The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 to 2000

Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism

John Losee

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350169135
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350071537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This book offers the reader a guide to the major philosophical approaches to science since World War Two. Considering the bases, arguments and conclusions of the four main movements – Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism and Foundationalism – John Losee explores how philosophy has both shaped and expanded our understanding of science.

The volume features major figures of twentieth century science, and engages with the work of previous philosophers of science, including Norman Campbell, Rudolf Carnap, Ernest Nagel, Karl Popper, Richard Dawkins, and John Worrall. In particular, The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000 aims to answer the following questions: How should competing philosophies of science be evaluated? Should philosophy of science be a prescriptive discipline? Can philosophy of science achieve normative status without designating trans-historical evaluative principles? And finally, how can understanding the history of science aid us in analyzing the philosophy of science? In answering these questions, this book shows us why we understand science the way we do.

The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 to 2000 is essential reading for students and researchers working in the history and philosophy of science.

1

Logical Reconstructionism

Sources of Logical Reconstructionism

Philosophy of science is a commentary on science. To whom is this commentary addressed? Norman Campbell, in Foundations of Science (1919),¹ announced that he was writing for professional scientists. He proposed to do for physics what Hilbert and Peano had done for mathematics. These mathematicians had clarified the structure of axiom systems, thereby creating a strong foundation for their discipline. Campbell recommended a similar study of the “foundations” of empirical science. He contributed analyses of the nature of measurement, the role of induction in the discovery of scientific laws, and the structure of scientific theories.

Campbell was not the first to pose questions about the structure of science.² However, his statement of the aims of philosophy of science was widely shared. After the Second World War, the philosophy of science emerged as a distinct academic discipline, complete with graduate programs and a periodical literature. This professionalization occurred, in part, because many scholars adopted Campbell’s outlook. They believed that there were achievements to be won by the study of the foundations of science, and that science would benefit from this study.

In the early 1950s, however, doubts about this program arose. Skeptics suggested that the philosopher is not qualified to prescribe “proper scientific procedure” to the scientist. But then, what task remains? What is it that distinguishes the work of the philosopher of science from that of the historian of science or the sociologist of science? Perhaps the drama includes no role for the philosopher of science.

Five decades after Campbell’s study of the foundations of science, Paul Feyerabend cast a retrospective glance over the recent record of the philosophy of science. His conclusion was that

there is not a single discovery in this field (assuming that there have been discoveries) that would enable us to attack important scientific problems in a new way or to better understand the manner in which progress was made in the past.³

Is the philosophy of science guilty as charged? One purpose of the present study is to compile evidence upon which a verdict may be rendered.

The Legacy of Logical Positivism

To a great extent, the philosophy of science of the 1940s was a legacy of the logical positivism of the 1930s. Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick were the acknowledged leaders of logical positivism.⁴ The logical positivist position was that all genuine philosophical problems can be solved by a logical analysis of language, and that metaphysical claims can be shown to fall outside the range of cognitively significant discourse.

The same conviction prevailed in the philosophy of science of the 1940s. Most philosophers of science agreed that an anti-metaphysical bias had promoted the growth of science and that claims about “vital forces,” “absolutely simultaneous events,” and the “luminiferous aether” had been excluded from science by the same sort of logical analysis recommended by logical positivists.

Logical positivists sought to provide a secure epistemological foundation for the sciences. By and large, they agreed that this was a matter of specifying the ways in which the statements of the sciences are related to “elementary propositions” whose truth or falsity can be determined directly and unambiguously.

Ludwig Wittgenstein outlined the logical structure of this transition in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).⁵ Given a set of logically independent elementary propositions, Wittgenstein constructed an artificial language that contains both complex propositions and universal propositions. Within this language, each complex proposition is a truth-function of its constituent elementary propositions. For example, “p & q” is true provided that p and q both are true, and false otherwise; “p v q” is true provided that at least one of the pair [p, q] is true, and false if both p and q are false. Wittgenstein also specified a procedure to make universally quantified propositions within the language truth-functions of the elementary propositions.

Philosophers of science found this formal structure intriguing. Is it possible to give empirical content to the structure so that the propositions of science may be included and the non-empirical claims of metaphysics may be excluded?

One first would have to select a set of elementary propositions. Wittgenstein had failed to provide a single example of an elementary proposition. However, he did maintain that an elementary proposition (1) exhibits the logical form of a state of affairs, and (2) asserts that this state of affairs exists.⁶ It would seem that to determine the truth-status of an elementary proposition one need only ascertain whether the state of affairs asserted to exist does in fact exist.

Philosophers of science who shared Campbell’s interest in providing a firm foundation for science were enamored of the prospect of a truth-functional language from which all non-empirical claims are excluded. There were two options for the interpretation of elementary propositions. The first option was the subjectivist position that they are introspective reports of states of immediate conscious awareness. Examples include “Here, now, red spot,” “Here, now, click,” and “Here, now, bitter taste.” The second option was the objectivist position that elementary propositions are intersubjectively observable properties and relations of physical objects. Examples include “This surface is red” and “Object b is between a and c.”

In “Testability and Meaning” (1936), Carnap selected the objective version of elementary propositions.⁷ Given an extensive set of observation terms that are predicable of individuals, Carnap sought to show how the concepts of the sciences could be generated from this set.

He noted that the concept “arthropod” may be constructed by an explicit definition in terms of phrases reducible to elementary propositions., viz., “x is an arthropod” if, and only if, “x is an animal and x has a segmented body and x has jointed legs.”⁸ Other scientific concepts introduced by explicit definition include “velocity” (v = d/t) and “enthalpy” (H = E + P V).

However, dispositional concepts such as “soluble” and “magnetic field intensity” cannot be defined explicitly in terms of elementary propositions. Given “Sx” = “x is soluble,” “Px” = “x is placed in a liquid,” and “Dx” = “x dissolves,” the explicit definition

(x) [Sx ≡ (Px

Dx)]

would qualify as “soluble” every object not now placed in a liquid. If “Pa” is false...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Logical Reconstructionism
• 2 Orthodoxy Under Attack
• 3 Interlude: A Classificatory Matrix for Philosophies of Science
• 4 Descriptivism
• 5 Normative Naturalism
• 6 Foundationalism
• 7 Descriptivism Versus Foundationalism
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright