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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
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 | | The Vienna Circle and History | |
Much confusion exists concerning the Vienna Circle and history, that is, both concerning the Vienna Circle’s attitude towards the history of philosophy and science and concerning its own place in that history. As more has been learnt about the history of the Vienna Circle itself—the development and variety of its doctrines as well as its own prehistory as a philosophical forum—that confusion can be addressed more adequately.As the unnamed villain of the opening sentences of Kuhn’s influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), logical empiricism is often accused of lacking historical consciousness and any sense of the embedding of philosophy and science in the wider culture of the day. Again it can hardly be denied that much logical empiricist philosophy, especially after World War II, was ahistorical in outlook and asocial in its orientation. Reichenbach’s distinction (1938) between the contexts of discovery and justification—which echoed distinctions made since Kant (Hoyningen-Huene 1987) and was already observed under a different name by Carnap in the Aufbau—was often employed to shield philosophy not only from contact with the sciences as practiced but also culture at large. But this was not the case for the Vienna Circle generally. On the one hand, unlike Reichenbach, who drew a sharp break between traditional philosophy and the new philosophy of logical empiricism in his popular The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), Schlick was very much concerned to stress the remaining continuities with traditional philosophy and its cultural mission in his last paper (1938). On the other hand, on the left wing of the Circle scientific meta-theory was opened to the empirical sciences. To be sure, Carnap for his own part was happy to withdraw to the “icy slopes” of the logic of science and showed no research interest of his own in the history of science or philosophy, let alone its social history. By way of the division of labor he left it to Neurath and Frank to pursue the historical and practice-related sociological questions that the pure logic of science had to leave unaddressed. (See, e.g., Neurath’s studies of the history of optics (1915, 1916), Frank’s homage to Mach (1917), his pedagogical papers in (1949b) and his concern with the practice of theory acceptance and change in (1956); cf. Uebel 2000 and Nemeth 2007.) Moreover, it must be noted that Neurath himself all along had planned a volume on the history of science for the International Encyclopedia of Science, a volume that in the end became Kuhn’s Structure. That is often held to be a supreme irony, given how Kuhn’s book is commonly read. But this is not only to overlook that the surviving editors of that series, Carnap and Morris found little to object in it, but also that Carnap found himself in positive agreement with Kuhn’s book (Reisch 1991, Irzik and Grunberg 1995; cf. Friedman 2001). Finally, one look at the 1929 manifesto shows that its authors were very aware of and promoted the links between their philosophy of science and the socio-political and cultural issues of the day.Turning to the historical influences on the Vienna Circle itself, the scholarship of recent decades has unearthed a much greater variety than was previously recognized. Scientifically, the strongest influences belonged to the physicists Helmholtz, Mach and Boltzmann, the mathematicians Hilbert and Klein and the logicians Frege and Russell; amongst contemporaries, Einstein was revered above all others. The Circle’s philosophical influences extend far beyond that of the British empiricists (especially Hume), to include the French conventionalists Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem and Abel Rey, American pragmatists like James and, in German-language philosophy, the Neo-Kantianism of both the Heidelberg and the Marburg variety, even the early phenomenology of Husserl as well as the Austrian tradition of Bolzano’s logic and the Brentano school. (See Frank 1949a for the influence of the French conventionalists and the affirmation of pragmatist sympathies; for the importance of Neo-Kantianism for Carnap, see Friedman 1987, 1992, Sauer 1989, Richardson 1998, Mormann 2007; for Neo-Kantianism in Schlick, see Coffa 1991, Ch. 9 and Gower 2000; for the significance of Husserl for Carnap, see Sarkar 2004 and Ryckman 2007; the Bolzano-Brentano connection is explored in Haller 1986.) It is against this very wide background of influences that the seminal force must be assessed that their contemporary Wittgenstein exerted. The literature on the relation between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is vast but very often suffers from an over-simplified conception of the latter. (See Stern 2007 for an attempt by a Wittgenstein scholar to redress the balance.) Needless to say, different wings of the Circle show these influences to different degrees. German Neo-Kantianism was important for Schlick and particularly so for Carnap, whereas the Austrian naturalist-pragmatist influences were particularly strong on Hahn, Frank and Neurath. Frege was of great importance for Carnap, less so for Hahn who looked to Russell. Most importantly, by no means all members of the Vienna Circle sought to emulate Wittgenstein—thus the division between the faction around Schlick and the left wing.While these findings leave numerous questions open, they nevertheless conclusively refute the picture long dominant due to A.J. Ayer’s popularisation of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines in hisLanguage, Truth and Logic. The picture suggested there of its philosophy by him was one of British empiricism topped up with formal logic (Hume plus Tractatus); by contrast, the strong Neo-Kantian and post-Kantian tendencies concerned with establishing the objectivity claim of science find no mention at all. In the preface to his later anthology Logical Positivism, Ayer remarked that his own Language, Truth and Logic “did something to popularize what may be called the classical position of the Vienna Circle” (1959, 8), but it should be noted that Ayer’s earlier book had made the connection between the Vienna Circle and British empiricism wholly dominant. Misleadingly as regards the Circle’s position, Ayer’s book (1936/46, 54, 96) embraced Berkeley’s epistemic phenomenalism and so adopted a traditional foundationalist position (even though he conceded fallibilist holism viz-a-vis external world statements). What Ayer called “the classical position” was at best the starting position of some but not all of its members which by 1932 the left wing as a whole had given up and even Schlick had no reason to endorse.All that said by way of embedding the Vienna Circle’s philosophy in its time, one must also ask whether its members understood their own position correctly. Here one issue in particular is becoming increasingly prominent and raises questions that are of importance for philosophy of science still today. That is whether, after all, logical empiricism did have the resources to understand correctly the then paradigm modern science, the general theory of relativity. According to the standard logical empiricist story (Schlick 1915, 1917, 1921, 1922), their theory conclusively refuted the Kantian conception of the synthetic a priori: Euclidean geometry was not only one geometry amongst many, it also was not the one that characterized empirical reality. With one of its most prominent exemplars refuted, the synthetic a priori was deemed overthrown altogether. As noted, Schlick convinced the young Reichenbach to drop his residually Kantian talk of constitutive principles and speak of conventions instead. Likewise Schlick rejected efforts by Ernst Cassirer (see his 1921, developing themes from his 1910) to make do with a merely relative a priori in helping along scientific self-reflection. Even though much later, and on the independent grounds of quantum physics, Frank attested to the increased proximity of his and Cassirer’s understanding of scientific theories (1938), Schlick’s disregard of Cassirer’s efforts remains notable.Most controversial is how the issue of general relativity as a touchstone for competing philosophies of science was framed: having dismissed Kant’s own synthetic a priori for its mistaken apodicity, no time was spared for discussion of its then contemporary development in Neo-Kantianism as a merely relative but still constitutive a priori. Now in the philosophy of physics, this omission—committed both by Schlick and Reichenbach—has recently come back to haunt logical empiricists with considerable vengeance. Thus it has been argued that the Schlick-Reichenbach reading of general relativity as embodying the standard logical empiricist model of scientific theories, with high theory linked to its observational strata by purely conventional coordinative definitions, is deeply mistaken in representing the local metric of space-time not to be empirically but conventionally determined, as indeed it is special relativity (Ryckman 1992) and that it is instead only the tradition of transcendental idealism that possesses the resources to understand the achievements of mathematical physics (Ryckman 2005; cf. Friedman 2001). It is tempting to speak of the return of the repressed Neo-Kantian opposition. But it is tempting too to note that Schlick’s and Reichenbach’s mistake was already corrected quietly and without fanfare by Carnap (see the example in his 1934/37, §50). Clearly then, the mistake was not inevitable and inherent in logical empiricist theorizing about science.The charge of a constitutive failing would rather seem to come from Demopoulos’s challenge to the two-languages model (nearly) universally adopted in logical empiricism (forthcoming). Importantly, this challenge does not proceed, as some previous ones have, from the impossibility of drawing a sharp distinction in all cases (Putnam 1962). Rather, the two-languages model falsely supposes that the process of testing scientific hypotheses must only advert to theoretically uncontaminated facts and so results in misunderstanding the empirical import of theoretical claims (as in the Newman problem). Instead, a conception of theory-mediated measurement and testing is suggested that extends responsiveness to observational data to theoretical claims by showing them to be essentially implicated in the production of observed experimental consequences. Hoping to advance beyond the stalemeate between realism and instrumentalism without appealing to question-begging semantics, Demopoulos here breaks with a supposition upheld by Carnap throughout, namely that the theoretical language be regarded as an essentially uninterpeted, at best partially interpreted calculus. Whatever the outcome of this challenge, it is remarkable how on this far-reaching and fundamental issue contemporary philosophy of science intersects with the history of philosophy of science.4. Concluding RemarksIn conclusion, the results of the discussions in section 3 can be briefly summarised. To start with, the dominant popular picture of the Vienna Circle as a monolithic group of simple-minded verificationists who pursued a blandly reductivist philosophy with foundationalist ambitions is widely off the mark. Instead, the Vienna Circle must be seen as a forum in which widely divergent ideas about how empiricism can cope with modern empirical and formal science were discussed. While by no means all of the philosophical initiatives started by members of the Vienna Circle have born fruit, it is neither the case that all of them have remained fruitless. Nor is it the case that everything once distinctive of Vienna Circle philosophy has to be discarded.Consider verificationism. While the idea to show metaphysics once-and-for-all and across-the-board to be not false but meaningless—arguably the most distinctive thesis associated with the Vienna Circle—did indeed have to be abandoned, two elements of that program remain so far unrefuted. On the one hand, it remains an open option to pursue the search for a criterion of empirical significance in terms of constructed, formal languages further along the lines opened by Carnap with his theory-relative proposal of 1956 (and its later defense against critics). On the other hand—albeit at the cost of merging with the pragmatist tradition and losing the apparent Viennese distinctiveness—the option to neglect as cognitively irrelevant, and in this sense metaphysical, all assertions whose truth or falsity would not make a difference remains as open as it always was. In addition it must be noted that, properly formulated, neither the formalist version of the criterion of empirical significance for constructed languages nor the pragmatist version of the criterion for natural languages are threatened by self-refutation.Consider analyticity. Here again, the traditional idea—sometimes defended by some members—did show itself indefensible, but this left Carnap’s framework-relative interpretation of analyticity and the understanding of the a priori as equally relative untouched. Moreover, if Carnap’s ramseyfications can be defended, an analytic/synthetic distinction could be upheld also for the theoretical languages of science. In any case, however, the distinction between framework principles and content continues to be drawable on a case by case basis.Consider reductionism and foundationalism. While it cannot be denied that various reductionist projects were at one time or another undertaken by members of the Vienna Circle and that not all of its members were epistemological anti-foundationalists either from the start or at the end, it is clearly false to paint all of them with reductivist and/or foundationalist brushes. This is particularly true of the members of the so-called left wing of the Circle, all of whom ended up with anti-foundationalist and anti-reductionist positions (even though this did involve instrumentalism for some).Consider also, however, the challenges mentioned above to the fundamental tenets of logical empiricism that remain issues of intense discussion: challenges to its conception of the nature of empirical theory and of what is distinctive about the formal sciences. That to this day no agreement has been reached about how its proposals are to be replaced is not something that is unique to logical empiricism as a philosophical movement, but that they remain on the table, as it were, shows the ongoing relevance and centrality of its work for philosophy of science.Whether the indicated qualifications and/or modifications count as defeats of the original project depends at least in part on what precisely is meant to be rejected when metaphysics is rejected and that in turn depends on what the positive vision for philosophy consists in. Here again one must differentiate. While some members ended with considerable more sympathy for traditional philosophy than they displayed in the Circle’s heyday—and may thus be charged with partial surrender—others stuck to their guns. For them, what remained of philosophy stayed squarely in the deflationist vein established by the linguistic turn. They offered explications of contested concepts or practices that, they hoped, would prove useful. Importantly, the explications given can be of two sorts: the formal explications of the logic of science by means of exemplary models of constructed languages, and the more informal explications of the empirical theory of science given by spelling out how certain theoretical desiderata can be attained more or less under practical constraints. This has been designated as the bipartite metatheory conception of scientific philosophy and ascribed to the left wing of the Circle as an ideal unifying its diverse methodologies (Uebel 2007, Ch. 12, 2015). Readers will note therefore that despite his enormous contribution to the development of Vienna Circle philosophy, it is not Schlick’s version of it that appears to this reviewer to be of continuing relevance to contemporary philosophy—unlike, in their very different but not incompatible ways, Carnap’s and Neurath’s and Frank’s. This may be taken as a partial endorsement of Hempel’s 1991 judgement (quoted in sect. 1 above), against which, however, Carnap has here been re-claimed for the Circle’s left wing.Needless to say, recent work on Vienna Circle philosophies continues to inspire a variety of approaches to the legacy they constitute (besides prompting continuing excavations of other members’ non-standard variants; e.g., on Feigl see Neuber 2011). There is Michael Friedman’s extremely wide-ranging project (2001, 2010, 2012) to use the shortcomings of Vienna Circle philosophies as a springboard for developing a renewed Kantian philosophy that also overcomes the failings of neo-Kantianism and provides a philosophy-cum-history fit for our post-Kuhnian times. Then there is Richardson’s proposal (2008) to turn the ambition to develop a scientific philosophy into a research programme for the history of science, so as to reveal more clearly the real world dynamics and limitations of philosophy as a scientific metatheory. And there is Carus’s suggestion (2007) that Carnap’s minimalist explicationism be placed in the service of a renewed Enlightenment agenda (continuing the task of the “scientific world conception”. All along, of course, Vienna Circle philosophies also continue to serve as foils for alternative and self-consciously post-positivist programs, sometimes informed by the results of recent scholarship and sometimes not.It would appear then that despite continued resistance to recent revisionist scholarship—a resistance that consists not so much in contesting but in ignoring its results—the fortune of Vienna Circle philosophy has turned again. Restored from the numerous distortions of its teachings that accrued over generations of acolytes and opponents, the Vienna Circle is being recognized again as a force of considerable philosophical sophistication. Not only is it the case that its members profoundly influenced the actual development of analytical philosophy of science with conceptual initiatives that, typically, were seen through to their bitter end. It is also the case that some of its members offered proposals and suggested approaches that were not taken up widely at the time (if at all), but that are relevant again today. Much like its precursors Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, the conventionalists Poincaré and Duhem, the pragmatists Peirce and Dewey—and like its contemporaries from Reichenbach’s Berlin group and the Warsaw-Lvov school of logic to the Neo-Kantian Cassirer—the Vienna Circle affords a valuable vantage point on contemporary philosophy of empirical and formal science. | |
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