we must find our own meaning for ourselves. However, wise men have traversed this path for centuries, and have accumulated wisdom, which can serve as our guide. To ignore this advice would be akin to someone ignoring accumulated wisdom in biology, physics, medicine, etc. and trying to recreate this knowledge on his own, starting from zero. Logical Positivism ignores two critical aspects of knowledge: knowledge is socially generated as a collective effort by communities, and knowledge is experiential. Experiential knowledge, like driving skills, or sports, cannot be reduced to propositions, but can be transmitted by experts. If we search for meaning on our own, we will never get beyond kindergarten. The process of social change begins with ourselves: Alternative Models of Development: Becoming the Change You Want to See