Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

Sellars's short autobiography. It covers the period of his life up to his first publications, showing the breadth of his background and influences in philosophy.

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

The ArgumentBehind the dispute over the relative priority of theory and experiment lie conflicting philosophical images of the nature of scientific inquiry. One crucial image arose in the 1920s, when the logical positivists agitated for a “unity of science” that would ground all meaningful scientific activity on an observational foundation. Their goals and rhetoric dovetailed with the larger movements of architectural, literary, and philosophical modernism. Historians of science followed the positivists by tracking experimental science as the basis for scientific progress. (...) After World War II, historians and philosophers of science created an antipositivist movement, inverting the positivist idea that observation had epistemic priority. But this counter-movement retained the modernist aspiration to unity, now chaining observation to theory. Once again historians of science, following their philosophical colleagues, illustrated the new modernism with historical instances of observation dominated by theory.Either reductionist scheme, by privileging one activity over the other, dictates an overly constrictive periodization. We need a wider class of periodization models that will allow instrumentation, experimentation, and theory a partial autonomy without granting any one the sole legitimate narrative standpoint. Such a heterogeneous representation of historical traditions may, surprisingly, make better sense of the perceived coherence of activity across theoretical transitions than the monolithic modernist representation of science it displaces. (shrink)

On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a powerful sway (...) over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap’s lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on “Science and Life.” “I work in science,” he began, “and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life.”1 In this paper I will explore this “single life” of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years. 1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, “Wissenschaft und Leben,” prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh , document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End and Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, edited with Bruce Hevly . His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. (shrink)