ogingat

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Part of this is that there’s an ambiguity in words…

What are the testable consequences of the questions you labeled as “not as metaphysical”? Hint: there are none! They’re exactly the ones the positivists were, and still are, trying to exclude! They’re what professional metaphysicians study!

I still feel like there is some sleight of hand going on here.

When Carnap wrote his paper on “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” he chose a particular (now famous) example of the sort of metaphysical language he thought was meaningless.  Was it something innocuous about the past or about mereology?  No – it was a paragraph of Heidegger, and a very Heideggerian one at that.  The one that ends with “the nothing nothings” or “the nothing nihilates.”  (As SEP puts it, “This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense.”)

Now, maybe you will say: there’s no reason to call that “positivism,” because everyone agrees with that now.  You say Heidegger is nonsense, I say I don’t understand him, we’re all on the same page.  But in my personal experience that is not true.  For one thing, the kind of “more-metaphysical metaphysics” represented by Heidegger has held sway over a lot of people in a lot of times and places.  (Carnap: “We select a few sentences from that metaphysical school which at present exerts the strongest influence in Germany.”)  Once upon a time, if you were a European intellectual, Hegelian thinking was just what you did, and it is still with us, in a way, via Marx.  Insofar as we now find it “too obvious to be mentioned explicitly” that this kind of thing is all gibberish, I would say, speaking broadly, we live in a very positivist age.  (Rejecting that broad sort of speech between “positivism has failed” is the kind of restriction of language I think is unhelpful.  If we find Carnap’s point too obvious now to be worth stating, in a way we are all thinking in the style of Carnap, at least much more so than in the style of Heidegger.)

But even that isn’t all.  When I was in college I knew a number of people who took Heidegger very seriously.  A political philosopher at the same college found Hegel interesting and regularly taught a seminar on Hegel and Marx.  There are Heideggerians still around in academia (Hubert Dreyfus, for one), and a lot of what is called “continental philosophy” (which is very popular in many areas of academia) looks metaphysical to me, or at least mysterious in the same way Heidegger and Hegel are mysterious.

When I say I have a positivist temperament, this is the line I am drawing.  It is a line that has made me stand out from numerous people I have met.  If you are willing to say that Heidegger and Hegel are nonsense then you are 90% with me, maybe 100% – but this is not some sort of neutral position that “everyone” agrees on.  This is what I mean by a “positivist temperament,” and if you go to certain parts of the university people will be happy to tell you that is what you have, for saying that this or that is nonsense.  If it is just a matter of whether I reject mild-mannered “professional metaphysicians,” pleasantly working away at A-theories and B-theories of time, well, fine, I don’t have a problem with them.  But when I talk about “metaphysics” I’m not using the term in its current professional sense but in its broader, world-historical sense, the one people still recognize as what divided Carnap from Heidegger, and still divides people along the same line today.