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 | |  The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Relative A Priori | |
Whether the verificationist agenda was pursued in a formalist or pragmatic vein, however, all members shared the belief that meaningful statements divided exclusively into analytic and synthetic statements which, when asserted, were strictly matched with a priori and a posteriorireasoning for their support. The Vienna Circle wielded this pairing of epistemic and semantic notions as a weapon not only against the substantive a priori of the Schoolmen but also against Kant’s synthetic a priori. Moreover, their notion of analyticity comprized both logical and mathematical truths, thereby extending Wittgenstein’s understanding of the former as “tautological” in support of a broadly logicist program.It is well known that this central component of the Vienna Circle’s arsenal, the analytic/synthetic distinction, came under sharp criticism from Quine in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951a), less so that the criticism can only be sustained by relying on objections of a type first published by Tarski. The argument is more complex, but here is a very rough sketch. So as to discard the analytic/synthetic distinction as an unwarranted dogma, Quine in “Two Dogmas” argued for the in-principle revisability of all knowledge claims and criticised the impossibility of defining analyticity in a non-circular fashion. The first argument tells against the apodictic a priori of old (the eternal conceptual verities), but, as we shall see, it is unclear whether it tells against at least some of the notions of the a priori held in the Vienna Circle. The second argument presupposes a commitment to extensionalism that likewise can be argued not to have been shared by all in the Circle. By contrast, Tarski had merely observed that, at a still more fundamental level, he knew of no basis for a sharp distinction between logical and non-logical terms. (For relevant primary source materials see also Quine 1935, 1951b, 1963, Carnap 1950, 1955, 1963b, their correspondence and related previously unpublished lectures and writings in Creath 1990, the memoir Quine 1991, and Tarski 1936.)The central role on the Vienna Circle’s side in this discussion falls to Carnap and the reorientation of philosophy he sought to effect in Logical Syntax (1934/37). It was the notion of the merely relative and therefore non-apodictic a priori that deeply conditioned his notion of analyticity and allowed him to sidestep Quine’s fallibilist argument in a most instructive fashion. In doing so Carnap built on an idea behind Reichenbach’s early attempt (1920) to comprehend the general theory of relativity by means of the notion of a merely constitutive a priori. Now Schlick had objected to the residual idealism of this proposal (see Oberdan 2009) and prefered talk of conventions instead and Reichenbach soon followed him in this (see Coffa 1991, Ch. 10). Carnap too did not speak of the relative a priori as such (in returning to this terminology present discussions follow Friedman 1994), but his pluralism of logico-linguistic frameworks furnish precisely that.First consider Schlick as a contrast class. Schlick (1934) appeared to show little awareness of the language-relativity of the analytic/synthetic distinction and spoke of analytic truths as conceptual necessities that can be conclusively surveyed. This would suggest that Schlick rejected Kant’s apodictic synthetic a priori but not the apodicity of analytic statements. Clearly, if that were so, Quine’s argument from universal fallibilism would find a target here. Matters are not quite so clear-cut, however. Schlick had long accepted the doctrine of semantic conventionalism that the same facts could be captured by different conceptual systems (1915): his analytic truths were conventions that were framework-relative and as such necessary only in the very frameworks they helped to constitute. Yet what Schlick did not countenance was the possibility of incommensurable conceptual frameworks. He held that any fact was potentially expressible in any framework (1936b). As a result, Schlick did not accept the possibility that after the adoption of a new framework the analytic truths of the old one may be no longer assertable, that they could be discarded as no longer applicable even in translation, as it were. Herein lay a point that Quine’s argument could exploit: Schlick’s analytic truths remained unassailable despite their language-relativity.Now Carnap, under the banner of the principle of logical tolerance (1934/37, §17), abandoned the idea of the one universal logic which had informed Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein before him. Instead, he recognized a plurality of logics and languages whose consistency was an objective matter even though axioms and logical rules were fixed entirely by convention. Already due to this logical pluralism, the framework-relativity of analytic statements went deeper for Carnap than it did for Schlick. But Carnap also accepted the possibility of incommensurability between seemingly similar descriptive terms and between entire conceptual systems (1936a). Accepting the analytic truths of the framework of our best physical theory may thus be incompatible with accepting those of an earlier one, even if the same logic is employed in both. Carnapian analyticities do not therefore express propositions that we hold to be true unconditionally, but only propositions true relative to their own framework. Carnapian analyticities are no longer held to be potentially translatable across all frameworks. Quine’s claim of universal revisability (which itself needs some modification; see Putnam 1978) thus misses its mark against them. (Quine, of course, rejected Carnap’s intensionalist accommodation of radical fallibilism via the notion of language change.)Concerning the criticism of the circular nature of the definition of analyticity, Carnap responded that it pertained primarily to the idea of analyticity in natural language whereas he was interested in “explications” as provided by the logic of science (or better, a logic of science, since there existed no unique logic of science for Carnap). Explications are reconstructions in a formal language of selected aspects of complex terms that should not be expected to model the original in all respects (1950b, Ch.1). Moreover, Carnap held that explication of the notion of analyticity in formal languages yielded the kind of precision that rendered the complaint of circularity irrelevant: vague intuitions of meaning were no longer relied upon. Those propositions of a given language were analytic that followed from its axioms and, once the syntactic limitations of theLogical Syntax period had been left behind, from its definitions and meaning postulates, by application of its rules: no ambiguity obtained.So it may appear that the notion of analyticity is easily delimitable in Carnap’s explicational approach: analytic propositions would be those that constitute a logico-linguistic framework. But complications arose from the fact that, on Carnap’s understanding, not all propositions defining a logico-linguistic framework need be analytic ones (1934/37, §51). It was possible for a framework to consist not only of L-rules, whose entirety determines the notion of logical consequence, but also of P-rules, which represent presumed physical laws. So let analytic propositions be those framework propositions whose negations are self-contradictory. Here a problem arose once the syntactic constraints were dropped by Carnap after Logical Syntax so as to allow semantic reasoning and the introduction of so-called meaning postulates: now the class of analytic propositions was widened to include not only logical and mathematical truths but also those obtained by substitution of semantically equivalent expressions. How was one now to explicate the idea that there can be non-analytic framework propositions (whose negations are not self-contradictory)? Consider that for opponents like Quine, responding that the negations of non-analytic framework propositions do not contradict meaning postulates, was merely to dress up a presupposed notion of meaning in pseudo-formal garb: while it provided what looked like formal criteria, Carnap’s method did not leave the circle of intensional notions behind and so seemed to beg the question. Meaning postulates (Carnap 1952), after all, could only be identified by appearing on a list headed “meaning postulates” (as Quine added in reprints of 1951a).Here one must note that in Logical Syntax, Carnap also modified the thesis of extensionality he had previously defended alongside Russell and Wittgenstein: now it merely claimed the possibility of purely extensional languages and no longer demanded that intensional languages be reduced to them (ibid., §67). Of course, the mere claim that the language of science can be extensional still proves troublesome enough, given that in such a language a distinction between laws and accidentally true universal propositions cannot be drawn (the notion of a counterfactual conditional, needed to distinguish the former, is an intensional one). Even so, this opening of Carnap’s towards intensionalism already at the height of his syntacticism—to say nothing of his explicit intensionalism in Meaning and Necessity (1947)—seems enough to thwart Quine’s second complaint in “Two Dogmas”. Carnap did not share Quine’s extensionalist agenda, so the need to break out of the circle of intensional notions once these were clearly defined in his formal languages did not apply. That their’s were in fact different empiricist research programmes was insufficiently stressed, it would appear, by Quine and Quinean critics of Carnap (Stein 1992; cf. Ricketts 1982, 2003, Creath 1991, 2004, Richardson 1997).To sustain his critique, Quine had to revive his and Tarski’s early doubts about Carnap’s methodological apparatus and dig even deeper. (Tarski also shared Quine’s misgivings about analyticity when they discussed these issues with Carnap at Harvard; see Mancosu 2005, Frost-Arnold 2013.) Their scepticism found its target in Carnap’s ingenious measures in Logical Syntax taken to preserve the thesis that mathematics is analytic from the ravages of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Gödel proved that every formal system strong enough to represent number theory contains a formula that is true but neither itself or its negation is provable in that system; such formulae—known since as Gödel sentences—are provable in a still stronger system which, however, also contains a formula of its own that is true but not provable in it (and neither is its negation). Commonly, Gödel’s proof is taken to have undermined the thesis of the analyticity of arithmetic. (For discussions of this challenge to Carnap’s logical syntax project, see Friedman 1988, 1999a, Goldfarb and Ricketts 1992, Richardson 1994, Awodey and Carus 2003, 2004.) Carnap responded by stating that arithmetic demands an infinite sequence of ever richer languages and by declaring analytic statements to be provable by non-finite reasoning (1934/37, §60a-d). This looked like fitting the bill on purely technical grounds, but it is questionable whether such reasoning may still count as syntactic. Nowadays, it is computational effectiveness that is taken to distinguish purely formal from non-formal, material reasoning. (Carnap’s move highlights the tension within Logical Syntax between formal and crypto-semantic reasoning. It thus points ahead to his acceptance of semantics in 1935—only one year after the publication of Logical Syntax and contrary to his opposition against it expressed in that book—that the rigid syntacticism officially advertised there was at the same time undermined as its failings were being compensated (illegitimately so by official standards), e.g., by considering translatability a syntactic notion. For a discussion of Carnap’s move, see Coffa 1978, Ricketts 1996, Goldfarb 1997, Creath 1996, 1999.) It is no criticism that Carnap’s reconstruction of arithmetic was not standard logicism, but that Carnap unduly stretched the idea of formal reasoning is. Was he saved by his shift to semantics?Tarski (1936) granted the language-relativity of the reconstructed notion of analyticity in Logical Syntax. He also did not object that Carnap’s procedure of circumventing the problem which the Gödel sentences presented to the thesis of the analyticity of arithmetic was illegitimate. Tarski rather questioned whether there were “objective reasons” for the sharp distinction between logical and non-logical terms and he pointed out that Carnap’s distinction between the logical and the empirical was not a hard and fast one. Since noting that the distinction between logical and non-logical was not a sharp one and arguing that no principled distinction could be upheld between them are two quite different reactions, however, Tarski’s point on its own does not fully support the Quinean critique. Quine’s conclusion (1940, §60) that the notion of logical truth itself is “informal” rather reflects the moral that he drew from Tarski’s observation. It appears that what motivated him (after a nominalistic interlude) to develop his naturalistic alternative to Carnap’s conception of philosophy was his considered rejection of Carnap’s accommodation of the thesis that arithmetic is analytic to Gödel’s result.Different strands of Quine’s criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction must thus be distinguished. While Quine’s criticisms in “Two Dogmas” on their own clearly did not undermine all forms of the distinction that were defended in the Vienna Circle—Carnap’s reconstructions of the notion of analyticity did not express unconditionally necessary and unrevisable propositions—they do gain in plausibility even against Carnap’s once it is recognized that the deepest ground of contestation lies elsewhere: not in the notion of analyticity widely understood but in that of logical truth narrowly understood. Read in this way, Quine can be seen to argue that the notion of L-consequence as explication of analytic truth—as opposed to P-consequence as non-analytic, mere framework entailments—traded not only on the idea of non-finitary notions of proof but also on a distinction of logical from descriptive expressions that itself only proceeded on the basis of a finite enumeration of the former (compare Carnap 1934/37, §§51–52). (This deficit was not repaired in Carnap’s later work either; see Awodey 2007.) What Quine criticized was precisely the fact that Carnap could ground the distinction between logical and non-logical terms no deeper than by the enumeration of the former in a given framework: was the distinction therefore not quite arbitrary?Quine’s direct arguments against the distinction between logical and empirical truth (1963) have been found to beg the question against Carnap and his way of conceiving of philosophy (Creath 2003). This way of responding to Quine’s objection requires us to specify still more precisely just what Carnap thought he was doing when he employed the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. To be sure, in (1955) he gave broadly behavioural criteria for when meaning ascriptions could be deemed accepted in linguistic practice, but in (1963a) he noted that this was not a general requirement for the acceptability of explicatory discourse. To repeat, explications did not seek to model natural language concepts in their tension-filled vividness, but to make proposals for future use and to extract and systematize certain aspects for constructive purposes. Thus Carnap clarified (1963b, §32) that he regarded the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements—just like the distinction between descriptive or factual and prescriptive or evaluative statements—not as descriptive of natural language practices, but as a constructive tool for logico-linguistic analysis and theory construction. It is difficult to overstress the significance of this stance of Carnap’s for the evaluation of his version of the philosophical project of the Vienna Circle. Carnap’s understanding of philosophy has thus been aptly described as the “science of possibilities” (Mormann 2000).As Carnap understood the analytic/synthetic distinction, it was a distinction drawn by a logician to enable greater theoretical systematicity in the reconstructive understanding of a given symbol system, typically a fragment of a historically developed one. That fully determinative objective criteria of what to regard as a logical and what as a non-logical term cannot be assumed to be pre-given does not then in and of itself invalidate the use of that distinction by Carnap. On the contrary, it has been convincingly argued that Carnap himself did not hold to a notion of what is a factual and what is a formal expression or statement that was independent of the specification of the language in question (Ricketts 1994). The ultimate ungroundedness of his basic semantic explicatory categories, this suggests instead, was a fact that his own theories fully recognized and consciously exploited. (Somewhat analogously, that we cannot define science independently of the practice of scientists of “our culture” was admitted by Neurath 1932a, Carnap 1932d and Hempel 1935, much to exasperation of Zilsel 1932 and Schlick 1935a.)It remained open for Carnap then to declare his notion of analyticity to be only operationally defined for constructed languages and to let that notion be judged entirely in terms of its utility for meta-theoretical reflection. Just on that account, however, a last hurdle remains: finding a suitable criterion of significance for theoretical terms that allows the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements to be drawn in the non-observational, theoretical languages of science. (This was a problem ever since the non-eliminative reducibility of disposition terms had been accepted and one that still held for Carnap’s 1956 criterion; see section 3.5 below). Only if that can be done, we must therefore add, can Carnap claim his formalist explicationist project to emerge unscathed from the criticisms of both Tarski and Quine.An important related though independently pursued line of criticism may be noted here. It finds its origin in Saunders Mac Lane’s review (1937) of Carnap’s Logical Syntax and focusses less on the analytic/synthetic distinction than on Carnap’s failure to give a formally correct definition of logic. It challenges the ambition to have accounted for the formal sciences but declines to embrace a naturalistic alternative. Further research along these lines has suggested to some that by extending Carnap’s approach and framework it can be linked to attempts in category theory to provide the missing definition (see Awodey 2012, 2016).None of the above considerations should lead one to deny, however, that one can find understandings of the term “analytic” by members of the Vienna Circle (like Schlick) that do fall victim to the criticisms of Quine more easily. Nor should one discount the fact that Carnap’s logic of science emerges as wilfully ill-equipped to deal with the problems that exercise the traditional metaphysics or epistemologies that deal in analyticities. (Of course, unlike his detractors, Carnap considered this to be a merit of his approach.) Lastly, it must be noted that Carnap’s intensionalist logic of science holds out the promise of practical utility only for the price of a pragmatic story that remains to be told. Of what nature are the practical considerations and decisions that, as Carnap so freely conceded (1950a), are called for when choosing logico-linguistic frameworks? (Such conventional choices do not respond to truth or falsity, but instead to whatever is taken to measure convenience.) That Carnap rightly may have considered such pragmatic questions beyond his own specific brief as a logician of science does not obviate the need for an answer to the question itself. (Carus 2007 argues that in this broad pragmatic dimension lies the very point of Carnap’s explicationism.) On this issue, too, it would have been helpful if there had been more collaboration with Neurath and Frank, who were sympathetic to Carnap’s explication of analyticity but did not refer to it much in their own, more practice-oriented investigations (see section 3.6 below). 3.3 Reductionism and Foundationalism: Two Criticisms Partly RebuttedAs it happens, anti-verificationism has two aspects: opposition to meaning reductionism and opposition to the formalist project. Turning to the former, we must distinguish two forms of reductionism, phenomenalist and physicalist reductionism. Phenomenalism holds statements to be cognitively significant if they can be reduced to statements about one’s experience, be it outer (senses) or inner (introspection). Physicalism holds statements to be cognitively significant if they can be reduced or evidentially related to statements about physical states of affairs. Here it must be noted not only that the Vienna Circle is typically remembered in terms of the apparently phenomenalist ambitions of Carnap’s Aufbau of 1928, but also that already by the early 1930s some form of physicalism was favoured by some leading members including Carnap (1932b) and that already in the Aufbau the possibility of a different basis than the phenomenal one had been indicated. Thus one must not only ask about the reductionism in the Aufbau but also consider just how reductivist in intent the physicalism was meant to be.Considerations can begin with an early critique that has given rise in some quarters to a sharp distinction between Viennese logical positivism and German logical empiricism, with the former accused of reductionism and the latter praised for their anti-reductionism, a distinction which falsely discounts the changing nature and variety of Vienna Circle doctrines. Reichenbach’s defense of empiricism (1938) turned on the replacement of the criterion of strict verifiability with one demanding only that the degree of probability of meaningful statements be determinable. This involved opposition also to demands for the eliminative reduction of non-observational to observational statements: both phenomenalism and reductive physicalism were viewed as untenable and a correspondentist realism was advanced in their stead. Now it is true that of the members of the Vienna Circle only Feigl ever showed sympathies for scientific realism, but it is incorrect that all opposition to it in the Circle depended on the naive semantics of early verificationism. Again, of course, some Vienna Circle positions were liable to Reichenbach’s criticism.Another misunderstanding to guard against is that the Vienna Circle’s ongoing concern with “foundational issues” and the “foundations of science” does in itself betoken foundationalism. (In the Vienna Circle’s days, foundationalism had it that the basic items of knowledge upon which all others depended were independent of each other, concerned phenomenal states of affairs and were infallible; nowadays, foundationalists drop phenomenalism and infallibility.) Already the manifesto sought to make clear the Circle’s opposition when it claimed that “the work of ‘philosophic’ or ‘foundational’ investigations remains important in accord with the scientific world conception. For the logical clarification of scientific concepts, statements and methods liberates one from inhibiting prejudices. Logical and epistemological analysis does not wish to set barriers to scientific enquiry; on the contrary, analysis provides science with as complete a range of formal possibilities as is possible, from which to select what best fits each empirical finding (example: non-Euclidean geometries and the theory of relativity).” (Carnap-Hahn-Neurath 1929 [1973, 316]) This passage can be read as an early articulation of the project of a critical-constructivist meta-theory of science that abjures a special authority of its own beyond that stemming from the application of the methods of the empirical and formal sciences to science itself, but instead remains open to what the actual practice of these sciences demands.How then can Vienna Circle philosophy be absolved of reductionism? As noted, it is the Aufbau(and echoes of it in the manifesto) that invites the charge of phenomenalist reductionism. To begin with, one must distinguish between the strategy of reductionism and the ambition of foundationalism. Concerning the Aufbau it has been argued that its strategy of reconstructing empirical knowledge from the position of methodological solipsism (phenomenalism without its ontological commitments and some of its epistemological ambitions) is owed not to foundationalist aims but to the ease by which this position seemed to allow the demonstration of the interlocking and structural nature of our system of empirical concepts, a system that exhibited unity and afforded objectivity, which was Carnap’s main concern. (See Friedman 1987, 1992, Richardson 1990, 1998, Ryckman 1991, Pincock 2002, 2005. For the wide variety of influences on the Aufbau more generally, see Damböck 2016.) However, it is hard to deny categorically that Carnap ever harbored foundationalist ambitions. Not only did Carnap locate hisAufbau very close to foundationalism in retrospect (1963a), but a passage in his (1930) led Uebel (2007) to claim that around 1929/30 Carnap was motivated by foundationalist principles and reinterpreted his own Aufbau along these lines—around the same time that Wittgenstein entertained a psychologistic reinterpretation of his own Tractatus that was reported back to the Circle by Waismann. To correct this foundationalist aberration was the task of the Circle’s subsequent protocol-sentence debate about the content, form and status of the evidence statements of science.This concession to the foundationalist misinterpretation of Vienna Circle philosophies generally must not, however, be taken to tell against the new reading of the Aufbau or the epistemologies developed from 1930 onwards on the physicalist wing of the Circle, however. In fact, the Aufbauitself fails when it is read as a foundationalist project, as it was by Quine (1951a) who pointed out that no eliminative definition of the relation ‘is at’ was provided (required for locating objects of consciousness in physical space). To be sure, this did not prompt Carnap (1961a) to abandon as mistaken reconstructions of the scientific language on the basis of methodological solipsism. Likewise, Carnap had not been prompted do so some thirty years earlier by Neurath (1931b, 1932a) who argued that such a type of rational reconstruction traded on objectionable counterfactual presuppositions (methodological solipsism did not provide a correct description of the reasoning involved in cognitive commerce with the world around us). All along Carnap (1932e, 1961a) merely conceded that it was more “convenient” to reconstruct the language of science on a physicalistic basis. Carnap’s responses are best interpreted, however, not as clinging to lost epistemological foundations, but as indicating a logician’s overriding concern with explicative language constructions of great variety and his long-standing and radical ontological abstemiousness. (Except for the period singled out above, the case for foundationalism is not supported either by the fact that as a logician of science Carnap gave up on what he now considered an epistemology unduly “entangled with psychological questions” (1934/37, §72). Already his concern in the Aufbau with different constructional systems speaks against it; moreover, philosophical scepticism never worried him.)Concerning physicalism likewise it may thus be asked whether it was only the recognition of the irreducibility of disposition terms, let alone of purely theoretical terms, that spelt the end of any earlier foundationalist impulse. Already by (1932e), however, Carnap’s physicalism was explicitly anti-foundationalist. That later in (1936/37) he called his non-eliminative definitions of disposition terms “reduction sentences” indicates that it was enough for him to provide a basis for the applicability of these terms by merely sufficient but not necessary conditions. Likewise, Carnap’s proposal (1939) to conceive of theoretical terms as defined by implicit definition in a non-interpreted language, but linked as a system via correspondence rules to terms for which a reductive chain can be determined, suggest that what concerned him primarily was the capture of indicator relations to sustain in principle testability of statements containing the terms in question. This is best understood as an attempt to preserve the empirical applicability of the formal languages constructed by way of explication for the contested concepts of scientific methodology, but not as reductivism with regard to some foundational given.By partial contrast, Neurath’s own physicalism all along was fallibilist and anti-foundationalist (1931b, 1932a). Consider that his complex conception of the form of protocol statements (1932b) explicated the concept of observational evidence in terms that expressly reflected debts to empirical assumptions which called for theoretical elaboration in turn. For unlike the logician of science Carnap, who left it to psychology and brain science to determine more precisely what the class observational predicates were that could feature in protocol statements (1936/37), the empirically oriented meta-theoretician of science Neurath was concerned to encompass and comprehend the practical complexities of reliance on scientific testimony: the different clauses (embeddings) of his proposed protocol statements stand for conditions on the acceptance of such testimony (see Uebel 2009). In addition, Neurath’s theory of protocol statements also makes clear that his understanding of physicalism did not entail the eliminative reduction of the phenomenon of intentionality but, like Carnap (1932c), merely sought its integration into empiricist discourse.Given these different emphases of their respective physicalisms, mention must also be made of the significant differences between Carnap’s and Neurath’s conceptions of unified science: where the formalist Carnap once preferred a hierarchical ordering of finitely axiomatized theoretical languages that allowed at least partial cross-language definitions and derivations—these requirements were liberalized over the years (1936b), (1938), (1939)—the pragmatist Neurath opted from the start to demand only the interconnectability of predictions made in the different individual sciences (1935a), (1936c), (1944). (Metereology, botany and sociology must be combinable to predict the consequences of a forest fire, say, even though each may have its own autonomous theoretical vocabulary.) Here too it must be remembered that, unlike Carnap, Neurath only rarely addressed issues in the formal logic of science but mainly concerned himself with the partly contextually fixed pragmatics of science. (One exception is his 1935b, a coda to his previous contributions to the socialist calculation debate with Ludwig von Mises and others.) Not surprisingly, at times the priorities set by Neurath for the pragmatics of science seemed to conflict with those of Carnap’s logic of science. (These tensions often were palpable in the grand publication project undertaken by Carnap and Neurath in conjunction with Morris, the International Encyclopedia of the Unity of Science (Reisch 2003).) That said, however, note that Carnap’s more hierarchical approach to the unity of science also does not support the attribution of foundationalist ambitions.But for a brief lapse around 1929/30, then, the post-Aufbau Carnap fully represents the position of Vienna Circle anti-foundationalism. In this he joined Neurath whose long-standing anti-foundationalism is evident from his famous simile, first used in 1913, that likens scientists to sailors who have to repair their boat without ever being able to pull into dry dock (1932b). Their positions contrasted at least prima facie with that of Schlick (1934) who explicitly defended the idea of foundations in the Circle’s protocol-sentence debate. Even Schlick conceded, however, that all scientific statements were fallible ones, so his position on foundationalism was by no means the traditional one. The point of his “foundations” remained less than wholly clear and different interpretation of it have been put forward. (On the protocol sentence debate as a whole, which included not only the debate between Carnap and Neurath but also that between the physicalists and Schlick, see, e.g., the differently centered accounts of Uebel 1992, 2007, Oberdan 1993, Cirera 1994.) While all in the Circle thus recognized as futile the attempt to restore certainty to scientific knowledge claims, not all members embraced positions that rejected foundationalism tout court. Clearly, however, attributing foundationalist ambitions to the Circle as a whole constitutes a total misunderstanding of its internal dynamics and historical development, if it does not bespeak wilfull ignorance. At most, a foundationalist faction around Schlick can be distinguished from the so-called left wing whose members pioneered anti-foundationalism with regard to both the empirical and formal sciences | |
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