Online research in philosophy

Idealist Heresies in Philosophy of Science: Cassirer, Carnap, and Kuhn. As common wisdom has it, philosophy of science in the analytic tradition and idealist philosophy are incompatible. Usually, not much effort is spent for explaining what is to be understood by idealism. Rather, it is taken for granted that idealism is an obsolete and unscientific philosophical account. In this paper it is argued that this thesis needs some qualification. Taking Carnap and Kuhn as paradigmatic examples of positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science it is shown that these accounts share important features with Cassirer's idealist philosophy of science developed in the first half of this century. As it turns out, often Cassirer is more modern than those classical philosophers of (post)posivitist philosophy of science. For instance, Quine's criticism against Carnap's empiricist philosophy of science launched in Two Dogmas of Empiricism is anticipated by Cassirer for several decades.

We compare Carnap's and Kuhn's views on science. Although there are important differences between them, the similarities are striking. The basis for the latter is a pragmatically oriented semantic conventionalist picture of science, which suggests that the view that post-positivist philosophy of science constitutes a radical revolution which has no interesting affinities with logical positivism must be seriously mistaken.

Abstract: In this paper I use or refer to a lot of metaphors, like "Brutus" for Kuhn, "Trojan Horse" for the Structure, "adopted sons" for Quine and Popper, "battlefield" for parts of philosophy. These are however only illustrations to possible theses or questions I investigate: "Did Kuhn refute logical positivism?", Why was Carnap so tolerating so much Popper, Quine and Kuhn?", "Why did logical positivism go away?". I will argue that a complex view should be developed abut these questions synthesising both Friedman's, Irzik's, Earman's, and Reisch's view on the one hand and Oliveira's on the other hand, who is criticising them. I try to sketch this complex view, which of course is not an attempt to a full story of logical positivism. Finally I describe Carnap's Principle of Tolerance as not merely a theory, but as a personal, ethical view, which he adopted in his behaviour with Kuhn, Popper, Quine and other rival philosophers.

Kuhnʼs influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,1 is often viewed as a revolt against empiricist philosophy of science. However, Friedman has reminded us lately2 that the book was commissioned by logical positivists, who were delighted with the result. In fact, the book was part of the International Encyclopedia of United Science initiated by members of the Vienna Circle, whose first volumes were published in 1938.3 The project aimed at providing a systematic positivist perspective on all the sciences, from logic and mathematics through linguistics and on to psychology and sociology. The publication of Structure as volume 12 of the encyclopedia was greeted enthusiastically by the editor, Carnap, as can be learned from the letters he wrote to Kuhn. There are several reasons for this reaction. First, as noted by Friedman, there is a resemblance between Kuhnʼs notion of changing paradigms and Carnapʼs philosophical ideas. Logical empiricism is “logical” because of its central tenet that scientific knowledge is the organization of facts within a conceptual structure; the existence of an appropriate conceptual structure is a precondition for the very possibility of scientific inquiry. Unlike Kant, however, the logical empiricists believed that the conceptual..

Thirty years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sharp disagreement persists concerning the implications of Kuhn’s "historicist" challenge to empiricism. I discuss the historicist movement over the past thirty years, and the extent to which the discourse between two branches of the historical school has been influenced by tacit assumptions shared with Rudolf Carnap’s empiricism. I begin with an examination of Carnap’s logicism --his logic of science-- and his 1960 correspondence with Kuhn. I focus on problems in the analysis applied to the unit of metascientific study or appraisal, arguing for a reassessment of historicist treatment of the internal/external distinction and historiographic meta-methodology. The critique of objectivism and relativism that eventuates from this re-assessment is a double-edged blade, undercutting both objectivist and relativist treatments of cognitive evaluation and scientific change. I use it to cut across an otherwise diverse group of historicist-influenced writers, including Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, H. M. Collins, Stephen Stich. I. Introduction..

The objective of this article is to sketch an historical analysis of the change in the philosophy of science that took place in the 1950s and 1960s around the time of the publication of Structure by Thomas Kuhn. I offer an alternative to the revisionist interpretation that this change is marked by ignorance or neglect, on the part of Kuhn and others, of logical positivism in its more mature form, in this way serving the revolutionary strategy. Countering this conception, I present good reasons for the philosophy of science community, in that historical context, to have used the logical positivist project as their reference and target of criticism rather than the later work of Carnap. I suggest that, faced with the original version of the project, the critics saw Carnap’s “liberalizations” as degenerative. I hold that the revisionists, in turn, neglected the historical context surrounding the philosophical change in question, and touched up the image of positivism from a contemporary perspective.

In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed. One aspect of this revisionism -defended by authors like Michael Friedman, John Earman and George Reisch - is the thesis that Carnap’s later thought is compatible with that of Kuhn and even that Carnap anticipates some relevant points of Kuhn’s theory of science. In this paper I discuss one of Carnap’s texts most frequently cited by revisionists in favor of their thesis -"Truth and Confirmation" - trying to put it in the context of Carnap’s work. My intention is to analyze revisionist interpretation on the basis of other texts by Carnap and show that revisionists, while assembling their jigsaw puzzle concerning Carnap’s work, have inadvertently forgotten to consider some pieces of importance in the formation of a theoretically and historically cogent picture.

In the light of two unpublished letters from Carnap to Kuhn, this essay examines the relationship between Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Carnap's philosophical views. Contrary to the common wisdom that Kuhn's book refuted logical empiricism, it argues that Carnap's views of revolutionary scientific change are rather similar to those detailed by Kuhn. This serves both to explain Carnap's appreciation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to suggest that logical empiricism, insofar as that program rested on Carnap's shoulders, was not substantially upstaged by Kuhn's book.

In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly regarding Carnap's work. In this paper, I argue against the interpretation that Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having been published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the revisionist idea that Carnap "would have found Structure philosophically congenial". I claim that Kuhn's book, from Carnap's point of view, is not in philosophy of science but rather in history of science (in the context of a sharp discovery—justification distinction). It could also explain the fact that, despite his sympathetic letters to Kuhn as editor, Carnap never refers to Kuhn's book in his work in philosophy of science.