Abstract
In the “Personal Postscript” to his seminal essay “Existential Hypothesis”, Herbert Feigl declares:
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Notes
- 1.
For an extended discussion of Feigl ’s attempt at a reconciliation of realism and empiricism, see Neuber 2011.
- 2.
There is little doubt that someone like Otto Neurath (himself a self-declared defender of the logical empiricist idea) would not have accepted this purely formalist point of view; but this would be a discussion for another day.
- 3.
Or, as Sellars writes at another place: “‘[T]oken’ is a meta-linguistic predicate, and is used properly when it is said that the state of affairs designated by one expression in a language is a token of another (perhaps the same) expression in the language.” (Sellars [1948] 1949, p. 440).
- 4.
At one place, he explicitly declares: “Not that coherence is the definition of truth. The point is rather that the Idealistic conception of coherence has its contribution to make to the theory of meaning, confirmation, and truth.” (Sellars [1948] 1949, p. 443).
- 5.
Thus in “Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology,” Sellars writes: “[W]hat can be clarified is the notion of one item in a world being in a formal sense about another item in the same world, which in turn has some direct or indirect relation to the same world. It is a matter of the same world as, and not of the world tout court.” (Sellars 1947a, p. 201). Moreover, in “Realism and the New Way of Words,” Sellars introduces the fictional character of an omniscient being (called ‘Jones’) that has, by definition, knowledge of THE (one and only) world, but which according to Sellars serves only as an illustrative contrast to the – only relevant – common empirical language user.
- 6.
Let it be noted, though, that Sellars ’s conception of a ‘world story’ bears strong similarities with Kasimir Ajdukiewicz’s notion of a “world-perspective.” Ajdukiewicz had introduced this notion in an article for the journal Erkenntnis in 1939 and Sellars had translated that article for the volume Readings in Philosophical Analysis, which he and Feigl published in 1949 (see Ajdukiewicz 1949).
- 7.
- 8.
It might be objected that there are many cases in which indexicals do not occur. Take, for example, the measurement statement ‘The temperature rises from 24, 37 °C to 29, 53 °C in the bomb calorimeter’. Here, we find no explicit use of indexicals. However, implicitly it is this specific bomb calorimeter in which at a specific point of time now at a specific place here the temperature rises from 25, 37 °C to 29, 53 °C.
- 9.
In his seminal Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, Schlick characterized this method as follows: “In order to fix a point in space, one must somehow, directly or indirectly, point to it […], that is, one establishes a spatio-temporal coincidence of two otherwise separate elements. And it now turns out that these coincidences always occur in agreement for all intuitive spaces of different senses and all individuals; precisely so is an objective ‘point,’ independent of individual experiences and valid for all, thereby defined.” (Schlick [1917] 1979, pp. 262–63) For an excellent discussion of Schlick ’s method of coincidences (and its – Einsteinian – scientific context), see Howard 1999.
- 10.
See Schlick [1918] 1974, p. 275: “[A]ll measurement, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, rests on the observation of spatio-temporal coincidences.”
- 11.
Thanks to Thomas Uebel for a very helpful comment concerning the main idea of this paper.
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Neuber, M. (2017). Feigl, Sellars, and the Idea of a “Pure Pragmatics”. In: Pihlström, S., Stadler, F., Weidtmann, N. (eds) Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50730-9_7
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