By Nominis Expers

      Positivism has been described as "a distinctive position in contemporary philosophy which stresses the analysis of language as the most important function of philosophy". This is a polite way of saying that the focus in Positivism has been an attempt to redefine the very rules of meaning. The positivist has attempted to put into place arbitrary and ultimately self stultifying laws governing what kind of statements we can call meaningful, and what kind of statements we must consider meaningless or nonsensical.

Nineteenth century French thinker August Comte (1798-1857) is considered the father of Positivism. He saw himself as a reformer of human society, intending to implement what he called "The Dominance of Scientific Knowledge".

"The most perfect form of knowledge is simple description of sense experience." This claim was rooted in his Hegel-inspired evolutionary view of the growth of human knowledge.       For Comte, the history of Western Civilization has three successive stages in which he attempts to demonstrate historical evolution in phenomenological categories:

      Theological: The "infantile" stage: primitive, supernatural world-view; belief in God or gods

      Metaphysical: The "adolescent" stage: Reference to invisible natural causes; "essences"; de-personalized forces; mind, Reason, whatever the case may be.

      Positivistic: In this "mature" stage, only scientific description is involved; all causes apart from physical world to be rejected; laws of nature are not explanations, but descriptions of nature. There are no Ultimate causes. The question should not be "why?", but rather, "what?". There are no absolutes, save one. There are no universals, save one. The only absolute is that "Everything is relative". So, according to this train of thought, there are absolutely no absolutes except the absolute that there are absolutely no absolutes.

      Comte attempted through the codification of these "principles" to establish what he called the "Religion of Humanity".

      Contemporary Positivists, of whom there are few, rely very little on Comte's specific ideas but retain his expicit and militant rejection of metaphysics and theology. "Science alone presents reliable knowledge of nature."

Analytic propositions
are those propositions which are true by definition; "Bachelors are unmarried men." No new information is given in the predicate and consist only of tautologies. Determination of the truth of analytic propositions involves only logic and linguistic analysis.

Synthetic propositions
contain all propositions having "factual" meanings and belong entirely to the sciences, there being no factual propositions except "scientific" (empirically verifiable) ones. They refer to facts and are those propositions whose truth depends on their relation to the facts. "There are bachelors in the building."

The "Verification Principle" is the most explicit example of the anti-metaphysical bias of the positivist.

According to the verification principle, if a proposition is not a tautology, true by definition, then it must be able to be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical methods to be considered meaningful. Otherwise, it is a pseudo-statement, without meaning.

      For the positivist, metaphysical or theological statements such as "God exists", being neither a tautology nor "scientific" (empirically verifiable), are neither true nor false, but meaningless; literally, "nonsense".

      The problem here, of course, is that the positivist is sawing off the branch upon which he sits. Is The Verification Principle an analytical statement, that is, true by definition? No. Can it be verified empirically (shown to be true "scientifically", by use of our five senses)? No. So if we use The Verification Principle to attempt to verify The Verification Principle, we find that by using it's own criteria, The Verification Principle is to be considered meaningless... a nonsense statement!