Theory and Reality

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

  Kuhn's Copernican Revolution (1957), is another classic, focused on the early stages, as the title suggests. Shapin's Scientific Revolution (1996), is not a good introduction to the Scientific Revolution but is a very interesting book anyway. There are several good books that focus on particular personalities. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (1968), is fascinating on Kepler, and Sobel, Galileo's Daughter (1999), is also good on Galileo (and his daughter, a nun leading a tough life). The standard biography of the amazingly strange Isaac Newton, by Robert Westfall, comes in both long (1980) and short (1993) versions.

  For a history of medicine, covering the whole world, see Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1998).

  2.1 The Empiricist Tradition

  The first approach to science that we will examine is a revolutionary form of empiricism that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, flourished for a time, was transformed and moderated under the pressure of objections, and then slowly became extinct. The earlier version of the view is called "logical positivism;' and the later, moderate form is more usually called "logical empiricism." There is variation in terminology here; "logical empiricism" is sometimes used for the whole movement, early and late. Although we will be looking at fossils in this chapter, these remnants of the past are of great importance in understanding where we are now.

  Before discussing logical positivism, it will be helpful to go even further back and say something about the empiricist tradition in general. In the first chapter I said that empiricism is often summarized with the claim that the only source of knowledge is experience. This idea goes back a long way, but the most famous stage of empiricist thought was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the work of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. These "classical" forms of empiricism were based upon theories about the mind and how it works. Their view of the mind is often called "sensationalist." Sensations, like patches of color and sounds, appear in the mind and are all the mind has access to. The role of thought is to track and respond to patterns in these sensations. This view of the mind is not implied by the more basic empiricist idea that experience is the source of knowledge, but for many years such a view was common within empiricism.

  Both during these classical discussions and more recently, a problem for empiricism has been a tendency to lapse into skepticism, the idea that we cannot know anything about the world. This problem has two aspects. One aspect we can call external world skepticism: how can we ever know anything about the real world that lies behind the flow of sensations? The second aspect, made vivid by David Hume, is inductive skepticism: why do we have reason to think that the patterns in past experience will also hold in the future?

  Empiricism has often shown a surprising willingness to throw in the towel on the issue of external world skepticism. (Hume threw in the towel on both kinds of skepticism, but that is unusual.) Many empiricists have been willing to say that they don't care about the possibility that there might be real things lying behind the flow of sensations. It's only the sensations that we have any dealings with. Maybe it makes no sense even to try to think about objects lying behind sensations. Perhaps our concept of the world is just a concept of a patterned collection of sensations. This view is sometimes called "phenomenalism" During the nineteenth century, phenomenalist views were quite popular within empiricism, and their oddity was treated with nonchalance. John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher and political theorist, once said that matter may be defined as "a Permanent Possibility of Sensation" (1865, 18 3). Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher, illustrated his phenomenalist view by drawing a picture of the world as it appeared through his left eye (see fig. z.1; the shape in the lower right part of the image is his elegant mustache). All that exists is a collection of observer-relative sensory phenomena like these.

  I hope phenomenalism looks strange to you, despite its eminent proponents. It is a strange idea. But empiricists have often found themselves backing into views like this. This is partly because they have often tended to think of the mind as confined behind a "veil of ideas" or sensations. The mind has no "access" to anything outside the veil. Many philosophers, including me, agree that this picture of the mind is a mistake. But it is not so easy to set up an empiricist view that entirely avoids the bad influence of this picture.

  In discussions of the history of philosophy, it is common to talk of a showdown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between "the rationalists" and "the empiricists." Rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz believed that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that does not depend on experience. Mathematics seemed to be a compelling example of this kind of knowledge. Empiricists like Locke and Hume insisted that experience is our only way of finding out what the world is like. In the late eighteenth century, a sophisticated intermediate position was developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that all our thinking involves a subtle interaction between experience and preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of experience. Key concepts like space, time, and causation cannot be derived from experience, because a person must already have these concepts in order to use experience to learn about the world. Kant also held that mathematics gives us real knowledge of the world but does not require experience for its justification.

  Fig. 2.1

  "The assertion, then, is correct that the world consists only of our sensations" (Mach 18 9 7, ro).

  Empiricists must indeed avoid overly simple pictures of how experience affects belief. The mind does not passively receive the imprint of facts. The active and creative role of the mind must be recognized. The trick is to avoid this problem while still remaining true to basic empiricist principles.

  As I said above, in the history of philosophy the term "rationalism" is often used for a view that opposes empiricism. In the more recent discussions of science that we are concerned with here, however, the term is generally not used in that way. (This can be a source of confusion; see the glossary.) The views called "rationalist" in the twentieth century were often forms of empiricism; the term was often used in a broad way, to indicate a confidence in the power of human reason.

  So much for the long history of debate. Despite various problems, empiricism has been a very attractive set of ideas for many philosophers. Empiricism has often also had a particular kind of impact on discussions outside of philosophy. Making a sweeping generalization, it is fair to say that the empiricist tradition has tended to be (z) pro-science, (z) worldly rather than religious, and (3) politically moderate or liberal (though these political labels can be hard to apply across times). David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell are examples of this tendency. Of the three elements of my generalization, religion is the one that has the most counterexamples. Berkeley was a bishop, for example, and Bas van Fraassen, one of the most influential living empiricist philosophers, is also religious. But on the whole it is fair to say that empiricist ideas have tended to be the allies of a practical, scientific, down-to-earth outlook on life. The logical positivists definitely fit this pattern.

  2.2 The Vienna Circle

  Logical positivism was a form of empiricism developed in Europe after World War I. The movement was established by a group of people who were scientifically oriented and who disliked much of what was happening in philosophy. This group has become known as the Vienna Circle.

  The Vienna Circle was established by Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath. It was based, as you might expect, in Vienna, Austria. From the early days through to the end, a central intellectual figure was Rudolf Carnap. Carnap seems to have been the kind of person whose presence inspired awe even in other highly successful philosophers.

  Logical positivism was an extreme, swashbuckling form of empiricism. The term "positivism" derives from the nineteenthcentury scientific philosophy of Auguste Comte. In the 1930s Carnap suggested that they change the name of their movement from "logical positivism" to "logical empiricism." This change should not be taken to suggest that the later
stages in the movement were "more empiricist" than the earlier stages. The opposite is true. In my discussion I will use the term "logical positivism" for the intense, earlier version of their ideas, and "logical empiricism" for the later, more moderate version. Although Carnap suggested the name change in the mid-1930s, the time during which logical positivist ideas changed most markedly was after World War II. I will spend some time in this section describing the unusual intellectual and historical context in which logical positivism developed. In particular, it is easier to understand logical positivism if we pay attention to what the logical positivists were against.

  The logical positivists were inspired by developments in science in the early years of the twentieth century, especially the work of Einstein. They also thought that developments in logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of language had shown a way to put together a new kind of empiricist phi losophy that would settle, once and for all, the problems that philosophy had been concerned with. Some problems would be solved, and other problems would be rejected as meaningless. Logical positivist views about language were influenced by the early ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein ([1922] 1988). Wittgenstein was an enigmatic, charismatic, and eccentric philosopher of logic and language who was not an empiricist at all. Some would say that the positivists adapted Wittgenstein's ideas, others that they misinterpreted him.

  Though they did admire some philosophers, the logical positivists were distressed with much of what had been going on in philosophy. In the years after Kant's death in 1804, philosophy had seen the rise of a number of systems of thought that the logical positivists found pretentious, obscure, dogmatic, and politically harmful. One key villain was G. W. F. Hegel, who worked in the early nineteenth century and had a huge influence on nineteenthcentury thought. Hegel was famous for his work on the relation between philosophy and history. He thought that human history as a whole was a process in which a "world spirit" gradually reached consciousness of itself. For Hegel, individuals are less important than the state as a whole, especially the role of the state in the grand march of historical progress. These ideas were taken to support strong forms of nationalism. Hegel's was an "idealist" philosophy, since it held that reality is in some sense spiritual or mental. But this is not a view in which each person's reality is made up in some way by that person's ideas. Rather, a single reality as a whole is said to have a spiritual or rational character. This view is sometimes called "absolute idealism."

  Hegel's influence bloomed and then receded in continental Europe. As it receded in continental Europe, in the later nineteenth century, it bloomed in England and America. Absolute idealism is a good example of what logical positivism was against. Sometimes the positivists would disparagingly dissect especially obscure passages from this literature. Hans Reichenbach (who was not part of the original Vienna Circle but who was a close ally) began his book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (19 51) with a quote from Hegel's most famous work on philosophy and history: "Reason is substance, as well as infinite power, its own infinite material underlying all the natural and spiritual life; as also the infinite form, that which sets the material in motion." Reichenbach lamented that a philosophy student, on first reading this passage, would usually think that it was his fault-the student's fault-that he did not understand it. The student would then work away until it finally seemed obvious that Reason was substance, as well as infinite power.... For Reichenbach, it is entirely Hegel's fault that the passage seems to make no sense. It seems to make no sense because whatever factual meaning the claim might be intended to convey has been smothered with misused language.

  People sometimes describe the history of this period as if it was a pitched battle between logical positivism and absolute idealism. That is not how things went. In the early twentieth century, there were many kinds of philosophy jostling and wrangling in Europe. There was a "back to Kant" movement going on (as there seems to be now; perhaps this will happen every hundred years). Another philosopher who came to seem an especially important rival to logical positivism was Martin Heidegger.

  Earlier I gave a quick summary of Hegel's ideas. It is much harder to do that for Heidegger. Heidegger is sometimes categorized as an existentialist. Perhaps he is the most famously difficult and obscure philosopher who has ever lived. I will borrow the summary reluctantly given by Thomas Sheehan in the entry for Heidegger in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998): "He argues that mortality is our defining moment, that we are thrown into limited worlds of sense shaped by our being-towards-death, and that finite meaning is all the reality we get." Simplifying even more, Heidegger held that we must understand our lives as based, first and foremost, upon practical coping with the world rather than knowledge of it. All our experience is affected by the awareness that we are traveling toward death. And the best thing we can do in this situation is stare it in the face and live an "authentic" life.

  This picture of life might seem to make some sense (especially on a bad day). But Heidegger combined his descriptions of how it feels to live in the world with abstract metaphysical speculation; especially notorious are his discussions of the nature of "Nothing" Heidegger also had one point in common with some (though not all) absolute idealists: his opposition to liberal democratic political ideas.

  Heidegger was seen as a key rival by the logical positivists. Carnap gave humorous logical dissections of Heidegger's discussions of Nothing in his lectures. Interestingly, recent work has shown that Carnap and Heidegger understood each other better than was once supposed (Friedman aooo).

  Logical positivism was a plea for Enlightenment values, in opposition to mysticism, romanticism, and nationalism. The positivists championed reason over the obscure, the logical over the intuitive. The logical positivists were also internationalists, and they liked the idea of a universal and precise language that everyone could use to communicate clearly. Otto Neurath was the member of the group with the strongest political and social interests. He and various others in the group could be described as democratic socialists. They had a keen interest in some movements in art and architecture at the time, such as the Bauhaus movement. They saw this work as assisting the development of a scientific, internationalist, and practical outlook on society (Galison 1990).

  The Vienna Circle flourished from the mid-igzos to the mid-1930s. Logical positivist ideas were imported into England by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), a vivid and readable book that conveys the excitement of the time. Under the influence of logical positivism, and the philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, English philosophy abandoned absolute idealism and returned to its traditional empiricist emphasis, an emphasis it has retained (more or less) ever since.

  In continental Europe the story turned out differently. For we have now, remember, reached the 193os. The development of logical positivism ran straight into the rise of Adolf Hitler.

  Many of the Vienna Circle had socialist leanings, some were Jewish, and there were certainly no Nazis. So the logical positivists were persecuted by the Nazis, to varying degrees. The Nazis encouraged and made use of pro-German, anti-liberal philosophers, who also tended to be obscure and mystical. In contrast to the logical positivists, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained a member throughout the war.

  Many logical positivists fled Europe, especially to the United States. Schlick, unfortunately, did not. He was murdered by a deranged former student in 1936. The logical positivists who did make it to the United States were responsible for a great flowering of American philosophy in the years after World War II. These include Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, and Herbert Feigl. In the United States the strident voice of logical positivists was moderated. Partly this was because of criticisms of their ideas-criticisms from the side of those who shared their general outlook. But the moderation was no doubt partly due to the different intellectual and political climate in the United States. Austria and Germany in the 193os had been an unusually intense environment for doing philos
ophy.

  2.3 Central Ideas of Logical Positivism

  Logical positivist views about science and knowledge were based on a general theory of language; we need to start here, before moving to the views about science. This theory of language featured two main ideas, the analyticsynthetic distinction and the verifiability theory of meaning.

  The analyticsynthetic distinction will probably strike you as bland and obvious, at least at first. Some sentences are true or false simply in virtue of their meaning, regardless of how the world happens to be; these are analytic. A synthetic sentence is true or false in virtue of both the meaning of the sentence and how the world actually is. "All bachelors are unmarried" is the standard example of an analytically true sentence. "All bachelors are bald" is an example of a synthetic sentence, in this case a false one. Analytic truths are, in a sense, empty truths, with no factual content. Their truth has a kind of necessity, but only because they are empty.

  This distinction had been around, in various forms, since at least the eighteenth century. The terminology "analyticsynthetic" was introduced by Kant. Although the distinction itself looks uncontroversial, it can be made to do real philosophical work. Here is one crucial piece of work the logical positivists saw for it: they claimed that all of mathematics and logic is analytic. This made it possible for them to deal with mathematical knowledge within an empiricist framework. For logical positivism, mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way. Synthetic claims about the world can be expressed using mathematical language, such as when it is claimed that there are nine planets in the solar system. But proofs and investigations within mathematics itself are analytic. This might seem strange because some proofs in mathematics are very surprising. The logical positivists insisted that once we break down such a proof into small steps, each step will be trivial and unsurprising.