Collective Reason: Roots of a Sociological Theory of Knowledge

Abstract

1. In a number of influential papers on the history of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Haller has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that the received view of this history is distorted. In particular he has argued that the notions entertained within the Circle encompassed much of what is usually attributed to today’s critics of the logical positivists, and that Neurath and Carnap developed ideas which anticipated the theory of science of T. S. Kuhn. In line with Hempel’s 1935 interpretation,¹ Haller points to the holistic character of Carnap’s and Neurath’s epistemology and to the historical and sociological orientation displayed especially by the latter. Neurath the sociologist, writes Haller,

fully realized that scientific research is the process of production of a collective that is determined by its social-economic situation and by history, especially its own history . ... Why this collective decides in favour of any given conception amongst the alternatives, why it chooses this rather than some other version of the correspondence of sentence and system , this, according to Neurath, cannot be given further justification. And thereby we stand at just that point at which Kuhn's theory appears as an immediate continuation of that of Neurath.²

Now holism and sociologism are of course different perspectives: Neurath’s precursors Mach, Poincare and Duhem were holists, but were more or less oblivious to the social nature of science.³