HS 222

LOGICAL EMPIRICISM
OVERVIEW

• the road to Vienna

• important distinctions – analytic/synthetic statements; theoretical/observational terms; context of

discovery/justification

• important ideas - verifiability criterion of meaning; holism about testing

FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626)

• doctrine of idols

• an account of scientific method (The Advancement of

Learning, Novum Organum Scientiarum)

• emphasis on induction, empiricism

RENE DESCARTES (1596 – 1650)

• attempt to ground sciences in certainty (like geometry)

• possibility of certainty by relying on reasons alone

• founder of the modern rationalist tradition

Descartes’ drawing of magnetic field
(Principia Philosophiae, 1644)
ISAAC NEWTON (1642 – 1727)

• knowledge of the world through experience alone

• emphasis on simplicity, invariance

• a post-mechanistic worldview
DAVID HUME (1711 – 1776)

• ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’

• external world scepticism

• inductive scepticism
IMMANUEL KANT (1724 – 1804)

• synthesis of rationalism and empiricism

• ‘experience without reason is blind, but reason without
experience is empty’

• analytic/synthetic

• a priori/a posteriori
KANT TO LOGICAL EMPIRICISM

• the world beyond experience – knowable or not?

• knowable
• speculative metaphysics, intuitionism, rationalism

• not knowable
• empiricism, scepticism, pragmatism
• empiricism – experience is the only ‘reliable’ source of ‘knowledge about the world’
• knowledge – a species of belief

• challenge for the 19th century empiricists –

• how are experiences converted to beliefs? (needs a theory of psychology)
• if experiences are all we have, how can we be certain about the reality of non-mental
phenomena? (scepticism about external world, induction)

• 20th century intellectual ferment in Europe challenged the excesses of 19th century and
ushered in new forms of modernism
• suprematism, new objectivity (visual art); Bauhaus (architecture); socialism
• logical empiricism – a form of 20th century philosophic movement that stressed on empiricism and
were concerned with working out an account of scientific methodology
• (epistemologically) scientifically oriented, (metaphysically) worldly, (politically) socialists and liberals
• aided by developments in philosophy of language and logic
• anti-obscurantist; wanted to rid philosophy of empty speculation
• saw philosophy’s role as clarifying the statements of sciences with the tool of logic and mathematics

• Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Carl Hempel, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, Herbert Fiegl (and others)
• greatly admired the advances in logic, mathematics, physics, and psychology
ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION

• analytic statements – statements that are true in virtue of their meaning alone
• synonyms, logical and mathematical statements

• synthetic statements – statements that are true because of how the world is

• according to LEs, only analytic statements are knowable a priori

• only synthetic statements can provide knowledge about the world
• mathematical truth can be accommodated within an empiricist framework
VERIFIABILITY CRITERION OF MEANING

• the meaning of a term is its ‘cognitive significance’

• logical significance and empirical significance

• the empirical significance of a term is exhausted by the conditions of its empirical

(dis)confirmation
• the intuitive idea – what a term/sentence means is related to how we can observationally test it (in
principle)
• terms which cannot be empirically tested lack any cognitive significance, and hence are ‘meaningless’
• prevents us from assigning cognitive significance (hence, understanding) to all ethical and aesthetic
claims
THEORETICAL/OBSERVATIONAL DISTINCTION

• observational terms – terms which pick out observable features of the world, like ‘red’,
‘rain’, ‘reindeer’
• the empirical content is provided by observational terms
• statements which lack observational terms lack empirical content and, by the verifiability
criterion, are meaningless

• but the descriptions that science provides involve many theoretical terms!
• are statements like ‘electron is a negatively charged half-spin lepton’ meaningless?
CONTEXT DISTINCTION

• context of discovery – generation of new ideas

• (acc to LP) descriptive; of interest to psychology, sociology, and history

• context of justification – test/verification of the idea

• (acc to LP) normative; of philosophical interest

• not a temporal distinction

• if we ignore the descriptive accounts, how do we know that our account of what scientific
knowledge should be actually corresponds to the actual processes of science?
PROBLEMS FOR LOGICAL POSITIVISM

• relation between theory and evidence

• hypothetico-deductivism; T → E
• theories get verified (acquire meaning) when the observational sentences that can be deduced
from them turn out to be true
• confirmation (empirical content) flows up the implicative ladder

• the criteria of meaning uses an implausible philosophy of language

• if terms individually have cognitive significance, theoretical terms become meaningless
• if sentences have cognitive significance, meaningless sentences can be tacked to theories; should
we say such conjunctions have empirical significance?
 HOLISM

• holism about theory testing – we need auxiliary hypotheses (boundary conditions, values of
variables, claims about instruments, &c) in order to deduce observation sentences from the
theory we have to test
• T & A1 & A2 & .. → E

• failure to obtain E does not imply the falsification of T; either of the conjuncts could be false
• ~E → ~T v ~A1 v ~A2 v ..
• does it mean that we never have good reason to pick out which conjunct is to be blamed?
• assumed by many LEs that meaning via verification accrues to sentences individually; but…

• holism about theory testing means empirical test is of complexes, not simple sentences;
• and if we insist that meaning is related to testability, holism about testing leads to holism about
meaning;
• and holism about meaning makes the analytic-synthetic distinction untenable
• if analytic truths are supposed to be immune to revision, and the analytic-synthetic distinction is
not a sharp one
• how do we go about revising analytic truths?

• according to Quine, the various theories hang together like a ‘web of belief’
• analytic truths (logic) is at the centre of the web; in principle revisable, but we work with the ‘maxim of
minimum mutilation’
• experience impinges on the entire web at the periphery
our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a
corporate body
(…)
My present suggestion is that it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic
component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement.Taken collectively, science has
its double dependence upon language and experience; but this duality is not significantly traceable into the
statements of science taken one by one.
(W.V.O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’)
 POST-QUINEAN LOGICAL EMPIRICISM

• verifiability criterion gets replaced by a holistic theory of meaning

THE AIM OF SCIENCE

Scientific research in its various branches seeks not merely to record particular occurrences in the
world of our experience: it tries to discover regularities in the flux of events and thus to establish
general laws which may be used for prediction, postdiction, and explanation.
(C. Hempel, ‘The Theoretician’s Dilemma’)

• scientific activity and everyday reasoning fall in a continuum

• both are concerned with predicting the future event on the basis of past experiences
PREDICTION

• according to empiricism, sense experience is the source of knowledge

• what of the knowledge of what lies beyond experience?

• according to LEs, science does not provide knowledge of a hidden world

• proxy for the descriptive function of science

• instead of describing the underlying structure of the world, science tracks patterns in the
observable phenomena
• the function of theoretical terms is to systematise the observations
DECLINE OF LOGICAL EMPIRICISM

• faults with the criteria of meaning and the account of theory testing

• keeping the context of discovery outside of philosophical inquiry leads to an

impoverished account of scientific activity

• the claim that science does not describe a reality beyond the experiential seems
contrived to many