"An essential overview of an important intellectual movement, Logical Empiricism in North America offers the first significant, sustained, and multidisciplinary attempt to understand the intellectual, cultural, and political dimensions of ...

We describe a simple, flexible exercise that can be implemented in the philosophy of science classroom: students are asked to determine the contents of a closed container without opening it. This exercise has revealed itself as a useful platform from which to examine a wide range of issues in the philosophy of science and may, we suggest, even help us think about improving the public understanding of science.

Despite influencing the social sciences since the 1930s, S. S. Stevens' "operationist" philosophy of science has yet to be adequately understood. I reconstruct Stevens' operationism from his early work and assess the influence of various views (logical positivism, behaviorism and the "operational viewpoint" of P. W. Bridgman, among others) on Stevens. Stevens' operationism emerges, on my reconstruction, as a naturalistic methodological directive aimed at agreement, founded in turn on the belief that agreement is constitutive of science, the scientific community, and (...) objectivity. Further, I show that operationism is historically and philosophically independent of the views mentioned above. (shrink)

This paper argues that, as all available accounts of how scientific and non-scientific goals might be distinguished rely upon distinctions as much in need of explication as the notion of scientific goals itself, naturalized accounts of science should reject the notion that there are characteristically scientific goals for a given time and place and instead countenance only the goals which happen to be had by individual scientists or their communities. This argument and the recommendation that follows from it are illustrated (...) by reference to Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

An account of scientific explanation is presented according to which (1) scientific explanation consists in solving “insight” problems (Metcalfe and Wiebe 1984) and (2) understanding is the result of solving such problems. The theory is pragmatic; it draws upon van Fraassen’s (1977, 1980) insights, avoids the objections to pragmatic accounts offered by Kitcher and Salmon (1987), and relates scientific explanation directly to understanding. The theory also accommodates cases of explanatory asymmetry and intuitively legitimate rejections of explanation requests.

We describe a simple, flexible exercise that can be implemented in the philosophy of science classroom: students are asked to determine the contents of a closed container, over the course of a semester, without opening it. This exercise has proved a useful platform from which to examine a wide range of issues in the philosophy of science and may, we suggest, even help us think about improving the public understanding of science.

In November of 1934, over successive Thursdays, the 26-year-old Willard van Orman Quine gave three “Lectures on Carnap” at Harvard University, the ostensive aim of which was a presentation of the “central doctrine” of Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache, “that philosophy is syntax.” These were among Quine’s very first public lectures, and they constituted the American premier of Carnap’s logische Syntax program. As such, these lectures are of considerable significance to the history of analytic philosophy. They show, for example, one (...) way Carnap’s syntactical program was presented and understood in the 1930s, and indeed they show how Quine, emerging even in 1934 as one of America’s brightest logicians, understood that particular project. Moreover, they promise to tell something about how Quine himself was thinking about central philosophical issues—the a priori, analyticity, and philosophy itself—early in his career, before he wrote the papers and books on those topics that established his reputation. This paper takes up this last topic. My aim is to reconstruct and understand how Quine was thinking about the a priori, analyticity, and philosophy itself in 1934, what he aimed to accomplish in the “Lectures on Carnap,” and the considerable extent to which he accomplished that aim. What Quine accomplished, in short, was the outline of a fascinating and original anti-metaphysics, with conventionalism at its heart. This was an anti-metaphysics that invited adoption of a particular conception of philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction The Inscrutability of Objectual Reference Empiricism, Naturalism, and Provincialism References.

To be a philosopher of science means, among other things, to have an account of what scientific explanation is, or, at the very least, to have a response to various accounts of scientific explanation on offer from other philosophies of science while earnestly working toward what one hopes will be one’s own, original account. One presumption clearly and often lying behind such work is that science provides two kinds of knowledge. There is propositional knowledge, “knowledge that” or “knowledge what,” and (...) there is some other kind of knowledge, something beyond propositional knowledge, usually called “knowing why.” We can know that the moon will have such a phase at this or that time, that home sales will always slump following a rise in interest rates, or that probably no two snowflakes are the same shape, without knowing why the moon will have that phase, home sales will fall as interest rates rise, or no two snowflakes have the same shape. But science, so the common contemporary presumption continues, fills in the missing knowledge — it tells us why. How science does this, when it can’t, and what the nature of this sort of knowledge is are precisely the issues that separate theorists of explanation. There are, of course, deflationary views of explanation, which reduce explanation to other properties or eliminate explanation altogether , but these are a decided minority. The vast majority of the work on scientific explanation takes itself to be addressing a certain, distinct, kind of knowledge. This is, moreover, a familiar and introductory point made in philosophical discussions of explanation. I rehearse it here because it has a role to play later, in my discussion of Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim’s 1948 article, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”. (shrink)