Logical Positivism, Jonathon Swift, and Neurosis

[coberst]

Logical Positivism, Jonathon Swift, and Neurosis

 

One might think of God as a great practical joker. S/he creates a species that considers it to inhabit an area between god and animal. Humans then seek to repress the animal side of its nature and to inflate the god like part of its nature, its aspect that is at various situations is consider as soul, or consciousness, or mind.

 

Jonathan Swift is perhaps the most famous of authors to parody the human eccentric behavior in attempting to repress recognition of our animal body. If there is a God s/he must be a very witty practical joker. Can you imagine the delight s/he must enjoy while observing humans contending with the problems relating to the scattering of the love apparatus among the eliminating portals of the human body?

 

Psychoanalysis is about the nature of repression; the essential characteristic of the human psyche.

 

There is a constant conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Societies repress the individual and the individual represses the self.

 

Neurotic behavior, dreams, and various “Freudian slips” provide us with e-mails from the unconscious that elude the conscious repression mechanism. These behavior characteristics are meaningful because they manifest the purpose of the unconscious that remains hidden from consciousness.

 

The conscious mind strenuously disowns and resists the rumblings of the unconscious. The conscious self disowns and resists its human nature.

 

Neurosis is the label given to these human phenomena of conflict between the conscious and unconscious self. All of us are neurotic to one degree or another. When this neurosis interferes with ‘normal’ human behavior then, and only then, does it require outside interference by society.

 

Universal neurosis is the analogy of “original sin” for theological doctrine.

 

“The most scandalous pieces of Swiftian scatology are three of his later poems—“The Lady’s Dressing Room”, “Strephon and Chloe”, “Cassinus and Peter”—which are variations on the theme:

Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, #*^%^.

Aldous Huxley explicates, saying, “The monosyllabic verb, which the modesties of 1929 will not allow me to print, rhymes with ‘wits’ and ‘fits’.”

 

Swift’s metaphor for humans as Yahoo’s, which are excrementally filthy, is even more in tune with his overall parodying human eccentricities when it comes to recognizing the nature of the body.

 

It appears to me that logical positivism, more appropriately called logical empiricism, is philosophy’s attempt to separate completely the human mind from the human body. Logical empiricism travels on the back of a system of symbolic logic whereby a scientifically codified set of symbols is developed which permits ordinary human language to be converted in to a system of symbols for the purpose of analyzing conscious thought for its truth value. Anything that does not fit into this symbol system epistemology is rejected as meaningless.

 

As best that I can understand it logical positivism is a philosophy that attempts to define meaning as being confined to empirical observations modified somewhat by rational processes, which does deposit some characteristics to the observed data.

[jedaisoul]

Logical empiricism travels on the back of a system of symbolic logic whereby a scientifically codified set of symbols is developed which permits ordinary human language to be converted in to a system of symbols for the purpose of analyzing conscious thought for its truth value.

How does logical empiricism deal with the subtely of human language? This is (fairly) easy in computer languages, because each word is (superficially) constrained to have only one meaning, and there is (generally) only one word to express a given meaning. But, in natural languages, synonyms exist. These have similar, but not identical, meanings. Also a given word can have a panoply of meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. This give the English language (in particular) a breadth of expressive meaning that it would lack if each word had only one meaning, and there were only one word that expressed a meaning. Note: I use English as an example as that is the only language I'm fluent in. It is not meant to demean any other languages.

 

...Anything that does not fit into this symbol system epistemology is rejected as meaningless.

Oh, right. If it does not fit the predetermined matrix, it's meaningless? That's convenient. It solves a lot of the problems I've mentioned above, with words with many or complex meanings! But does it match reality? I think not!

[KerryK]

How does logical empiricism deal with the subtely of human language? This is (fairly) easy in computer languages, because each word is (superficially) constrained to have only one meaning, and there is (generally) only one word to express a given meaning. But, in natural languages, synonyms exist. These have similar, but not identical, meanings. Also a given word can have a panoply of meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. This give the English language (in particular) a breadth of expressive meaning that it would lack if each word had only one meaning, and there were only one word that expressed a meaning. Note: I use English as an example as that is the only language I'm fluent in. It is not meant to demean any other languages.

 

 

Oh, right. If it does not fit the predetermined matrix, it's meaningless? That's convenient. It solves a lot of the problems I've mentioned above, with words with many or complex meanings! But does it match reality? I think not!

 

I've read several books that related to logical positivism. These are mainly historical/biographical books with either Wittgenstein, Godel, or a few others. There is something positive (sorry) to be said about the philosophy in the sense that applying it does insure, in some sense, that the results are "reliable". That is, sticking to only what is observable could give you some kind of confidence in your results. ("Observable" here, of course, doesn't refer only to what we can see with our senses, but also what can be logically inferred, but also with our senses, per se, at base.)

 

HOWEVER, while we might be led astray by metaphysics, consciousness, and so forth, the bottom line is that we "know" (whatever exactly that means) that there are things we cannot observe. This doesn't necessarily mean "GOD" or anything like that, but, for example, ideas seem more than simply electrical discharges in the brain. We do "grasp" them, despite what Wittgenstein might claim.

 

BTW, a book I'm currently reading is Wittgenstein's Poker. It's got a lot of good history of the Vienna Circle.

[coberst]

jedausoul

 

I am a retired electronics engineer and while working I took courses in Symbolic Logic from the philosophy dept of a local university. This was 35 years ago and my thoughts might be a bit foggy but this is as I remember it to be.

 

Symbolic logic was proposed as a means to readily analyze complex arguments for their validity. There were standard symbols available for application to phrases and sentences. Since this mode of truth telling (logical positivism) comprehended all meaning as being consciously constructed necessary and sufficient definitions, meaning was fairly easily discovered.

 

Then by manipulating these symbols in prescribed algorithms one could ascertain the validity of the very complex arguments. This made computer generated analysis a piece of cake.

 

This met reality as proscribed by logical positivism. I think that this philosophy has since been discredited by many.

[coberst]

Kerry

 

Your description agrees generally to my understanding.

[jedaisoul]

Then by manipulating these symbols in prescribed algorithms one could ascertain the validity of the very complex arguments. This made computer generated analysis a piece of cake.

I agree to it's relevance to computer generated analysis, but even there it is an abstraction. It does not describe what actually takes place in the computer's CPU and memory. This may not matter in practice, but should be remembered in principle, particularly in philosophic discussions of the truth of such representations.

 

This met reality as proscribed by logical positivism. I think that this philosophy has since been discredited by many.

Well, thanks for this frank admission.

[coberst]

jedaisoul

 

The computer output would not fit my definition of truth or meaning but the logical positivists defined their own version of truth and meaning and anything that failed to meet their standards was branded as non sense.

 

I chose to speak about this in my OP because I wanted to show how philosophy has worked so deligently to separate man from animal and to move us ever closer to God-like creatures.