The Logician’s Dilemma: Deductive Logic, Inductive Inference and Logical Empiricism

Abstract

One of the consistent and admirable features of the practice of logical empiricist philosophers of science during the period in which logical empiricism dominated English-language philosophy of science was the remarkable extent to which they subjected their own philosophical conceptions to persistent criticism, especially with respect to the question of their adequacy as an account of the (sound elements of) the actual practice of scientists. During roughly the decade 1955–1965 it became clear, largely as a result of investigations by logical empiricists (see, e.g., Feigl 1956; Hempel 1954, 1958, 1965a) that there were serious problems to be solved if logical empiricism was to prove adequate to the task of explicating all of “... the relevant facts concerning the logic and procedure of science.” In a number of papers (Boyd 1972, 1973, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984a, 1984b) I have argued that in fact logical empiricism is inadequate to this task and that a scientific realist conception of scientific knowledge is required in order to obtain an adequate account of even instrumental knowledge in science. My strategy in those papers has been to try to show, about every recognized feature of scientific methodology, that its epistemic reliability (even with respect to instrumental knowledge) can neither be explained nor justified except from a realist perspective.

It is ... difficult to escape the conclusion that when the two ... opposing views on the cognitive status of theories are each stated with some circumspection, each can assimilate into its formulations not only the facts concerning the primary subject matter explored by experimental inquiry but also all the relevant facts concerning the logic and procedure of science. In brief, the opposition between these views is a conflict over preferred modes of speech. (Nagel, The Structure of Science, p. 152).