Putting the ‘empiricism’ in ‘logical empiricism’: the director’s cut

Abstract

In 1992, Thomas Uebel set the standard for scholarship on both Neurath and the protocol-sentence debate in Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath’s Naturalism in the Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate. That book was an in-depth study of the logical empiricists’ protocol-sentence debate, which ‘‘concerned the form, content, and status of scientific evidence statements’’ (1). Put otherwise, this debate addressed how best to understand those scientific activities (including linguistic activities) that make the empirical sciences empirical. The book reviewed here, Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate, is a heavily revised and expanded version of that earlier work. Before delving into the content of the book, let us ask: how does the new version differ from the old? First, there are light revisions throughout, including small expository additions or deletions, and additional citations of primary and secondary sources. Second, there are many entirely new subsections, several of which address developments in the secondary literature since 1992. For example, Uebel engages with Chris Pincock’s ‘reserved reading’ of Carnap’s Aufbau, and when discussing Popper’s interactions with the Vienna Circle, Uebel draws upon Malachi Hacohen’s recent biography. Third, at the macro-level, one old chapter has been deleted (‘‘Beyond Logical Empiricism’’), and (roughly) two new chapters have been added. The first covers archival precursors to major articles of the early 1930s (discussed further below), and the second primarily interprets and evaluates Schlick’s puzzling notion of Konstatierungen (‘affirmations’), the supposed evidentiary bedrock of empirical science, including a summary and extension of Uebel’s own recent debate with Thomas Oberdan on this topic. Despite these many changes great and small, both the general historical narrative and argumentative thrust of Empiricism at the Crossroads are similar to that of the