Metaphysics

Logical positivism famously dismissed metaphysics as meaningless. It failed to satisfy the verification criterion, according to which for any statement to ...

Failure to acknowledge the role that presuppositions play in the pursuit of scientific knowledge grants natural science the epistemically privileged status of the science of pure being once enjoyed by rationalist metaphysics; it does not get rid of dogmatism; it merely replaces one kind of uncritical dogmatic realism with another. But what the logical positivists also assumed is that the criterion of verification that belongs to the empirical sciences is a universal criterion of meaning, not a domain-specific criterion that merely determines what does and does not count as a genuine scientific hypothesis. While there are facts of the matter that can be consulted to establish whether the canvas is a genuine Goya or a fake, there is no fact of the matter that could be cited to establish whether the paint on the canvas is real or ideal. As a result, they also failed satisfactorily to address the question concerning the logical status of the verification principle which states ‘propositions which are not empirically verifiable are meaningless, unless they are tautologies’. But the conclusion that one must choose between a rationalist or a naturalist metaphysics is a little hasty. The claim about ice is a proposition which can be verified or found to be true or false. There are, he claimed, facts of the matter that can be invoked to settle whether the canvas is or is not a genuine Goya: the nature and direction of the strokes could be compared to those of certified Goya paintings; the canvas could be carbon dated to establish whether the paint matches the relevant period of time, and historical records mentioning such and such commissioning the painting could be referred to. The dispute between the two art critics is like one between two persons debating whether or not it is raining outside; such a dispute can be settled by consulting the facts; but there are no facts that can be consulted to establish whether the rain is real or ideal, precisely because the rain, just as mountains and rivers for Berkeley, looks exactly the same, whether it is real, as the materialist argues, or ideal as the immaterialist claims. The issue may be difficult to solve, but it is resolvable at least in principle, because there is an understanding of what kind of facts could be adduced in evidence either for or against the claim that the canvas is a genuine Goya. As Collingwood argued in An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), a thinly disguised attack on Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic (1936), the only way to go beyond the metaphysics that logical positivism critiqued is to acknowledge the presuppositions that govern our attempts to come to know reality in different domains of inquiry, and to make explicit the role that they play in giving rise to the kind of questions different forms of knowledge seek to answer. It is only once the role that presuppositions play in shaping the questions we ask (and seek answers to) in different forms of inquiry is acknowledged, that one can truly go beyond the uncritical dogmatic metaphysics that positivism tried, but arguably failed, to do away with. This was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century when logical positivism mounted one of the most scathing attacks on the very idea that the nature of reality could be known by reflection alone, a priori, from the so-called philosophical armchair.