The Nature of Political Theory

86 The Nature of Political Theory

The earliest and most vociferous expression of this new found confidence of ana-
lytic philosophy was logical positivism. It wasthemost characteristic expression of
this early period. Logical positivism developed initially in 1920s and 1930s Vienna
amongst a group of mathematicians, scientists, and some philosophers. Its most not-
able philosophical voices were Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann,
Otto von Neurath, Herbert Feigl, and Victor Kraft. In Britain, the most well-known
exponent was Alfred Ayer. Many of the initial Viennese group, like Carnap and Feigl,
became émigrés to North America during the 1930s and had some impact on the
burgeoning behavioural perspective.^2 The basic premises of the movement were first,
a strong empiricism—namely that all knowledge was founded on testable experi-
ence, and second that mathematics and logic were independent of direct experience.
The conception they had of mathematics (and logic) was largely dependent upon
the work of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Gottlob Frege, and the early
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Complete negativity was expressed towards metaphysics—as
being distinct from both experience and logical truth. Consequently, philosoph-
ical idealism—which was committed to metaphysics—was ruled out of court in the
premises of logical positivism.
Logical positivism had a vision of a unified scientific enterprise. Theonlyvalid
knowledge was scientific. Consequently there were only two types of meaningful pro-
positions that could be made about the world. The first were those which embodied
in the sphere of mathematics, logic, or lexicography, which largely embodied tauto-
logies and were thus trivial, if significant. These were often given the title ‘analytic’
propositions. The second form of proposition was found in the substance of the
empirical sciences. These have been variously called ‘synthetic’ or ‘empirical’ pro-
positions. The crucial point about the latter propositions was that their truth could
be empirically confirmed. In fact, this was the veryraison d’êtreof the sciences in
general. The term identifying this process of empirical confirmation was the ‘verifica-
tion principle’. Meaningful universal empirical or factual statements were those that
could be empirically verified by rigorous scientific method. Such statements, quite
literally made ‘sense’. Verification enabled a lucid distinction to be made between true
and false statements or theories. It provided a clear criterion of meaningful discourse.
However, there was a third class of statement which embodied quite literally the whole
range of the humanities and many social sciences. Classically, these were statements
appearing in metaphysics, ethics, theology, much political philosophy, aesthetics,
and the like. The worst offender for logical positivists was metaphysics. In effect, the
verification principle was the method for eradicating metaphysics. Metaphysics did
not figure in any account of meaningful propositions. Metaphysical statements were
neither tautologous nor empirically verifiable. If they did not equate with these they
were quite literally nonsense. The metaphysician ‘produces sentences which fail to
conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant’
(Ayer 1952: 35). Metaphysicians, like ethicists, aestheticians, or theologians, professed
to tell us something about the world, but nothing could be verified. One upshot of
this in moral philosophy was the doctrine of emotivism that saw morality having no
descriptive or logical sense. It was simply the expression of laudatory emotions.