Neo-positivism is dead. Let that imperfect designation stand for the project that dominated and defined the philosophy of science, especially in its Anglophone form, during the fifty or so years following the end of the Second World War. While its critics were many,1 its death was slow, and some think still to find a pulse.2 But die it did in the cul-de-sac into which it was led by its own faulty compass.

This paper concerns the issue of whether the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle (Carnap, Neurath, Frank) can be understood as having provided the blueprint for a bipartite metatheory with a formal-logical part (the “logic of science”) supporting and being supported by a naturalistic-empirical part (the “behavioristics of science”). A claim to this effect was recently met by a counterclaim that there was indeed an attempt made to broaden Carnap’s formalist conception of philosophy by the pragmatist Morris, but that (...) this initiative failed and that Carnap showed no interest in it. To defend the original claim this paper provides an analysis of Carnap and Morris on the subject matter of pragmatics in order to show that and how Carnap adopted Morris’s proposals in so far as they agreed with bipartite metatheory conception. (shrink)

Much feminist philosophy of science has been developed as a reaction against logical empiricism and the associated view that social factors play no role in good science. Recent accounts of the Vienna Circle that highlighted the ways in which some of its members attempted to combine their empiricism with emancipatory politics are used here as a basis on which to reassess the relationship between logical empiricism and feminism. The focus is chiefly on Otto Neurath.

Starting from the sixties of the past century theory change has become a main concern of philosophy of science. Two of the best known formal accounts of theory change are the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude (PPV for short) and the AGM theory of belief change (AGM for short). In this paper, we will investigate the conceptual relations between PPV and AGM and, in particular, we will ask whether the AGM rules for theory change are effective means for approaching the truth, (...) i.e., for achieving the cognitive aim of science pointed out by PPV. First, the key ideas of PPV and AGM and their application to a particular kind of propositional theories - the so called "conjunctive propositions" - will be illustrated. Afterwards, we will prove that, as far as conjunctive propositions are concerned, AGM belief change is an effective tool for approaching the truth. (shrink)

: The distinction between science and philosophy plays a central role in methodological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplinary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a discipline's self-image, often based on history, often plays an important role in the values, projects and practices of its members. Recent focus on the dynamics of scientific change supplements Kuhnian neat model with a role for philosophy and yields a model (...) of the evolution of philosophy of science. This view illuminates important aspects of science and itself contributes to philosophy of science. This interactive model is general yet based on exclusive attention to physics. In this paper and two sequels, I focus on the human sciences and argue that their role in the history of philosophy of science is just as important and it also involves a close involvement of the history of philosophy. The focus is on Gestalt psychology and it points to some lessons for philosophy of science. But, unlike the discussion of natural sciences, the discussion here brings out more complication than explication, and skews certain kinds of generalizations. (shrink)

One of the key events in the relations between the Central European philosophers and those of the Nordic countries was the Second International Congress for the ...

William Whewell’s 19th-century views are seldom given a prominent place in the history of the philosophy of science. There is, however, a key feature of his account that is, upon historical analysis, prescient of later developments, notably in pragmatism. Whewell calls this the “fundamental antithesis of philosophy”, which centres around the idea that there is no clear demarcation between subject and object (between mind and world or theory and fact). In this paper, I trace this notion’s genealogy. It originated with (...) Kant, who influenced Whewell. Whewell then developed it into a detailed thesis, one that influenced Peirce. It is identifiable in Quine, then (middle) Putnam, and now Cheryl Misak and Steven Levine (aka the new pragmatists). The purpose is to identify a previously overlooked lineage of influence running through the history of philosophy. Whewell’s antithesis might also offer a way to resist both the relativism that tends to accompany post-modern styles of pragmatism and the pretensions to a God’s-eye view latent in analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an impact (...) on these two traditions. The discussion will show that both took their liberties in the interpretation of the thesis, a move that allowed them to liberate themselves from Brentano’s inheritance and to fully develop their own philosophical positions. (shrink)

Carnap’s lectures at the 1935 Paris Congress for the Unity of Science marked the beginning of his mature metaphilosophy. This paper considers what role remained for epistemology once it was “purified” of all psychological elements as Carnap there demanded. It is argued that while this did mean the end of traditional epistemology, room was found for nontraditional versions in the course of the further development of Carnap’s logic of science.

This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and (...) how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as contrasted to instrumentalism and realism as contrasted to relativism/constructivism. It is argued that the pragmatist tradition cannot avoid these tensions but is largely constituted by them. (shrink)

Three main conflicts between Popper and Agassi are discussed. Over the ethics of hard work which in reality turns out to be over perfectionism and optimism. Over the role of metaphysics in science. Over methodological individualism where is it argued that Popper's views are contradictory and that Agassi' Institutionalism prevails.

Olaf Müller’s book develops a new case for underdetermination, and, as he is focusing on theories of a ‘limited domain’, this assumes the containability of the theories. First, the paper argues that Müller’s theory of darkness is fundamentally Newtonian, but for Newton’s optical theory the type of theoretical structure Müller adopts is problematic. Second, the paper discusses seventeenth-century challenges to Newton, changes in the proof-structure of Newton’s optical theory, and how these affect Müller’s reconstruction. Müller’s book provides empirically equivalent theories, (...) yet the historical theories were not empirically equivalent, and the same experiments were used to extract different bodies of evidence to rebut the opponent. Third, Goethe’s multi-layered critique of Newton’s experimental proof is investigated, including his developmental account of prismatic colours, the role of experimental series in rejecting Newton’s observations, and his incorporation of the ‘limited domain’ of prismatic colours in a broader framework. Two key elements of Goethe’s method, polarity and strengthening are discussed in contrast to Müller, who only utilises polarity in his account. Finally Neurath’s attempts to come to grips with the optical controversies and the prism-experiments with ‘blurred edges’ are recalled. Müller also discusses in detail some of these experiments and heavily draws on Quine. Neurath developed Duhem’s and Poincaré’s conventionalist insights and had good reasons to be pessimistic about theory-containment. Their differences provide some additions to the history of the Duhem–Quine thesis. (shrink)

The past decade or so has witnessed an increase in the number of philosophical discussions about emergence and reduction in science. However, many of these discussions (though not all) remain too abstract and theoretical, and are wanting with respect to concrete examples taken from the sciences. This dissertation studies the topics of reduction and emergence in the context of a case study. I focus on the case of chemistry and investigate how emergentism can help us secure the autonomy of this (...) discipline in relation to the underlying microphysics. I develop an account of emergence (called functional emergence) that is, I argue, capable of answering the question of why we have chemistry instead of just applied quantum mechanics. I argue that functionally emergent properties in chemistry -- properties that are defined by their behaviour, not by some shared microphysical constituent -- can help us defend the autonomy of chemistry; they allow for the existence of sui generis chemical regularities, which can be used in sui generis chemical explanations. Functional emergence generates difficulties for some accounts of inter-theoretic reduction, but unlike other theories of emergence it is compatible with weaker forms of reductionism. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...) to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

Hartry Field has argued that Alfred Tarski desired to reduce all semantic concepts to concepts acceptable to physicalism and that Tarski failed to do this. In the two succeeding decades, Field has been charged with being too lenient with Tarski; but it has been almost universally accepted that an objection at least as strong as Field's is telling against Tarski's theory. Close examination of the relevant literature, most of it printed in this journal in the 1930s, reveals that Field's conception (...) of physicalism is anachronistic. Tarski did succeed in furthering the sort of physicalist program he had in mind. (shrink)

Some members of the Vienna Circle argued for a coherence theory of truth. Their coherentism is immune to standard objections. Most versions of coherentism are unable to show why a sentence cannot be true even though it fails to cohere with a system of beliefs. That is, it seems that truth may transcend what we can be warranted in believing. If so, truth cannot consist in coherence with a system of beliefs. The Vienna Circle's coherentists held, first, that sentences are (...) warranted by coherence with a system of beliefs. Next they drew upon their verification theory of meaning, a consequence of which is that truth cannot transcend what can be warranted. The coherence theory of knowledge and verificationism together entail that truth cannot transcend what can be warranted by coherence with a system of beliefs. The Vienna Circle's argument for coherentism is strong and anticipates contemporary anti-realism. (shrink)

Historians of science and religion usually trace the origins of the “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion have been in perennial “conflict” or “warfare,” to the late nineteenth century, particularly to the narratives of New York chemist John William Draper and historian Andrew Dickson White. In this essay, I argue against that convention. Their narratives should not be read as stories to debunk, but rather as primary sources reflecting themes and changes in religious thought during the late nineteenth (...) century. I contend that Draper and White were part of a long liberal Protestant heritage that emphasized history, reason, and religious emancipation against ecclesiastical authority. As an alternative source of origins, however, I suggest that the real “conflict thesis” is to be found in the fledgling discipline of the history of science as it emerged during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The real origin of the “conflict thesis” is found in the very discipline that now seeks to condemn it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Arne Naess once called himself ?a kind of metaphysician?: did or did he not therewith turn his back on his philosophical mentors in the Vienna Circle? To try to determine the meaning of this self-ascription, this paper first considers in detail two works in which his disagreements with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle found their clearest and most detailed expression. Concentrating on Carnap it will be argued that while some of Naess's criticisms cannot be taken as authoritative, he (...) did indicate a clear dividing line between himself and Carnap. Turning then to Naess's valediction to philosophy of science from 1972, Naess's appreciation of the role of metaphysics for science will be discussed and compared with his appreciation for the role of metaphysics for personal and political life as expressed in his still later ecophilosophy. Once allowance is made for the different needs addressed by his writings for the deep ecology movement and a certain 1960s' rhetoric is discounted as no longer appropriate, it can be seen that Naess's theoretical philosophy exhibited a remarkable continuity throughout. (shrink)

Coherence and correspondence are classical contenders as theories of truth. In this paper we examine them instead as interacting factors in the dynamics of belief across epistemic networks. We construct an agent-based model of network contact in which agents are characterized not in terms of single beliefs but in terms of internal belief suites. Individuals update elements of their belief suites on input from other agents in order both to maximize internal belief coherence and to incorporate ‘trickled in’ elements of (...) truth as correspondence. Results, though often intuitive, prove more complex than in simpler models (Hegselmann & Krause 2002, 2006; Grim, Singer, Reade & Fisher 2015). The optimistic finding is that pressures toward internal coherence can exploit and expand on small elements of truth as correspondence is introduced into epistemic networks. Less optimistic results show that pressures for coherence can also work directly against the incorporation of truth, particularly when coherence is established first and new data is introduced later. (shrink)

The relationship between American pragmatism and logical empiricism is complicated at best. The received view is that by around the late 1930s or early 1940s pragmatism had been replaced, supplanted, or eclipsed by the younger and more logic-oriented form of empiricism developed in interwar Vienna. Recently, however, this picture has been challenged, and this paper offers further reasons for thinking that the received view is inadequate. Through a critical examination of William James's Pragmatism and “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Rudolf (...) Carnap's “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” and other works, the paper builds a case for the existence of a rather striking correspondence between the work of one of pragmatism's most vaunted figures and the thought of logical empiricism's most famous advocate. Not only were both philosophers interested in what might be called metaphilosophy or the psychology of philosophy, both held very similar deflationary views. (shrink)

This paper offers an ethnomethodological clarification of Husserl's concepts of Galilean physics and regressive inquiry. It employs the reader's textual-practical operationalization of these concepts. With the use of a simple optical prism as a perspicuous case of a scientific instrument, the reader will be asked and instructed to make a self-reflexive inquiry into the practical contingencies of the prismatic field of reflection. The reader will discover that the geometric structures of the reflective field of the prism is an achievement and (...) formalization of the reader's own operatlonalizations. I named these discoverable discovering operationspraxioms or practical axioms — the pre-scientific contingencies of the geometric structures of prismatic reflection. (shrink)

Review of John Symons, Olga Pombo, and Juan Manuel Torres. 2011. Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science. Dordrecht: Springer.

A coherent and helpful public policy based on science is difficult to achieve for at least three reasons. First, there are purely practical problems—for example, that scientific experts often disagree on policy-relevant questions and their debates often continue well beyond policy appropriate timelines. Second, there are epistemic problems—for example, that science is hardly the neutral supplier of factual information that traditionally has been supposed. And third, there are social problems: given the commercialization of today’s science and its enduring limitations, much (...) of scientific research today fails to meet the moral and political standards one would expect it to meet in order to inform public policy. In this paper, we examine such problems in the context of breast cancer screening policy and suggest the role philosophy of science should play in dealing with the situation. (shrink)

Professor Joseph Agassi hat in dieser Zeitschrift meine Analyse von Quines Stellung in der analytischen Tradition kritisiert und dabei insbesondere die Irrelevanz von Neurath betont und Quines Nähe zu Popper herausgestellt. In meiner Antwort geht es mir sowohl um eine Rehabilitation Neuraths als auch um die Unterschiede von Quines Philosophie zu Popper und Wittgenstein.

(2001). Against a third dogma of logical empiricism: Otto Neurath and 'unpredictability in principle' International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 199-209. doi: 10.1080/02698590120059068.

The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

Our purpose in the present work is to survey some of the formulations that the theme of networks has received in contemporary philosophy of science over a period spanning twelve decades, from the end of the 19th century up to the present time. The proposal advanced herein is to interpret the evolution of this theme in four stages: first, one that goes from a metaphor or expressive image to a notion aspiring at implementation, but still having a virtual character, in (...) the orthodox view of theories; second, a shift towards networks viewed as explicit, with the notion still having an enormous metaphorical power, as in Neurath and Quine; third, from this towards a concept amenable to implementation, as in Thagard, but still in search of an epistemological rationale, supposedly provided by BonJour and Dancy; and finally, as a notion fully endowed with a precise structuralist implementation, in the scope of the structuralist metatheory of Balzer-Moulines-Sneed. The interpretive framework adopted in this exercise in the history of philosophy of science is a modified version of Gerald Holton's thematic model, adapted to the history of philosophy instead of its original domain, the history of scientific ideas. In our version of the thematic model, we posit two main dimensions for the appraisal of any given philosophical concept, besides the thematic dimension: the metaphorical one and the dimension of its systematic implementation. (shrink)

In the present work we will search for a refinement of some key epistemological perspectives for the construction of a methodological framework in the social systems simulations area. So, we will proceed to show the origin of some issues in the existent conceptualization and its path through the information sciences as a precedent. There we will identify the consequences of such issues and will work in enlightening the conflictive notions in order to defend an epistemological pluralism which would result beneficial (...) for this area. (shrink)

The verifiability principle was the characteristic claim of a group of thinkers who called themselves the Vienna Circle and who formed the philosophical movement now known as logical positivism. The verifiability principle is an empiricist criterion of meaning which declares that only statements that are verifiable by —i.e., logically deducible from— observational statements are cognitively meaningful. -/- This essay is a short introduction to the philosophical movement of logical positivism and its formulation of the verifiability principle. Its primary aim is (...) to provide students of philosophy with an accessible first overview of this philosophical movement. -/- After pointing out some aspects of the philosophical background of logical positivism (section 1), I will comment on the reasoning that lead these authors to formulate the verifiability principle (section 2), and I will analyse the debate about how to understand observational language and how observational statements (the so-called ‘protocol statements’) are verified (section 3). I will also comment on the two main consequences of accepting the verifiability principle: the conception of philosophy as the task of logical analysis and the project of unified science (section 4), and I will explain the different views on ethical language defended by logical positivists (section 5). I will end this essay by identifying the main problems of the verifiability principle and I will explain the core ideas of Carnap’s confirmability criterion, which attempts to resolve these problems (section 6 and 7). (shrink)

This paper responds to a recent criticism of Uebel's analysis of Neurath's protocol statements and proposes some independent amendments.

This paper provides a description and analysis of Wilhelm Neurath's economics and theory of value. Otto Neurath's rejection of a distinct methodology for social science and his insistence on the political partisanship of scientific sociology, I argue, represent his attempt to both continue the practical orientation of his father's theorizing and answer the normative problem his father's theories faced.

The aim of this paper is to give a self-reflective account of the building of Galileo's pendulum in order to discover what were the practical contingencies of building and using the pendulum for demonstrating the law of isochronism. In doing this, the unique Lebenswelt structures of Galilean physics are explicated through the ethnomethodological concepts developed by Harold Garfinkel. The presupposition is that the practical logic of Galilean physics is embedded in the instruments themselves. In building the pendulum and recovering its (...) original use, Galilean physics becomes for ethnomethodologists a first-hand practical discovery. This is not a reconstruction of the mind of the historical Galileo but, rather, an explication of Galileo's practical perspective on the instrument as an intersubjective and interchangeable standpoint available for ethnomethodological analysis. This enables us to study historical facts from the standpoint of the practical logic of the original practice with a pedagogical eye for the instructive reproducibility of science. (shrink)