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Anthropomorphic Tendencies in Positivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Charles Hartshorne
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Extract

The theme of this paper is that positivism, whether old or new, is a version of the doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of things. Certain limitations of the human mind are mistaken for characteristics of the universe. I am not primarily concerned with the particular views of actual positivists, but with a general alternative of thought. If no one is in all respects a positivist in the sense criticized in this article, it is certainly true that there are many who would not accept what I suggest is the only satisfactory alternative to positivism; so that existent positivisms will, if my reasoning is correct, consist in more or less arbitrary compromises between the unmitigated form, and the real overcoming, of that anthropomorphic narrowness which all positivism (and some forms of so-called realism and naturalism) involves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1941 , pp. 184 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1941

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References

1 Enlargement of a paper read to the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December, 1937 (Princeton). I wish to emphasize the remark made in the text that this article is not an attempt to estimate the value of the work of Carnap, Reichenbach, or any other individual, except so far as that work purports to establish the limits of human knowledge and to eliminate metaphysics. I wish only to show that the success of this attempted elimination has been exaggerated; that the attempt has indeed quite definitely failed. It does not follow that we owe nothing to those who made it. An incisive failure may be more helpful, more cause for admiration and gratitude, than a vague or equivocal success. We cannot know adequately what metaphysics is until we know with the utmost clearness what it means to attempt to get along without it. Those neo-Humians who are known as “logical positivists” may in the end do more for the science of metaphysics than the neo-Hegelians or neo-Thomists.

2 “Value and Existence,” Int. F. of Ethics, Vol. XLVIII, pp. 475-86. See also D. H. Parker, Experience and Substance (The University of Michigan Press, 1941). Several of the topics discussed in this article are dealt with in brilliant fashion in this book, including the question of probability in the finite run.

3 The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1934.

4 The University of Chicago Press, 1938.

5 See my Beyond Humanism, Chicago, Willett Clark, 1937. Chs. 9-10.

6 See A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism (1927).

7 That philosophical theology can be more rigorously logical than it has hitherto succeeded in being I have sought to show in my book, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. Chicago, Willett Clark, 1941.