Logical empiricism of the 1930s was quite different from logical empiricism as it thrived in the 1950s. This later version is better known in part because it was codified by Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn attacked “that image of science by which we are now possessed” (1962, 1) - an image of theories as logically transparent structures reaching from observations to abstract theory and changing in time by acquiring or modifying concepts and statements. This image of science went hand in hand with logical empiricism's interests in the logical structure of theory and procedures such as explanation and confirmation.

Yet the project that Kuhn attacked was itself very young. Kuhn wrote Structure in the late 1950s after a transformation had taken place, specifically, a narrowing in the scope, of the values and goals of logical empiricism. For Kuhn, logical empiricism was a philosophy of science concerned mainly with logic and using logic to understand science.

A standard picture of the conception of a priori knowledge developed within the logical empiricist tradition runs as follows. This conception arose primarily in the context of the philosophy of mathematics - where, in particular, it was intended to provide an alternative to the Kantian theory of synthetic a priori knowledge that would be both acceptable from an empiricist point of view and more adequate to mathematical practice than the simple-minded empiricism associated with John Stuart Mill. Here the logical empiricists found an answer in the logicist philosophy of mathematics of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, according to which mathematics is reducible to logic (the new mathematical logic developed by Frege and Russell) and is therefore analytic a priori, not synthetic a priori. There is thus no need of the Kantian faculty of pure intuition, and, at the same time, we can still (thanks to the richness and complexity of Frege's and Russell's new logic) do justice to both the a priority and the complexity of our actual mathematical knowledge. The heart of the logical empiricists' answer to Kant, therefore, is that his main example of synthetic a priori knowledge, pure mathematics, is not synthetic after all. All that we ultimately need to explain the possibility of pure a priori knowledge in the exact sciences is the analytic a priori.

Thus Hans Reichenbach in a letter written during the summer of 1935 to his colleague Ernst von Aster in Giessen, by way of comment on his book Die Philosophie der Gegenwart (The Philosophy of the Present, 1935). The fact that in his Turkish exile Reichenbach was still keen to point out the independence of the “Berlin Circle” is also demonstrated by other parts of his correspondence at that time.

In the twenty-first century, no one is a logical empiricist. There are, to be sure, more than a few philosophers whose work resembles in important ways the work of the logical empiricists, indeed, whose work, if it had been done in the 1950s, would be logical empiricist work. But, no one presents such work under the rubric “logical empiricism.” Nor, really, could anyone plausibly attempt to do so - being a logical empiricist really is not a live option for a twenty-first century philosopher.

It is a matter of some historical and philosophical interest to think about why and how logical empiricism came to lose its status as a philosophical project to be pursued. After all, as this volume amply demonstrates, logical empiricism was a leading project in analytic philosophy in the not too distant past and, indeed, the preeminent project within certain branches of philosophy, such as philosophy of science. Something substantial must have happened for such a project to decline so importantly in influence that even the most technical work in areas such as confirmation theory or philosophy of physics cannot today be said to be examples of logical empiricist philosophy of science.

THE HYPOTHETICO-DEDUCTIVE METHOD

Confirmation and probability are the objects of much attention on the part of logical empiricists. In the first place, confirmation is connected with the ideal represented by the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method, reflecting the idea that scientific knowledge results from the interplay of laws, advanced by way of hypotheses, and singular statements regarding observational findings. Only well-established scientific laws allow for the application of the H-D method and can provide a sound basis for prediction and explanation. Most logical empiricists regard confirmation as the natural candidate for establishing scientific laws. Another candidate is corroboration, embraced by Popper contra logical empiricism.

A lucid description of the interplay between laws and observational statements, which is at the core of the H-D method, is to be found in the following passage by Hans Hahn, anticipating the notion of corroboration:

INTRODUCTION: THE “STANDARD ACCOUNT” AND ITS LIMITATIONS

The precise nature of Wittgenstein's relationship to the Vienna Circle has been much debated, and there are deep disagreements about the strengths and weaknesses of the different positions attributed to the principal protagonists. However, there has been a widespread consensus about the overall character of the encounter: the early Wittgenstein was an important influence on the founders of logical empiricism, and the later Wittgenstein one of its leading opponents. In other words, the “standard account” of Wittgenstein's relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle's formulation of its positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a “scientific conception of the world.”

However, this telegraphic summary of a complex and intricate relationship is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it amounts to an oversimplified template that prevents our appreciating the fluidity and protean character of the philosophical dialogues that took place at the time, both between Wittgenstein and various members of the Vienna Circle, and among the logical empiricists over the value of Wittgenstein’s contribution. Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s own views changed rapidly and repeatedly during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the participants in these discussions gave expression to a wide range of different views; taken out of context, their formulation of those views can easily strike a contemporary reader as clear anticipations of positions that are now standard items of philosophical terminology, such as physicalism, verificationism, or a use theory of meaning. Nevertheless, at the time those positions had not been articulated with anything like the degree of clarity that we now take for granted. In retrospectively identifying and attributing clear-cut positions, lines of influence, and axes of disagreement to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors in Cambridge and Vienna, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar terminology and the associated distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way.

If there is a movement or school that epitomized or typified analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it was, by all odds, logical empiricism. Logical empiricists such as Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Carl G. Hempel, and Herbert Feigl had, by 1950, influenced the major fields of analytic philosophy. They had been instrumental in creating a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, in establishing mathematical logic as a topic in and a tool for philosophy, and in creating the project of formal semantics. Logical empiricism provided an importantly new understanding of the nature of empiricism and a new rejection of metaphysics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century give logical empiricism a central place in the project, often repeating for analytic philosophy the revolutionary rhetoric of early logical empiricism. Because of this importance of logical empiricism in establishing the project of analytic philosophy, philosophical innovations both within and outside the analytic tradition in the 1960s and 1970s often were at pains to distance themselves from one aspect or another of logical empiricism.

THE THEORY QUESTION

A central question of philosophy of science, arguably the most central one, is “What is the structure of scientific theories?” Some contemporary philosophies of science have challenged the centrality of this “theory question” (henceforth T-question), arguing that it is more important to get an adequate understanding of the practice of scientific inquiry. Yet the logical empiricists placed great emphasis on theory: “Theories . . . are the keys to the scientific understanding of empirical phenomena: to claim that a given kind of phenomenon is scientifically understood is tantamount to saying that science can offer a satisfactory theoretical account of it” (Hempel 2001 (1970), 218). Hence, investigating the structure of these “keys” ought to be a central task for philosophy of science. As has been often observed, the basic problem of logical empiricism was how to be a good empiricist and at the same time “logical.” Or, to cast it in a more historico-philosophical setting, the problem was how the empiricist legacy of philosopher-scientists such as Ernst Mach and Pierre Duhem could be combined with the exigencies of modern logic and mathematics. As will be shown, this problem is intimately related to the problem of answering the T-question in an acceptable empiricist way.

The importance the logical empiricists attributed to the T-question does not mean that they always formulated it explicitly. Often they addressed it by asking questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, or they embedded it in more general problems such as “What is the structure of empirical science?” or “What is the structure of the language of empirical science?”

Having finished his doctorate in two years, W. V. O. Quine made a beeline for Vienna. This was 1932, and the object of his visit, Rudolf Carnap, had already gone on to Prague. After a few months of attending Moritz Schlick's lectures and meetings of the Vienna Circle, Quine too went on to Prague. He was not to return to Vienna for over 35 years, not, in fact, until he delivered “Epistemology Naturalized” (Quine 1969) as a lecture there in 1968. In the meantime Quine acquired, and indeed cultivated, a reputation for rejecting, some would say refuting, everything that was central to the new Viennese philosophy.

Here I want to challenge that picture. Quine did arrive in Vienna in 1932, but intellectually at least he never left. Quine tended to identify the Vienna Circle with Carnap. The Vienna that I am talking about is broader and more heterogeneous. Quine is rarely seen as a historian, but his historical picture of the Circle and of Carnap has been enormously influential, and his historical writing plays a crucial role in his argument for his nonhistorical views. Second, Quine's own views have direct Viennese antecedents, or if not, the arguments for them do. And finally, the views for which Quine was most famous were modified over the years, specifically in Carnap's direction. In short, Vienna remained the city of Quine's dreams; it was the home of his concerns, the source of his arguments, and the lodestar of his aspirations.

VIENNA

What I mean by “Vienna” of course is the Vienna Circle. And this is a broad and varied tradition. Naturally, the city has other long-standing and distinguished philosophical traditions. Generally, those traditions seem to have been of an empiricist sort, Aristotelian and sometimes Thomist. That is not surprising, given the redominance of Catholicism. Brentano and his school were well established in Vienna (and in Poland), and I say that despite Brentano’s having been born in Germany, leaving the priesthood, and spending most of his time in Vienna as privatdocent rather than as professor. But if we take Viennese philosophy so broadly as to include the whole Aristotelian tradition, then the idea that Quine fits somewhere in such a wide spectrum would hardly be worth considering.

Logical empiricism, as is well known, was deeply intertwined with both physics and logic. Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and, later, Herbert Feigl and Carl Hempel all pursued research programs inspired particularly by the achievement of relativistic physics and informed, to quite various degrees, by such accomplishments in logic as Gottlob Frege's account of mathematical knowledge, David Hilbert's program of axiomatization and implicit definition, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Bertrand Russell's theory of types, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness results, and Alfred Tarski's theory of truth. Quite often these thinkers were not merely inspired by the profound achievements of relativity and mathematical logic, but (as in the case of Schlick and Reichenbach especially) developed, as their own central philosophical projects, accounts of the validity and objectivity they took to be embodied in these advances in the natural and formal sciences. Thus to a considerable extent the history of logical empiricism reflects, and even parallels, the history of physics and logic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Yet a review of logical empiricists' writings reveals an affinity toward and a growing interest in behaviorism, neobehaviorism, Gestalt, and psychophysics - varieties of experimental psychology that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.

INTRODUCTION. THE COLLECTIVE DIMENSION: EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIENNA CIRCLE

The so-called Vienna Circle of logical empiricism first came to public attention in 1929 with the publication of a manifesto entitled Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific World-Conception. The Vienna Circle). Published for the Ernst Mach Society, this influential philosophical manifesto - dedicated to Moritz Schlick, the titular leader of the Vienna Circle - was signed by Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, who may be regarded as its editors and, with Herbert Feigl, its authors (Mulder 1968). The name “Vienna Circle” was originally suggested by Otto Neurath, who wanted to evoke pleasant associations with the “Vienna woods” or the “Viennese waltz” by alluding to the local origin of this collective (Frank 1949, 38).

The plan for this publication was set in motion when Moritz Schlick, who had come to Vienna in 1922 to take up a professorial appointment previously held by Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann (and Adolf Stöhr) and had founded the Vienna Circle in 1924, received a lucrative offer from the University of Bonn at the beginning of 1929. The threatened departure of Schlick was to be prevented by a joint official declaration of solidarity by the members of the Vienna Circle, the Ernst Mach Society (of which he was the head from 1928 to 1934), and further sympathizers with the cause of scientific philosophy.

INTRODUCTION

Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Herbert Feigl, and Carl Hempel all studied physics at university. Relativity theory and quantum theory, the two revolutionary developments of twentieth-century physics, happily coincided with the rise and consolidation of logical empiricism. Yet the designation “philosophy of physics” was little used by the logical empiricists themselves, while, with notable exceptions, they produced little of what is currently understood under that head, viz., detailed investigations into particular aspects or interpretations of physical theories. Certainly, there are important works of Reichenbach's, a few of Schlick's, mostly from his pre-Vienna days, and one or two others, recognizably belonging to philosophy of physics. Nonetheless, it is something of an anachronism to speak of logical empiricism's “philosophy of physics”.

One reason is that logical empiricist orthodoxy allotted but a narrow window to the legitimate practice of “scientific philosophy”. Carnap's 1934 declaration that “we pursue Logical Analysis but no Philosophy” is perhaps characteristic (Carnap 1934a, 28, emphasis in original). Frank, a working physicist, warned that philosophical deliberation continually posed the threat of becoming an “opium for science” (Frank 1932, viii/1998, 11), and that the very meaning of the term “philosophy of natural science” was to be sharply demarcated from all manner of “school philosophy”.

INTRODUCTION

Our image of logical empiricism has changed dramatically during the last two decades. One of the entrenched views proven wrong was that the logical empiricists were not interested in the historical and social context of science and of philosophy of science. Today we know that some of the most important members of the Vienna Circle (especially Neurath, Carnap, Frank, and Hahn) were perfectly aware of the fact that their efforts to elaborate a new philosophical conception of scientific knowledge were by no means “neutral” in respect to the social conditions and political struggles of the time. Carnap's foreword to Der logische Aufbau der Welt in 1928 and the Vienna Circle's manifesto of 1929 are only the best known examples. Yet it is not that easy to find explicit answers to the questions of which part history and sociology of science should play in the “orchestrated” unified science (to borrow an expression Neurath adopted) and how the relation between history and sociology of science and philosophy of science should be conceived. To reconstruct such an answer is the purpose of this chapter.

THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL DIMENSION OF EARLY LOGICAL EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

One reason why the aspect of logical empiricism that concerns us here has escaped attention for so long is that the type of contextualization of science which Neurath, Frank and Zilsel intended did not fit very well into the twentieth-century debates through which the sociology of science defined itself as an autonomous discipline. This holds for the debates in the 1920s and ’30s about the sociologies of science developed by Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim just as much as for Robert Merton’s, which dominated the international discussion in the 1940s and ’50s. In both cases the subject matter of the new discipline was delimited against two competitors: first, against Marxist social theory and its materialist thesis that being determines consciousness; second, against philosophy (with similar arguments as in the dispute about psychologism prior to World War I).

Philosophy of social science is unlikely to figure in many people's judgment as a field in which logical empiricism effected great progress. If anything, impressions run to the contrary. Considered in the right light, however, the riches of logical empiricist philosophy of social science were considerable. The trick is to find the proper lighting. Here the aim is to illuminate a much misunderstood early doctrine, not only for its intrinsic interest but also - alongside Chapters 3 and 11 but from a different angle - to highlight what was lost when central members of the Vienna Circle were marginalized in the heyday of orthodox logical empiricism.

THE PLURALITY OF LOGICAL EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHIES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, BROADLY CONCEIVED

For current purposes virtually all post-World War II philosophy of social science must be neglected. The reason is by no means that there is no good work in the field during that time by logical empiricists. Nor is the reason that in this period it is even more difficult to decide membership of the movement than in the previous one. It is rather that no figures central in pre–WorldWar II logical empiricism in this field remained to continue their work after the war. Given this discontinuity of personnel, the concentration here will lie on prewar logical empiricist philosophy of social science. Even so delimited, the field holds forgotten riches.

Its philosophy of logic and mathematics was what most characteristically distinguished logical empiricism from previous forms of empiricism or positivism. This is the aspect that gave it the name logical empiricism, and gave it the hope of succeeding where the nineteenth-century attempts at a scientific empiricism by such figures as Comte, Mill, and Mach had failed. The inability of these thinkers to supply a plausible account of mathematics had undermined the claim of empiricism to be the philosophical approach most adequate to modern science. It was generally agreed that Mill's empiricist account of arithmetic had not succeeded.

Few novels have had such an influence on world affairs, or engendered such divergent, interpretive communities and views that have continually changed. Gayatri Spivak identified the implied multi-levelled readers of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses as the international, postcolonial migrant readerships:

Yet some of the contradictions of the term 'secular Muslim' emerged in the diverse responses to the publication of the novel, as we shall see. Those who interpret the novel as blasphemy object chiefly to two chapters in the book. One of the protagonists of the novel is the Indian actor Gibreel Farishta, who suffers schizophrenic dream-sequences in which God reveals his will to the Prophet. A scribe named Salman writes down God's commands as they come from the lips of Mohammed, and he decides to play a trick by changing some of the divine words.