Interest in the concept of objectivity is part of the legacy of Modern Philosophy, tracing back to a new way of understanding the starting point of philosophical reflection. It traces back to an “epistemological turn” that attended the development of New Science of the 16th and 17th Century. These origins are an indication that what a thinker takes as the starting point of philosophical reflection deeply affects how they approach key philosophical concepts, including truth, knowledge, and objectivity. Chapter 1 Introduces (...) this key concept in philosophy, and some of the history of its use. (shrink)

In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly regarding Carnap’s work. In this paper, I argue against the interpretation that Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having been published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the revisionist idea that Carnap “would have found Structure philosophically congenial”. I claim that Kuhn’s book, from Carnap’s point of view, is not in philosophy of science but rather in history of science (...) (in the context of a sharp discovery–justification distinction). It could also explain the fact that, despite his sympathetic letters to Kuhn as editor, Carnap never refers to Kuhn’s book in his work in philosophy of science. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein gives in his papers [1] and [2] interesting analyses of some problems of inductive logic and of some approaches I have proposed. I shall discuss here some of these problems in order to clarify my present position. My comments will mainly concern the variety of instances, and only briefly the analogy influence, and the inductive methods for a coordinate language.

Many who take a dismissive attitude towards metaphysics trace their view back to Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’. But the reason Carnap takes a dismissive attitude to metaphysics is a matter of controversy. I will argue that no reason is given in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, and this is because his reason for rejecting metaphysical debates was given in ‘Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy’. The argument there assumes verificationism, but I will argue that his argument survives the rejection of verificationism. The root (...) of his argument is the claim that metaphysical statements cannot be justified; the point is epistemic, not semantic. I will argue that this remains a powerful challenge to metaphysics that has yet to be adequately answered. (shrink)

Sober and Elgin defend the claim that there are a priori causal laws in biology. Lange and Rosenberg take issue with this on Humean grounds, among others. I will argue that Sober and Elgin don’t go far enough – there are a priori causal laws in many sciences. Furthermore, I will argue that this thesis is compatible with a Humean metaphysics and an empiricist epistemology.

The twin goals of this essay are: to investigate a family of cases in which the goal of guaranteed convergence to the truth is beyond our reach; and to argue that each of three strands prominent in contemporary epistemological thought has undesirable consequences when confronted with the existence of such problems. Approaches that follow Reichenbach in taking guaranteed convergence to the truth to be the characteristic virtue of good methods face a vicious closure problem. Approaches on which there is a (...) unique rational doxastic response to any given body of evidence can avoid incoherence only by rendering epistemology a curiously limited enterprise. Bayesian approaches rule out humility about one’s prospects of success in certain situations in which failure is typical. (shrink)

I make an attempt at the description of the delicate role of the standard model of arithmetic for the syntax of formal systems. I try to assess whether the possible instability in the notion of finiteness deriving from the nonstandard interpretability of arithmetic affects the very notions of syntactic metatheory and of formal system. I maintain that the crucial point of the whole question lies in the evaluation of the phenomenon of formalization. The ideas of Skolem, Zermelo, Beth and Carnap (...) (among others) on the problem are discussed. ‘A tries to explain to B the meaning of negation. Finally A gives up, saying: “You don’t understand what I mean, and I am not going to explain any longer,” to which B replies: “Yes, I see what you mean, and I am glad you are willing to continue your explanations”’. G. Mannoury, reported by E. W. Beth (Beth, 1963, 489). (shrink)

Logical analysis is in Frege primarily not an analysis of a concept but of its sense. Five Fregean philosophical principles are presented as constituting a framework for a theory of logical or conceptual analysis, which I call analytical explication. These principles, scattered and sometime latent in his writings are operative in Frege's critique of other views and in his constructive development of his own view. The proposed conception of analytical explication is partially rooted in Frege's notion of analytical definition. It (...) may also be the basis of what is required of a reduction of one domain to another, if it is to have the philosophical significance many reductions allegedly have. (shrink)

Both inside and outside philosophy of science, the past 25 years has seen a remarkable increase in the epistemic importance attached to the role of background beliefs and values of agents engaged in cognitive inquiry. Emphasis on the role of background commitments has been beneficial in bringing philosophy of science back into closer relation with the varied forms of science. But at present there cannot be said to be any clear consensus among philosophers on issues of the theoretical status of (...) such commitments, or of their import upon conceptions of scientific meta-methodology.The situation worsens when one considers widespread suspicion today among many historicists and sociologists of science of the viability of philosophy of science as a normative enterprise. This marks the ground between normative epistemology and its critics. But to understand the skeptical attitude towards normative theory, one must attend to the background assumptions about normative discourse imbedded in logical empiricism, and in particular to the state of logical empiricist metascience just prior to the revolution of sorts that occurred in the 1960’s. (shrink)

What are scientific models? Philosophers of science have been trying to answer this question during the last three decades by putting forward a number of different proposals. Some say that models are best understood as abstract Platonic objects or fictional entities akin to Sherlock Holmes, while others focus on their mathematical nature and see them as set theoretical structures. Although each account has its own strengths in offering various insights on the nature of models, several objections have been raised against (...) these views which still remain unanswered, making the debate on the ontology of models seem unresolvable. The primary aim of this paper is to show that a large part of these difficulties stems from an inappropriate reading of the main question on the ontology of models as a purely metaphysical question. Building on Carnap, it is argued that the question of the ontology of scientific models is either an internal theoretical question within an already accepted linguistic framework or an external practical question regarding the choice of the most appropriate form of language in order to describe and explain the practice of scientific modelling. The main implication of this view is that the question of the ontology of models becomes a means of probing other related questions regarding the overall practice of scientific modelling, such as questions on the capacity of models to provide knowledge and the relation of models with background theories. (shrink)

The symposium on Francesco Guala’s Understanding Institutions was thought provoking. Five critical papers took issue with Guala’s reconciliation of the game-theoretical view of institutions and the rule-governed view. We offer some critical commentary that adopts a different perspective. We agree that institutions are central to social life and, thus, also to the social sciences; they are also prior to and more fundamental than individuals. We add some historical points on the ways previous philosophers thought about institutions, and we come at (...) this from a philosophical viewpoint that is not that of analytic philosophy but rather that of Popper’s critical rationalism. In that framework, we espouse an idea of the relation between philosophy and the philosophy of science that is different from that of Guala and his commentators, and we recommend a reformist philosophy of institutions that is neither radical nor traditionalist and that makes better sense of the institution of the scholarly symposium than do... (shrink)

This paper concerns Carnap’s early contributions to formal semantics in his work on general axiomatics between 1928 and 1936. Its main focus is on whether he held a variable domain conception of models. I argue that interpreting Carnap’s account in terms of a fixed domain approach fails to describe his premodern understanding of formal models. By drawing attention to the second part of Carnap’s unpublished manuscript Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, an alternative interpretation of the notions ‘model’, ‘model extension’ and ‘submodel’ (...) in his theory of axiomatics is presented. Specifically, it is shown that Carnap’s early model theory is based on a convention to simulate domain variation that is not identical but logically comparable to the modern account. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to work out Quine's account of explication. Quine does not provide a general account, but considers a paradigmatic example which does not fit other examples he claims to be explications. Besides working out Quine's account of explication and explaining this tension, I show how it connects to other notions such as paraphrase and ontological commitment. Furthermore, I relate Quinean explication to Carnap's conception and argue that Quinean explication is much narrower because its main (...) purpose is to be a criterion of theory choice. (shrink)

The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of (...) particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together. (shrink)

Im Zentrum dieses Bandes stehen die Beiträge einer Tagung, die im Oktober 2017 an der Universität Konstanz stattgefunden hat. Thema der Tagung war ein den historischen Kontext einbeziehender Blick auf den frühen Rudolf Carnap, vom Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Emigration Ende 1935. Der 1891 in Ronsdorf bei Wuppertal geborene Rudolf Carnap entschloss sich erst relativ spät zu einer Karriere als akademischer Philosoph, nämlich 1920, nachdem er sein durch den Krieg unterbrochenes Studium der Physik und Philosophie in Jena und (...) Freiburg abgeschlossen und kurze Zeit überlegt hatte, als Lehrer in der Schulreform-Bewegung zu arbeiten. Es folgte die philosophische Promotion im Jahr 1921, bei Bruno Bauch in Jena, mit einer Doktorarbeit zum Raumproblem. 1923 organisierte Carnap, gemeinsam mit Hans Reichenbach und anderen, eine für die Entstehung des Logischen Empirismus bedeutsame kleine Tagung in Erlangen. Auf Einladung von Moritz Schlick habilitierte er sich 1926 an der Universität Wien und verbrachte die Zeit bis 1931 zumindest teilweise in Wien, als eines der Kernmitglieder des Wiener Kreises um Moritz Schlick. Seine Habilitationsschrift erschien 1928 unter dem Titel Der logische Aufbau der Welt (hier immer Aufbau). 1931 folgte Carnap einem Ruf an die Deutsche Universität Prag. In den darauffolgenden Jahren blieb aber der enge Kontakt mit Wien und dem Wiener Kreis erhalten. Carnaps hauptsächliche Arbeit in dieser Zeit war seinem zweiten großen Buchprojekt gewidmet, der 1934 publizierten Logischen Syntax der Sprache. Daneben verfasste Carnap in seiner Zeit in Wien und Prag auch zahlreiche Aufsätze, zu unterschiedlichen Aspekten der Logik, der Metaphysikkritik und der Wissenschaftstheorie. Er war Mitautor des Manifests Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis und nahm regen Anteil an den zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Aktivitäten des Logischen Empirismus, von der Gründung der Zeitschrift Erkenntnis bis hin zum Projekt einer Enzyklopädie der Einheitswissenschaft. Spätestens ab 1933 musste Carnap jedoch feststellen, dass an eine weitere wissenschaftliche Karriere in dem von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus geprägten politischen Klima in Kontinentaleuropa nicht zu denken war. Er strebte deshalb die Emigration ins englischsprachige Ausland an, die schließlich Ende 1935 gelang, als Carnap ein Angebot von der Universität Chicago erhielt. Obwohl Carnap nur den kleineren Teil der in diesem Band abgedeckten eineinhalb Jahrzehnte in Wien verbracht hat, widmet sich der Großteil der hier versammelten Beiträge schwerpunktmäßig der für Carnaps philosophische Karriere zentralen Wiener Zeit. (shrink)

Donald Davidson considère qu'une théorie de l'interprétation doit êtreradicale, c'est-à-dire qu'elle ne doit présupposer aucune connaissance de la langue à interpréter. Cette exigence repose sur l'idée suivante: si une théorie de l'interprétation pour une langue L présuppose une certaine compréhension de L, alors elle perd son pouvoir explicatif et échoue à rendre compte de ce qui permet la compréhension de L. L'interpr'tation radicale a l'avantage de nous forcer à rendre explicite ce qui est à l'œuvre dans le processus d'interprétation du (...) comportement verbal d'autrui. Elle nous permet aussi de nous concentrer sur la nature des données empiriques qui rendent possible la communication. Il importe de noter que Davidson ne veut aucunement suggérer qu'un interprète compétent de Lconnaϊtoupossèdeune théorie de l'interprétation pour L: la théorie set plutôt à donner une description de sa compétence. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the life and key work of Rudolf Carnap with special attention to his work on inductive logic.

This article outlines how conceptual spaces theory applies to modeling changes of scientific frameworks when these are treated as spatial structures rather than as linguistic entities. The theory is briefly introduced and five types of changes are presented. It is then contrasted with Michael Friedman’s neo-Kantian account that seeks to render Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” as a communicatively rational historical event of conceptual development in the sciences. Like Friedman, we refer to the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics as an example (...) of “deep conceptual change.” But we take the communicative rationality of radical conceptual change to be available prior to the philosophical meta-paradigms that Friedman deems indispensable for this purpose. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

Our aim in this article is to show how the theory of conceptual spaces can be useful in describing diachronic changes to conceptual frameworks, and thus useful in understanding conceptual change in the empirical sciences. We also compare the conceptual space approach to Moulines’s typology of intertheoretical relations in the structuralist tradition. Unlike structuralist reconstructions, those based on conceptual spaces yield a natural way of modeling the changes of a conceptual framework, including noncumulative changes, by tracing the changes to the (...) dimensions that reconstitute a conceptual framework. As a consequence, the incommensurability of empirical theories need not be viewed as a matter of conceptual representation. (shrink)

There are certain remarks in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein writes about Jews and about what he describes as their ‘Jewish mind’. In these remarks he appears to be trying to make a distinction between two different spiritual forces which operate in Western culture and which give rise to two different types of artists and works of art. On one side of the divide are Jews and works of art imbued with Jewish spirit. On the other side are men (...) of culture and works of art which exhibit a non-Jewish spirit. Among the various remarks made in this context, he offers the following thoughts about the spiritual nature of Jews, their mentality, character and artistic achievements: ‘You get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish’ . Following Renan he writes: ‘The Semitic races have an unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete’ . This, he explains, is because Jews are attracted by ‘pure intellectualism’. ‘I think it would be possible now to have a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would simply be stylized human types.’ ‘Masked theatre is anyway the expression of an intellectualistic character. And for the same reason perhaps it is a theatrical form that will attract only Jews’ . ‘The Jew is a desert region, but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect’ . ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand somebody else's work better than that person understands it himself.’ But intellect, it seems, is not a mental attribute providing for genius and true creative powers. ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. … It might be said that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass which has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. ’. (shrink)

Michael Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason is a welcome contribution to the ongoing articulation of philosophical perspectives for understanding the sciences in the context of post-positivist philosophy of science. Two perspectives that have gained advocacy since the demise of the “received view” are Quinean naturalism and Kuhnian relativism. In his 1999 Stanford lectures, Friedman articulates and defends a neo-Kantian perspective for philosophy of science that opposes both of these perspectives. His proffered neo-Kantian perspective is presented within the context of the problem (...) of theory change or “scientific revolutions,” and its main feature is a conception of scientific knowledge that requires “relativized constitutive a priori principles.” The lectures make up the first part of the book; the second part of the book, “Fruits of Discussion,” is a further elaboration and defence of the ideas advanced in the lectures. The resulting book serves as a useful sequel to Friedman’s impressive historical studies in Foundations of Space-Time Theories, Kant and the Exact Sciences, and Reconsidering Logical Positivism. In the preface, Friedman tells us that this book represents the philosophical viewpoint that he has arrived at as a result of completing these works. As such, it is not surprising that the prominent themes of the book are ones that have occupied Friedman’s attention in the past, viz., the importance of a priori principles in the exact sciences, the conventionalism of the logical positivists, and, more generally, an articulation of what remains defensible in neo-Kantian philosophy of science. (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)

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)

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)

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified (...) affirmative answer. (shrink)

Michael Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason is a welcome contribution to the ongoing articulation of philosophical perspectives for understanding the sciences in the context of post-positivist philosophy of science. Two perspectives that have gained advocacy since the demise of the “received view” are Quinean naturalism and Kuhnian relativism. In his 1999 Stanford lectures, Friedman articulates and defends a neo-Kantian perspective for philosophy of science that opposes both of these perspectives. His proffered neo-Kantian perspective is presented within the context of the problem (...) of theory change or “scientific revolutions,” and its main feature is a conception of scientific knowledge that requires “relativized constitutive a priori principles.” The lectures make up the first part of the book; the second part of the book, “Fruits of Discussion,” is a further elaboration and defence of the ideas advanced in the lectures. The resulting book serves as a useful sequel to Friedman’s impressive historical studies in Foundations of Space-Time Theories, Kant and the Exact Sciences, and Reconsidering Logical Positivism. In the preface, Friedman tells us that this book represents the philosophical viewpoint that he has arrived at as a result of completing these works. As such, it is not surprising that the prominent themes of the book are ones that have occupied Friedman’s attention in the past, viz., the importance of a priori principles in the exact sciences, the conventionalism of the logical positivists, and, more generally, an articulation of what remains defensible in neo-Kantian philosophy of science. (shrink)

Although for a couple of centuries empiricism was prevalent in physics circles, the development of various schools of philosophy of science, during the second half of the twentieth century, made it clear we do not encounter nature with empty minds and that scientists always use some assumptions in their scientific work. In this article. We argue that metaphysical assumptions play an important role at various stages of science activity. But these assumptions are usually taken from various schools of philosophy or (...) religions. Monotheistic religions can provide such principles. Thus, metaphysics works as a bridge between science and religion. (shrink)

Putnam construed the aim of Carnap’s program of inductive logic as the specification of a “universal learning machine,” and presented a diagonal proof against the very possibility of such a thing. Yet the ideas of Solomonoff and Levin lead to a mathematical foundation of precisely those aspects of Carnap’s program that Putnam took issue with, and in particular, resurrect the notion of a universal mechanical rule for induction. In this paper, I take up the question whether the Solomonoff–Levin proposal is (...) successful in this respect. I expose the general strategy to evade Putnam’s argument, leading to a broader discussion of the outer limits of mechanized induction. I argue that this strategy ultimately still succumbs to diagonalization, reinforcing Putnam’s impossibility claim. (shrink)

The claim that theoretical entities are not real, that they are merely convenient fictions, has been defended and attacked in diverse ways. This paper is concerned with only one defense of the fictionalist thesis and with a certain realist attack on it. The defense in question is that theories which prima facie make reference to theoretical entities can be revised in such a way that no such apparent reference is made by eliminating all occurrences of theoretical expressions. It will be (...) argued here that there is a procedure for revising theories which meets certain minimal criteria of adequacy, contrary to arguments in the literature. Further, it will be argued that the existence of this procedure provides neither sufficient nor necessary support for the fictionalist thesis, that this procedure is not of significance in the dispute between the fictionalist and the realist. Whether or not the theoretical-nontheoretical distinction is viable is another story which will not be told here. It will be assumed for the sake of argument that such a distinction can be drawn. (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)

My main purpose is to discuss what it is for philosophy to enlighten. In kant's sense, Enlightenment is what brings a rational outlook to social and political life. My second purpose is to display the self-Image of the vienna circle as philosophers of enlightenment. They thought the value of positivism was that it expressed the scientific spirit, Which was for them a moral viewpoint.

Carnap’s work was instrumental to the liberalization of empiricism in the 1930s that transformed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to what came to be known as logical empiricism. A central feature of this liberalization was the deployment of the Principle of Tolerance, originally introduced in logic, but now invoked in an epistemological context in “Testability and Meaning”. Immediately afterwards, starting with Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Carnap embraced semantics and turned to interpretation to guide the choice of a (...) theoretical language for science. The first thesis of this paper is that recourse to an intended interpretation led to a partial retrenchment of the conventionalism implied by the Principle of Tolerance. It required that the choice of a language be based on abstraction from a context; this procedure later became a component of the process of explication that was distinctive to Carnap’s mature views. The interpretive origin of formal systems also ensured their likely syntactic consistency, an issue on which Carnap was strongly criticized by figures such as Beth and Gödel. The second thesis of this paper is that this reliance on an intended interpretation enabled constructed formal systems to be relevant to the development of empirical science. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the key role played by Carl G. Hempel's work on theoretical realism and scientific explanation in effecting a crucial philosophical transition between the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, the dominant view was that science is incapable of furnishing explanations of natural phenomena; at the end, explanation is widely viewed as an important, if not the primary, goal of science. In addition to its intellectual benefits, this transition (...) has important practical consequences with respect to dealing with the global problems humans everywhere will face in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article is intended as a contribution to the current debates about the relationship between politics and the philosophy of science in the Vienna Circle. I reconsider this issue by shifting the focus from philosophy of science as theory to philosophy of science as practice. From this perspective I take as a starting point the Vienna Circle’s scientific world-conception and emphasize its practical nature: I reinterpret its tenets as a set of recommendations that express the particular epistemological attitude in which (...) both the Vienna Circle’s (doing) philosophy of science and its political engagement were rooted. -/- Regarding politics, and referring to new primary sources, I reconstruct how the scientific world-conception placed the Vienna Circle within a neoliberal-socialist political network that pursued concrete political aims. In light of my reconstruction I shall argue that neither the Vienna Circle’s alleged ethical noncognitivism nor its alleged adhesion to the Weberian ideal of a value-free science rules out the possibility of ascribing to the Vienna Circle a politically engaged philosophy of science: the case of the Vienna Circle shows how philosophy of science, as a public activity, can itself become a form of political engagement, even without necessarily entailing a theory of objective values. (shrink)

This paper concerns the debate on the nature of Rudolf Carnap'sproject in his 1928 book The Logical Structure of the Worldor Aufbau. Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson haveinitiated much of this debate. They claim that the Aufbauis best understood as a work that is firmly grounded inneo-Kantian philosophy. They have made these claims in oppositionto Quine and Goodman's ``received view'' of the Aufbau. Thereceived view sees the Aufbau as an attempt to carry out indetail Russell's external world program. I argue (...) that both sidesof this debate have made errors in their interpretation ofRussell. These errors have led these interpreters to misunderstandthe connection between Russell's project and Carnap's project.Russell in fact exerted a crucial influence on Carnap in the1920s. This influence is complicated, however, due to the factthat Russell and Carnap disagreed on many philosophical issues. Iconclude that interpretations of the Aufbau that ignoreRussell's influence are incomplete. (shrink)

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)

This paper investigates the strange case of an argument that was directed against a positivist verification principle. We find an early occurrence of the argument in a talk by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden at the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy in Prague, where Carnap and Neurath were present and contributed short rejoinders. We discuss the underlying presuppositons of the argument, and we evaluate whether the attempts by Carnap (especially) actually succeed in answering this argument. We think they don’t, and offer (...) instead a few sociological thoughts about why the argument seems to have disappeared from the profession’s evaluaton of the positivist criterion of verifiability. (shrink)