Abstract
When Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, he and many of his readers thought that introducing a historical dimension into the study of scientific theories and their languages was a decisive break with logical empiricism. But it has now been shown that Carnap himself — the editor of the series in which Kuhn’s book was published — welcomed it unreservedly, and that he had good reason to.1 Kuhn’s position, it is now widely agreed, was to some degree compatible with Carnap’s later view, which had developed considerably since the Vienna Circle doctrines of the 1920s.2 But why, then, have history and philosophy of science since Kuhn largely rejected logical empiricism? Evidently, Kuhn added more than just a historical dimension; his conception of knowledge was also quite different from Carnap’s (Section 1 below). Could Carnap have accommodated a historical dimension that fit better? This chapter argues that Carnap’s framework (Section 2) allows a role for the history of science that is distinct from ‘history proper,’ or history as it is ordinarily conceived by historians (Sections 3 and 4). Moreover, history of science in just this Carnapian spirit began to appear soon after Kuhn’s first writings (Section 5). And although it attracted less attention than Kuhn at the time, it has grown into a flourishing alternative tradition, which, I conclude (Section 6), deserves more attention, as it can interact fruitfully with the post-Kuhnian mainstream to open new perspectives for a historically-informed logical empiricism.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Atran, S. 1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Avineri, S. 1968 The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Awodey, S. and A.W. Carus 2009 ‘From Wittgenstein’s Prison to the Boundless Ocean: Carnap’s Dream of Logical Syntax’ in P. Wagner, ed. Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 79–106.
Awodey, S. and E. Reck 2002 ‘Completeness and Categoricity’ History and Philosophy of Logic 23, pp. 1–30, 77–94.
Barker, P., X. Chen, and H. Andersen ‘Kuhn 2003 On Concepts and Categorization’ in T. Nickles, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 212–45.
Bloor, D. 1997 Wittgenstein, Rules, and Institutions (London: Routledge).
Carnap, R. 1926 Physikalische Begriffsbildung (Karlsruhe: Braun).
Carnap, R. 1934 Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna: Springer).
Carnap, R. 1939 Foundations of Logic and Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Carnap, R. 1947 ‘Probability as a Guide in Life’ Journal of Philosophy 44, pp. 141–8.
Carnap, R. 1950a Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Carnap, R. 1950b ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’ repr. in R. Carnap Meaning and Necessity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 205–21.
Carnap, R. 1955 ‘On Some Concepts of Pragmatics’ Philosophical Studies 6 (1955), pp. 89–91, repr. in Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1956), pp. 249–51.
Carnap, R. 1963 ‘The Philosopher Replies’ in P. Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), pp. 859–1013.
Carus, A.W. 2004 ‘Carnap, Sellars, and the Logical Space of Reasons’ in S. Awodey and C. Klein, eds Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), pp. 315–52.
Carus, A.W. 2007a Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Carus, A.W. 2007b ‘Carnap’s Intellectual Development’ in M. Friedman and R. Creath, eds The Cambridge Companion to Carnap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 19–42.
Carus, A.W. 2010 ‘The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge: Howard Stein’s Reshaping of Logical Empiricism’ Monist 93, pp. 618–39.
Carus, A.W. (forthcoming) ‘Engineers and Drifters: The Ideal of Explication and its Critics’ in P. Wagner, ed. The Ideal of Explication and Naturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Carus, A.W. and S. Ogilvie 2005 ‘The Poverty of Historical Idealism’ History Workshop Journal 59, pp. 270–81.
Carus, A.W. and S. Ogilvie 2009 ‘Turning Qualitative into Quantitative Evidence: A Well-Used Method Made Explicit’ Economic History Review 62, pp. 893–925.
Chang, H. 2004 Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Cohen, G.A. 1978 Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
DiSalle, R. 2006 Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Earman, J. 1992 World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time (MIT Press).
Earman, J. 1993 ‘Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology’ in P. Horwich, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 9–36.
Elster, J. 1985 Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Feingold, M. 1996 Review of Shapin (1994), Isis 87, pp. 131–9.
Friedman, M. 1993 ‘Remarks on the History of Science and the History of Philosophy’ in P. Horwich, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 37–54.
Friedman, M. 2001 Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA: CSLI Publications).
Friedman, M. 2002 ‘Geometry as a Branch of Physics: Background and Context for Einstein’s “Geometry and Experience”’, in D. Malament, ed. Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), pp. 193–229.
Friedman, M. 2003 ‘Kuhn and Logical Empiricism’ in T. Nickles, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 19–44.
Friedman, M. 2006 ‘Kant — Naturphilosophie - Electromagnetism’ in M. Friedman and A. Nordman, eds. The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 51–79.
Friedman, M. 2008 ‘History and Philosophy of Science in a New Key’ Isis 99, pp. 125–34.
Galison, P. 1995 ‘Context and Constraints’ in J.Z. Buchwald, ed. Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 13–41.
Galison, P. 2008 ‘Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science’ Isis 99, pp. 111–24.
Geertz, C. 1973 ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in C. Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books), pp. 3–30.
Guicciardini, N. 2003 ‘Conceptualisai and Contextualism in the Recent Historiography of Newton’s Principia’ Historia Mathematica 30, pp. 407–431.
Hare, R.M. 1952 The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Irzik, G. and T. Grünberg 1995 ‘Carnap and Kuhn: Arch Enemies or Close Allies?’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46, pp. 285–307.
Irzik, G. 2003 ‘Changing Conceptions of Rationality: From Logical Empiricism to Postpositivism’ in P. Parrini, W.C. Salmon, and M. Salmon, eds Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), pp. 325–46.
Jeffrey, R. 1994 ‘Carnap’s Voluntarism’ in D. Prawitz, B. Skyrms, and D. Westerståhl, eds Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science IX (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 847–66.
Kripke, S. 1979 ‘A Puzzle about Belief in: A. Margalit, ed. Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel).
Kuhn, T.S. 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Kuhn, T.S. 1971 ‘Concepts of Cause in the Development of Physics’ repr. in T. Kuhn The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977).
Kuhn, T.S. 1993 ‘Afterwords’ in P. Horwich, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 311–41.
Kuhn, T.S. 2000 ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’ in T.S. Kuhn The Road Since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 253–323.
Lenz, J. 1956 ‘Carnap on Defining “Degree of Confirmation”’ Philosophy of Science 23, pp. 230–36.
Levi, I. 1980 The Enterprise of Knowledge: An Essay on Knowledge, Credal Probability and Chance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Lynch, M. 1993 Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Martin, R. 1959 Toward a Systematic Pragmatics (Amsterdam: North-Holland).
Nersessian, N.J. 2002 ‘Maxwell and ‘the Method of Physical Analogy’: Model-Based Reasoning, Generic Abstraction, and Conceptual Change’ in D. Malament, ed. Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), pp. 129–66.
Nersessian, N.J. 2003 ‘Kuhn, Conceptual Change, and Cognitive Science’ in T. Nickles, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 178–211.
Nersessian, N.J. 2008 Creating Scientific Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Netz, R. 1999 The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Netz, R. 2002 ‘Counter Culture: Towards a History of Greek Numeracy’ History of Science 127, pp. 321–52.
Nickles, T. 2003 ‘From Logic to Case-Based and Model-Based Reasoning’ in T. Nickles, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 142–77.
Pallares-Burke, M.L. The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Porter, T. 2009 ‘How Science Became Technical’ Isis 100, pp. 292–309.
Putnam, H. 1967 ‘Time and Physical Geometry’ Journal of Philosophy 64, pp. 240–47.
Reichenbach, H. 1924 ‘Die Bewegungslehre bei Newton, Leibniz, und Huyghens’ Kant-Studien 29, pp. 416–38.
Reisch, G. 1991 ‘Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?’ Philosophy of Science 58, pp. 264–77.
Richardson, A. 2007 ‘“That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism”: Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science’ in A. Richardson and T. Uebel, eds The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 346–69.
Salmon, W. 1990 ‘Rationality and Objectivity in Science, or Tom Kuhn Meets Tom Bayes’ in C.W. Savage, ed. Scientific Theories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 175–204.
Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. 1985 Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Schuster, J.A. 1997 Review of H.F. Cohen The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, Isis 88, pp. 118–21.
Scull, A. 2007 ‘The Fictions of Foucault’ Times Literary Supplement (21 March, 2007).
Shapin, S. 1994 A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Smith, G. 2001 ‘The Newtonian Style in Book II of the Principia’ in J.Z. Buchwald and I.B. Cohen, eds Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 249–98.
Smith, G. 2002a ‘From the Phenomenon of the Ellipse to an Inverse-Square Force: Why Not?’ in D. Malament, ed. Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court), pp. 31–70.
Smith, G. 2002b ‘The Methodology of the Principia’ in I.B. Cohen and G. Smith, eds The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 138–73.
Smith, G.E. 2010 ‘Revisiting Accepted Science: The Indispensability of the History of Science’ Monist 93, pp. 545–79.
Stein, H. 1958 An Examination of Some Aspects of Natural Science (Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago).
Stein, H. 1967 ‘Newtonian Space-Time’ The Texas Quarterly 10, pp. 174–200, repr. in R. Palter, ed. The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 258–84.
Stein, H. 1968 ‘On Einstein-Minkowski Space-Time’ Journal of Philosophy 65, pp. 5–23.
Stein, H. 1972 ‘Graves on the Philosophy of Physics’ Journal of Philosophy 69, pp. 621–34.
Stein, H. 1974 ‘Maurice Clavelin on Galileo’s Natural Philosophy’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25, pp. 375–97.
Stein, H. 1992 ‘Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?’ Synthese 93, pp. 275–95.
Stein, H. 1998 ‘How Does Physics Bear upon Metaphysics; and Why Did Plato Holdthat Philosophy Cannot be Written Down?’ Colloquium Talk at the University of Chicago (unpublished).
Thompson, E.P. 1978 The Poverty of Theory and other Essays (London: Merlin Press).
Vovelle, M. 1973 Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle; les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon).
Wehler, H.-U. 2001 Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht).
Wilson, M. 2006 Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Winch, P. 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Wrightson, K. 1993 ‘The Enclosure of Social History’ in A. Wilson, ed. Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 59–77.
Wrightson, K. and D. Levine 1995 Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 293
Zabell, S. 2005 Symmetry and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Zabell, S. 2007 ‘Carnap on Probability and Induction’ in M. Friedman and R. Creath, eds The Cambridge Companion to Carnap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 273–94.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 A.W. Carus
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Carus, A.W. (2013). History and the Future of Logical Empiricism. In: Reck, E.H. (eds) The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-30487-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-30487-2_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29968-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30487-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)