Abstract
The increasing, cumulative, and spectacular successes of science and technology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made science the most prestigious and authoritative institution in western society.1 This can be seen in a number of ways. In Germany, from about 1830 onwards scientism was not only in the ascendancy but an intellectual threat to the legitimacy of philosophy. From about 1870 onwards in Germany the new philosophy tended to justify itself as concerned with the logic of science and the articulation of a world view replacing philosophy. This current was subsequently to sweep across Great Britain and the Atlantic.2 At the first meeting of the American Philosophical Association, on March 31, 1902, at Columbia University, the association’s charter president, J.E. Creighton, pointed out that philosophy’s importance had been eclipsed by the empirical sciences. He urged that philosophy should compete more effectively with the empirical sciences by becoming more methodological, systematic, and by setting strict standards of what counts as professional work.3
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Notes (Chapter 2)
"Analytical philosophy was stimulated and came into being through science,particularly through the development of eighteenth-century botany, chemistry, physics, nineteenth-century non-Euclidean geometries, and above all mathematical logic“ Skolimowski (1967), p. 8.
American universities were much more heavily influenced in the twentieth century by the German model of a research institute than were British universities. It is, therefore, not too surprising that the notion of analytic philosophy as a technical discipline is much more endemic to the United States than it is to Britain. The 1930s migration of positivists from Germany to the U.S. is also relevant.
See the unpublished dissertation of Edward I. Pitts, Penn State, 1979.
Unless we indicate otherwise, when we use the expressions `analytic philosophy’ or `analytic philosopher’ with or without the qualification `doctrinaire’, what we shall mean are those philosophers who subscribe to all or a significant part of the Enlightenment Project. Analytic philosophy cannot be reduced to the Enlightenment Project, and some of the strongest critics of the Enlightenment Project are in some broader sense analytic philosophers.
Russell (1945), p. 834.
Sellars (1963), p. 173.
Dummett (1978), p. 438. Quine’s statements that philosophy is continuous with science are to be found in Quine (1969b) and (1969c).
Sacks (1990), p. 193, n.1.
Rorty (1982), p. 33.
The dominant contemporary spirit… [is one of] privileging facts about the physical and seeking to understand statements about mind and consciousness in its terms. This is known as physicalism, or less often materialism (the word physicalism is preferred because physics itself asserts that not everything that exists is material; the world includes such items as forces and fields)“ Blackburn (1996), p.68.
Castafieda (1980), p. 27.
Chisholm (1982), p. vii.
R.G. Collingwood (1957), p. 175: “[A] search for truth, and a search that does not go unrewarded: but that natural science is not, as the positivists imagined, the only department or form of human thought about which this can be said, and is not even a self-contained and self-sufficient form of thought, but depends for its very existence upon some other form of thought which is different from it and cannot be reduced to it.” Collingwood’s original critique of positivism and scientism, An Essay on Philosophical Method, was first published in 1933.
For the realist it is important that there is no residual reference to us (our language, our sensibilities, our conceptual scheme)… realists believe that a good conceptual scheme `carves reality at the joints“’ Blackburn (1996), p. 71. Unambiguous expressions of this kind of realism are to be found in Salmon (1984); D. Lewis (1983); Humphreys (1989); Salmon (1990); Boyd (1993). For a discussion of Carnap as a scientific realist see Creath (1985). There are other weaker senses of `realism’, senses which increasingly reflect awareness of the inherent difficulties of the Enlightenment Project. See Putnam (1987) for the distinction between realism with a capital `R’ and with a lower case `r’. Dummett (1978) argues for `antirealism’ which turns out to be the anti-positivist position that truth conditions are to be replaced by assertability conditions; sense experience is not essential to the verification or assertability of a truth.
in whatever ways the theories of science of Popper and Carnap may differ, their common and decisive weakness lies in the fact that they proceed generally in an unhistorical manner. And so it is with most of the other contemporary proposals….“ Hubner (1983), p. 70.
A full blown history of the philosophy of science (as opposed simply to the philosophy of science or the history of science) would show that modern or post-Renaissance philosophers poured the new wine of seventeenth century mechanical science into the old bottles of both Aristotelianism (Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke) and Platonism (e.g., Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley) as well as theism (Newton) while some interpreted the new science in terms of the Copernican view of philosophy (Hume and Kant).
For a description of the continuing importance of Aristotelianism in the history and philosophy of science see Losee (1993).
For a discussion of contemporary debate about the nature of explanation in Aristotle see Ruben (1990).
Toulmin (1972).
Hempel and Oppenheim (1948); Hempel (1942).
Popper (1950), pp. 445–46.
The theory of evolution in biology “explains” but does not predict. Analytic philosophers must either deny that the theory of evolution explains or surrender the notion that explanation and prediction are symmetrical.
Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), p. 323.
Hempel (1965a).
Goodman (1947), pp. 149–51.
See Armstrong (1983).
In the controversy between Einstein’s general theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s version of quantum mechanics, analytic philosophers have tended to side with Einstein because Einstein’s views are, more compatible with total conceptualization and the alleged symmetry between explanation and prediction.
Capaldi (1975).
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise to-morrow: and this means we do not know whether it will rise“ Wittgenstein, Tractatus (6.36311).
Nagel (1961).
Nagel (1961) suggested that genuine scientific laws, as opposed to accidental generalizations, are unrestricted in time and space. However, this would rule out Kepler’s laws of planetary motion (space), and Newton’s theory of gravitation (time). Nagel’s book (1961) was a classic statement of the positivist philosophy of science. Nagel extended Hempel’s account of scientific explanation to biology and argued that teleological explanations could be eliminated. He also extended Hempel’s account to historical explanation.
Contemporary sub-atomic physics has made this issue even more complicated by invoking entities such as quarks or properties of entities that are in principle not isolable.
For a useful discussion of the Bayesianisn program in confirmation see Papineau (1996), pp. 295–298.
Popper (1959).
Kneale (1949).
What we have here is the old commitment to transcendental idealism–the world in itself is not the world of which we have empirical knowledge–along with an empirical realist claim, that the world of which we do have knowledge is constituted in part by the framework we apply to it, so that the success of its application is not surprising. The difference being that whereas Kant is concerned with the constitutive role of the mind, Quine is concerned with that of language“ Sacks (1990), pp. 183–84.
Braithwaite (1955).
This should help to explain the consternation of analytic philosophers of science when faced with Heisenberg’s contention of the existence of probabilistic laws on the sub-structural level of quantum physics.
This development or transition from epistemological individualism to a social view of knowledge acquisition will have important parallels in other areas of analytical philosophical endeavor. It clearly parallels the transition in epistemology from a focus on sense data to a focus on language.
Nagel (1961), pp. 336–37.
Although he attended some of the meetings of the Vienna Circle, Popper was never considered a member, and he disagreed with Carnap on a number of issues. For our purposes, however, we note the following: (1) whatever their disagreements, Popper subscribed to scientism, to naturalism, and to the anti-agency view of the human self; (2) Popper was always a classical liberal, highly critical of Neurath’s Marxism and the widespread socialist beliefs of the members of the circle.
Copernicus’ heliocentric theory is not to be confused with the Copernican Revolution in philosophy initiated by Hume and Kant. There is, however, an historical connection in that Kant had Copernicus in mind when he formulated the expression “Copernican Revolution in philosophy.” See Capaldi (1970).
Duhem (1954), p. 187.
Quine (1951).
Ibid.,p. 43.
Feyerabend (1975).
Hubner (1983) argues that analytic philosophy of science“lack[s] an understanding of the historical foundations of scientific progress, as this
relates to something which goes beyond the immediate framework of science today“ (p. 70).
Kuhn (1970), p. 206.
Lakatos and Musgrave (1970).
resolution of scientific controversies often takes a long time - for example, almost a century in the case of Copernicanism… All that traditional naturalism needs to show is that resolution is ultimately achieved, in favor either of one of the originally contending parties or of some emerging alternative that somehow combines their merits“ Kitcher (1992), pp. 97–98.
Laudan (1977), (1984).
A similar argument is to be found in C.S. Peirce. For a trenchant critique of this argument see Rescher (1978),especially pp. 250–52.
Worrall (1988), p. 274.
Rescher (1978), especially Chapter VIII.
Van Fraassen (1989) rejects the existence of law as a metaphysical notion and advocates the instrumentalist view that science is a construction or set of models to represent phenomena.
Popper (1950), pp. 234–35.
Einstein is not a perfect fit for Popper. When asked what He would have done if Eddington’s observations had failed to support his theory, Einstein replied: “Then, I should have been sorry for the good lord, for the theory is correct.” Quoted in Holton (1970). Einstein is the favorite scientist of analytic philosophers of science who adhere to the Enlightenment Project because he was always a committed realist. On the other hand, one can find twentieth-century scientific geniuses who are not realists and therefore routinely ignored or dismissed by these same philosophers. Werner Heisenberg is an example: “[T]he objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behavior of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behavior…. Science always presupposes the existence of man and we… must remember that we are not merely observers, but also actors on the stage of life” Heisenberg (1958), p. 15.
Popper (1983), p. 131.
Popper (1962), p. 246.
Popper (1983), pp. 28–29.
Popper (1983), pp. 17–18.
Margolis (1986) and (1987).
Holton (1988).
Toulmin (1972).
See also Hull (1988) and (1989).
See Sober (1993).
Shapere (1983).
Feyerabend (1975), (1978), (1981).
This different kind of understanding we call `explication’ and contrast it with both `elimination’ and `exploration’ as these function within the analytic conversation. See Chapter Three for the beginning of the deployment of this trio of concepts.
See van Fraassen (1980) and (1989).
Hesse (1974), (1980). See also Cartwright (1983) denying that unification is necessary to science.
Stockman (1983), pp. 258–59: “If its [science] objectivity, its universality and its necessity, cannot be grounded, as it seems on the basis of earlier argument that it cannot, then the case for the `autonomy’ of science is weakened, and the case for an alternative conception of scientific progress bound to `external’ goals of the satisfaction of real human needs is strengthened.”
Hubner (1983) engages in a detailed analysis of Einstein’s theory of relativity in order to show that the analytic philosophical notion of rationality is false, that analytic philosophy of science ignores history, and that the historical context determines what the facts and fundamental principles will be (p. 107). He also manages to do this without falling into relativism (p. 116).
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Capaldi, N. (1998). Analytic Philosophy Of Science. In: The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3300-7_3
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