Logical Positivism Research Articles

The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters, 1929–1932

This article reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley in 1929 and 1931–32) and ...

A cricket game, a train ticket and a vacuum to be filled: Ayer’s logical positivism as a focal point for post-war British cultural struggles

ABSTRACT In 1948, A.J. Ayer was attacked on the pages of The New Statesman and Nation magazine where it was claimed that his views were partly responsible for increasingly Fascist attitudes at Oxford. Ayer was charged with promoting a philosophy of values (or one lacking therein) that allowed Fascism to fill the moral vacuum. Ayer noted that he knew who had written the article (and the ones that followed) and that this person had done so for entirely contingent and non-philosophical reasons. This paper aims to examine the historical context by discussing the article and the events that followed it; to show that the specific charges against Ayer were rooted in deeper philosophical/practical issues, namely the nature and status of philosophy; and to demonstrate that logical empiricism, or rather logical positivism as a movement, was indeed especially sensitive to political issues.

DİL FELSEFESİ: ÖNCESİ VE SONRASIYLA WITTGENSTEIN

Language philosophy which is a discipline that investigates the nature of language conceptually, analyzes various meanings, deals with meaning, explaining how it is formed, explains the relation between language, language reality and language-communication. It has been the main field of philosophy since the beginning of the 20th century. In the course of history of philosophy, most philosophers have been concerned with the issue of language and language problems. Thus the fundamental views on language from the early periods into twenty first century has been grounded by the perspectives of prominent philosophers. This paper focuses on studies of Wittgenstein, who is considered (by some) to be one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, played a significant role in 20th-century analytic philosophy, providing an important guide to one of the liveliest and most challenging areas of study in philosophy between the works of Wittgenstein’s first period of Tracatus Logico Philosophilus and the second period of Philosophical Investigations. There were two recognized periods of Wittgenstein’s thought—the early and the later. On the other hand, due to the difficulty of his works, he is not well understood. However, it is the later Wittgenstein, mostly known in the Philosophical Investigations. In the Tractatus philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language, and he tries to illustrate what this logic is. However, in Wittgenstein’s later work, he provides this concern with logic and language. With his language-games, he seems to go against the logical positivist's view of language of that period. This paper attempts to give an expository information on the fundamentals of philosophy of language between the two periods, outlining a thematic overview of the various approaches of Wittgenstein.

От биоэтики светской к биоэтике христианской: о значении наследия Х. Тристрама Энгельгардта в России

A perception of “Christian bioethics” developed by the American philosopher Hugo Tristram Engelhardt in Russia requires a systematic interdisciplinary analysis. This is due to the realities of medical practice, as well as cultural and historical differences between the Russian and American societies. In Russia, there are certain difficulties in the open discussion of ethical issues in the public sphere. However, the recently growing participation of the Orthodox Church in public debates on the issues of medicine and biotechnology produce a basis for a reception of Engelhardt’s Christian bioethics. This article presents an analysis of how Engelhardt’s academic carrier was connected to his personal transformation, and how a “logical positivist” and physician interested in genetics, through his studies of continental philosophy, history of medicine, Catholicism and bioethics, came up finally as a founder of Christian bioethics based on Eastern Christian Orthodoxy. This analysis is purposed to expand the theoretical discussion of moral dilemmas posed at the intersection of medicine, religion and philosophy within the Russian academic discourse.

Conceptual Schemes and Relativism

The idea of conceptual schemes is one of the most influential and widely used notions in contemporary philosophy. Within the analytic tradition the idea occupies a fundamental position in positivist views as well as in replacing them post-positivist conceptions. Outside the analytic tradition a similar idea is of key importance in structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Despite the broad applicability of the notion of a conceptual scheme, its precise sense is far from being evident in the context of various philosophical trends. Moreover, the well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson's position is that any clear, non-metaphorical meaning cannot be as - cribed to that notion at all – the statement which he tried to substantiate in his famous paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme published in 1974.The present paper is aimed, firstly, at outlining the historico-philosophical evolution of the idea of conceptual scheme, concentrating on its development in logical positivism and post-positivist theories of such philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, et al., and, secondly, at examining Davidson's criticism of both the idea and the position of conceptual relativism which was raised on its ground, revealing the assumptions which that criticism relies on and which concern relations between language and thought, truth and translation, as well as the role of the scheme-content dualism for empiricism and the place of extensionalism in semantics, etc. Our purpose, on the one hand, is to evaluate the historico-philosophical significance of Davidson's criticism; on the other hand, it is to show that his critical arguments remain to be actual since they shed a new light on the idea of conceptual schemes and allow us to determine their place in tackling the fundamental philosophical question of a relation between reality, thought and language.

A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov Richard Lambert III Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov, eds., A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 278 pp. In their edited volume A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch, editors Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov deliver a comprehensive scholarly introduction that valiantly strives to render the works of a great Austrian modernist—finally—more accessible to a broad audience. Impressive in both scope and depth, the Companion leaves no stone unturned in its attempt to chronicle both the longevity and scope of Broch's diverse writings and offers both tried-and-true assessments of Broch's major novels alongside new perspectives and disciplinary approaches toward some of the author's less prominent works. The resulting collection is thus a fitting testimony to the breadth of Broch's intellectual engagements, ranging from art and literature to ethics, politics, and social theory. This commitment to comprehensiveness is without question the major success of the volume. The Companion wrangles Broch's complicated, complex aesthetic and oftentimes explicitly philosophical writings into a concise, comprehensible, and exhaustive introductory work. The Companion is effectively structured chronologically. After Bartram and McGaughey's introduction, which offers a full biographical overview of Broch's life and career, each contribution profiles a subsequent work or critical evolution in Broch's thought according to its date of publication or its emergence as a salient theme in his writings. The scope and focus of these contributions vary from chapter to chapter, and the interpretive impetus accordingly fluctuates between exploring new perspectives, methods, and themes, on the one hand, and relating canonical interpretations on the other. Kathleen L. Komar's examination of Broch's Die Schlafwandler, "Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self," embraces both of these tendencies by offering accepted readings of the trilogy alongside novel, if brief, examinations of the motifs of degrading images and female writers. Two subsequent contributions devoted to Broch's earliest writings aim to define Broch's intellectual affinities discursively. Gunther Martens ("Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age") returns to a familiar mode of inquiry in Broch scholarship by linking the author's voluminous secondary writings on literature to both Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, while Galin Tihanov attempts to [End Page 106] contextualize Broch's relationship to literary modernism vis-à-vis Romantic refrains ("Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism"). Beyond these earlier and better-known works, the Companion also contains a number of contributions that provide thorough yet economical (re-)introductions to some of Broch's underappreciated, overlooked, or overly complex work. Brechtje Beuker's "Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luftgegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine" furnishes a glimpse into Broch's brief theatrical forays and contextualizes his works for the stage within historical trends in economic and social criticism. In "Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die unbekannte Größe," Gwyneth Cliver explores Broch's short novel Die unbekannte Größe as a referendum on the author's past flirtations with logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Meanwhile, Judith Ryan ("Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times"), Sebastian Wogenstein ("Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings"), and Jennifer Jenkins ("Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable") deliver glossaries of keywords, passages, and definitions to orient new readers in the nuances of Broch's social theory, political theory, and his novel Der Tod des Vergil. Finally, a cluster of contributions investigate Broch's devotion to a series of intellectual interlocutors. Appearing in the first half of the Companion, Gisela Brude-Firnau's "Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer" traces the narrator's ambivalence in the face of ideology to the anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism associated with Ludwig Klages and, in turn, Klages's following in National Socialism. Similarly, Judith Sidler's contribution "From the 'Tierkreis-Erzählung' to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last...

Semiotics and Philosophy

Semiotics has not been warmly welcomed as an area of research concentration within philosophy, especially not within philosophy in the English empirical tradition. But when we consider that much of the focus of semiotic research is signification, reference, and representation, it seems evident that semiotic questions are as old as reflective thought itself. A look at how these questions have been treated throughout the history of philosophy suggests that Umberto Eco was right in claiming that most major philosophers have grappled with sign theory, if only implicitly. The theory of signs was an active area of research during the Middle Ages and John Locke opened the Modern Age with the recommendation that semiotics should be cultivated. But the philosophers of Modernity embraced a Cartesian separation between mind and body unsupportive of a robust science of signs. When semiotics emerged as a discrete field of research in the writings of Charles S. Peirce and in the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure, it remained on the fringes of philosophy. Around mid-20th century there was a resurgence of interest in semiotics and a promising attempt was made to merge American pragmatism and semiotics with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. But that effort failed and semiotics was excluded from mainstream philosophy. There is now reason to suppose that philosophy, no longer under the domination of analytic philosophy, may be moving into a new period when a weakening commitment to epistemological nominalism will make room for a return to semiotic realism. Perhaps the time is right to follow Locke’s lead and to reconcile formal semiotics with philosophy—possibly heralding a new paradigm.

Kant on Concepts, Intuitions, and the Continuity of Space

This paper engages with Kant‘s account of space as a continuum. The stage is set by looking at how the question of spatial continuity comes up in a debate from the 1920s between Ernst Cassirer and logical empiricist thinkers about Kant‘s conception of spatial representation as a pure intuition. While granting that concrete features of space can only be known empirically, Cassirer attempted to save Kant‘s conception by restricting it to the core commitment of space as a continuous coexistent manifold. Cassirer did not however come up with a transcendental argument for spatial continuity. The paper presents such an argument by providing a reading of Kant‘s from which it transpires that Kant does not simply rely on supposed into the continuity of space. It is by way ofinstead that we can know space to be continuous and Kant’s distinction between intuitions and concepts does hinge on such knowledge.

The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism by John Losee

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism by John Losee Daniel J. McKaughan John Losee. The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 319. Cloth, $114.00. Should philosophers of science offer methodological prescriptions about how science ought to be practiced, or should they rest content with describing ways it has actually been practiced over time? Do the standards by which good science is assessed remain stable over time? How should rival philosophies of science be evaluated, and what role ought history of science play in such assessments? This book engages such questions while introducing a range of key ideas and debates by examining the four positions named in its subtitle: Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism. Why 1945 to 2000? After World War II, as graduate programs and journals were established, philosophy of science developed into a fully professionalized academic field (5). Stopping at the turn of the century is not similarly motivated, and Losee leaves unremarked whether the field's golden age has come to an end. Chapter 1 introduces the Logical Reconstructionist program and chapter 2 presents central shortcomings that led to its widespread abandonment. These span half the book. Logical Reconstructionism focuses on explicating core concepts like scientific explanation, [End Page 413] laws of nature, theory confirmation and replacement, and approaches this task in a characteristically transhistorical way. After setting the stage for understanding the prevailing orthodoxy in 1945, with brief discussions of logical positivism and work such as Campbell's Foundations of Science (1919) and Bridgman's The Logic of Modern Physics (1927), Losee addresses, among other things, attempts to distinguish sharply between observational and theoretical language, Hempel and Oppenheim's Deductive-Nomological and Inductive-Statistical approaches to explanation, Carnap on confirmation theory and its paradoxes, Popper on falsification and the demarcation between science and pseudo-science, views concerning the nature, structure, and interpretation of theories, and influential books like Nagel's Structure of Science (1951) and Braithwaite's Scientific Explanation (1953). Chapter 2 covers both external critiques of the movement and problems arising from within (e.g. the problematization of the distinction between observation and theory by Feigl, Hesse, Achinstein, Feyerabend, and Quine), along with replies to these challenges. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is briefly introduced, as is Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis. As the project of Logical Reconstructionism fell under the weight of criticism, three broad responses developed. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 introduce Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism, respectively, after a brief "interlude" in chapter 3 that classifies the basic positions according to (a) whether they have normative aims and (b) maintain that science is subject to "inviolable" or transhistorical criteria of assessment. Logical Reconstructionism said "yes" to both (a) and (b), as do other more contemporary forms of Foundationalism (views that insist some enduring principles must be accepted as properly basic starting points of any scientific practice). Descriptivism says "no" and "no," aiming only to describe actual evaluative practice, eschewing claims about how science ought to be practiced. Normative Naturalism is the view that, by practicing science, we have come to hold that some evaluative standards are more effective than others for achieving the goals that scientific communities typically have. Its proponents attempt to steer what Losee sees as an uneasy course between Descriptivism and Foundationalism, retaining commitment to (a) while sometimes disagreeing about (b) but typically maintaining that, like theories, aims and evaluative standards remain open to revision. Chapter 4 distinguishes several versions of Descriptivism, discussing work by Meehl, Holton, Giere, Thagard, Gopnik, and two other trends: comparing long term scientific growth to evolution by natural selection (e.g. Toulmin, Hull, Dawkins, Campbell, Popper, and Ruse), and The Strong Programme in which tracing causal influences of social context on practice threatens to relativize or displace the role of reasoning (e.g. Bloor, Barnes, and Shapin). Chapter 5 considers attempts to develop Normative Naturalism, in Losee's view all ultimately unsuccessful, focusing on Neurath, Quine, Kantorovich, Fine, Burian, Kitcher, Shapere, and Laudan. Chapter 6 discusses Foundationalism and its critics...

The Voice

The Voice R. M. Berry (bio) Stanley Cavell and the Potencies of the Voice Adam Gonya Bloomsbury Academic www.bloomsbury.com 224 Pages; Cloth, $84.00 In Stanley Cavell and the Potencies of the Voice, Adam Gonya offers a new way of understanding Stanley Cavell's philosophy, situating it relative to two "pictures" of the human voice. According to the first, a speaker or writer knows something and selects the right words to communicate it. According to the second, a speaker or writer surrenders to a mood and words simply come. Gonya calls the former the picture of the voice's "assertive potency" and the latter the picture of its "receptive potency," and he takes Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to exemplify each. While the metaphysical alienation imagined by both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche seems without obvious parallel in Cavell's work, what interests Gonya is the role of language in the two philosophers' responses to it. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, a poet escapes metaphysical confinement by perceiving "the particular thing," not as an example under a concept, but as "the [transcendental] Idea of its species." Only after having attained this "pure knowledge" does he or she face the problem of how to express it. The compositional task becomes one of using words to qualify and limit other words, "as one dull knife can sharpen another," producing a distinct representation freed of all abstraction. Theoretically, it could be rendered in prose as well as poetry, since the material qualities of language—rhythm, alliteration, accent, syntax, rhyme—add nothing to it. Its meaning is translatable into other languages without loss. While this account of satisfactory expression bears some similarity to Logical Positivism's picture of ideal reference, it diverges sharply from Nietzsche's account of Dionysian poetry. For Nietzsche, the Dionysian utterance has no prose equivalent or adequate translation. Instead, it originates in a state of intoxication, a "musical mood" that is fundamentally alien to words and concepts. Rather than sharpening meaning, the poet's words only expose their meaning's inadequacy, as though pursuing an impossible absoluteness of differentiation and "straining [language] to its limits to imitate music." While it is not clear that this pursuit gives verbal sounds priority over sense, it is clear that Dionysian poetry, like music, is without articulable content. The poet is a medium or channel merely, with no knowledge of his or her own to impart. As Gonya put it, "The Dionysian utterance … is its singularity." Cavell's importance for Gonya is that his ordinary language procedure, asking what we say when, represents an overlap of these two pictures. Gonya interprets Cavell's ambition to "bring the human voice back into philosophy" as "a therapeutic broadening of what we have called the first potency to include the resources of the second," a broadening that exposes the "sometimes tragic" consequences of philosophy's restriction to justified assertion alone. To bring out these consequences, Gonya introduces three figures—"Jungle Man," "Skeptical Man," and "Common Man"—which he believes make concrete the "zones of expressive strain or miscarriage or even failure" that Cavell addresses. In discussing each, Gonya detects a struggle in Cavell's writing between the imperative to make oneself intelligible and the imperative to avoid falsifying oneself, and if, as Gonya suggests, Cavell proceeds more by receptiveness to what we say when than by testing it against antecedent knowledge, the metaphysical question of the origin of what we say when becomes hard to ignore. It is hard not to feel that Jungle Man is less germane to Cavell's philosophy than Gonya's other figures, since Cavell never treats a lack of training in or exposure to language as a philosophical problem. In that sense, Jungle Man may represent a zone of expressive failure less than a philosophical fantasy of such failure, one that Wittgenstein's therapies would try to make "completely disappear." The fantasy is of someone native to our community who because of some extraordinary experience—Jungle Man wanders off as a child and then, after miraculously surviving in the wild for fifteen years, returns home—finds our ordinary expressive practices unnatural. "Of what had he been deprived that now...

Tachyons Particles as a Paradigm for the Existing of the Status of Quantum Metaphysics

As many scientists wrote repeatedly, quantum mechanics is a naturalistic theory and it flourished in 1920s, so as to solve physical problems through empirical experiment. It is the most vivacious empirical science to explain cosmological puzzles for the last one hundred years consistently. Philosophers of physics evidently argue that the nature of quantum mechanics (sometimes so-called quantum theory or physics) in physics can be associated with the coming of logical positivism (empiricist philosophy) on the philosophy segment. As history of physics showed quantum physics is a one among the many scientific theories which is the most fruitful and applied over. Though scientists were raised intentionally or unintentionally metaphysical questions, but they applied quantum mechanical stance. Accordingly, till 20 th c physicists were simply defending on experiment based reality only (but failed)! However, mid-20 th century later theoretical physicists have changed this experimental physics and it follows revolutionized science. Therefore, there was a paradigm shift from the quantum mechanics stance to quantum metaphysics posture because the revolution in physics is not only to review and reading about the physical world, but also the world of metaphysics too. Thus, in modern societies, a strange and new theoretical quantum science was developed in 1967’s by Gerald Feinberg, so called quantum metaphysics which can justify through Tachyon particles so as to realize metaphysical mien. Based on quantum physics postures, Feinberg puts forward an assumption of quantum metaphysics and Tachkyonic particles in general. Keywords: Quantum Physics, Physics, Metaphysics, Quantum Metaphysics, Tachyons, Feinberg DOI : 10.7176/APTA/82-02 Publication date: January 31 st 2020

Revisiting the Logical Empiricist Criticisms of Vitalism

Vitalism claims that biological organisms are governed by nonmaterial agents like entelechies. The received view today rejects vitalism by presupposing metaphysical materialism (or physicalism). Metaphysical materialism maintains that the world is ultimately material (or physical), and it, therefore, repudiates the existence of nonmaterial entelechies. However, this marks a shift compared with the arguments against vitalism developed by logical empiricists, who were indifferent to metaphysical issues and were only concerned with logical and empirical matters in the sciences. Logical empiricists rejected the concept of the entelechy (vitalism), because vital laws confirmed by biological phenomena were unavailable; in contrast, they accepted the concept of the atom (materialism), since it constituted physical laws and was therefore associated with verifiable results in modern physics.

Time as an Empirical Concept in Special Relativity

According to a widespread view, Einstein's definition of time in his special relativity is founded on the positivist verification principle. The present paper challenges this received outlook. It argues that Einstein's position on the concept of time, to wit, simultaneity, is best understood as a mitigated version of concept empiricism. He contrasts his position to Newton's absolutist and Kant's transcendental arguments, and in part sides with Hume's and Mach's empiricist arguments. Nevertheless, Einstein worked out a concept empiricism that is considerably more moderate than what we find in the preceding empiricist tradition and early logical positivism. He did not think that the origin of concepts is in observations, but in conventions, and he also maintained a realist ontology of physical events, which he thought is necessary for his theory. Consequently, his philosophy of time in special relativity is not couched in terms of an antimetaphysical verificationism.

Organizational Adaptation Strategies and the Performance of Retail Supermarkets in Nairobi City County, Kenya

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of organizational adaptation strategies on the performance of retail supermarkets in Nairobi City County. The study was guided by the philosophy of logical positivism using descriptive design that involved quantitative and qualitative approaches. The population comprised of all the 227 supermarkets in Nairobi City County. The sampling frame for the study was 143 supermarkets in Nairobi City County Sample survey design were used. Data was collected using a questionnaire which targeted chief executive officers, supervisors, or managers of the supermarkets. The study found that organizational direction, structure, and culture have a significant influence on the performance of retail supermarket in Nairobi City County, Kenya. The study recommends that organizations should be adapted to their internal environment through the use of corporate direction, organizational culture, and organizational structure. Elements of corporate direction, namely vision. Mission and objectives guide the firm’s general trend as guided by is philosophy and together with a strong organizational culture, which lies embed in the firm and a well laid out structure spur organizational performance. The study further points out the and encourages more strengthened studies which would consider larger geographical zones.

Keynes Had No ‘Hidden Method’ in the A Treatise on Probability (1921): Keynes's Method Is an Explicit Inductive Logic Built on Inexact Measurement and Approximation, Which Was Openly Based on Boole’s Non Linear, Non Additive Approach Using Interval Values Probability

J M Keynes’s method was explicitly introduced and used in the A Treatise on Probability in Parts II, III and V. Keynes’s method is an inductive logic built on the mathematical logic and algebra of George Boole. Boole introduced non linearity and non additivity into his approach using interval valued probability that used lower and upper bounds. Boole’s approach, like Keynes’s, deals explicitly with problems like non comparability, non measurability and incommensurability that can’t be dealt with by additive and linear probability representations. Keynes initially introduced a brief discussion of these problems in chapter III of the A Treatise on Probability and Chapter 4 of the General Theory. Keynes called this method inexact measurement and approximation in chapter 15 of the A Treatise on Probability. It is impossible for Keynes to be anti-mathematical,anti-formalist, anti logicist, or a rationalist, given that, building on Boole, he created an inductive logic. Rationalists, by definition, do not accept the concept of induction, which is why they are called deductivists and not inductivists. Keynes, of course, took certain elements of the rationalist perspective and combined these elements (a priori thought, intuition, etc.) with certain elements of empiricism to create an early version of logical empiricism. Similarly, it is impossible for Keynes to have been anti logicist, anti formalist and anti mathematical because his work in Parts II and V of the A Treatise on Probability is logical,formal,and mathematical analysis built directly on the mathematical logic and algebra of George Boole. The belief that Keynes was a rationalist and/or anti logicist, anti formalist and anti mathematical is maintained by economists, such as A. Carabelli and R. O’Donnell, who never read or understood Parts II, III and V of the A Treatise on Probability or chapters 16-21 of G Boole’s 1854 The Laws of Thought. It is impossible for Keynes to be a rationalist and proclaim at the end of chapter 26 of the A Treatise on Probability that probability is the guide to life since all rationalists reject inductive logic.

Qualitative Content Analysis: Why is it Still a Path Less Taken?

Die Geschichte der Inhaltsanalyse ist grostenteils die Geschichte ihrer quantitativen Variante. Obwohl die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse (QIA) in wissenschaftlichen Schriften behandelt wurde, blieb sie weitgehend auf eine explorative, impressionistische und weniger pragmatische Rolle beschrankt. Der in den 1940er Jahren verbreitete logische Positivismus und die Dominanz quantitativer Analyseformen pragten die Methode insbesondere in angelsachsischen Regionen in einem quantitativen Sinne. Diese und andere Trends uberschatteten die methodologischen Entwicklungen innerhalb der QIA, obwohl kritische Stimmen Einwande gegen die ubermasige Fokussierung auf Quantifizierung und die Analyse des manifesten Inhalts auf Kosten der tieferen Bedeutungen im Text erhoben. Im Beitrag wird ein kurzer Ruckblick auf die Geschichte und die Bedeutung der QIA gegeben, um anschliesend auf die Hauptgrunde ihrer Marginalisierung im angelsachsischen im Vergleich zum kontinentalen Kontext einzugehen. Wahrend die starkere Prasenz der qualitativen Forschung einschlieslich der QIA in Deutschland und anderen nicht englischsprachigen Landern durch die Dominanz der hermeneutischen intellektuellen Traditionen erklart werden kann, ist ihre generelle Bedeutungslosigkeit im angelsachsischen Raum mit methodologischer Unklarheit, der positivistischen quantitativen Orthodoxie bei der Bewertung qualitativer Methoden und der erkenntnistheoretischen und ontologischen Ambiguitat des Ansatzes verbunden. Basierend auf der Diskussion werden einige Uberlegungen zu den zukunftigen Entwicklungen der QIA angestellt.

The place of historiography in the network of logical empiricism

ABSTRACTIn this paper I investigate how intellectual problems concerning an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge played a role in the network of logical empiricist philosophers between 1930 and 1945. Specifically, I focus on the practical efforts of Hans Reichenbach and Otto Neurath to incorporate these intellectual stakes concerning history. I argue that Reichenbach was mainly concerned with creating more institutional space for scientific philosophy. Consequently, he was interested in determining his relation to historically oriented philosophy on the practical level only. Otto Neurath, I claim, was interested in promoting an intellectual incorporation of an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge into the Unity of Science movement. His attempts, however, largely failed. I conclude that the intellectual stakes concerning history did have an effect within the network of logical empiricist philosophers, but that, by 1945 these stakes were entirely dissolved. The displacement of the network to the United States removed Reichenbach’s practical problems, while Neurath was unable to persuade enough actors before his death.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) (2014) The Poetics of Crime Understanding and Researching Crime and Deviance Through Creative Sources

Neoliberalism, market policies, and competition have created challenges to security governance after 9/11 (Ferguson, 2017). The proliferating scientific republic and increasing securitisation have bolstered new knowledge claims over the idea of crime, and have given rise to different orientations and methods to craft an understanding of crime. ‘The Poetics of Crime’ can be seen as a rigorous attempt that departs from the notion of thoughtfully ‘cultivated beliefs’ and carefully ‘nurtured debated attempts’ being the outcome of postmodernity’s claims of safety, security and surveillance. Proliferating security fetishism thus promoting ‘criminological society’ produces different sets of knowledge on crime. Methodological cynicism and beliefs have whirled the existing preconditions of defining crime through logical positivism and syllogism, opening up new avenues to develop knowledge to define contemporaneous of crime. The book under review attempts to transcend and criticise conventional methods of understanding crime and find creative ways to define crime. With shifting approaches to theorising crime, and significant shifts in policing practices, there is a pressing need to adopt a more egalitarian approach to understand crime through public criminology (Loader, 2000; Loader and Sparks, 2011). The book is divided into four sections. It offers a rich critique of existing methodological issues and the influences of bureaucratic practices on criminology, while attempting to study the antecedents of crime through new approaches to understanding art forms. In their criminological perspectives, scholars highlight the significance of ‘fact in fiction’ for building an understanding of crime.

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

A influência do Tractatus no critério positivista de significado

Uma das motivações para as pesquisas realizadas pelos membros do Círculo de Viena a respeito dos fundamentos da linguagem científica se encontra na obra de Wittgenstein “Tractatus Logico-Philophicus”.Embora haja divergências sobre a legitimidade dessa influência, o livro foi, com efeito, tomado como motivação teórica para a estruturação da linguagem científica, desenvolvida pelos empiristas lógicos. Este artigo apresenta as teorias desenvolvidas pelos membros do Círculo de Viena ressaltando os elementos presentes no Tractatusque foram tomados, em grande parte, como influência sobre o “critério de significado” de uma proposição filosófica adotado pelos empiristas lógicos na tentativa de se estabelecer uma fundamentação para o conhecimento.