Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

in metaphysics taught in universities throughout the analytic world—indeed, in this very university—typically begin with self-conscious, multi-week, probing reflections on whether or not it’s really okay to now do metaphysics.

There’s a wonderful irony behind this revolt against metaphysics. It’s that the logical positivists, whose basic complaint against metaphysics was that it was all irretrievably confused and fuzzy, themselves had a notion of metaphysics that was, you guessed it, somewhat confused and fuzzy. The fuzziness was manifested in a couple of now-famous technical glitches in the positivist program. Whenever anyone came up with a means of sorting out the good philosophy from the metaphysical, some young upstart logic whiz always pointed out that the proposed means either ruled out some clearly good philosophy or ruled in some ghastly bit of metaphysics. Even worse, nobody could ever find an acceptable way to defend the main sail on the positivist’s ship, the verifiability criterion. The verifiability criterion said that the meaning of a meaningful statement was conveyed completely by the means by which it is verified. The criterion was enormously useful in accomplishing sort of an end-run around metaphysics; since metaphysical statements couldn’t be verified, the criterion told you they were meaningless. The positivists were pretty happy about all this until it sank in that the verifiability criterion itself couldn’t be verified. Think about it—to verify the verifiability criterion, you’d have to sort out all the meaningful statements beforehand, and that you couldn’t do without first assuming the verifiability criterion! So the verifiability criterion is not verifiable. If it’s not verifiable, then, according to itself, it’s meaningless. So the verifiability criterion might as well be a bit of metaphysics. In the possible world in which Homer Simpson is not only a real person but a logical positivist living in Vienna in the 1930s, Homer just said “D’oh!”

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m going to stop rambling on about logical positivism and show something from Monty Python. Hang on, I’ve got one more thing to say. It’s now pretty clear that the positivists weren’t revolting against metaphysics per se, but against philosophy itself. Really, they were quite upset that philosophy had not made much progress. Other sciences had, of course; consider, for example, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, metallurgy, geology, geography, archeology, agriculture, mathematics, genetics, political science, poultry science, economics, anthropology, horticulture, nutrition, medicine, psychology, sociology, forestry . . . well, you get the idea. It seemed like philosophy had even had a head start over all the other intellectual enterprises, but had somehow forgotten to keep in touch with the real world. Instead it spiraled off into bizarro metaphysics, where you could say anything at all and get away with it because there was no way to determine the truth of what you said or indeed if you even really said anything at all in the first place. This is really the first, and the biggest theme, of contemporary analytic philosophy—the contempt for innumerable philosophers of yore, who managed to get nothing done while everyone else was off figuring out neat things like natural selection and the heliocentricity of the solar system. Now let’s look at our first clip.

“International Philosophy,” from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Notice a few things. First, not one of the players is a logical positivist. That’s because all the logical positivists are in the stands (if they’ve come to the game at all), screaming something like “Kick the ball already, you silly nits!!” Okay, there is Wittgenstein, playing for Deutschland, but you can tell by the tweed that it’s the later Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein who wrote Philosophical Investigations, and who was reviled by Russell, for example, for having abandoned good (in other words, analytic) philosophy. Notice also that it’s not even a philosopher who starts the ball rolling, so to speak, but Archimedes, an engineer. You saw all the others wandering around—isn’t it annoying? Well, the positivists were annoyed too, and that’s why they revolted.

The positivists’ version of the Molotov Cocktail, you’ll recall, was the verifiability criterion. I have a good clip for that, too, but I have a thing or two to say first. Despite its troubling aspects, the verifiability criterion became the cornerstone of verificationism, which is roughly the position that the only way to say something meaningful about the world is to say something that can, in principle, be determined to be either true or false in light of experience. Central to verificationism is the notion that for each statement about the world there is a definite set of experiences that by itself determines whether the statement in question is true or false. This is sometimes called “semantic reductionism” at the level of statements, as in: any meaningful statement can be reduced to a set of experiences (more correctly, statements about experience, if you favor the brand of philosophy I call “annoying particularism”). If you’re out to verify the statement ‘The cat is on the mat’, for example, then presumably you’re in search of certain experiences—like seeing the cat on the mat. Having the experience guaranteed the truth of the statement, or at least that is what verificationism told you. A really important spear that felled the mastodon of positivism—more important, perhaps, than the embarrassing bit about the verifiability criterion not itself being verifiable—was the discovery that reductionism simply wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true! To determine the truth or falsity of a statement you not only need a set of special experiences, but you need to know the truth or falsity of a host of other different statements as well. That is, verifying that the cat is on the mat is not a matter of experience alone, but of accepting all sorts of other different statements, all the way from ‘Light rays travel in straight lines’ to ‘I am not having another one of those darn flashbacks.’

Now, in response to this you might be inclined to say, as are my friends on occasion, something along the lines of