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Paul Oppenheim on Order—The Career of a Logico-Philosophical Concept

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The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 273))

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Abstract

Paul Oppenheim (1885–1977) entered into the annals of twentieth-century philosophy as the co-author of Hempel, Kemeny, Putnam and Rescher, among others. Together, these authors made crucial contributions to issues such as the nature of scientific explanation, reduction, and the unity of science. In his far less studied writings as a single author, Oppenheim pursued a line of argument that is closely related to those classical issues of analytical philosophy, while at the same time opening up new perspectives.

In the 1920s, Oppenheim started to publish on the natural order of the sciences, and this topic continued to occupy him throughout his career. His own attitude can be characterized as being surprisingly tolerant. That is, he tried to develop a formal framework within which one could place all possible scientific disciplines from metaphysics and mathematics all the way to geography and history. This framework was meant to help elucidate the relationship between these disciplines, and to place notions such as “Gestalt” or “type” within a philosophical reconstruction of the sciences.

Our paper shows how Oppenheim’s ideas concerning a natural and tolerant ordering of the sciences interact with the topics of his co-authored works, which became part of the analytical orthodoxy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Max Born wrote concerning Oppenheim: “The Oppenheims had a son, who was a business partner of his father, but addicted to philosophy; he wrote a book concerning which he involved me in many a tedious discussion” (quoted after Rescher 1997, 337).

  2. 2.

    This paper has been reprinted in several important anthologies (e.g. Feigl and Brodbeck 1953, 319–352). On the role of these anthologies in shaping a standard view of logical empiricism, see Giere (1996, 338). On the role of this paper within the history of theories of explanation, see Salmon (1990).

  3. 3.

    Up to now, no complete list of Oppenheim’s (co-)publications is available; but compare the data given in the biographical sources in note 12. Without claiming absolute completeness, the present paper tries to fill some gaps in the bibliography of Oppenheim.

  4. 4.

    For typical examples, repeated in almost stereotypical fashion in virtually all of Oppenheim’s joint papers, see e.g. Helmer and Oppenheim (1945), 25 note 1; Hempel and Oppenheim (1948a), 135 note 1; Kemeny and Oppenheim (1952), 307 note 1. On the style of his collaborative projects, see Rescher (1997), 341: According to Rescher, it was Hempel who recruited “a long series of collaborators” for Oppenheim.

  5. 5.

    Even if referred to, Oppenheim’s early texts seem to be little used: Beth (1959), one of the few works to have Oppenheim (1926) in the bibliography, does not refer to the book in his text at all.—The reception of Oppenheim’s texts would merit closer study; J.H. Woodger (himself, being a biologist with no formal training in mathematics, looking for new logical tools to analyze theory forming in biology) views the Grelling–Oppenheim and Hempel–Oppenheim texts from the 1930s as models for “applications of the new logical ideas” (Woodger 1939, 81; cf. also Woodger 1952, 326). On Woodger—who is frequently referred to in Oppenheim’s texts—see Gregg and Harris (1964).—Nelson Goodman in 1946 (Goodman 1946) devotes a review to the papers by Hempel and Oppenheim and by Helmer and Oppenheim on the concept of confirmation; the review appeared just weeks after he first presented his own seminal paper on counterfactual conditionals. See also the reference to the Kemeny–Oppenheim paper on factual support in Goodman 1953, 69 note 6.—See also Kemeny (1951) on the relationship between the Helmer–Hempel–Oppenheim ideas and Carnap’s account of probability, and Kempski (1952) for an application of the Grelling–Oppenheim analysis of Gestalt concepts in the social sciences; on similar issues, see also Kluge (1999). In general, Oppenheim’s ideas proved remarkably fertile for studies in the field of the social sciences; see, e.g. Znaniecki (1952, 182), with an affirmative reference to Hempel’s and Oppenheim’s ideas on the concepts of type and order.

  6. 6.

    On Hempel’s philosophical development, see e.g. Friedman (2000) and Wolters (2000).

  7. 7.

    On Grelling, see Peckhaus (1993) and Luchins et al. (2001).

  8. 8.

    It is of great interest to compare Oppenheim’s study with Lewin’s Comparative Theory of Science (Lewin 1925). Lewin wants to study the “living roots” and the future perspectives of the traditional philosophical term “Wissenschaftslehre,” and finds both in the “practice of the special sciences” (Lewin 1925, 49). His own method is one of “comparative description” (Lewin 1925, 70). Although he explicitly refers to terms from early logical empiricism (e.g. “Einheitswissenschaft,” Lewin 1925, 57), and although his text is presented at the Erlangen conference on scientific philosophy that Carnap organized in 1923, he does not adopt a logic-based method. On Lewin’s project see Köchy (2010).

  9. 9.

    The Reichenbach papers in Pittsburgh would have to be consulted for further information. According to Hempel, he himself was introduced to Oppenheim by Reichenbach (Hempel 1991, 8).—In his classic The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Reichenbach 1951), Reichenbach does not mention Oppenheim, although Reichenbach places quite strong emphasis on the formative role of the nineteenth century: He views the relevant developments of this period, however, exclusively in terms of the logical empiricists’ account of science and philosophy.—Of great interest is Carnap’s account of the conference on scientific philosophy at Erlangen in 1923 where he met Reichenbach for the first time, and where Lewin presented his idea of a comparative theory of science; on this conference see Thiel (1993). Some of the issues that we find back in Oppenheim’s work have been treated at this conference: “pure logic,” including “relational structures,” but also “applied logic, e.g., the relation between physical objects and sense-data, a theory of knowledge without metaphysics, a comparative theory of the sciences, the topology of time, and the use of the axiomatic method in physics” (quoted from Reichenbach 1978, 40; in this volume, one also finds a considerable amount of biographical information on Reichenbach). The comprehensive volume on Reichenbach (Salmon 1979) refers to Oppenheim only via the Hempel–Oppenheim paper; the biographical account in Kamlah (1993) does not mention Oppenheim.

  10. 10.

    This text was originally published as “Ziele und Wege der Physikalischen Erkenntnis” in Handbuch der Physik, vol. 4: Allgemeine Grundlagen der Physik.

  11. 11.

    Cf. Ash (1995). See also Ash (1994) and Cat (2007) for highly interesting discussions of the relationship between Gestalt psychology and logical positivism, including the links to the Berlin Group.

  12. 12.

    The most extensive information on Oppenheim’s biography can be found in Rescher (1997) and Rescher (2006). See also Schröder–Heister (1984) and Luchins et al. (2001); a nice anecdote on Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheim in Tucker (1985).

  13. 13.

    Rescher (1997, 338). The archive of Frankfurt University, however, could not verify these reports on the basis of archival documents.

  14. 14.

    Cf. Ziche (2011); on the difficulty of characterizing Driesch’s role precisely—as an opponent of logical empiricism, or rather as introducing a sort of “family conflict” within this group—see Danneberg (1993).—On the “Varieties of Order” within Gestalt psychology see Smith (1988a), 61–65.

  15. 15.

    This paper was presented at several international conferences: In 1938, at the 4th conference on the unity of science in Cambridge, and again in 1939 in English at Harvard; see Stadler (1997), 427, 431.

  16. 16.

    Oppenheim (1926), 8; in the German original, Oppenheim speaks of the “gegebenen Wissenschaften.”

  17. 17.

    Oppenheim stresses explicitly that “with this form of definition [in terms of a tendency towards the ‘typical’ resp. towards the ‘individual’], there no longer is a break between the natural sciences and the humanities” (Oppenheim 1926, 25).

  18. 18.

    In 1936, Kurt Lewin presents his conception of psychology in topological form, devoting quite a lot of attention to the mathematical basis of this mode of presentation (Lewin 1936). Oppenheim is not mentioned in this work. Regarding “problems of coordination,” Lewin refers to Reichenbach, A.E. Blumberg and Feigl (Blumberg and Feigl were co-authors of an early paper on logical positivism in 1931; Lewin 1936, 59).

  19. 19.

    Some of the illustrations in Oppenheim’s Natürliche Ordnung are reproduced in Ziche (2008).

  20. 20.

    Mathematics lies close to the pole of generality, in virtue of the low density of concepts and properties encountered in mathematical statements (only metaphysics comes closer to being absolutely general); history marks the extreme pole of concreteness, with a maximum of property density, but low conceptual density; geography also has high property density, and lies thus at the concrete side of the coordinate space, but it also displays a rather high conceptual density and thus differs fundamentally from history (Oppenheim 1926, 257; the coordinates he uses are explained on pp. 235, 237).

  21. 21.

    On “Begriffszahl” and “Merkmalszahl” see Oppenheim (1926), 236sqq.

  22. 22.

    Cf. Danneberg and Schernus (1994), 461. On Ostwald, see Ziche (2008), ch. IV.7; Ziche (2009).

  23. 23.

    The original runs: “[…] die sog. Erklärung, genauer gesagt für die Aufstellung von Gesetzen, die empirische Daten bestimmter Art miteinander verknüpfen. In der Formulierung der Gesetze nämlich treten ja die Begriffe auf, die die verknüpften Daten beschreiben, und sind diese Begriffe formal inadäquat, so muß dasselbe auch für die mittels ihrer formulierten Gesetze gelten.”

  24. 24.

    In German: “Es ist geplant, in späteren Veröffentlichungen eine solche allgemeine Theorie der ordnenden Begriffsbildung ausführlich und in formal strengerer Weise zu entwickeln und sie für die logische Analyse weiterer Wissenschaftsgebiete nutzbar zu machen.”

  25. 25.

    In German, this program is stated as looking for “einen vertieften, ins Einzelne gehenden Nachweis für die logische Einheit der Wissenschaft.”

  26. 26.

    In German: “Freilich ist diese Toleranz mit dem Nachteil verknüpft, daß in der Reihe der zur Untersuchung gelangenden Wissenschaften auch die Metaphysik—die allerdings im Wesentlichen schon auf die Erkenntnistheorie beschränkt wird—und gewisse normative Teildisziplinen, etwa der Nationalökonomie und der Geschichtswissenschaft auftreten.”

  27. 27.

    In German: “führt bei der mehr deskriptiven Tendenz des Buches nicht zu der m.E. unvermeidlichen Konsequenz, daß ‘normative’ und logisch verwandte Disziplinen als Systeme von Scheinsätzen aus der Reihe der zu untersuchenden echten Wissenschaften—es handelt sich hier ja nicht um eine Frage der Terminologie—gestrichen werden.”

  28. 28.

    In the German original: “Welche der beiden sprachlichen Darstellungsformen ist nun vorzuziehen? Die Antwort, vorzuziehen sei diejenige, welche ihrer Form nach die Struktur der Wirklichkeit richtig wiedergibt, ist als metaphysisch abzulehnen. Keine der beiden Sprachformen kann überhaupt ‘richtig’ oder ‘unrichtig’ sein, wohl aber kann je nach dem Zusammenhang eine zweckmässiger sein als die andere.”

  29. 29.

    This paper is the only co-authored paper in which Oppenheim features as the first author; but then, that may just be a question of adhering to an alphabetical order that is broken only once, in the case of the Rescher–Oppenheim paper. It contains one of the more explicit discussions of Carnap’s ideas, and clearly rejects Carnapian ‘epistemological’ reductionism (Oppenheim and Putnam 1957, 5). On the Oppenheim–Putnam conception of “unity of science,” see Hacking (1996).

  30. 30.

    Hilary Putnam considered this paper in 1969 as “still being the best paper on the subject” (Putnam 1969, 242).

  31. 31.

    Jaegwon Kim refers to this paper as “the only explicit discussion of the levels picture I know of in contemporary analytical philosophy” (Kim 2002, 6), thereby extending the label “contemporaneous” to cover almost fifty years of philosophical development—and he also emphasises the close similarities with earlier hierarchical models.

  32. 32.

    E.g. by Comte and Flint (Oppenheim and Putnam 1957, 34 note 45); on the context cf. Ziche (2008).

  33. 33.

    Oppenheims’ later paper (Oppenheim 1959) is marked as a discussion note on the earlier one and is classified by Oppenheim as a “supplement.” In it he does not refer back to his earlier autonomous work but only relates to the paper on the “Unity of Science” that he co-authored with Putnam.—Oppenheim’s papers from the 1960s and 1970s focus on quantum mechanics. In Bedau and Oppenheim (1961), the discussion is based on the relationship between “phenomenal” and “interpretational” sentences, and attempts a precise definition of “compatibility.” In cooperation with Brody (Brody and Oppenheim 1966, 1967, 1969), these ideas are extended into the field of psychology, together with Lindenberg (Lindenberg and Oppenheim 1974, 1978) he extends this notion even further to cover epistemological and economic issues, still remaining as untechnical as possible, and without making use of new developments in logic (such as modal logic).

  34. 34.

    Oppenheim narrows down his field of study to publications in “empirical science” (Oppenheim 1957, 155), without however commenting on this any further. That he envisages a broad view of “science” becomes clear from his rejection of the distinction between natural sciences and humanities (Oppenheim 1957, 182 note 24); see also the programmatic reference to the unity of science at the end of the paper (Oppenheim 1957, 191).

  35. 35.

    While some presentations of the received view narrow down this requirement to the requirement of an axiomatic presentation in first-order logic, this is historically inaccurate. Oppenheim is also explicit about admitting a broader range of logical languages; cf. Oppenheim (1957), 157.

  36. 36.

    While he officially adopts Kemeny’s explication of strength in terms of the “logical measure function,” Oppenheim also considers the use of other, similar measures of strength (see Oppenheim 1957, 169–170).

  37. 37.

    See Oppenheim (1957), 165, for the official definition of the coordinates, which includes some normalization.

  38. 38.

    On these typological categories cf. also Ostwald (1909).

  39. 39.

    See the data in the bibliography. See also the review by Chisholm (1962), who briefly discusses all four texts.—French library catalogues (e.g. the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale) refer to Oppenheim’s “Dimensions of Knowledge,” together with the accompanying pieces by Morris, Kling and Bromberger, under the title “psychologie de la pensée,” thus opening up yet another link to older issues in psychology, but also underlining the continuity in Oppenheim’s work in which the psychology of thought had already featured prominently in the 1920s (see Sect. 13.3).

  40. 40.

    On the related motive of disunity as a category in analyzing the sciences, see Galison and Stump (1996).

  41. 41.

    Apart from what has been mentioned above, cf., e.g., also his denial of any realist taxonomy and his affirmation of pragmatic language choice in Oppenheim (1957), 173.

  42. 42.

    On the question as to how to study the emergence of an analytical orthodoxy, see again Giere (1996).

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Paul Ziche & Thomas Müller

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  1. Paul Ziche
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Correspondence to Paul Ziche .

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  1. Universität Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn, 33098, Germany

    Nikolay Milkov

  2. Fak. Kulturwissenschaften, Abt. Philosophie, Universität Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, Paderborn, 33098, Germany

    Volker Peckhaus

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figure 1

Paul Oppenheim in the early 1930s in Frankfurt

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Ziche, P., Müller, T. (2013). Paul Oppenheim on Order—The Career of a Logico-Philosophical Concept. In: Milkov, N., Peckhaus, V. (eds) The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 273. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5485-0_13

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