system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Help! I'm a logical positivist!

I ask for help because I'm pretty confident I'm wrong, as logical positivism is an almost universally rejected thesis; and also because before this 'revelation' of mine, metaphysics was my favourite area of philosophy. Perhaps the position I've come across isn't quite identical to logical positivism, but it's pretty close in my understanding.

The issue comes of course from language. My first premise is (1) *Words cannot be meaningfully defined in terms of one another*. By this I simply mean that language cannot be a giant self-referential web. If we define some word W in terms of other words (W2, W3, etc.) then W2 and W3 cannot be meaningfully defined in terms of W. If our entire language just consists of words defined in terms of each other with no foundation then none of the words mean anything. I think (1) is probably a tautology? But I'm not sure how I would go about proving this. I hope you can see what I mean.

Words can't refer merely to other words, so words have to refer, in the end, to something we experience. This is concluded from my second assertion, which is that all we ever have access to is the contents of our own consciousness. I think this is a tautology too. It just seems incoherent to say we can transcend our consciousness.

So for words to be meaningful they have to be defined in terms of conscious experiences. They needn't be particularly precise definitions, as experiences are messy and unpredictable, but they still have to refer to conscious experience in some way or another to mean anything. We can build extremely elaborate systems of concepts that are all built on more elementary ones, but for them to actually mean anything they have to all at some point translate exactly to conscious experiences.

This is the conclusion I find worrying. If all meaningful language just translates identically to descriptions of conscious experiences, how can we do metaphysics, or most philosophy at all? How can it even make sense to speak of 'being'? 'causation'? 'abstracta'? This is my problem, and it arises from what seem to be two tautological assertions.

I suppose this thesis is slightly different from classical positivism in that it doesn't require that meaningful statements describe merely sense-experience, but all conscious experience.

Your help would be much appreciated as these recent thoughts have dismayed me quite a bit. Thank you.

Edit: It appears that my views align very well with those expressed in the *Tractatus* and that the best course of action for me would be to read Philosophical Investigations and other resources on Wittgenstein. I look forward to this and I thank you all for the excellent help and kind hearted responses.
gpt
You're in the thrall the early Wittegenstein.  The cure is the later Wittgenstein.

Read the Philosophical Investigations; it's the standard critique of the theory of language and reference that you're trapped by.