Abstract
This paper considers George A. Reisch’s account of the role of Cold War political forces in shaping the apolitical stance that came to dominate philosophy of science in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that at least as early as the 1930s, Logical Empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap already held that philosophy of science could not properly have political aims, and further suggests that political forces alone cannot explain this view’s rise to dominance during the Cold War, since political forces cannot explain why a philosophy of science with liberal democratic, anti-communist aims did not flourish. The paper then argues that if professionalization is understood in the right way, it might point toward an explanation of the apolitical stance of Cold War philosophy of science.
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Notes
Reichenbach, in his 1938 Experience and Prediction, also excludes practical aims from philosophy of science. For reasons of space, my discussion is limited to Carnap.
Carnap would later expand the domain of the philosophical so as to include semantics as well and syntax. See (Carnap 1947). The important point for my purposes is that never he takes pragmatic considerations to be properly philosophical.
The interpretation of Carnap’s mature view I am glossing here is defended in detail in (Ricketts 1994).
I prefer to speak of a “wave of professionalization,” rather than simply “professionalization,” since it more clearly allows that the process is one that admits of degrees. This is especially important when talking about philosophy of science in the 1950s, since, as Reisch’s account makes very clear, philosophy of science was already a professional discipline in America at least by the 1930s, and probably well before that: philosophers were employed by universities to teach courses on the methodology of science, they wrote textbooks about the methodology of science, and they published articles in journals such as William Malisoff’s Philosophy of Science. In the German-speaking world, this level of professionalism in philosophy of science had been in place since the mid-19th Century. But, if we have the right model of professionalization, there is no problem in recognizing this, and at the same time thinking Cold War philosophy of science became more professional. Thanks to Gary Hatfield for pressing me on these and related points.
American Medical Association, “AMA applauds FDA approval of OTC access for Plan B,” August 24, 2006. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/16734.html
Sociologists in the first half of the 20th Century took these institutional characteristics to be definitive of the professions themselves. See for example (Car-Saunders & Wilson 1933) and (Wilensky 1964). One problem with this type of model is the way it naturally extends to include vocations that pre-theoretically, we do not consider professions. Mechanics can attend community college classes in order to learn their trade. Hairdressers go to hairdressing schools in order to receive certifications that are widely recognized in their field. (This problem was noticed in [Wilensky 1964]). More recent models of the professions avoid these problems by focusing on distinctive aspects of the character of the professional’s work itself.
Thanks to Jason Rheins and Alan Richardson for helpful discussion on these points.
The desire to mark off philosophy of science as distinct from the history, sociology, and psychology of science explains why these do not emphasize the philosopher of science’s need for a specialized knowledge of the content of actual science. While in the 1950s as now, such knowledge was important for a professional philosopher of science, it is no less important for the historian of science. So the abstract theory that determined the boundaries of an increasingly specialized philosophy of science could not have been knowledge of the content of science.
Notice too that Feigl selected his essay to introduce a reader whose purpose, he and Sellars explain in their preface, was to respond to “the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers” about “the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis” (Feigl & Sellars 1949, p. v). The introductory essay and those that follow it were intended to train students in what Feigl and Sellars considered philosophy.
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Edgar, S. Logical Empiricism, Politics, and Professionalism. Sci & Educ 18, 177–189 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-007-9102-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-007-9102-x