The aim of this essay is to show that the key innovations of Karl Popper's philosophy of science can be disentangled from the prevailing conventionalism in his main work "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Popper's falsificationism and his rejection of justification can be detached from his view that the criterion of demarcation, the basic statements and the claim that laws are falsifiable hypotheses are stipulations.

In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)

In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U. S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. This two-part paper reconstructs Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and (...) institutions, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. This first part reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. I describe Carnap’s first substantive contacts with American philosophers as well as the events leading up to his decision to emigrate. In addition, I argue that some of Carnap’s work from the mid-1930s—in particular “Testability and Meaning”—can be better understood if we take into account his attempts to correct the American narrative about logical positivism and his increasingly desperate efforts to find a position in the United States. (shrink)

My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...) problems from current work in history of engineering and technology studies. I then model Carnap’s practice based on those lessons and uncover ways in which Carnap’s technical work in inductive logic takes some of these lessons on board. This shows ways in which Carnap’s philosophical project subtly changes right through his late work on induction, providing an important corrective to interpretations that ignore the work on inductive logic. Specifically, I show that paying attention to the historical details of Carnap’s attempt to apply his work in inductive logic to decision theory and theoretical statistics in the 1950s and 1960s helps us understand how Carnap develops and rearticulates the philosophical point of the practical/theoretical distinction in his late work, offering thus a new interpretation of Carnap’s technical work within the broader context of philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general. (shrink)

I argue that Carl Hempel’s pioneering work on scientific explanation introduced an assumption that Hempel never motivated, namely, that explanation is an aim of science. Ever since, it has remained largely unquestioned in analytic philosophy of science. By expanding the historical scope of the debate on explanation to philosophers from the first half of the twentieth century, I show that the debate should include a critical reflection on Hempel’s assumption. This reflection includes two problems: how to motivate one’s position on (...) the aims of scientific knowledge and how to decide which examples count as expressions of those aims. (shrink)

Après le rappel de différents contextes dans lesquels a émergé et s’est affirmée en Allemagne au xixe siècle l’idée de philosophie scientifique, l’article a pour objectif une description de la conception de Reichenbach, contrastée avec celle de plusieurs membres du Cercle de Vienne. Je montre en particulier le lien épistémologique et institutionnel entre le groupe de Reichenbach à Berlin et celui de Göttingen autour de Hilbert. J’esquisse aussi un rapprochement entre certains traits caractéristiques de la position de Reichenbach et la (...) conception régionale de l’épistémologie historique française. L’axiomatique et la métamathématique de Hilbert sont bien entendu une racine commune aux orientations suivies par Reichenbach et les épistémologues français des mathématiques. Mais l’impact de la théorie de la relativité, de la mécanique quantique et du calcul des probabilités ne fut pas moins grand et renouvela en profondeur les concepts de temps, d’espace, de substance, de cause et de loi dans une mise en question des thèses du transcendantalisme kantien qui tourna l’intérêt vers les pratiques scientifiques effectives. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach is well known for his limiting frequency view of probability, with his most thorough account given in The Theory of Probability in 1935/1949. Perhaps less known are Reichenbach's early views on probability and its epistemology. In his doctoral thesis from 1915, Reichenbach espouses a Kantian view of probability, where the convergence limit of an empirical frequency distribution is guaranteed to exist thanks to the synthetic a priori principle of lawful distribution. Reichenbach claims to have given a purely objective (...) account of probability, while integrating the concept into a more general philosophical and epistemological framework. A brief synopsis of Reichenbach's thesis and a critical analysis of the problematic steps of his argument will show that the roots of many of his most influential insights on probability and causality can be found in this early work. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach’s position in the debate over scientific realism is remarkable. On the one hand, he endorsed the programmatic premises of logical empiricism; on the other, he explicitly employed a realist approach to conceptions such as reference, causality, and inference to the best explanation. How could that work out? It will be shown in the present paper that in Reichenbach’s view scientific realism is not, as frequently assumed, opposed to logical empiricism but rather to logical positivism. A distinction without a (...) difference? Not at all, at least for Reichenbach. As is well known, his particular—probabilistic—variant of logical empiricism was intended to circumvent what he considered the shortcomings of the Vienna Circle’s verificationist approach to the language of science. In Experience and Prediction, Reichenbach became most explicit in this regard. However, I shall argue that his position remained notoriously unstable in the end. It oscillated between a full-fledged scientific realist reading and an eminently pragmatist reading. Nevertheless, Reichenbach’s contribution proved instrumental in preparing subsequent efforts at reconciling logical empiricism and scientific realism. (shrink)