Many informed readers of Carnap (and Quine) have taken Quine’s objections to Carnap’s account of analyticity in terms of semantical rules to have failed. This paper counters this, arguing that Quine actually saw himself as applying Carnap’s own philosophical standards more strictly than Carnap himself did. Quine was, as he later reported, “just being more carnapian than Carnap.” This paper offers a careful analysis of Section 4 of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which shows Carnap conflating two senses of “semantical rule.” Although the first is clear, Quine sees it as being of no use in defining analyticity. The second, though integral to Carnap’s method of defining analyticity, Quine shows to be left unexplained by Carnap’s definitions.

While Quine is often taken to have broken the Viennese straitjacket of Logical Positivism, which rejected metaphysics, as an a priori but non-analytic, substantive discipline, allowing speculative metaphysics to be reborn, this paper argues against this. Instead, for all their much-discussed disagreements over analyticity and ontology, Quine shared Carnap’s more fundamental commitment to ‘scientific philosophy’: to the idea that legitimate philosophy is the work of handmaidens, site managers or accountants of science. Their primary role is to act to clarify, precisify and make explicit the methods and deliverances of science. The essay then brings Carnap and Quine to bear on more recent analytic trends towards metaphysics by specifically contrasting Carnap and Quine’s scientific philosophy with recent work by Timothy Williamson. This essay stresses Carnap and Quine’s considerable distance from Williamson; and that from Quine’s point of view as well as from Carnap’s, this recent ascendance of metaphysics will seem a departure from science without sufficient justification.

Kuhn has been hailed as one of the main critics of logical positivism since the publication of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But the image of science he criticizes in the published version of the book is not considered sufficiently clear and has left room for doubt as to whether or not positivism, rarely directly cited, is a real target of this criticism. In the first manuscript of the work, written in 1958, the traditional image of science becomes clearer due to the contrast Kuhn makes between science and art. This chapter shows that the traditional image of science that Kuhn presents through the contrast with art in the first manuscript is the same as the one logical positivists present in the contrast with philosophy, particularly in the context of one of their most important and characteristic ideas, the proposal of a scientific philosophy. This allows a proper assessment of the share of responsibility of logical positivism in the construction of the traditional image of science Kuhn criticizes and, thus, a better understanding of Kuhn’s relationship with positivism.

There is a familiar narrative of the development from Ernst Mach’s 'positivism' to the more sophisticated 'neo-positivism' of the Vienna Circle, with language analysis and formal logic as additional ingredients. But we also see an alternative historiography telling of the rise and decline of scientific philosophy and the genetic theory of learning from Mach to the Vienna Circle. Recent research on Mach uncovers a more complex and multifaceted influence and pluralist reception of his work within the Vienna Circle based on a general appreciation of his empiricism and his idea of the unity of science. This chapter reconstructs the complex and diverse reception of Mach by main members of the Vienna Circle, showing the inherent pluralism based on the common anti-Kantian and 'late Enlightenment' consensus between empiricism and pragmatism, with Mach figuring as a critic of 'school philosophy' and a pioneer of contemporary history and philosophy of science. The thesis of a strong positive reception and further development and extension (regarding language and logic) of Mach’s doctrines with a critical distance vis-à-vis academic metaphysical philosophy is demonstrated as a manifestation of Mach’s function as a role model and predecessor of Viennese Logical Empiricism from the 'First Vienna Circle' to the heyday of the Schlick Circle.