Death of Logical Positivism

I am a logical positivist. Here is a philosopher defending belief in God, while attacking logical positivism:

[Q] logical 4:39 positivists would say that religious 4:42 language is completely meaningless 4:44 there's no truth value in any of the 4:46 words so it's like almost saying 4:49 gobbleygook

[A] mhm gobbleygook well that's 4:51 an interesting one of course I think the 4:54 thing the problem about logical 4:55 positivism first of all as a formal 4:57 philosophy it's pretty much dead and 4:59 buried now you know certainly in 5:00 philosophy departments and there's a 5:02 simple reason for that because you know 5:04 logical positivism actually has can't 5:08 sustain its own basis you know because 5:10 if the only statements that you can make 5:12 which are valid statements are 5:13 scientific statements then logical 5:15 positivism is not a scientific statement 5:17 and therefore has no basis there's no 5:19 reason to believe that it is the case so 5:21 I think people have likened it you know 5:23 to the classical thing where you're 5:24 sitting on the branch and you're soaring 5:26 the branch but you're just soaring on 5:28 the wrong side and you just fall down 5:29 and I think that's what happened to 5:31 logical positivism and and why it 5:33 eventually just couldn't be sustained

So he believes in God, but says that a belief in scientific statements cannot be sustained!

This is really nutty. He has beliefs in God that are not scientifically and logically provable, and he complains that others have non-provable beliefs.

I would say that he is just stupid, but he is reciting the conventional wisdom of 98% of philosophers.

I got more details on the arguments against logical positivism:

Philosophers largely abandoned logical positivism by the mid-20th century due to a combination of internal flaws and external critiques that exposed its limitations. It’s not entirely "dead" — some of its echoes linger — but as a dominant framework, it’s been relegated to history’s sidelines. Logical positivism, peaking in the 1920s and 1930s with the Vienna Circle (think Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath), aimed to make philosophy rigorous by tying meaningful statements to empirical verification. If a claim couldn’t be tested through observation or reduced to logic (like math), it was dismissed as meaningless—metaphysics, ethics, and religion got the axe. It was a bold cleanup of fuzzy thinking, inspired by science’s success.

The cracks showed fast. First, the verification principle—the idea that a statement’s meaning hinges on how it can be empirically verified — turned out to be self-defeating. As critics like Karl Popper pointed out, the principle itself isn’t empirically testable. Is it meaningless, then? This paradox gnawed at its core. Second, scientific practice didn’t match the theory. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) showed science isn’t just a pile of verified facts — it’s messy, paradigm-driven, and full of untestable assumptions. Universal laws (e.g., "all swans are white") can’t be fully verified, only falsified, as Popper argued in the 1930s, pushing his falsificationism as an alternative.

Then came Willard Van Orman Quine’s attack in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951). He demolished the positivist split between analytic (true by definition) and synthetic (true by observation) statements, arguing that knowledge is a web of interconnected beliefs, not a neat stack of verified bits. No statement is immune to revision, even logic itself—goodbye, positivist certainty. Add Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work (Philosophical Investigations, 1953), which shifted focus from rigid verification to language as a flexible, social tool, and the positivist dream of a unified scientific language looked naive.

By the 1950s and 1960s, these critiques — plus a growing interest in existentialism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy — left logical positivism battered. Philosophers like A.J. Ayer tried to soften it (his "weak verification" tweak in Language, Truth, and Logic, 1946 edition), but the momentum was gone. The Vienna Circle itself dissolved under Nazi pressure in the 1930s, scattering its thinkers, and postwar philosophy moved on.

Is it dead? Mostly. Its strict form — verificationism and all — has few defenders. But its spirit lives in diluted ways: analytic philosophy still loves clarity and evidence, and some scientists (like Sam Harris) echo its disdain for untestable claims. Yet, as a movement, it’s a relic — killed by its own ambition to purge philosophy of ambiguity, only to find the world too complex for its rules. Today’s thinkers prefer pluralism or pragmatism over positivism’s narrow lens.

The first argument is silly. One can believe in sticking to scientific statements, even if one cannot prove that those are the only meaningful ones. It reminds me of the argument that one cannot be an atheist, without a proof of the non-existence of God. Or that one cannot axiomatize mathematics, without axioms that make math complete. Or that one must accept quantum computation, unless there is a proof that it is impossible.

The second argument is just saying that science is not scientific. Followers of Professor Paradigm Shift portray science as a bunch of fads with no objective validity or progress towards truth.

I criticized the Quine paper. It is a famous philosophy paper, but also a dopey one. It mainly gives some examples of trivial logical paradoxes, based on imprecise use of language, and concludes that logic cannot apply to the real world.

For example, Quine says that "bachelor" means "unmarried man", but if you make that substitution in the sentence "'Bachelor' has less than ten letters.", then you can an incorrect result. Okay, but this example does not prove that logic is worthless.

Saying "growing interest in existentialism" is just code for philosophers becoming increasingly detached from the real world.

This attack on logical positivism reminds me of attacks on axiomatic mathematics. Both attacks say that something should be abandoned because it does not fulfill the naive goals of its early enthusiasts.

You do not have to subscribe to logical positivism, but it is not wrong. It provides a consistent worldview. You could complain that it avoids some metaphysical issues, but it is perfectly fine as far as it goes.

These anti-positivist positions left me disgusted with philosophy. If philosophers simply complained that positivists have a narrower lens, I would say that is a reasonable position. But that is not what they do. They claim that positivism must be rejected entirely because it cannot prove itself correct.

Nothing can prove itself correct. The concept does not even make any sense. Inconsistent systems can prove anything, and that makes them worthless, not desirable. Philosophers should be able to understand that.

I also quibble with Sam Harris being called a scientist. His only connection to science is a UCLA neuroscience degree at age 42 where he wrote his thesis on "The Moral Landscape: How Science Could Determine Human Values." I guess he had to take some science classes, but his thesis sounds like philosophy to me. He never held a science job. He has never does scientific work. He attacks religion as unscientific, but that does not make him a scientist.