Abstract
The Americanization of originally European analytic philosophy, beginning with the rise of Nazism in Europe before WWII, has aptly been described as a move “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square” (Holton 1993). Not only logical empiricism but also later developments of analytic philosophy have had interesting links with the American tradition of pragmatism. This paper examines the “Viennese” logicalempiricist background of neopragmatism, drawing attention to the ways in which, for instance, some of Hilary Putnam’s ideas can be traced back to Rudolf Carnap’s logical empiricism. It will be suggested that Morton White’s holistic pragmatism ought to be taken more seriously in the contemporary developments of pragmatism in (post-)analytic philosophy.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I will speak of “logical empiricism” instead of “logical positivism”, unless there is some philosophical or historical reason to be more specific about the terminology. By “logical empiricism” I understand the somewhat broader set of ideas and the slightly more inclusive philosophical approach that survived the collapse of the Vienna Circle (and thus the collapse of logical positivism in a strict sense). The Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila may in fact have been the first to coin the term, “logical empiricism” (der logische Empirismus). Unlike some others associated with the Vienna Circle, he was careful to call his view “logical empiricism”, never “logical positivism”.
- 2.
For the distinction between “neopragmatism” and “new pragmatism” (which need not have any explicit relation to the historical tradition of pragmatism), see Misak (2007).
- 3.
For a recent study on Lewis and the “pragmatic a priori”, see Järvilehto (2011); for detailed examinations of the concept of the a priori in logical empiricism, see Friedman (2007) and Mormann (2012). For discussions of Quine ’s problematic place in the pragmatist tradition, see Koskinen and Pihlström (2006) and Sinclair (2013). In this paper, because of my focus on neopragmatism, I will have to mostly ignore both Lewis and Quine . By no means can I hope to aim at any kind of exhaustiveness in my treatment of pragmatism and logical empiricism; I will merely be able to offer some perspectives on the matter, informed by the development of neopragmatism.
- 4.
For instance, Ramsey ’s 1927 essay, “Facts and Propositions”, articulates a pragmatic understanding of the meaning of a proposition in terms of the conduct that would result from asserting the proposition. This is, clearly, a position reminiscent of Charles Peirce ’s and William James ’s views.
- 5.
For more details and exact references (including archival documentation based on Carnap ’s, Schlick ’s, Neurath ’s and others’ papers and correspondence), see Limbeck-Lilienau (2012). For Dewey ’s Encyclopedia contributions, see his (1938) and (1939). Already some years later Dewey was, however, critical of the project and his own involvement in it. For an examination of Dewey’s criticism, see da Cunha (2012).
- 6.
- 7.
See especially Limbeck-Lilienau (2012). The international philosophy congress in Prague in 1934 was a crucial step in the emergence of the mutual recognition of pragmatism and logical empiricism, but as Limbeck-Lilineau concludes, “neither the [logical empiricists’] liberalization of the meaning criterion, nor the introduction of dispositional concepts was initiated through the contact with pragmatism” (107).
- 8.
In fact Charles Morris used the term “neopragmatism” already in 1928. (I owe this piece of information to Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau.) According to him, pragmatism was already then, before its explicit encounters with logical empiricism, living a second phase, after the early phase of Peirce ’s and James ’s works.
- 9.
Richard Rorty ’s – another key neopragmatist’s – more “postmodern” critique of metaphysics is, of course, very different from the logical empiricists’ (and from Putnam ’s), but he shares with Carnap et al. the conviction that in some sense metaphysics fails to make sense.
- 10.
Among Putnam ’s many critics, Kenneth Westphal (2003) is particularly explicit in his criticism of this residual Carnapian element in Putnam ’s internal realist position. Putnam, of course, is not the only neopragmatist whose Carnapian or quasi-Carnapian ideas would be worth examining. For example, if we broaden our concept of neopragmatism to include Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) and other post-positivist thinkers’ “new philosophy of science” – just think of Kuhn’s account of the practice-embeddedness of normal-scientific research within a paradigm – we may certainly appreciate the analogy between the Kuhnian paradigm and the Carnapian linguistic framework. Such analogies have been suggested by Friedman (e.g., 2001, 2003). Richardson (2007, 356) also notes that paradigms and linguistic frameworks play analogous roles as “conditions of scientific knowledge”. See further Pihlström and Siitonen (2005) and Pihlström (2008) and (2012b). In this essay, I will largely have to set aside the Kantian dimensions of pragmatism, even though that topic is also clearly relevant to the reappraisal of neopragmatism in relation to logical empiricism (cf. also Pihlström 2003 and (ed.) 2011b).
- 11.
I cannot here even summarize Putnam ’s opposition between metaphysical and internal realism in the way it was elaborated in his famous writings in the 1980s and early 1990s; I hope this material is relatively familiar to my readers, as this complex philosophical debate largely shaped the discussion of realism for decades. For more details, see, e.g., Pihlström (1996) and (with later reflections) (2009). My focusing on Putnam’s 2012 book here is also motivated by the fact that he there says various new things about his relation to metaphysics that seem to play an important role in the development of his views on realism.
- 12.
Putnam discusses this example in many places, including Putnam (1987), (1990), and (2004). See also Pihlström (1996). It would require a long story to explain how this conceptual relativity differs from Quine ’s (1969) “ontological relativity”, according to which ontology is relative to theory or translation. No interpretation of Quine can be offered in this essay, so I must skip that exercise here. On Putnam ’s criticism of Quine , see, e.g., Putnam (1994) and Koskinen and Pihlström (2006).
- 13.
Putnam, however, distinguishes between conceptual relativity, which involves equivalent or mutually intertranslatable conceptual schemes, and the more general phenomenon of conceptual pluralism, which has no such involvement but recognizes that “the world has many levels of form” irreducible to each other or to any single privileged form. See, e.g., Putnam (2012), 64–65. Another point of comparison here would be Goodman ’s (1978) controversial theory of “worldmaking”, which postulates a plurality of “world versions”.
- 14.
In addition to Quine , Rorty is another major philosopher that must be more or less neglected in this essay. See Pihlström (1996) for my (already somewhat dated) critical exploration of Rorty ’s neopragmatism. For critical comparisons of Putnam ’s and Rorty ’s views on realism, truth, and religion, see Pihlström (2004) and (2013), chap. 3.
- 15.
“Two Dogmas” is available in Quine (1953a); for the famous “more thorough pragmatism” quote, see 46. An examination of Quine ’s and Carnap ’s complex relation would obviously be beyond the scope of this article. For their correspondence, see Creath (1990). See also, for useful examinations of Quine’s relation to Carnap , Neurath , and other leading logical empiricists, Isaacson (2004, especially 229–249), as well as Creath (2007).
- 16.
Or perhaps we could say that it emerged already in 1928 when Morris used the term (cf. above).
- 17.
Putnam (1995, 69–73) does contrast Carnap ’s methodologically solipsist and verificationist empiricism to the classical pragmatists’ cooperative and interactionist view of inquiry; this kind of criticism of Carnap’s “spectator” conception of observation is continued, e.g., by Burke (2013, 68–72). This does not remove Putnam ’s and Carnap ’s fundamental agreement regarding realism, conceptual relativity, and metaphysics, however.
- 18.
One might perhaps apply the pragmatic maxim to find out what, if any, the key difference between Vienna Circle verificationism and Putnam ’s 1980s Harvard verificationism was. These might come up as practically identical positions.
- 19.
- 20.
In addition to Putnam , Huw Price (2011) is another neopragmatist developing partly Carnapian views even today, defending a Carnapian pluralism of linguistic frameworks. He compares Carnap ’s (1950) pluralism about ontological commitment to what would today be called “global irrealism” (Price 2011, 284) and contrasts Carnapian pluralism with Quinean monism, reminding us that a pragmatic or functional pluralism provides motivation for Carnap ’s logico-syntactical pluralism (ibid., 289). Quine ’s objections to Carnap can, according to Price , be to a large extent defused when we note that the one and the same existential quantifier can be “employed in the service of different functional, pragmatic or linguistic ends” (ibid., 291) – which, in effect, is what Putnam has argued when claiming that words like “exist” or “there is” have a plurality of different uses (e.g., in Putnam 2004). Indeed, Price (2011, 292, n8) perceptively points out that his “Carnapian view” comes close to Putnam’s “pragmatic pluralism”. While Price ’s historical comments on Carnap vs. Quine (vs. Putnam ) are in my view appropriate, I do not think we need to follow him into the final conclusion that “metaphysics remains where Carnap left it” (ibid., 303), nor to his proposal to integrate pragmatic functional pluralism and metaphysical “deflationism” (ibid.). This is because there is another – more Kantian – strategy for revising (and reviving) pragmatist metaphysics (cf. Pihlström 2009), though that, of course, is an entirely different story not to be told here.
- 21.
Kant (1781/1787) himself would not recommend confusing the two, either, because the things in themselves, in his view, clearly are not “made up”.
- 22.
A similar claim could be made about Philip Kitcher’s (2013) admirable proposal – which comes close to Putnam ’s recent views – to integrate realism (especially scientific realism) with pragmatic pluralism and the interest-relativity of our world-categorization (see especially Kitcher on “Carnap and the Caterpillar” in ibid., chap. 8). The in my view essential transcendental dimension is missing from the otherwise very balanced and carefully worked-out position.
- 23.
See Pihlström (2013) for some reflections on neopragmatist philosophy of religion, including Putnam ’s. Note that Putnam nowhere seems to comment on the classical pragmatists’ relations to the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism, except for what he says in his 1995 volume on Wittgenstein as a kind of pragmatist.
- 24.
However, we must be careful here. When Putnam (2012, 487–488) tells us that he “cannot inhabit the intellectual world” of philosophers like Hegel, Spinoza, or Leibniz , he does not mean that such philosophers wrote meaningless sentences; to suggest that they just wrote “nonsense” is “a hangover from the mistaken idea that we should ‘just say no’ to metaphysics” (ibid., 488). Cf. also the above-quoted passage in which Putnam says one can be a realist “in metaphysics” while accepting conceptual relativity (ibid., 56). So Putnam’s rejection of metaphysics is not total; he has, better than some others, recovered from the logical empiricist “hangover”. However, pace Putnam, I would suggest that one can find certain views unintelligible (cf. ibid., 490), or some intellectual worlds uninhabitable, as a result of transcendental reflection on human capacities and incapacities, specifically as manifested in one’s own case. Such reflection may, for instance, lead us to a deeper understanding of why one, when faced with, say, an eliminativist physicalist position, “[hasn’t] got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them” (Putnam , ibid., quoting Wittgenstein ’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, a work he finds important in his writings on religion as well).
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
In addition to the realism issue, Putnam ’s philosophy of religion is worth briefly taking up here because of its strong Wittgensteinian influences. Going back to the Viennese background of Wittgenstein (in the sense of Janik and Toulmin 1973) instead of the Vienna Circle proper is therefore the crucial move at this point. While neither Putnam nor other neopragmatists have shared the Vienna Circle’s condemnation of the entire theism vs. atheism debate as a piece of speculative metaphysics – recall that Carnap , among others, regarded both theism and atheism as equally meaningless metaphysics – Putnam ’s pragmatist attitude to religion can again be reconnected with his Carnapian, logically empiricist heritage. Embracing a religious way of thinking is a matter of choosing a certain linguistic framework, or what Wittgenstein called a language-game (though Wittgenstein never simply spoke about religion as a language-game); as Carnap argued, such choices can only be pragmatically justified. Religious beliefs do not mirror a pre-existing reality but are anchored in human beings’ decisions to use certain ways of speaking, or their growing into certain ways of speaking. This, clearly, is more a Wittgensteinian than a Carnapian conception of religion, but it does bear some resemblance to the anti-metaphysical, logical empiricist view on religion as merely poetic language serving purposes quite different from literal, scientific language.
- 29.
For further elucidation, historical and systematic, see Pihlström (2004).
- 30.
Note also that Putnam , in one of his many writings on Wittgenstein , brings the later Wittgenstein precisely into the context of discussion shaped by Carnap ’s and Reichenbach ’s logical empiricism, more specifically by their discussions of the phenomenalist (egocentric, methodologically solipsist) language and “usual language” (or “thing language”); this is exactly where, he argues, Wittgenstein ’s treatment of private language and public language becomes urgently relevant (see Putnam 2012, 349–353).
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
Putnam (2012, 563–564), among many others, opposes this transcendental reading of the private language argument, referring to James Conant as one of those who successfully explain it away as a misreading of Wittgenstein . In this discussion – in the context of his insightful engagement with Cavell – Putnam in my view fails to acknowledge the transcendental nature of his own line of thought (attributed to Cavell): “[…] skepticism universalized, skepticism that refuses to acknowledge any human community, is, to the extent that it is possible, a posture that negates not only its own intelligibility but also the very existence of a speaking and thinking subject, negates the skeptic’s own existence and the world’s” (ibid., 564). I also remain unconvinced by Putnam ’s claim that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus would have shown transcendental idealism (which Kant had argued to make empirical realism possible) to be “unintelligible nonsense” (ibid., 342). Putnam’s “deflationary reading of the supposed ‘solipsism’ of the Tractatus”, as he appropriately labels it, of course goes well together with his stubborn refusal to ever acknowledge transcendental idealism as a background of his own pragmatic or internal realism (cf. also Putnam 2006, responding to my contrary suggestions in Pihlström 2006).
- 34.
- 35.
Wittgenstein may even have derived the notion of a family resemblance from pragmatism, that is, from William James ’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which he is known to have read carefully. See Goodman (2002).
- 36.
Note, again, that it is far from clear that Quine can be called a “pragmatist” at all, despite his influence on both Putnam ’s and Rorty ’s versions of neopragmatism. See Koskinen and Pihlström (2006).
- 37.
I am fully aware that some New Wittgensteinians resist such formulations.
- 38.
- 39.
White , of course, was also a key mediating figure between logical empiricism and pragmatism, along with philosophers like Lewis , Nagel , Quine , and Goodman . For an excellent recent discussion, see Sinclair (2011). Cf. also my recent paper on White (Pihlström 2011a), on which I to some extent rely here, as well as, again, Koskinen and Pihlström (2006) on Quine and pragmatism.
- 40.
- 41.
I would thus not suggest that we follow him into, say, the claim that there is no pragmatic difference between Peircean scholastic realism and nominalism (see again White 2002). On the contrary, there is a major pragmatic difference between these positions – but these (and other) metaphysical views indeed have to be understood pragmatically, not as metaphysical theories independent of pragmatic and hence eventually broadly cultural considerations.
- 42.
As is well known, logical empiricism has recently been observed to have been more strongly neo-Kantian than the received view construes it as being – see, e.g., Friedman (2001) and Richardson (1998) – and the same, arguably, applies to pragmatism and neopragmatism – see Pihlström (2003) and (2009). Indeed, insofar as this neo-Kantian emphasis is on the right track, neopragmatism may be considerably more Kantian than the leading neopragmatists themselves, especially Rorty but even Putnam , have ever acknowledged. On the neo-Kantian character of logical empiricist philosophy of science comparable to Kuhn’s “new” philosophy of science (and, hence, pragmatism), see also Pihlström and Siitonen (2005).
References
Allison, Henry. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense – A Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. (1st ed. 1983.)
Ayer, A.J. 1936. Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986.
Burke, F. Thomas. 2013. What Pragmatism Was. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1934. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Wien: Springer.
———. 1950. Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology. In Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, ed. Leonard Linsky, 208–228. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. (Originally published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 11.)
———. 1963. Replies and Systematic Expositions. In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 859–1013. La Salle: Open Court.
———. 1967. The Logical Structure of the World & Pseudoproblems in Philosophy. Trans. Rolf A. George. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Originally published as Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928.)
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.
Creath, Richard, ed. 1990. Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine – Carnap Correspondence and Related Work. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2007. Vienna, the City of Quine’s Dreams. In Richardon and Uebel (2007), 332–345.
da Cunha, Ivan Ferreira. 2012. John Dewey and the Logical Empiricist Unity of Science. Cognitio 13: 219–230.
Dewey, John. 1938. Unity of Science as a Social Problem. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1(1): 29–38.
———. 1939. Theory of Valuation. In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science 2:4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, Michael. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
———. 2003. Kuhn and Logical Empiricism. In Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickels, 19–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2007. Coordination, Constitution, and Convention: The Evolution of the A Priori in Logical Empiricism. In Richardson and Uebel (2007), 91–116.
Giere, Ronald N., and Alan W. Richardson, ed. 1996. Origins of Logical Empiricism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 16. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks: The Harvester Press.
Goodman, Russell B. 2002. Wittgenstein and William James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haaparanta, Leila, and Heikki J. Koskinen, ed. 2012. Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hickman, Larry. 2007. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from Dewey. New York: Fordham University Press.
Hildebrand, David. 2003. Beyond Realism and Antirealism: Dewey and the Neopragmatists. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Holton, Gerald. 1993. From the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square: The Americanization of a European World Conception. In Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Developments, ed. Friedrich Stadler, 47–73. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Isaacson, Daniel. 2004. Quine and Logical Positivism. In The Cambridge Companion to Quine, ed. Roger F. Gibson, 214–269. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
James, William. 1907. In Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. 1973. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Järvilehto, Lauri. 2011. Pragmatic A Priori Knowledge: A Pragmatic Approach to the Nature and Object of What Can Be Known Independently of Experience. Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research 429. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. (Ph.D. Diss.)
Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990.
Kitcher, Philip. 2013. Preludes to Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koskinen, Heikki J. 2004. From a Metaphilosophical Point of View: A Study of W.V. Quine’s Naturalism, Acta Philosophica Fennica. Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland.
Koskinen, Heikki J., and Sami Pihlström. 2006. Quine and Pragmatism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42, 309–346.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. (1st ed. 1962).
Lewis, C.I. 1923. A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori. The Journal of Philosophy 20: 169–177.
Limbeck-Lilienau, Christoph. 2012. Carnap’s Encounter with Pragmatism. In Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, ed. Richard Creath, Vol. 16, 89–110. Dordrecht: Springer.
Mackie, J.L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Misak, Cheryl, ed. 2007. New Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mormann, Thomas. 2012. Toward a Theory of the Pragmatic A Priori: From Carnap to Lewis and Beyond. In Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, ed. Richard Creath, Vol. 16, 113–132. Dordrecht: Springer.
Morris, Charles. 1928. Neopragmatism and the Ways of Knowing. The Monist 38: 494–510.
———. 1934. Pragmatism and Metaphysics. The Philosophical Review 43(6): 149–164.
———. 1937. The Concept of Meaning in Pragmatism and Logical Positivism. In Pragmatic Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Amelie Rorty. Garden City: Doubleday & Co. 1966, 374–381.
———. 1938. Peirce, Mead, and Pragmatism. The Philosophical Review 47: 109–127.
———. 1963. Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism. In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 87–98. La Salle: Open Court. Philosophical Investigations 26, 125-148.
Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. 2003. Logic in Action: Wittgenstein's Logical Pragmatism and the Impotence of Scepticism. Philosophical Investigations 26: 125–148.
———. 2004. The Third Wittgenstein. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Nagel, Ernest. 1940. Charles S. Peirce, Pioneer of Modern Empiricism. In Sovereign Reasons, ed. Ernest Nagel, 89–100. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka (1992). Eino Kaila and Scientific Realism. In Niiniluoto et al. (1992), 102–116.
———. 1999. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka, Matti Sintonen, and Georg Henrik von Wright, ed. 1992. Eino Kaila and Logical Empiricism, Acta Philosophica Fennica. Vol. 52. The Philosophical Society of Finland: Helsinki.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka, and Sami Pihlström, ed. 2012. Reappraisals of Eino Kaila’s Philosophy, Acta Philosophica Fennica. Vol. 89. The Philosophical Society of Finland: Helsinki.
Peirce, Charles S. 1992–1998. The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. The Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pihlström, Sami. 1996. Structuring the World: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism, Acta Philosophica Fennica 59. The Philosophical Society of Finland: Helsinki.
———. 2003. Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View. Amherst: Prometheus/Humanity Books.
———. 2004. Putnam and Rorty on Their Pragmatist Heritage: Re-reading James and Dewey. In Dewey, Pragmatism, and Economic Methodology, ed. Elias L. Khalil. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 2005. Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
———. 2006. Putnam’s Conception of Ontology. Contemporary Pragmatism 3: 1–13.
———. 2008. How (Not) to Write the History of Pragmatist Philosophy of Science? Perspectives on Science 16: 26–69.
———. 2009. Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology. London: Continuum.
———. 2010. Emergence or Continuity? Toward a Pragmatist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement. Journal of Philosophical Research 35: 323–352.
———. 2011a. Morton White’s Philosophy of Culture: Holistic Pragmatism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Human Affairs 21: 140–156.
———. (ed.) 2011b. The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism. London: Continuum. (Paperback edition, The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism, 2015. London: Bloomsbury.)
———. 2012a. A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4:2, www.journalofpragmatism.eu.
———. 2012b. Toward a Pragmatically Naturalized Transcendental Philosophy of Science and Pragmatic Scientific Realism. Studia Philosophia Estonica 5.
———. 2013. Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. New York: Fordham University Press.
Pihlström, Sami, and Arto Siitonen. 2005. The Transcendental Method in Post-Empiricist Philosophy of Science. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 36.
Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1987. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle: Open Court.
———. 1990. In Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 1992. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 1994. In Words and Life, ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 1995. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
———. 2002. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004. Ethics without Ontology. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2006. Responses. Contemporary Pragmatism 3.
———. 2012. Philosophy in an Age of Science, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V. 1953a. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1980.
———. 1953b. Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory. Mind 62: 433–451.
———. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ramsey, Frank Plumpton. 1927. Facts and Propositions. In F.P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 34–51.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1939. Dewey’s Theory of Science. In The Philosophy of John Dewey, 3rd ed, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 159–192. La Salle: Open Court, 1989.
Richardson, Alan W. 1998. Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2007. ‘That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism’: Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science. In Richardson and Uebel (2007), 346–370.
Richardson, Alan W., and Thomas Uebel. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rydenfelt, Henrik, and Sami Pihlström, ed. 2013. William James on Religion. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Schlick, Moritz.1932–1933. Positivism and Realism, trans. Peter Heath. In The Philosophy of Science, ed. Richard Boyd et al. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 37–55, 1991.
Shook, John R. 1998. Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography 1898–1940. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.
Sinclair, Robert. 2011. Morton White’s Moral Pragmatism. Cognitio 12: 143–155.
———. 2013. Quine and Conceptual Pragmatism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.
Uebel, Thomas. 1992. Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath’s Naturalism in the Vienna Circle’s Protocol Sentence Debate. Atlanta: Rodopi.
———. 1996. The Enlightenment Ambition of Epistemic Utopianism: Otto Neurath’s Theory of Science in Historical Perspective. In Giere and Richardson (ed.), 91–112.
Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003. Can Pragmatic Realists Argue Transcendentally? In Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, ed. John R. Shook. Prometheus: Amherst.
White, Morton. 1956. Toward Reunion in Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2002. A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1921. Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961.
———. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.
———. 1969. On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and D. Paul. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on a presentation at the workshop, Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism, Vienna Circle Institute, University of Vienna (November 8–9, 2013). Related material was also presented at the conference, Philosophical Revolutions, University College Dublin (June, 2013). I should like to thank Maria Baghramian , Sarin Marchetti , Larry Hickman , Friedrich Stadler, Ilkka Niiniluoto , and Heikki J. Koskinen , among many others, for valuable comments and discussion. I also gratefully acknowledge the critical comments by an anonymous referee.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pihlström, S. (2017). On the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism. In: Pihlström, S., Stadler, F., Weidtmann, N. (eds) Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50730-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50730-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50729-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50730-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)