Logic and the Philosophical Interpretation of Science

Abstract

The Vienna Circle began gathering in the early 1920s with a profound objective. Developments of fundamental importance in science, particularly the advent or relativity and quantum theories, had occurred which clearly upset much of what has become known as classical physics. But these new theories seemed to carry much more in the way of implications. For not only the classical scientific theories, but also the classical philosophies which attempted to interpret science, its methods, and its goals, seemed to have been refuted by these new scientific revelations. It was the explicit original aim of the Vienna Circle and likeminded thinkers elsewhere, and of the logical empiricist movement they ultimately spawned, to develop, through close examination of the new scientific developments and their implications, a new view of the nature of knowledge, the methods of reasoning by which the search for that knowledge should proceed, and the goals at which it aimed. It was a laudable mission indeed, and one sort of result was some extremely valuable (if ultimately controversial) insights into the nature and methods of the new sciences, typified by the work of Carnap, Reichenbach, and others on space and time and the interpretation of quantum mechanics.¹