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Truth or Faith?
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) deeply influenced the Vienna Circle, initially provided a philosophical foundation for their logical positivism. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and other logical positivists eagerly latched onto his assertion that language functions by picturing facts about the world, leading them to declare that any statement not empirically verifiable or logically deduced was, quite literally, “nonsense.”
If you could not measure it, it was not real. God? A syntax error. Poetry? Emotional static. Even philosophy itself became suspect, a parlor game for the linguistically deluded.
~ james-ungureanu
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I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.
I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet…
I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty…
