Squaring the Vienna circle with up-to-date logic and epistemology
pp. 149-165
in: Thomas Bonk (ed), Language, truth and knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
Logical empiricists are dead. I used to know some of them, including Rudolf Carnap, Peter Hempel, Herbert Feigl, Freddy Ayer, and Eino Kaila. But this is not news. More relevantly, the main proponents of the philosophical movements that are generally thought of as having replaced logical empiricism are also dead. By these movements, I mean in the first place the so-called "New Philosophy of Science," Quine's epistemology as well as to some extent Popper's philosophy. Of philosophers of such persuasions that I used to know, Quine, Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos are all gone. Does this constitute an invitation to nostalgia? No, nostalgia just is not what it used to be in the good old days. Instead of incipient nostalgia, I find at the bottom of my mind a disturbing reaction to the flood of historical studies of the Vienna Circle and its members. I am beginning to think that we are insulting the logical empiricists by considering them predominantly as objects of historical curiousity. Who are more dead philosophically, I am tempted to ask, Carnap and his friends or Quine and Kuhn and their ilk? Slowly an unzeitgemässig conviction has formed in my mind. Perhaps it was the logical empiricists, not the new philosophers of science in the stamp of Quine and Kuhn, who were on the right track. Perhaps it is the likes of Quine and Kuhn that we should have come here to bury and not to praise.
