‘Logical empiricism’ and the philosophy of science

Abstract

'Philosophy of science' suggests to many a highly technical project that offers logical analyses of scientific and metascientific terms a perspective that may not greatly appeal to historians, sociologists, or scientists. This image of philosophy of science owes much to a common understanding of logical empiricism (nee positivism), a project that seemed to attempt to force all of science, and all of our understanding of science, into the Procrustean bed of formal logic. George Reisch laments this vision of the philosophy of science, and seeks to complicate it in a novel way, by arguing that logical empiricism might have bequeathed to us a very different philosophy of science. In so doing, he conducts us through a history of logical empiricism in its European phase during the 1920s and 1930s. He recovers the socialist agenda then at the heart of logical empiricism, and notes its alliances with progressivist wings in early twentieth-century American philosophy. He then offers a history of the technical and apolitical project that philosophy of science has become. As the title telegraphs, Reisch argues that the Cold War led the logical empiricists many of them immigrants from Germany or Austria, often Jewish, and often with socialist leanings away from their youthful political engagement, towards philosophical isolationism. That there is an important political history to the philosophy of science in the twentieth century is largely unknown to many in the profession. Most philosophers of science tacitly endorse a 'liberal neutralist' account of science: they believe that scientific knowledge