Overview of Doctrines

Despite the pluralism of the Vienna Circle’s views, there did exist a minimal consensus which may be put as follows. A theory of scientific knowledge was propagated which sought to renew empiricism by freeing it from the impossible task of justifying the claims of the formal sciences. It will be noted that this updating did not leave empiricism unchanged.
Following the logicism of Frege and Russell, the Circle considered logic and mathematics to be analytic in nature. Extending Wittgenstein’s insight about logical truths to mathematical ones as well, the Circle considered both to be tautological. Like true statements of logic, mathematical statements did not express factual truths: devoid of empirical content they only concerned ways of representing the world, spelling out implication relations between statements. The knowledge claims of logic and mathematics gained their justification on purely formal grounds, by proof of their derivability by stated rules from stated axioms and premises. (Depending on the standing of these axioms and premises, justification was conditional or unconditional.) Thus defanged of appeals to rational intuition, the contribution of pure reason to human knowledge (in the form of logic and mathematics) was thought easily integrated into the empiricist framework. (Carnap sought to accommodate Gödel’s incompleteness results by separating analyticity from effective provability and by postulating that arithmetic consisted of an infinite series of ever richer arithmetical languages; see the discussion and references in section 3.2 below.)
The synthetic statements of the empirical sciences meanwhile were held to be cognitively meaningful if and only if they were empirically testable in some sense. They derived their justification as knowledge claims from successful tests. Here the Circle appealed to a meaning criterion the correct formulation of which was problematical and much debated (and will be discussed in greater detail in section 3.1 below). Roughly, if synthetic statements failed testability in principle they were considered to be cognitively meaningless and to give rise only to pseudo-problems. No third category of significance besides that of a priori analytical and a posteriori synthetic statements was admitted: in particular, Kant’s synthetic a priori was banned as having been refuted by the progress of science itself. (The theory of relativity showed what had been held to be an example of the synthetic a priori, namely Euclidean geometry, to be false as the geometry of physical space.) Thus the Circle rejected the knowledge claims of metaphysics as being neither analytic and a priori nor empirical and synthetic. (On related but different grounds, they also rejected the knowledge claims of normative ethics: whereas conditional norms could be grounded in means-ends relations, unconditional norms remained unprovable in empirical terms and so depended crucially on the disputed substantive a priori intuition.)
Given their empiricism, all of the members of the Vienna Circle also called into question the principled separation of the natural and the human sciences. They were happy enough to admit to differences in their object domains, but denied the categorical difference in both their overarching methodologies and ultimate goals in inquiry, which the historicist tradition in the still only emerging social sciences and the idealist tradition in philosophy insisted on. The Circle’s own methodologically monist position was sometimes represented under the heading of “unified science”. Precisely how such a unification of the sciences was to be effected or understood remained a matter for further discussion (see section 3.3 below).
It is easy to see that, combined with the rejection of rational intuition, the Vienna Circle’s exclusive apportionment of reason into either formal a priori reasoning, issuing in analytic truths (or contradictions), and substantive a posteriori reasoning, issuing in synthetic truths (or falsehoods), severely challenged the traditional understanding of philosophy. All members of the Circle hailed the end of distinctive philosophical system building. In line with the Tractatusclaim that all philosophy is really a critique of language, the Vienna Circle took the so-called linguistic turn, the turn to representation as the proper subject matter of philosophy. Philosophy itself was denied a separate first-order domain of expertise and declared a second-order inquiry. Whether the once queen of the sciences was thereby reduced to the mere handmaiden of the latter was still left open. It remained a matter of disagreement whether philosophy was also denied wholly autonomous sources of insight and what type of distinctively philosophical insight, if any, would remain legitimate. Just as importantly, the tools of modern logic were employed also for metatheoretical construction, not just for the reduction of empirical claims to their observational base or, more generally, for the derivation of their observational consequences. For the price of abandoning foundationalist certainty this allowed for an enormous expansion of the domain of empirical discourse. Ultimately, it opened the space for the still ongoing discussions of scientific realism and its alternatives (see section 3.4 below).
The Circle’s leading protagonists differed in how they conceptualized this reflexive second-order inquiry that the linguistic turn had inaugurated. Nevertheless, they all agreed broadly that the ways of representing the world were largely determined by convention. A multitude of ideas hide behind this invocation of conventionality. One particularly radical one is the denial of the apodicity of all apriority, the denial of the claim that knowledge justified through reason alone represents truths that are unconditionally necessary. Another one is the imputation of agency in the construction of the logico-linguistic frameworks that make human cognition possible, the denial that conventionality could only mean acquiescence in tradition. Whether such ideas were followed by individual members of the Circle, however, depended on their own interests and influences. It is these often overlooked or misunderstood differences that hold the key to understanding the interplay of occasionally incompatible positions that make up Vienna Circle philosophy. (As can be seen from some of their internal disputes, moreover, these differences were also not always obvious to the protagonists themselves.)
To see a striking example, consider their overarching conceptions of philosophy itself. Some protagonists retained the idea that philosophy possessed a separate disciplinary identity from science and, like Schlick, turned philosophy into a distinctive, albeit non-formal activity of meaning determination. Others, like Carnap, agreed on the distinction between philosophy and science but turned philosophy into a purely formal enterprise, the so-called logic of science. Still others went even further and, like Neurath under the banner of “unified science”, also rejected philosophy as a separate discipline and apportioned what remained of it after the rejection of metaphysics to science as its meta-theory. With Schlick, then, philosophy became the activity of achieving a much clarified and deepened understanding of the cognitive and linguistic practices actually already employed in science and everyday discourse. By contrast, for Carnap, philosophy investigated and reconstructed existing language fragments, developed new logico-linguistic frameworks and suggested possible formal conventions for science, while, for Neurath, the investigation of science was pursued by an interdisciplinary meta-theory that encompassed empirical disciplines, again with a pragmatic orientation. Thus we find in apparent competition different conceptions of post-metaphysical philosophy: the projects of experiential meaning determination, of formal rational reconstruction and of naturalistic explications of leading theoretical and methodological notions. (For roughly representative early essay-length statements of their positions see Schlick 1930, Carnap 1932a and Neurath 1932a; later restatements are given in Schlick 1937, Carnap 1936b and Neurath 1936b.) In the more detailed discussions below these differences of overall approach will figure repeatedly (see also section 3.6 below).
Criticisms of the basic positions adopted in the Vienna Circle are legion, though it may be questioned whether most of them took account of the sophisticated variations on offer. (Sometimes the Circle’s own writings are disregarded altogether and “logical positivism” is discussed only via the proxy of Ayer’s popular exposition; see, e.g., Soames 2003.) But some Neo-Kantians like Ernst Cassirer may claim that they too accepted developments like the merely relative a priori and an appropriate conception of the historical development of science. Likewise, Wittgensteinians may claim that Wittgenstein’s own opposition to metaphysics only concerned false attempts to render it intelligible: his merely ineffable but uneliminated metaphysics concerned precisely what for him were essentials of ways of representing the world. The commonest criticisms, however, concerned not the uniqueness of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines, or their faithfulness to their supposed sources, but whether they were tenable at all. Prominent objects of this type of criticism include the verificationist theory of meaning and its claimed anti-metaphysical and non-cognitivist consequences as well as its own significance; the reductionism in phenomenalist or physicalist guises that appeared to attend the Circle’s attempted operationalisation of the logical atomism of Russell and Wittgenstein; and the Circle’s alleged scientism in general and their formalist and a-historical conception of scientific cognition in particular. These criticisms are discussed in some detail below in order to assess why which of the associated doctrines remain of what importance.
As noted, the Vienna Circle did not last long: its philosophical revolution came at a cost. Yet what was so socially, indeed politically, explosive about what appears on first sight to be a particularly arid, if not astringent, doctrine of specialist scientific knowledge? To a large part, precisely what made it so controversial philosophically: its claim to refute opponents not by proving their statements to be false but by showing them to be (cognitively) meaningless. Whatever the niceties of their philosophical argument here, the socio-political impact of the Vienna Circle’s philosophies of science was obvious and profound. All of them opposed the increasing groundswell of radically mistaken, indeed irrational, ways of thinking about thought and its place in the world. In their time and place, the mere demand that public discourse be perspicuous, in particular, that reasoning be valid and premises true—a demand implicit in their general ideal of reason—placed them in the middle of crucial socio-political struggles. Some members and sympathisers of the Circle also actively opposed the then increasingly popular völkisch supra-individual holism in social science as a dangerous intellectual aberration. Not only did such ideas support racism and fascism in politics, but such ideas themselves were supported only by radically mistaken arguments concerning the nature and explanation of organic and unorganic matter. So the first thing that made all of the Vienna Circle philosophies politically relevant was the contingent fact that in their day much political discourse exhibited striking epistemic deficits. That some of the members of the Circle went, without logical blunders, still further by arguing that socio-political considerations can play a legitimate role in some instances of theory choice due to underdetermination is yet another matter. This particular issue will not be pursued further here (see references at the end of section 2.1 above), nor will the general topic of the Circle’s embedding in modernism and the discourse of modernity (see Putnam 1981b for a reductionist, Galison 1990 for a foundationalist, Uebel 1996 for a constructivist reading of their modernism, Dahms 2004 for an account of personal relations with representatives of modernism in art and architecture), will not be pursued further.

3. Selected Doctrines and their Criticisms

Given only the outlines of Vienna Circle philosophy, its controversial character is evident. The boldness of its claims made it attractive but that boldness also seemed to be its undoing. Turning to the questions of how far and, if at all, which forms of Vienna Circle philosophy stand up to some common criticisms, both the synchronic variations and the diachronic trajectories of its variants must be taken into account. This will be attempted in the sections below.
Before expectations are raised too high, however, it must also remembered that in this article only the views of members of the Vienna Circle can be discussed, even though the problematic issues were pervasive in logical empiricism generally. (For articles on Reichenbach see, e.g, Spohn 1991 and Salmon and Wolters 1994, Richardson 2005, 2006, and Milkov and Peckhaus 2013.) Moreover, here the emphasis must lie on the main protagonists: Schlick, Carnap and Neurath. (Neither Hahn or Frank, nor Waismann or Feigl, for instance, can be discussed here as extensively as their work deserves; see, e.g., Uebel 2005b, 2011b, McGuinness 2011, Haller 2003, respectively.) What will be noted, however, is that Vienna Circle philosophy was by no means identical with the post-World War II logical empiricism that has come to be known as the “received view” of scientific theories, even though it would be hard to imagine the latter without the former. (For a systematic if schematic critical discussion of the received view, see Suppe 1977, for a partial defense Mormann 2007a.)
To deepen the somewhat cursory overview of Vienna Circle philosophy given above, we now turn to the discussion of the following issues: first, the viability of the conceptions of empirical significance employed by Vienna Circle in its classical period; second, its uses of the analytic-synthetic distinction; third, its supposedly reductionist designs and foundationalist ambitions for philosophy; fourth, its stances in the debate about realism or anti-realism with regard to the theoretical terms in science; fifth, Carnap’s later ideas in response to some of the problems encountered; sixth, the issue of the status of the meaning criterion itself and of the point of their critique of metaphysics; seventh, the Vienna Circle’s attitude towards history and of their own place in the history of philosophy.
These topics have been chosen for the light their investigation throws on the Circle’s own agendas and the reception of its doctrines amongst philosophers at large, as well as for the relative ease with which their discussion allows its development and legacy to be charted. There can be little doubt about the enormous impact that the members of the Vienna Circle had on the development of twentieth-century philosophy. What is less clear is whether any of its distinctive doctrines are left standing once the dust of their discussion has settled or whether those of its teachings that were deemed defensible merged seamlessly into the broad church that analytic philosophy has become (and, if so, what those surviving doctrines and teachings may be).
It must be noted, then, that the topics chosen for this article do not exhaust the issues concerning which the members of the Vienna Circle made significant contributions (which continue to stimulate work in the history of philosophy of science). Important topics like that of the theory and practice of unified science, of the nature of the empirical basis of science (the so-called protocol-sentence debate) and of the general structure of the theories of individual sciences can only be touched upon selectively. Likewise, while the general topic of ethical non-cognitivism receives only passing mentions, the Circle’s varied approaches to value theory cannot be discussed here (for an overview see Rutte 1986). Other matters, like the contributions made by Vienna Circle members to the development of probability theory and inductive logic, the philosophy of logic and mathematics (apart from the guiding ideas of Carnap) and to the philosophy of individual empirical sciences (physics, biology, psychology, social science), cannot be discussed at all (see Creath and Friedman 2007 and Richardson and Uebel 2007 for relevant essays). But it may be noted that with his “logic of science” Carnap counts among the pioneers of what nowadays is called “formal epistemology”.

Overview of Doctrines

3. Selected Doctrines and their Criticisms

Overview of Doctrines :: تعاليق

Overview of Doctrines