Machamer; A Brief Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science.pdf

Chapter 1

A Brief Historical

Introduction to the

Philosophy of Science*

Peter Machamer

Philosophy of science is an old and practiced discipline. Both Plato and Aristotle

wrote on the subject, and, arguably, some of the pre-Socratics did also. The Middle

Ages, both in its Arabic and high Latin periods, made many commentaries and

disputations touching on topics in philosophy of science. Of course, the new

science of the seventeenth century brought along widespread ruminations and

manifold treatises on the nature of science, scientiﬁc knowledge and method.

The Enlightenment pushed this project further trying to make science and its

hallmark method deﬁnitive of the rational life. With the industrial revolution,

“science” became a synonym for progress. In many places in the Western world,

science was venerated as being the peculiarly modern way of thinking. The nine-

teenth century saw another resurgence of interest when ideas of evolution melded

with those of industrial progress and physics achieved a maturity that led some

to believe that science was complete. By the end of the century, mathematics

had found alternatives to Euclidean geometry and logic had become a newly

re-admired discipline.

But just before the turn to the twentieth century, and in those decades that fol-

lowed, it was physics that led the intellectual way. Freud was there too, he and

Breuer having published Studies in Hysteria in 1895, but it was physics that gar-

nered the attention of the philosophers. Mechanics became more and more uniﬁed

in form with the work of Maxwell, Hertz and discussions by Poincaré. Plank

derived the black body law in 1899, in 1902 Lorenz proved Maxwell’s equations

were invariant under transformation, and in 1905 Einstein published his paper on

special relativity and the basis of the quantum. Concomitantly, Hilbert in 1899

published his foundations of geometry, and Bertrand Russell in 1903 gave forth

his principles of mathematics. The development of uniﬁed classical mechanics and

alternative geometries, now augmented and challenged by the new relativity and

quantum theories made for period of unprecedented excitement in science.

What follows provides a brief historical overview of the problems and concepts

that have characterized philosophy of science from the turn of the twentieth century

Peter Machamer

until the present day. This is presented in the form of conceptual and problem-

oriented history because I believe that the real interest in philosophy of science and

the lessons to be learned from its history are found in the topics it addressed and the

methods it used to address them. Further, the cast of characters, and the speciﬁc

articles and books can be easily researched by anyone who is interested. There is,

appended a selective chronological bibliography of “classical” sources.

A few caveats need to be stated from the start. First, I deal almost exclusively

with certain aspects of one Austro-Germanic-Anglo-American tradition. This is

not because there was not interesting and important work in philosophy of science

going on in France and elsewhere. I do this, ﬁrst, because this tradition is the one

that is formative for and dominant in contemporary American philosophy (for

good or ill), and, second, because it is the tradition in which I was raised and

about which I know the most. Another caveat is that space limitations and igno-

rance often require the omission of many interesting nuances, qualiﬁcations and

even outright important facets of the history of philosophy of science. What I try

to do is run a semi-coherent thread through the twentieth century, in such ways

that a developmental narrative can be followed by those who have not lived within

the conﬁnes of the discipline. Many scholars would have done things differently.

C’est la vie!

To provide some structure for the exposition, I shall break this text into three

important periods:

• 1918–50s: Logical Positivism to Logical Empiricism

• 1950s through 1970s: New Paradigms and Scientiﬁc Change

• Contemporary Foci: What’s “hot” today

Logical Positivism to Logical Empiricism: 1918–55

As was noted above, the forming spirit of twentieth century philosophy of

science were the grand syntheses and breakthroughs (or revolutions) in physics.

Relativity and, later, quantum theory caused scientists and philosophers alike

to reﬂect on the nature of the physical world, and especially on the nature of

human knowledge of the physical world. In many ways, the project of this new

philosophy of science was an epistemological one. If one took physics as the par-

adigmatic science, and if science was the paradigmatic method by which one came

to obtain reliable knowledge of the world, then the project for philosophy of

science was to describe the structure of science such that its epistemological under-

pinnings were clear. The two antecedents, that physics was the paradigmatic

science and that science was the best method for knowing the world, were taken

to be obvious. Once the structure of science was made precise, one could then

see how far these lessons from scientiﬁc epistemology could be applied to others

areas of human endeavor.

A Brief Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Another important background tradition needs to be described. Propositional

and predicate logic became the model for clear reasoning and explicit statement.

First in the work of Frege (in the 1880s–90s), and later with Russell and White-

head (in the 19-teens), logic came to be regarded as the way to understand and

clarify the foundations of mathematics. It became the ideal language for model-

ing any cognitive enterprise. Simultaneously, Hilbert re-introduced to the world

the ideal of axiomatization. Again this was a clarifying move to ensure that there

were no hidden assumptions, and everything in a system was made explicit. This

logico-mathematical language became the preferred form, because of its precision,

into which philosophy of science had to be cast.

The epistemological project of the positivists was to explicate how science was

grounded in our observations and experiments. Simultaneously, the goal was to

provide an alternative to the neo-Kantianism that was the contemporaneously

concurrent form of philosophy. Taking from the tradition of British empiricism,

empirical grounding, or being based on the facts, was seen as the major difference

between science and the other theoretical and philosophical pretenders to knowl-

edge. This insight led the positivists to attempt to formulate and solve the problem

of the nature of meaning, or more speciﬁcally, empirical meaning. What was it,

they asked, that made statements about the world meaningful? This attempt to

explicate the theory of meaning had two important parts: First, claims about the

world would have to be made clear, avoiding ambiguity and the other confusions

inherent in natural language. To this end, the positivists tried to restrict them-

selves to talking about the language of science as expressed in the sentences of sci-

entiﬁc theories, and attempted to reformulate these sentences into the clear and

unequivocal language of ﬁrst-order predicate logic. Second, they tried to develop

a criterion that would show how these sentences in a scientiﬁc theory related to

the world, i.e. in their linguistic mode this became the problem of how theoreti-

cal sentences related to observation sentences. For this one needed to develop a

procedure for determining which sentences were true. This method came to be

codiﬁed in the veriﬁcation principle, which held that the meaning of an empirical

sentence was given by the procedures that one would use to show whether the

sentence was true or false. If there were no such procedures then the sentence was

said to be empirically meaningless.

The class of empirically meaningless sentences were said to be non-cognitive,

and they included the sentences comprising systems of metaphysics, ethical claims

and, most importantly, those sentences that made up theories of the pseudo-

sciences. This latter problem, distinguishing scientiﬁc sentences from those only

purporting to be scientiﬁc, came to known (following Karl Popper’s work) as the

demarcation problem.

The veriﬁcation principle was thought to be a way of making precise the

empirical observational, or experimental component of science. Obviously, the

positivists, following in the empiricist tradition, thought, the basis of science lay

in observation and in experiment. These were the tests that made science reliable,

the foundation that differentiated science from other types of knowledge claims.

Peter Machamer

So, formally, what was needed was a set of sentences that bridged the gap from

scientiﬁc theory to scientiﬁc experiment and observation. These sentences that tied

theory to the world were called bridge sentences or reduction sentences. The set

of sentences that described the world to which theoretical sentences were reduced

or related was called the observation language. Sentences in the observation

language were taken to be easily veriﬁable or decidable as to their truth or falsity.

So that these bridge sentences might be made very explicit, theories were them-

selves idealized as sets of sentences that could be put into an axiomatic structure,

in which all their logical relations and deductions from them could be made

explicit. The most important sentences in a scientiﬁc theory were the laws of

science. Laws came in two types: universal and statistical. Universal Laws were

sentences of the theory that had unrestricted application in space and time

(sometimes they were explicitly said to be causal, and, later, they were held to be

able to support counterfactual claims.) Idealized universal laws had the logical

form:

xFx Gx

)

Since such a form could be used to clearly establish their logical implications.

Obviously, this was an idealized form, since most of the laws of interest were from

physics and had a much more complex mathematical form. Statistical laws only

made their conclusions more or less probable.

Scientiﬁc explanation was conceived as deducing a particular sentence (usually

an observation or basic sentence) from a universal law (given some particular initial

conditions about the state of the world at a time). The particular fact, expressed

by the sentence, was said to be explained if it could be so deduced. This was called

the deductive-nomological model of explanation. “Nomos” is the Greek word for

law. If, a particular sentence was deduced before the fact was observed, it was a

prediction, and then later if it was veriﬁed, the theory from which it was deduced

was said to be conﬁrmed. This was the hypothetico-deductive model because the

law was considered an hypothesis to be tested by its deductive consequences.

The names of some of the major players in this period of philosophy of science

were Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl

Hempel. There were two main groups, one centered in Vienna (Schlick, Carnap

and Neurath), called the Vienna Circle that was established late in the 1920s, and

the other, coming a bit later, in Berlin (Reichenbach and Hempel). There was a

important third group in Warsaw, doing mostly logic and consisting of Alfred

Tarski, Stanislau Lesnewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski.

This view of science, as an idealized logically precise language which could have

all its major facets codiﬁed, never worked. Throughout the history of logical pos-

itivism there were debates and re-formulations among its practitioners about the

idealized language of science, the relations of explanation and conﬁrmation, the

adequate formulation of the veriﬁcation principle, the independent nature of

observations, and the adequacy of the semantic truth predicate. The static, uni-

() …

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A Brief Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

versalist nature of science that was idealized by positivism proved to be wrong.

The attempt to ﬁx procedures and claims in a logically simpliﬁed language proved

to be impossible. The neat, clear attempts at explicating explanation, conﬁrma-

tion, theory and testability, all proved to have both internal difﬁculties with their

logical structures and external problems in that they did not seem to ﬁt science as

it was actually practiced.

The positivists themselves were the ﬁrst to see the problems with their program,

and, as they attempted to work out the philosophical difﬁculties, the positions

changed shifted into what became called logical empiricism. This happened in the

mid-to late 1930s, the same time that many of the group left Germany and Austria

because of World War II and the rise of Adolph Hitler. Reichenbach left Germany

immediately after Hitler took power in 1933 and went ﬁrst to Istanbul, Turkey,

Richard von Mises went also. Reichenbach then in 1938 went to UCLA in the

USA. Neurath and Popper both ended up in England. Carnap, from Prague, and

Hempel, from Berlin, came to the USA.

Here is bit more sociology of the how philosophy of science developed. The

ﬁrst modern program in history and philosophy of science (HPS) was set up at

University College, London. A. Wolf ﬁrst offered a history of science course in

collaboration with Sir William Bragg and others in 1919–20. Then a “Board of

Studies in Principles, Methods and History of Science” was established in 1922,

and an M.Sc. was ﬁrst offered in 1924. Wolf was the ﬁrst holder of the chair in

“History and Method of Science.” In 1946, the Chair became full time with the

appointment of Herbert Dingle. The London School of Economics’ Department

evolved after the appointment of Karl Popper to the Readership in Logic and Sci-

entiﬁc Method in 1945. The same Wolf who was associated with U.C., London

also held the Chair in Logic and taught courses at LSE, prior to Popper. The Uni-

versity of Melbourne in 1946 began teaching courses in HPS.

Erkenntnis , the journal of the Vienna Circle, or rather the Max Plank Society,

was ﬁrst published in 1930. This followed on the ﬁrst congress on the Episte-

mology of the Exact Sciences held in Prague in September of 1929. In 1934

the journal, Philosophy of Science , published its ﬁrst issue. William M. Malisoff, a

Russian biochemist, was its ﬁrst editor. Malisoff died unexpectedly in 1947, and

C. West Churchman became editor. The Philosophy of Science Association was in

existence in 1934. In 1948 the PSA had 153 members, and Philipp Frank was its

President. In the discipline of history of science, the American History of Science

Society was founded in 1924. The HSS journal Isis , had been started earlier in

1912 by George Sarton when he was still in Belgium.

Logical empiricism never had the coherence as a school that logical positivism

had. Various inﬂuences began to make themselves felt after the late 1930s. One

most important conceptual addition came from American born pragmatism. Its

speciﬁc inﬂuences can be seen clearly in the post-1940 work of Hempel, and even

Carnap; also in the work of American born, Ernest Nagel and W. V. O Quine.

But, until the late 1950s, philosophers of science, despite signiﬁcant changes in

the programs and allowable methods, philosophers of science were still trying to

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