Talk:Logical behaviorism
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why "logical"?
editWhat's logical about it.
I read somewhere that it was pertaining to the "logicalism" of turning math into Set Theory, where the number one actually corresponds to the set of all single things. Thus freeing math from being something unscientific, and becoming something which could be more complete and symbolized (somehow - claimed to be better than the number symbols themselves) thus becoming "objective" and, well, "logical". Is that so? Who adopted this way of thinking?
(Written later, just before posting) OH! I just remembered. Its Hilary Putnam. So I'll get that quote and update it here later. 03:01, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- The article.
- The quote: In short, numbers are treated as logical constructions out of sets. The number theorist is doing set theory without knowing it, according to this interpretation. What was novel about this was the idea of getting rid of certain philosophically unwanted or embarrassing entities (numbers) without failing to do justice to the appropriate body of discourse (number theory) by treating the entities in question as logical constructions.
- Bertrand Russell was quick to hold up this success as a model to all future philosophers.
- And certain of those future philosophers -- the Vienna positivists, in their 'physicalist' phase (about 1930) - took Russell's advice so seriously as to produce the doctrine
that we are calling logical behaviorism - the doctrine that, just as numbers are (allegedly) logical constructions out of sets, so mental events are logical constructions out of actual and possible behavior events.