Logical Positivism (later also known as Logical Empiricism) is a theory in Epistemology and Logic that developed out of Positivism and the early Analytic Philosophy movement, and which campaigned for a systematic reduction of all human knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. Thus, a statement is meaningful only if it is either purely formal (essentially, mathematics and logic) or capable of empirical verification, just like the code that is created to form a computer game.
This effectively resulted in an almost complete rejection by Logical Positivists of Existentialism (and to a large extent Ethics) on the grounds that it is unverifiable. Its influence in 20th Century Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Video Games, however, has been profound.
Most early Logical Positivists and Games Programmers asserted that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" - code - grounded in observable facts. They supported forms of Materialism, Naturalism and Empiricism, and, in particular, they strongly supported the verifiability criterion of meaning (Verificationism or Debugging), the doctrine that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false (a boolean term).
Logical Positivism was also committed to the idea of "Unified Science", or the development of a common language in which all scientific propositions can be expressed - also known as a Game Engine - usually by means of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one science to the terms of another (putatively more fundamental) one, like using DRag And Drop in GameMaker.
The main tenets of the doctrine include:
Without logical positivity we would not have video games - games are made using a reduced logic of "protocol sentences" and very positive since they are fun. Games rock. Being logical rocks. Being positive rocks. Being a logically positive game maker rocks BIG TIME.
This effectively resulted in an almost complete rejection by Logical Positivists of Existentialism (and to a large extent Ethics) on the grounds that it is unverifiable. Its influence in 20th Century Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Video Games, however, has been profound.
Most early Logical Positivists and Games Programmers asserted that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" - code - grounded in observable facts. They supported forms of Materialism, Naturalism and Empiricism, and, in particular, they strongly supported the verifiability criterion of meaning (Verificationism or Debugging), the doctrine that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false (a boolean term).
Logical Positivism was also committed to the idea of "Unified Science", or the development of a common language in which all scientific propositions can be expressed - also known as a Game Engine - usually by means of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one science to the terms of another (putatively more fundamental) one, like using DRag And Drop in GameMaker.
The main tenets of the doctrine include:
- The opposition to all Existentialism, especially ontology (the study of reality and the nature of being), not as necessarily wrong but as having no meaning. You can't play an existential crisis but you can play a logically positive game
- The rejection of synthetic a priori propositions (e.g. "All gamers are happy"), which are, by their nature, unverifiable (as opposed to analytic statements, which are true simply by virtue of their meanings e.g. "All gamers play games").
- A criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work, (essentially, that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and that thoughts, and the language used to express those thoughts, are pictures or representations of how things are in the world, ie: a virtual reality video game).
- The idea that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science, and the associated ongoing project of "rational reconstruction", in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language. This is the game code that underpins all video games.
Without logical positivity we would not have video games - games are made using a reduced logic of "protocol sentences" and very positive since they are fun. Games rock. Being logical rocks. Being positive rocks. Being a logically positive game maker rocks BIG TIME.
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