The physicist David Deutsch says there's a through line that goes from logical positivism, through to post-modernism and then we get "woke". Is he confused?

Monday said:

Deutsch isn’t confused so much as… heavily editorializing. He’s trying to draw one of those “philosophy family trees” where you point at one seed and pretend it naturally sprouted all the stuff you don’t like. It’s kind of like blaming punk music for TikTok influencers. Sure, you can draw a crooked line if you squint, but it’s more projection than genealogy.

Logical positivism (1920s–40s): “Only statements verifiable by experience or logic are meaningful.”
Postmodernism (1960s–80s): “Truth is socially constructed, knowledge is contingent, authority is suspect.” "Woke" (2010s–now): “Social justice activism and heightened sensitivity to structural inequalities.”

Now, you don’t need an electron microscope to see the problem. Positivists were hyper-obsessed with objective verification, while postmodernists basically torched the very idea of objective truth. Those two are philosophical enemies, not BFFs in some secret society that gave birth to Twitter call-out threads.

Deutsch’s gripe is more rhetorical: he thinks there’s a cultural habit of undermining objectivity that sneaks in through different intellectual fads, so he lumps them into a slippery slope story. In reality, intellectual history is messy, full of sharp breaks, contradictions, and people yelling at each other in journals.

So is he “confused”? Not really. Is he compressing a century of philosophy into a cartoon so he can boo at the ending? Absolutely.

Want me to sketch the actual arguments against that lineage, so you don’t accidentally repeat it at a party and get verbally dunked on?

You said:

Only statements verifiable by experience or logic are meaningful.

How similar is this view to Kantian epistemology.

Monday said:

That “only statements verifiable by experience or logic are meaningful” slogan (logical positivism) looks superficially like something Kant might’ve written, but it’s really not. It’s like confusing a knock-off band tee with the actual band—it borrows some vibes, but the substance is different.

Here’s the comparison without me sugarcoating it for your poor brain cells:

Kant (18th c.):

• Splits knowledge into a priori (before experience) and a posteriori (from experience).

• Claims we have synthetic a priori truths (like math, causality, even basic physics structures) that shape experience itself.

• He’s all about conditions of possibility of experience: the mind contributes categories (causality, substance, etc.) that structure the world we perceive.

• Translation: he’s saying there are meaningful truths that aren’t just logic or empirical observation—they’re baked into the cognitive machinery itself.

Logical Positivists (1920s–40s):

• They wanted to throw out all that metaphysical scaffolding.

• Their criterion: a statement is meaningful only if it’s either empirically verifiable (science) or tautologically true (logic/maths).

• Anything else = nonsense. Goodbye metaphysics, goodbye theology, goodbye “synthetic a priori.”

So, similarity: both camps despise unmoored metaphysics, both prize clarity, and both care about the limits of what we can know.
Difference: Kant insists that the mind adds something necessary and universal to experience (categories, forms of intuition), while logical positivists want to bulldoze that and leave just raw empiricism + formal logic.

In short: positivists look like Kant if you cut out the interesting half of Kant and turned him into a grumpy lab technician.

Do you want me to put this into a spicy chart format (Kant vs. Positivism), or are you just going to nod along pretending you don’t secretly mix them up anyway?