Joining Team Positivism - by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

A friend, comrade, and coauthor of mine has recently seen the light and decided to start identifying as a positivist. I thought his reasons for his conversion were interesting, and of course I am always keen to win converts for Carnap so I hope that by posting this others might be inspired. So read on, and if you too fall off your ass while listening to a positivism podcast feel free to send me your conversion story and maybe you can be next in this new series!

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In 1957, a politician named Femi met Marie.

Ọbafẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ was born in the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, which had recently been purchased by the British Crown from the Royal Niger Company. During his childhood, the Southern and Northern protectorates were combined into a single Nigerian colony, under the control of a single colonial Governor, with powers akin to a military dictator’s – the political culmination of five centuries of European commercial pursuits in the region, most of which centered on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

But by 1957, he was living in a country on the verge of independence. The Nigerian Youth Movement, led by statesmen like Nnamdi Azikiwe, had spent the last two decades spreading Pan-African consciousness via newspapers, cultural events, and other forms of organizing. Meanwhile, the British Empire had its hands full: first with the second World War and then with the many anti-colonial movements that emerged in its wake. Amongst the concessions to the movement: the gradual development of regional structures for Nigerian self-rule, based in large part a federalist blueprint defended by Awolowo (the legacy of which is the subject of some debate). The “native” government was split into three, semi-autonomous regional governments: Northern, Western, and Eastern. The year Femi met Marie, Awolowo headed the Western Regional Government as its Premier. 

Marie Neurath was director of the Isotype Institute. A mathematician and physicist by training, she had worked with her late husband Otto to develop and promote “a method for assembling, configuring and disseminating information and statistics through pictorial means”: Isotype. Isotype, as a form of visual communication, designed to expand the realm of people who could engage with complex social dynamics to a much larger proportion of the population than those who could read and write a particular verbal language. This political goal had special significance in parts of the colonized world where the dominant written language was the one imported by the colonizer class, and literacy in it signalled advantages in class position and other social hierarchies. 

Awolowo recognized the significance of Neurath’s contribution immediately. Months later, the Western Regional Government hired her to help put together their public information program. Awolowo, an avowed democratic socialist, was spearheading a slate of universalist initiatives, matching the titles of the First ‘White Papers’ they produced together: including Education for All and Health for All. The pictures Neurath helped developed aimed to pictographically convey both the content of the Western Regional Government’s development programs and the reasons for them – why the Western Regional Government thought universal health care was a worthy goal to pursue. And the purpose of that was to expand democratic engagement meaningfully: beyond voting for elected officials, down to direct engagement with what was happening on the ground.

In 2021, a philosopher named Femi (no, the other one) met Marie. 

I had met positivism before! In grad school we read bits and pieces of positivist thought: some Hempel here, some Carnap there. But, mostly, it was an adjective to describe other philosophers’ views - usually derisively. Kofi was among the first people I met who took the view seriously at all, much less advocated for it. So I read a bit more, mainly out of curiosity (an early response to a sustained treatment of Otto Neurath’s view on “protocol sentences” was, more or less: “What?”). But then I met Marie.

The explanation that came out of the hour long discussion between Gil Morejón, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, William Paris, and Kofi Bright on Left of Philosophy was extremely illuminating here – I could finally hear the music positivism was dancing to. The what of positivism was clear enough to me, but I hadn’t yet understood the why.

Before, I had understood foundational principles of positivism (like the verificationist criterion of meaning) narrowly, as a debate with solely argumentative stakes for researchers  – owing no small part to the kind of bloodless, apolitical bent of the analytic style of philosophy that the students of the Vienna and Berlin Circles spread into the world. But, helped along by this conversation, I met Marie: I began to understand the political stakes of this position in connection with concepts like “elite capture” and “miseducation” that have featured prominently in my thoughts. 

From this vantage point, verificationism began to seem less like a technical stance about which sentences make sense and more like an ethical stance about what we owe to each other: which includes explanations, rather than mystifications of the commitments of others wrapped up in unevaluable language. That commitment that could well start by explaining “protocol sentences” but needn’t and shouldn’t end there – and it didn’t for many positivists like Marie Neurath and comrades of hers like Rudolf Carnap, who were deeply involved in the radical movements for justice of their day. 

Now, I understand positivism something like this: it’s a philosophy grounded in accountability, a way of beginning from the fact that we owe an account of ourselves and our politics to those around us. And people are owed explanations for much the same reason that they are owed other things – like, say, Education for All and Health for All. Now that’s a team I can get behind!