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Thank you Vicomte13 and SWB for your interest. I found both your posts very enjoyable and clear sighted. I will respond using mostly Stephen Hicks words from his book Explaining Postmodernism. This is an attempted summary or gloss of Hicks' take on the Analytic School. It is also interlaced with some of my comments on what you posted.

From my reading of Hicks, the Analytical School didn't believe that philosophy provided meaningful answers to problems in the same way that science could. Bertrand Russell states the case in The Problems of Philosophy: Can we prove there is an external world? No. Can we prove there is cause an effect? No. Can we validate the objectivity in our inductive generalizations? No. Can we find an objective basis for morality? No.

Therefore, philosophy became not a content discipline -- content being metaphysics, ethics, theology and aesthetics -- but a method discipline. The function of philosophy was then to "analyze" and assist science. It would analyze the perceptual, linguistic and logical tools that science uses. Scientists perceive, organize their observations linguistically in concepts and then they structure those concepts using logic. Philosophy's job was to figure out what perception, language and logic are all about.

What they figured out about perception was that it was theory-laden. According to Hicks, the biggest names in the philosophy of science – Otto Neurath, Karl Popper, Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn and W. V. O. Quine – all argued that our theories largely dictate what we see. They framed their point with Kant's original language: our perceptual intuitions do not conform to objects but rather our intuition conforms to what our faculty of knowledge supplies from itself (Kant's categories). This conclusion is devastating for science: if our percepts are theory-laden, then perception is hardly a neutral and independent check upon theorizing. If our conceptual structures shape our observations as much as vice versa, then we are stuck inside a subjective system with no direct access to reality.

Vicomte13:‘Gravity.
What is gravity?
If you look it up, you will find it to be an attractive property associated with mass.
Ok, then what's mass? It's something that occupies space and has gravity.
What's space? A real dimension capable of holding mass.
Delve down a few more layers, and you'll get "energy" in there.
And you will discover that you are running a round robin of definitions: gravity is caused by mass. Mass is identified by causing gravity.

Now, the Analytical School would throw up its hands at this point and say "See, there's no THERE there! It's not reality! It's just concepts! And fuzzy ones at that."'

In this case "gravity" would be a fuzzy concept but the Analytical School would probably go farther and say our perception of gravity was theory-laden to begin with, which means our concepts can never be neutral or objective. Therefore, there can be no reality check to our theories -- unless, as you say, you jump out of a window and fall and hit the ground.

Hicks states that by the middle of the century the mainstream conclusion about concepts and propositions of logic and mathematics was that they are conventional. Logical and mathematical propositions were disconnected from experiential reality. An example is 2 + 2 = 4, while being necessarily true, must not be about the world of experience. Hicks quotes Schlick that logic and mathematics, "do not deal with any facts, but only with the symbols by means of which the facts are expressed." Wittgenstein is also quoted: "All propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing."

Vicomte13, this reminds me of the digital world you mention: "the Analytical School would prefer to deny that there is any universe at all if it can't be perfectly digital."

However, Hick goes on to say that the conclusions about logic and mathematics are devastating for science. If logic and mathematics are divorced from experiential reality, then the rules of logic and mathematics hardly say anything about that reality. The implication is that logic or mathematical proofs cut no ice in adjudicating competing claims of fact. Hicks quotes Ayer: "Analytic propositions are entirely devoid of factual content. And it is for this reason that no experience can confute them." Offering logical proofs about matters of fact is thus pointless. And conversely, it is pointless to expect any amount of factual evidence to add up to a necessary or universal conclusion.

Hicks then asks where do logic and math come from? He mentions the Neo Kantian and Neo Humean accounts and states that the Neo Humean explanation – pragmatists such as Quine, Nelson, Goodman and Ernest Nagel – prevails in the end. On this account, logical and mathematical propositions are merely a function of how we have decided to use words and which combination of words we have decided to privilege. Concepts are merely nominal, based on subjective human choices about how to carve up the flow of phenomenal experience.

From this point Hicks argues that conceptual relativism follows directly from such nominalism: we could have decided differently what concepts to adopt; we could carve up the world differently. According to Quine, if all concepts are nominal, then one consequence is that there is no basis for a distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. All propositions then become a posteriori and merely contingent. Logical relativism is the next consequence. Logical principals are constructs of concepts. What accounts as a principle of logic, then, is not dictated by reality but is rather up to us: "the principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else"(Ayer) also "the rules of language are, in principle, arbitrary" (Schlick). Logical principles become a matter of which formulations we are willing to accept, depending on whether or not we like the consequences of accepting and given principle (Goodman). The rules of logic and grammar then can be variable as other conventions – like greeting rituals of shaking hands, hugging or rubbing noses – and no form of greeting of system of logic is objectively right than any other.

SWB: Reality is not a movie, structured by the whims of a society of directors, and thinking it is almost always a sign of derangement.

Of course this might go against Ayer: "the principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else." Is Ayer full of hot air? But your insight is right: the Otto Premingers and Erich Von Stroheims of postmodernism want to give you the director's cut when it comes to logic and reality. Reality will be as faded and useless as Norma Desmond with plenty of out of work screen writers clamoring to rewrite the script for the directors or dictators' final approval.

Hicks concludes that by the 1950s, these conclusions were commonplace. Language and logic were seen as conventional, internal systems – and not as objective, reality-based tools of consciousness. By 1962 Thomas Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions announcing the developments of the preceding four decades of analytic philosophy and highlighted the dead end it reached. If science's tools are perception, logic and language, then science is merely an evolving, socially subjective enterprise with no claim to objectivity than any other belief system. The idea that science speaks of reality or truth is an illusion. There is no Truth; there are only truths and, truths change.

My Conclusion: I still like to know how they put a man on the moon in the 1960s with Kuhn's belief that science is an evolving, socially subjective enterprise with no claim to objectivity than other belief systems. I can see science using mathematics and logic as tools that allows man to construct theoretical models of reality, though the tools themselves may not be of this world or may be subjective. The models themselves would have to be proven empirically and in some cases some models would have to be discarded -- for example, climate change has many models trying to describe the same phenomena: they all can't be right. History shows that science evolves so that models become more refined or new ones are added that are more accurate in describing phenomena (which accounts for more of the "slop" that man doesn't know). Gravity is still a scientific theory but in the future there may be yet another theory or model for gravity that accounts more precisely for the phenomena. But other parties might also want to account for gravity – e.g., a theological account of God's will working in the world – and this account would contain as much truth, according to Kuhn's logic, as science.