Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Logical positivism is now sometimes referred to as ‘verificationalism’ and is associated with a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle. Any ideas that are open to be disproved (that is, the scientific method, broadly speaking) are open to be explored. But ideas not open to such scrutiny — such as, for instance, most if not all of philosophy and religion — must be rejected. But, by its own criterion of truth, logical positivism, as a theory, must itself be rejected. (Logical positivism commits what is known as the ‘Socratic fallacy’ — sometimes known as the ‘definist’ fallacy — which is to suppose that unless a term can be defined, it has no meaning.)

It’s the idea of innate ideas — of intrinsic standards of truth, goodness and beauty — that ‘materialists’, especially the logical positivists, are rejecting.

The positivists’ view is one part of what might be described as ‘modernist’. Modernism is a difficult term to pin down, but for our purposes here, I will define it as a rejection of all truth that is not based on observation. Therefore, it is more or less the scientific view of truth, and along with this an abandonment of any search for, or belief in, meaning, and an abandonment of the past, especially the ideas of the Enlightenment. Modernism has led on to what’s known as ‘post-modernism’. With post-modernism, there is not even a single objective reality to believe in — all is interpretation.

Post-modernism, roughly speaking, suggests all narratives have an equally valid claim to truth —

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