Empiricism at Sea

Abstract

Ought one represent the Quine-Kuhn-Hanson-Feyerabend-Lakatos-Polanyi rejection of the logical positivist account of science that dominated the world of English-speaking philosophy in the decades between 1930 and 1960 as a rejection of empiricism itself? Is it permissible to group these critics together as though the differences between them in this context were not significant? These are the first questions that are likely to leap to the reader’s mind as he peruses Professor Feigl’s spirited defence of a threatened orthodoxy. As he reads on, another question may begin to nag him a little too. From the beginning, Professor Feigl concedes that “drastic revisions are in order”. Indeed, he admits so many of these revisions as his essay progresses that one is not altogether sure finally where to locate the substantial disagreement he believes to exist between him and those whom he is attacking. His aim, he says, is to defend “the central tenets of classical as well as of modern (or ‘logical’) empiricism” against the mistaken objections of ‘the critics of empiricism’. But as one notes the concessions he makes to these same critics, one cannot but ask whether many of the central tenets of these two forms of empiricism are not in fact being abandoned, and whether the critics are really critics of empiricism, as such, or only of two historical forms of it associated with 18th century Britain and 20th century Vienna respectively. In short, is it really empiricism that is at bay? And has not Professor Feigl, in the light of the concessions he makes, become one of the hunters himself, displaying (incidentally) an admirable openness of mind thereby?