.

10 Lnapter une

in a way modeled on the understanding of the physical world achieved dur-

ing the Scientinc Revolution.

Further
·Reading
The topics in this chapterwill be discussed in detail later, and referenceswill be
2
giventhen. Two other introductorybooks areworth mentioning,though. Hempel's Logic Plus Empiricism
Philosophy of Natural Science (1966) was for many years the standard introduc-
tory textbook in this area.It opens with the story of Semmelweissand is a clearand
reasonablestatementof mainstreamtwentieth-centuryempiricism.Alan Chalm.ers's
What Is This Thing Called Science? (1999) is also very clear;it presentsa different
2.1 TheEmpiricistTradition
view from Hempel'sand the one defendedhere.
For all the topics in this book, there are also referenceworks that readersmay The first approach to science that we will examine is a revolutionary form
find helpful. Simon Blackburn'sOxford Dictionary of Philosophy is a remarkably of empiricism that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century,
useful book and is fun to browse through. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philos- flourished for a time, was transformed and moderated under the pressure
ophy is also of high quality.The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Science of objections, and then slowly became extinct. The earlier version of the
has many short papers on key topics (though many of these papers are quite ad- view is called "logical positivism," and the later, moderate form is more
vanced). The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy is still in progress but usually called "logical empiricism." There is variation in terminology here;
will be a very useful (and free) resource. "logical empiricism" is sometimes used for the whole movement, early and
There are many good books on the ScientificRevolution, each with a different late. Although we will be looking at fossils in this chapter, these remnants
emphasis.Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (1985), is a classic and very good on of the past are of great importance in understanding where we are now.
the physics. Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science Before discussing logical positivism, it will be helpful to go even further
(1997 ), is both conciseand thorough. It has an excellentchapter on mechanismand back and say something about the empiricist tradition in general. In the
contains a large annotated bibliography.Schuster 1990 is also a useful quick sum- first chapter I said that empiricism is often summarized with the claim that
mary,and Dear's Revolutionizing the Sciences (2001) is a concise and up-to~date the only source of knowledge is experience. This idea goes back a long way,
book with a good reputation. But Toulmin and Goodfield'sFabric of the Heavens but the mostfarnous stage of empiricist thought was in the seventeenth and
(1962), an old book recentlyreprinted,is my favorite.It focuses on the conceptual eighteenth centuries, with the work of John Locke, George Berkeley, and
foundations underlyingthe developmentof scientificideas. (It is the first of three David Hume. These "classical" forms of empiricism were based upon the-
books by Toulminand Goodfield on the history of science;the second, The Archi- ories about the mind and how it works. Their view of the mind is often
tecture of Matter is also relevanthere.) called "sensationalist." Sensations, like patches of color and sounds, ap-
Kuhn'sCopernican Revolution (1957), is another classic, focused on the early pear in the mind and are all the mind has access to. The role of thought is
stages, as the title suggests. Shapin'sScientific Revolution (1996), is not a good in- to track and respond to patterns in these sensations. This view of the mind
troductionto the ScientificRevolutionbut is a very interestingbook anyway.There is not implied by the more basic empiricist idea that experience is the
are severalgood books that focus on particularpersonalities.Koestler,The Sleep- source of knowledge, but for many years such a view was common within
walkers (r968), is fascinating on Kepler, and Sobel, Galileo's Daughter (1999), is empiricism.
also good on Galileo (and his daughter, a nun leading a tough life). The standard Both during these classical discussions and more recently, a problem for
biographyof the amazingly strange Isaac Newton, by Robert Westfall, comes in empiricism has been a tendency to lapse into skepticism, the idea that we
both long (r980) and short (1993) versions. cannot know anything about the world. This problem has two aspects.
For a history of medicine, coveringthe whole world, see Porter, The Greatest One aspect we can call external world skepticism: how can we ever know
Benefit to Mankind (1998). anything about the real world that lies behind the flow of sensations? The

19
 Log1cnu:. cmp1na~m .::.1

r second aspect, made vivid by David Hume, is inductive skepticism: why do

we have reason to think that the patterns in past experience will also hold
in the future?
Empiricism has often shown a surprising willingness to throw in the
towel on the issue of external world skepticism. (Hume threw in the towel
on both kinds of skepticism, but that is unusual.) Many empiricists have
been willing to say that they don't care about the possibility that there
might be real things lying behind the flow of sensations. It's only the sen-
sations that we have any dealings with. Maybe it makes no sense even to
try to think about objects lying behind sensations. Perhaps our concept of
the world is just a concept of a patterned collection of sensations. This view
is sometimes called "phenomenalism." During the nineteenth century, phe-
nomenalist views were quite popular within empiricism, and their oddity
was treated with nonchalance. John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher
and political theorist, once said that matter may be defined as "a Perma-
nent Possibility of Sensation" (1865, 183). Ernst Mach, an Austrian physi-
cist and philosopher, illustrated his phenomenalist view by drawing a pic-
ture of the world as it appeared through his left eye (see fig. 2.1; the shape
in the lower right part of the image is his elegant mustache). All that exists
is a collection of observer-relative sensory phenomena like these.
I hope phenornenalism looks strange to you, despite its eminent propo- Fig. 2.r
nents. It is a strange idea. But empiricists have often found themselves back- "The assertion,then, is correctthatthe world consisrs
ing into views like this. This is partly because they have often tended to think only of our sensations" (Mach r897, ro).
of the mind as confined behind a "veil of ideas" or sensations. The mind has
no "access" to anything outside the veil. Many philosophers, including me, about the world-Kant also held that mathematics gives us real knowledge
agree that this pieture of the mind is a mistake. But it is not so easy to set of the world but does not require experience for its justification.
up an empiricist view that entirely avoids the bad influence of this pieture. Empiricists must indeed avoid overly simple pietures of how experience
In discussions of the history of philosophy, it is common to talk of a affects belief. The mind does not passively receive the imprint of facts. The
showdown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between "the ratio- active and creative role of the mind must be recognized. The trick is to
nalists" and "the empiricists." Rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz be- avoid this problem while still remaining true to basic empiricist principles.
lieved that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that does not de- As I said above, in the history of philosophy the term "rationalism" is
pend on experience. Mathematics seemed to be a compelling example of often used for a view that opposes empiricism. In the more recent discus-
this kind of knowledge. Empiricists like Locke and Hume insisted that ex- sions of science that we are concerned with here, however, the term is gen-
perience is our only way of finding out what the world is like. In the late erally not used in that way. (This can be a source of confusion; see the glos-
eighteenth century, a sophisticated intermediate position was developed by sary.) The views called "rationalist" in the twentieth century were often
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argned that all our think- forms of empiricism; the term was often used in a broad way, to indicate a
ing involves a subtle interaction between experience and preexisting men- confidence in the power of human reason.
tal structures that we use to make sense of experience. Key concepts like So much for the long history of debate. Despite various problems,
space, time, and causation cannot be derived from experience, because a empiricism has been a very attractive set of ideas for many philosophers.
person must already have these concepts in order to use experience to learn Empiricism has often also had a particular kind of impact on discussions
 i:.i:. 1...napu::r
1wo Logic Plus Empiricism 23

t outside of philosophy. Making a sweeping generalization, it is fair to say losophy that would settle, once and for all, the problems that philosophy
that the empiricist tradition has tended to be (r) pro-science, (2) worldly had been concerned with. Some problems would be solved, and other prob-
rather than religious, and (3) politically moderate or liberal (though these lems would be rejected as meaningless. Logical positivist views about lan-
political labels can be hard to apply across times). David Hume, John Stu- guage were influenced by the early ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein ([r922]
art Mill, and Bertrand Russell are examples of this tendency. Of the three 1988). Wittgenstein was an enigmatic, charismatic, and eccentric philoso-
elements of my generalization, religion is the one that has the most counter- pher of logic and language who was not an empiricist at all. Some would
examples. Berkeley was a bishop, for example, and Bas van Fraassen, one say that the positivists adapted Wittgenstein's ideas, others that they mis-
of the most influential living empiricist philosophers, is also religious. But interpreted him.
on the whole it is fair to say that empiricist ideas have tended to be the Though they did admire some philosophers, the logical positivists were
allies of a practical, scientific, down-to-eanh outlook on life. The logical distressed with much of what had been going on in philosophy. In the years
positivists definitely fit this pattern. after Kant's death in r804, philosophy had seen the rise of a number of
systems of thought that the logical positivists found pretentious, obscure,
2.2 TheVienna Circle dogmatic, and politically harmful. One key villain was G. W. F. Hegel,
who worked in the early nineteenth century and had a huge influence on
Logical positivism was a form of empiricism developed in Europe after nineteenth-century thought. Hegel was famous for his work on the relation
World War I. The movement was established by a group of people who between philosophy and history. He thought that human history as a whole
were scientifically oriented and who disliked much of what was happening was a process in which a "world spirit" gradually reached consciousness
in philosophy. This group has become known as the Vienna Circle. of itself. For Hegel, individuals are less important than the state as a whole,
The Vienna Circle was established by Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath. especially the role of the state in the grand march of historical progress.
It was based, as you might expect, in Vienna, Austria. From the early days These ideas were taken to support strong forms of nationalism. Hegel's
through to the end, a central intellectual figure was Rudolf Carnap. Car- was an "idealist" philosophy, since it held that reality is in some sense spir-
nap seems to have been the kind of person whose presence inspired awe itual or mental. But this is not a view in which each person's reality is made
even in other highly successful philosophers. up in some way by that person's ideas. Rather, a single reality as a whole is
Logical positivism was an extreme, swashbuckling form of empiricism. said to have a spiritual or rational character. This view is sometimes called
The term "positivism" derives from the nineteenth-century scientific phi- "absoluteidealism."
losophy of Auguste Comte. In the I 9 3os Carnap suggested that they change Hegel's influence bloomed and then receded in continental Europe. As
the name of their movement from "logical positivism" to "logical empiri- it receded in continental Europe, in the later nineteenth century, it bloomed
cism;' This change should not be taken to suggest that the later stages in the in England and America. Absolute idealism is a good example of what log-
movement were "more empiricist" than the earlier stages. The opposite is ical positivism was against. Sometimes the positivists would disparagingly
true. In my discussion I will use the term "logical positivism" for the in- dissect especially obscure passages from this literature. Hans Reichenbach
tense, earlier version of their ideas, and "logical emp~icism" for the later, (who was not part of the original Vienna Circle but who was a close ally)
more moderate version. Although Carnap suggested the name change in began his book The Rise of ScientificPhilosophy (r9 5 r) with a quote from
the mid-r 9 3os, the time during which logical positivist ideas changed most Hegel's most famous work on philosophy and history: "Reason is sub-
markedly was after World War II. I will spend some time in this section de- stance, as well as infinite power, its own infinite material underlying all the
scribing the unusual intellectual and historical context in which logical natural and spiritual life; as also the infinite form, that which sets the ma-
positivism developed. In particular, it is easier to understand logical posi- terial in motion:' Reichenbach lamented that a philosophy student, on first
tivism if we pay attention to what the logical positivists were against. reading this passage, would usually think that it was his fault-the stu-
The logical positivists were inspired by developments in science in the dent's fault-that he did not understand it. The student would then work
early years of the twentieth century, especially the work of Einstein. They away until it finally seemed obvious that Reason was substance, as well as
also thought that developments in logic, mathematics, and the philosophy infinite power .... For Reichenbach, it is entirely Hegel's fault that the pas-
of language had shown a way to put together a new kind of empiricist phi- sage seems to make no sense. It seems to make no sense because whatever
24 ChapterTwo Logic Plus Emp1rteism 25

factual meaning the claim might be intended to convey has been smothered work as assisting the development of a scientific, internationalist, and prac-
with misused language. tical outlook on society (Galison 1990) ..
People sometimes describe the history of this period as if it was a The Vienna Circle flourished from the mid-192os to the mid-r93os.
pitched battle berween logical positivism and absolute idealism. That is not Logical positivist ideas were imported into England by A. J. Ayer in Lan-
how things went. In the early rwentieth century, there were many kinds of guage, Truth, and Logic (r936), a vivid and readable book that conveys
philosophy jostling and wrangling in Europe. There was a "back to Kant" the excitement of the time. Under the influence of logical positivism, and
movement going on (as there seems to be now; perhaps this will happen the philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, English philosophy
every hundred years). Another philosopher who came to seem an especially abandoned absolute idealism and returned to its traditional empiricist em-
important rival to logical positivism was Martin Heidegger. phasis, an emphasis it has retained (more or less) ever since.
Earlier I gave a quick summary of Hegel's ideas. It is much harder to do In continental Europe the story turned out differently. For we have now,
that for Heidegger. Heidegger is sometimes categorized as an existential- remember, reached the r 9 3 cs. The development of logical positivism ran
ist. Perhaps he is the most famously difficult and obscure philosopher who straight into the rise of Adolf Hitler.
has ever lived. I will borrow the summary reluctantly given by Thomas Many of the Vienna Circle had socialist leanings, some were Jewish,
Sheehan in the entry for Heidegger in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Phi- and there were certainly no Nazis. So the logical positivists were persecuted
losophy (1998): "He argues that mortality is our defining moment, that we by the Nazis, to varying degrees. The Nazis encouraged and made use of
are thrown into limited worlds of sense shaped by our being-towards-death, pro-German, anti-liberal philosophers, who also tended to be obscure and
and that finite meaning is all the reality we get:' Simplifying even more, mystical. In contrast to the logical positivists, Martin Heidegger joined the
Heidegger held that we must understand our lives as based, first and fore- Nazi party in r 9 3 3 and remained a member throughout the war.
most, upon pracrical coping with the world rather than knowledge of it. Many logical positivists fled Europe, especially to the United States.
All our experience is affected by the awareness that we are traveling toward Schlick, unfortunately, did not. He was murdered by a deranged former stu-
death. And the best thing we can do in this situation is stare it in the face dent in r936. The logical positivists who did make it to the United States
and live an "authentic" life. were responsible for a great flowering of American philosophy in the years
This picture oflife might seem to make some sense (especially on a bad after World War IL These include Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl
day). But Heidegger combined his descriptions of how itfeels to live in the Hempel, and Herbert Feig!. In the United States the strident voice of logi-
world with abstract metaphysical speculation; especially notorious are his cal positivists was moderated. Partly this was because of criticisms of their
discussions of the nature of "Nothing:' Heidegger also had one point in ideas-criticisms from the side of those who shared their general outlook.
common with some (though not all) absolute idealists: his opposition to But the moderation was no doubt partly due to the different intellectual
liberal democratic political ideas. and political climate in the United States. Austria and Germany in the
Heidegger was seen as a key rival by the logical positivists. Carnap gave 1930s had been an unusually intense environment for doing philosophy.
humorous logical dissections of Heidegger's discussions of Nothing in his
lectures. Interestingly, recent work has shown that Carnap and Heidegger
2.3 CentralIdeas of LogicalPositivism
understood each other betrer than was once supposed (Friedman :z.ooo).
Logical positivism was a plea for Enlighteument values, in opposition Logical positivist views about science and knowledge were based on a gen-
to mysticism, romanticism, and nationalism. The positivists championed eral theory of language; we need to start here, before moving to the views
reason over the obscure, the logical over the intuitive. The logical posi- about science. This theory of language featured rwo main ideas, the analytic-
tivists were also internationalists, and they liked the idea of a universal and synthetic distinction and the verifiability theory of meaning.
precise language that everyone could use to communicate clearly. Otto The analytic-synthetic distincrion will probably strike you as bland and
Neurath was the member of the group with the strongest political and so- obvious, at least at first. Some sentences are true or false simply in virtue
cial interests. He and various others in the group could be described as of their meaning, regardless of how the world happens to be; these are an-
democratic socialists. They had a keen interest in some movements in art alytic. A synthetic sentence is true or false in virtue of both the meaning of
and architecture at the time, such as the Bauhaus movement. They saw this the sentence and how the world actually is. "All bachelors are unmarried"
r 26 ChapterTwo Logic PLUSEmpiticism 27

is the standard example of an analytically true sentence. "All bachelors are I turn now to the other main idea in the logical positivist theory of lan-
bald" is an example of a synthetic sentence, in this case a false one. Ana- guage, the verifiability theory of meaning. This theory applies only to sen-
lytic truths are, in a sense, empty truths, with no factual content. Their tences that are not analytic, and it involves a specific kind of "meaning;'
truth has a kind of necessity, but only because they are empty. the kind involved when someone is trying to say something about the world.
This distinction had been around, in various forms, since at least the Here is how the theory was often put: the meaning of a sentence consists
eighteenth century. The terminology "analytic-synthetic" was introduced in its method of verification. That formulation might sound strange (it al-
by Kant. Although the distinction itself looks uncontroversial, it can be ways has to me). Here is a formulation that sounds more natural: knowing
made to do real philosophical work. Here is one crucial piece of work the the meaning of a sentence is knowing how to verify it. And here is a key ap-
logical positivists saw for it: they claimed that all of mathematics and logic plication of the principle: if a sentence has no possible method of verifica-
is analytic. This made it possible for them to deal with mathematical knowl- tion, it has no meaning.
edge within an empiricist framework. For logical positivism, mathematical By "verification" here, the positivists meant verification by means of
propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conven- observation. 0 bservation in all these discussions is construed broadly, to
tional decision to use symbols in a particular way. Synthetic claims about include all kinds of sensory experience. And "verifiability" is not the best
the world can be expressed using mathematical language, such as when it word for what they meant. A better word would be "testability." This is be-
is claimed that there are nine planets in the solar system. But proofs and in- cause testing is an attempt to work out whether something is true or false,
vestigations within mathematics itself are analytic. This might seemstrange and that is what the positivists had in mind. The term "verifiable" gener-
because some proofs in mathematics are very surprising. The logical posi- ally only applies when you are able to show that something is true. It would
tivists insisted that once we break down such a proof into small steps, each have been better to call the theory "the testability theory of meaning."
step will be trivial and unsurprising. Sometimes the logical positivists did use that phrase, but the more standard
Earlier philosophers in the rationalist tradition had claimed that some name is "verifiability theory," or just "verificationism."
things can be known ·a priori; this means known independently of experi- Verificationism is a strong empiricist principle; experience is the only
ence. Logical positivism held that the only things that seem to be knowable source of meaning, as well as the only source of knowledge. Note that ver-
a priori are analytic and hence empty of factual content. ifiability here refers to verifiability in principle, not in practice. There was
A remarkable episode in the history of science is important here. For some dispute about which hard-to-verify claims are really verifiable in
many centuries, the geometry of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid principle. It is also important that conclusive verification or testing was not
was regarded as a shining example of real and certain knowledge. Im- required. There just had to be the possibility of finding observational evi-
manuel Kant, inspired by the immensely successful application of Euclid- dence that would count for or against the proposition in question.
ean geometry to nature in Newtonian physics, even claimed that Euclid's In the early days of logical positivism, the idea was that in principle one
geometry (along with the rest of mathematics) is both synthetic and know- could translate all sentences with factual meaning into sentences that re-
able a priori. In the nineteenth century, mathematicians did work out al- ferred only to sensations and the patterns connecting them. This program of
ternative geometrical systems to Euclid's, but they did so as a mathemati- translation was fairly quickly abandoned as too extreme. But the verifiabil-
cal exercise, not as an attempt to describe how lines, angles, and shapes ity theory was retained after the program of translation had been dropped.
work in the actual world. Early in the twentieth century, however, Einstein's The verifiability principle was used by the logical positivists as a philo-
revolutionary work in physics showed that a non-Euclidean geometry is sophica~ weapon. Scientific discussion, and most everyday discussion, con-
true of our world. The logical positivists were enormously impressed by sists of verifiable and hence meaningful claims. Some other parts of lan-
this development, and it guided their analysis of mathematical knowledge. guage are clearly not intended to have factual meaning, so they fail the
The positivists insisted that pure mathematics is analytic, and they broke verifiability test but do so in a harmless way. Included are poetic language,
geometry into two parts. One part is purely mathematical, analytic, and expressions of emotion, and so on. But there are also parts of language that
says nothing about the world. It merely describes possible geometrical sys- are supposed to have factual meaning-are supposed to say something
tems. The other part of geometry is a set of synthetic claims about which about the world-but which fail to do so. For the logical positivists, this
geometrical system applies to our world. includes most traditional philosophy, much of ethics, and theology as well!
 28 cnapterTwo Logic Plus Empiricism 29

This analysis of language provided the framework for the logical posi- The logical positivists also believed in a second kind of logic, a kind that
tivist philosophy of science. Science itself was seen as just a more complex was (and is) much more controversial. This is inductive logic. Inductive logic
and sophisticated version of the sort of thinking, reasoning, and problem- was supposed to be a theory of arguments that provide support for their
solving that we find in everyday life-and completely unlike the meaning- conclusions but do not give the kind of guarantee found in deductive logic.
less blather of traditional philosophy. From the logical positivist point of view, developing an inductive logic
So let us now look at the logical positivists' picture of science and of the was of great importance. Hardly any of the arguments and evidence that
role of philosophy in a scientific worldview. Next we should turn to an- we confront in everyday life and science carry the kind of guarantees found
other distinction they made, between "observational" language and "the- in deductive logic. Even the best kind of evidence we can find for a scien-
oretical" language. There was uncertainty about how exactly to set this dis- tific theory is not completely decisive. There is always the possibility of er-
tinction up. Usually it was seen as a distinction applied to individual terms. ror, but that does not stop some claims in science from being supported by
"Red" is in the observational part of language, and "electron" is in the evidence. The logical positivists accepted and embraced the fact that error
theoretical part. There was also a related distinction at the level of sen- is always possible. Although some critics have misinterpreted them on this
tences. "The rod is glowing red" is observational, while "Helium atoms point, the logical positivists did not think that science ever reaches absolute
each contain two electrons" is theoretical. A more important question was certainty.
where to draw the line. Schlick thought that only terms referring to sensa- The logical positivists saw the task of logically analyzing science as
tions were observational; everything else was theoretical. Here Schlick sharply distinct from any attempt to understand science in terms of its his-
stayed close to traditional empiricism. Neurath thought this was a mistake tory or psychology. Those are empirical disciplines, and they involve a dif-
and argued that terms referring to many ordinary physical objects are in the ferent set of questions from those of philosophy.
observational part of language. For Neurath, scientific testing must not be A terminology standardly used to express the separations between dif-
understood in a way that makes it private to the individual. Only observa- ferent approaches here was introduced by Hans Reichenbach. Reichen-
tion statements about physical objects can be the basis of public or "inter- bach distinguished between the "context of discovery" and the "context of
subjective" testing. justification:' That terminology is not helpful, because it suggests that the
The issue became a constant topic of discussion. In rime, Carnap came distinction has to do with "before and after." It might seem that the point
to think that there are lots of acceptable ways of marking out a distinction being made is that discovery comes first and justification comes afterward.
between the observational and theoretical parts of language; one could use That is not the point being made (though the logical positivists were not
whichever is convenient for the purposes at hand. This was the start of a completely clear on this). The key distinction is betw~en the study of the
more general move that Carnap made toward a view based on the "toler- logical structure of science and the study of historical and psychological as-
ance" of alternative linguistic frameworks. pects of science.
We now need to look at logical. positivist views about logic. For logical So logical positivism tended to dismiss the relevance of fields like his-
positivism, logic is the main tool for philosophy, including philosophical tory and psychology to the philosophy of science. In rime this came to be
discussion of science. In fact, just about the only useful thing that philoso- regarded as a big mistake.
phers can do is give logical analyses of how language, mathematics, and Let us put all these ideas together and look at the picture of science that
science work. results. Logical positivism was a revolutionary, uncompromising version of
Here we should distinguish two kinds of logic (this discussion will be empiricism, based largely on a theory of language. The aim of science-and
continued in chapter 3). Logic in general is the attempt to give an abstract the aim of everyday thought and problem-solving as well-is to track and
theory of what makes some arguments compelling and reliable. Deductive anticipate patterns in experience. As Schlick once put it, "what every sci-
logic is the most familiar kind of logic, and it describes patterns of argument entist seeks, and seeks alone, are ... the rules which govern the connection
that transmit truth with certainty. These are arguments with the feature that of experiences, and by which alone they can be predicted" (r932-33, 44).
if the premises of the argument are true, the conclusion must be true. Im- We can make rational predictions about future experiences by attending to
.I
pressive developments in deductive logic had been under way since.the late patterns in past experience, but we never get a guarantee. We could always
nineteenth century and were still going on at the rime of the Vienna Circle. be wrong. There is no alternative route. to knowledge besides experience;
 30 ChapterTwo Logic Plus Empiricism 31

when traditional philosophy has tried to find such a route, it has lapsed into the verifiability principle. It turned out to be hard to formulate the prin-
meaninglessness. ciple in a way that would exclude all the obscure traditional philosophy but
The interpretation of logical positivism I have just given is a standard include all of science. Some of these problems were almost comically simple.
one. There is controversy about how to interpret the aims and doctrines of For example, if "Metals expand when heated" is testable, then "Metals ex-
the movement, however. Some recent writers have argued that there is less pand when heated and the Absolute Spirit is perfect" is also testable. If we
of a link berween logical positivism and traditional empiricism than the could empirically show the first part of the claim to be false, then the whole
standard interpretation claims (Friedman r999 ). But in the sense of em- claim would be shown false, because of the logic of statements containing
piricism used in this book, there is definitely a strong link. We see that in "and." (If A is false then A&B must be false too.) Patching this hole led to
the Schlick quote given in the previous paragraph. new problems elsewhere; the whole project was quite frustrating (Hempel
During the early rwentieth century, there were various other strong ver- r965, chap. 4). The attempt to develop an inductive logic also ran into se-
i·' sions of empiricism being developed as well. One was operationalism, rious trouble. That topic will be covered in the next chapter.
,,
which was developed by a physicist, Percy Bridgman (r927). Operational- Other criticisms were directed not at the details but at the most basic
ism held that scientists should use language in such a way that all theoret- ideas of the movement. The criticism that I will focus on here is one of
ical terms are tied closely to direct observational tests. This is akin to logi- these, and its most famous presentation is in a paper sometimes regarded
cal positivism, but it was expressed more as a proposed tightening up of as the most important in all of rwentieth-century philosophy: W V. Quine's
scientific language (motivated especially by the lessons of Einstein's theory "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (r953).
of relativity) than as an analysis of how all science already works. Quine argued for a holistic theory of testing, and he used this to moti-
In the latter part of the rwentieth century, an image of the logical posi- vate a holistic theory of meaning as well. In describing the view, first I
tivists developed in which they were seen as stodgy, conservative, unimag- should say something about holism in general. Many areas of philosophy
inative science-worshipers. Their strongly pro-science stance has even been contain views that are described using the term "holism." A holist argues
seen as antidemocratic, or aligned with repressive political ideas. This is very that you cannot understand a particular thing without looking at its place
unfair, given their actual political interests and activities. Later we will see in a larger whole. In the case we are concerned with here, holism about test-
how ideas about the relation berween science and politics changed through ing says that we cannot test a single hypothesis or sentence in isolation. In-
the rwentieth century in a way that made this interpretation possible. The stead, we can only test complex nerworks of claims and assumptions. This
accusation of stodginess is another matter; the logical positivists' writings is because only a complex nerwork of claims and assumptions makes def-
were often extremely dry and technical. Still, even the driest of their ideas inite predictions about what we should observe.
were part of a remarkable program that aimed at a massive, transdiscipli- Let us look more closely at the idea that individual claims about the
nary, intellectual housecleaning. And their version of empiricism was or- world cannot be tested in isolation. The idea is that in order to test one
ganized around an ideal of intellectual flexibility as a mark of science and claim, you need to make assumptions about many other things. Often these
rationality. We see this in a famous metaphor used by Neurath (who exem- will be assumptions about measuring instruments, the circumstances of
plifies these themes especially well). Neurath said that in our attempts to observation, the reliability of records and of other observers, and so on. So
learn about the world and improve our ideas, we are "like sailors who have whenever you think of yourself as testing a single idea, what you are really
to rebuild their ship on the open sea;' The sailors replace pieces of their testing is a long, complicated conjunction of statements; it is the whole
ship plank by plank, in a way that eventually results in major changes but conjunction that gives you a definite prediction. If a test has an unexpected
which is constrained by the need to keep the ship afloat during the process. result, then something in that conjunction is false, but the failure of the test
itself does not tell you where the error is.
For example, suppose you want to test the hypothesis that high air pres-
2.4 Problemsand Changes
sure is associated with fair, stable weather. You make a series of observa-
'
I'
' Logical positivist ideas were always in a state of flux, and they were subject tions, and what you seem to find is that high pressure is instead associated
:ri
to many challenges. One set of problems was internal to the program. For with unstable weather. It is natural to suspect that your original hypothe-
example, there was considerable difficulty in getting a good formulation of sis was wrong, but there are other possibilities as well. It might be that your
32 ChapterTwo LogicPlusEmpiricism 33

barometer does not give reliable measurements of air pressure. There might Strictly, the positivists generally held that these observations are only asso-
also be something wrong with the observations made (by yon or others) of ciated with a specific hypothesis against a background of other assump-
the weather conditions themselves. The unexpected observations are telling tions. But then it seems questionable to associate the test results solely with
you that something is wrong, but the problem might lie with one of your the hypothesis itself. Quine, in contrast, made the consequences of holism
background assumptions, not with the hypothesis you were trying to test. about testing very clear. He also drew conclusions about language and
Some parts of this argument are convincing. It is true that only a net- meaning; given the link betvveen testing and meaning asserted by logical
work of claims and assumptions, not a single hypothesis alone, tells us positivism, holism about testing leads to holism about meaning. And holism
what we should expect to observe. The failure of a prediction will always about meaning causes problems for many logical positivist ideas.
have a range of possible explanations. In that sense, testing is indeed ho- The version of holism that Quine defended in "Two Dogmas" was an
listic. But this leaves open the possibility that we might often have good rea- extreme one. It included an attack on the one idea in the previous section
sons to lay the blame for a failed prediction at one place rather than an- that you might have thought was completely safe: the analytic-synthetic
other. In practice, science seems to have some effective ways of working out distinction. Quine argued that this distinction does not exist; this is an-
where to lay the blame. Giving a philosophical theory of these decisions is other unjustified "dogma" of empiricism.
a difficult task, but the mere fact that failed predictions always have a range Here again, some of Quine's arguments were directed at a version of the
of possible explanations does not settle the holism debate. analytic-synthetic distinction that the logical positivists no longer held.
Holist arguments had a huge effect on the philosophy of science in the Quine said that the idea of analyticity was intended to treat some claims as
middle of the twentieth century. Quine, who sprinkled his writings with immune to revision, and he argued that in fact no statement is immune to
deft analogies and dry humor, argued that mainstream empiricism had revision. But Carnap had already decided that analytic statements can be
been committed to a badly simplistic view of testing. We must accept, as revised,. though they are revised in a special way. A person or community
Quine said in a famous metaphor, that our theories "face the tribunal of can decide to drop one whole linguistic and logical framework and adopt
sense-experience ... as a corporate body" (r953, 4r). Logical positivism another. Against the background provided by a given linguistic and logical
must be replaced with a holistic version of empiricism. framework, some statements will be analytic and hence not susceptible to
But there is a puzzle here. The logical positivists already accepted that empirical test. But we can always change frameworks. By the time that
testing is holistic in the sense described above. Here is Herbert Feig], writing Quine was writing, Carnap's philosophy was based on a distinction between
in r943: "No scientific assumption is testable in complete isolation. Only changes made within a linguistic and logical framework, and changes be-
whole complexes of inter-related hypotheses can be put to the test" (r94 3, tween these frameworks.
r6). Carnap had been saying the same thing (r937, 318). We can even find In another (more convincing) part of his paper, Quine argued that there
statements like this in Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (r936). is no way to make scientific sense of a sharp analytic-synthetic distinction.
Quine did recognize Pierre Duhem, a much earlier French physicist and He connected this point to his holism about testing. For Quine, all our
philosopher, as someone who had argued for holism about testing. (Holism ideas and hypotheses form a single "web of belief," which has contact with
about testing is often called "the Duhem-Quine thesis.") But how could it experience only as whole. An unexpected observation can prompt us to
be argued that logical positivists had dogmatically missed this important make a great variety of possible changes to the web. Even sentences that
fact, when they repeatedly expressed it in print? Regardless of this, many might look analytic can be revised in response to exp~rience in some cir-
philosophers agreed with Quine that logical positivism had made a bad cumstances. Quine noted that strange results in quantum physics had sug-
mistake about testing in science. gested to some that revisions in logic might be needed.
Though the history of the iSSlJeis strange, it might be fair to say this: al- In this discussion of problems for logical positivism, I have included
though the logical positivists officially accepted a holistic view about test- some discussions that started early and some that took place after World
ing, they did not appreciate the significance of the point. The verifiability War II, when the movement had begun its U.S.-based transformation. Let
principle seems to suggest that you can test sentences one at a time. It seems us now look at some central ideas of logical empiricism, the later, less ag-
to attach a set of observable outcomes of tests to each sentence in isolation. gressive stage of the movement.
34 ChapterTwo LogicPlusEmpiricism 35

POSTUL.ATES
2.5 Logical Empiricism

Let's see how things looked in the years after World War II. Schlick is dead, PRIMITIVE
CONCEPTS
and other remnants of the Vienna Circle are safely housed in American uni-
I
versities-Carnap at Chicago, Hempel at Pittsburgh and then Princeton, I\ \ I
Reichenbach at UCLA (via Turkey), Feig! at Minnesota. Many of the same I \ t. \ I ' '\ II I
I \ I 1
people are involved, but the work is different. The revolutionary attempt \ ' .J/1-DEFINED
I
I ¥
' / ~ 'I : CONCEPTS
to destroy traditional philosophy has been replaced by a program of care- I
I I I
ful logical analysis of language and science. Discussion of the contribu- I I I
tions that could be made by the scientific worldview to a democratic so- I I I
I I I
cialist future have been dropped or greatly muted. (Despite this, the FBI I I I
I J I EMPIRICAL
collected a file on Carnap as a possible Communist sympathizer.) I I I CONCEPTS
As before, ideas about language guided logical empiricist ideas about
science. The analytic-synthetic distinction had not been rejected, but it "SOIL• of
OBSERVATION
was regarded as questionable. The logical empiricists felt the pressure of (EXPERIENCE)

Quine's argnments. The verifiability theory, which had been so scythe-like

in its early forms, was replaced by a holistic empiricist theory of meaning.
Theories were seen as abstract structures that connect many hypotheses Fig. 2.2
together. These structures are connected, as wholes, to the observable Feigl'spicture of the logical empiricistview of theories
realm, but each bit of a theory-each claim or hypothesis or concept- (FromFeigl 1970; reproducedcourtesy
does not have some specific set of observations associated with it. A theo- of Universityof Minnesota Press)
retical term (like "electron" or "gene") derives its meaning from its place
in the whole structure and from the structure's connection to the realm explanation in science (see especially Hempel and Oppenheim r948; Hem-
of observation. pel r96 5). For Hempel, to explain something is to show how to infer it us-
Late in the logical empiricist era, in r970, Herbert Feig! gave a pictorial ing a logical argument, where the premises of the argument include at least
representation of what he called "the orthodox view" of theories (see one statement of a natural law (see chapter r3 below). This illustrates the
fig. 2.2). A network of theoretical hypotheses ("postulates") is connected idea, common to logical positivism and logical empiricism, that logic is the
by stages to what Feig! calls the "soil" of experience. This anchoring is the main tool of philosophy of science.
source of the network's meaning. Feig! used this picture to describe a single We saw that logical positivism held that the sole aim of science is to
scientific theory. For the more extreme holism of Quine, a person's total set track patterns in experience. For logical positivism, when a scientist seems
of beliefs form a single network. to be trying to describe unobservable structures in the world that give rise
The logical positivist distinction between observational and theoretical to what we see, the scientist must instead be seen as describing the observ-
parts of language was kept roughly intact. But the idea that observational able world in a special, abstract way. Scientific language is only meaning-
language describes private sensations had been dropped. The observational ful insofar as it picks out patterns in the flow of experience. Now, does log-
base of science was seen as made up of descriptions of observable physical ical empiricism make the same claim? Does logical empiricism claim that
objects (though Carnap thought it might occasionally be useful to work scientific langnage ultimately ouly describes patterns in observables?
with a language referring to sensations). The answer is that logical empiricists agonized over this. In their hearts
Logical positivist views about the role of logic in philosophy and their answer was yes, but this answer seemed to get harder and harder to
about the sharp separation between the logic of science and the historical- defend. Carl Hempel wrote a paper in r9 58 called "The Theoretician's
psychological side of science were basically unchanged. A good example of Dilemma;' which was the height of logical empiricist agony over the issue.
the kind of work done by logical empiricists is provided by their work on As a fairly traditional empiricist, Hempel was attracted to the idea that the
36 ChapterTwo LogicPlus Empiricism 37

only possible role for those parts of language that seem to refer to unob- levels of structure. Scienceuses unusual theoretical concepts (which look ini-
servable entities is to help us pick out patterns in the observable realm. And tially like attempts to refer to hidden things) as a way of discovering and de-
if the parts of theories that appear to posit unobservable things are really scribing subtle patterns in the observable realm. So the logical positivists and
any good, this "goodness" has to show up in advantages the theory has in the logical empiricists talked constantly about prediction as the goal of sci-
its handling of observables. So there is no justification for seeing these parts ence. Prediction was a substitute for the more obvious-looking-but ulti-
of scientific language as describing real objects lying beyond experience. mately forbidden-goal of describing the real hidden structure of the world.
But Hempel and the logical empiricists found themselves forced to concede Twentieth-century empiricism made an important mistake here. We can
that this view does not make much sense of actual scientific work. When make sense of science only by treating much of it as an attempt to describe
scientists use terms like "electron" or "gene," they act as if they are do- hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena. This is a version
ing more than tracking complex patterns in the observable realm. But the of scientific realism, an idea that will be discussed later in this book. In sci-
idea that the logical empiricists were being pushed toward-the idea that ence there are depths. There is not a simple and fixed distinction between
scientific theories are aimed at describing unobservable real structures- two "layers" in nature-the empiricists were right to distrust this idea. In-
was hard to put on the table and defend. Empiricist philosophy of language stead there are many layers, or rather a continuum between structures that
seemed implacably opposed to it. are more accessible to us and structures that are less accessible. Genes are
Empiricists were familiar with bad versions of the idea that behind the hidden from us in some ways, but not as hidden as electrons, which in turn
ordinary world of observables there is a special and superior realm, pure are not as hidden as quarks. Although there are "depths" in science, what
and perfect. This "layered" view of reality seemed to empiricists a source is deep at one time can come to the surface at later times, and there may be
of endless trouble, right from the time of the ancient Greek philosopher lots of ways of interacting with what is presently deep.
Plato, who distinguished the illusory, unstable world of "appearances"
from the more perfect and real world of "forms;' Empiricists have rightly
2.6 Onthe Fallof LogicalEmpiricism
been determined to avoid this kind of picture. But much of science does ap-
pear to be a process in which people hypothesize hidden structures that Logical empiricist ideas dominated much American philosophy, and they
give rise to observable phenomena. These hidden structures are not "pure were very influential elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in some
and perfect" or "more real" than the observable parts of the world, but parts of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century. But by the mid-
they do lie behind or beneath observable phenomena. Of course, unob- r96os the view was definitely under threat; and by the middle or late
servable structures posited by a theory at one time might well turn out to r97os, logical empiricism was near to extinction. The fall of logical em-
be observable at a later time. In science, there is no telling what kinds of piricism was due to several factors, all of which I have either introduced in
new access to the hidden parts of the world we might eventually achieve. this chapter or will discuss in later chapters. One is the breakdown of the
But still, much of science does seem to proceed by positing entities that are, view of language that formed the basis of many logical positivist and logi-
at the time of the research in question, truly hidden. For the traditional em- cal empiricist ideas. Another is pressure from holist arguments. A third is
piricist philosopher, understanding scientific theorizing in a way that posits the frustrating history of attempts to develop an inductive logic (chapter 3).
a layer of observable phenomena and a layer of hidden structure respon- A fourth is the development of a new role for fields like history and psy-
sible for the phenomena takes us far too close to bad old philosophical chology in the philosophy of science (chapters 5-7). And eventually there
views like Plato's. We are too close for comfort, so we must give a different was pressure from scientific realism. But this was only possible after logi-
kind of description of how science works. cal empiricism had begun to decline.
The result is the traditional empiricist insistence that, ultimately, the
only thing scientific language can do is describe patterns in the observable
realm. In the first published paper that introduced logical positivism, Car-
FurtherReading
nap, Hahn, and Neurath said: "In science there are no 'depths';thereis sur-
face everywhere" ([r929] r973, 306). This is a vivid expression of the em- For much more on the empiricist ~d.ition in general, see Garrett and Barbanell,
piricist aversion to a view in which the aim of theorizing is to describe hidden Encyclopedia of Empiricism (I997).
38 Chapter
Two

Schlick's"Positivismand Realism"(I 9 32-3 3) and Feigl's"LogicalEmpiricism"

(194 3) aregood statementsof logical positivism byoriginalmembersof the Vienna
Circle. (Feig!uses the term "logical empiricism;' but his paper describes a fairly
strong, undilutedversionof the view.)Ayer'sLanguage, Truth, and Logic (1936) is
readable,vivid, and exciting. Some see it as a distortion of logical positivist ideas.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (r99 8) has an interestingcollection
of articles, especiallyin the light of new debates about the history of logical posi-
3
tivism. The article on logical positivism is by Friedmanand reflectshis somewhat Induction and Confirmation
unorthodox reading (de-emphasizing the empiricist tradition). Stadler's entry on
the Vienna Circlegives a more traditionalview. See also Creath'sentry on Carnap.
On all these issues, see also the essaysin Giereand Richardson1997.
PeterGalison's"Aufbau/Bauhaus" (x990) is a wonderfulaccount of the artistic,
3.1 The Motherof All Problems
social, and political interestsof the logical positivists and the links between these
interestsand their philosophicalideas. Passmorex966 is a good and accessiblesur- In this chapter we begin looking at a very important and difficult problem,
vey of philosophicalmovementsand trendsin the late nineteenthand earlytwenti- the problem of understanding how observations can confirm a scientific
eth centuries,includingabsolute idealism. theory. What connection between an observation and a theory makes that
Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (r96 5), is the definitivestatement of observation evidence for the theory? In some ways, this has been the fun-
logical empiricism.His Philosophy of Natural Science (r966) is the easy version. damental problem in the last hundred years of philosophy of science. This
Carnap's later lectures have been published as Introduction to the Philosophy of problem was central to the projectS of logical positivism and logical em-
Science (r995). piricism, and it was a source of constant frustration for them. And although
An attemptto revivesome logical positivistideas has recentlybegun;see, for ex- some might be tempted to think so, this problem does not disappear once
ample, Elliott Sober'sforthcomingbook Learningfrom Logical Positivism. we give up on logical empiricism. The problem, in some form or other,
arises for nearly everyone.
The aim of the logical empiricists was to develop a logical theory of ev-
idence and confirmation, a theory treating confirmation as an abstract re-
lation between sentences. It has become fairly clear that their approach to
the problem is doomed. The way to analyze testing and evidence in science
is to develop a different.kind of theory. But it will take a lot of discussion,
in this and later chapters, before the differences between approaches that
will and will not work in this area can emerge. The present chapter will
mostly look at how the problem of confirmation was tackled in the middle
of the twentieth century. And that is a tale of woe.
Before looking at twentieth-century work on these issues, we must again
look further into the past. The confirmation of theories is closely connected
to another classic issue in philosophy: the problem of induction. What rea-
son do we have for expecting patterns observed in our past experience to
hold also in the future? What justification do we have for using past obser-
vations as a basis for generalization about things we have not yet observed?
The most famous discussions of induction were written by the eighteenth-
century Scottish empiricist David Hume ([r739] r978). Hume asked, What
reason do we have for thinking that the future will resemble the past? There

39