On the Vienna Circle: Four of Eight

We have come to a point where we should really discuss the issue of the "unity of the sciences," a central issue of debate, it seems, within the Vienna Circle -- and in the philosophy of science (or the sciences?) to this day.

This was an issue central to their philosophizing. When they became a big enough of a deal to organize international conferences, those conferences were to be known as the International Congress for the Unity of Science.

At one of the conferences that they gave that title, at Prague in 1934, Alfred Tarski made his appearance on the stage of the history of philosophy. Tarski (portrayed above) gave a lecture on the ideas of truth and falsity in which he tried to resolve the ancient Liars' paradox. His efforts, Edmonds tells us, "caused so much buzz that an additional session was hastily arranged to discuss it further."

Tarski's reaction to the Liar Paradox was to suggest a formal language with a hierarchy of truths. At the bottom level there are statements about bananas and trolleys. But in this language it would be impossible to make statements ABOUT statements. At the second layer it would be possible to make statements about the first-layer statements. "What I've said about the bananas on the trolley was a lie." There would be no paradox there. To make statements about the second layer statements one has to ascend to a third layer. And so forth. At no layer could one make a statement about "this" statement since the reference would always have to work down the hierarchy.

That is a digression, though. What I want to ask here is ... what does the phrase "the unity of science" mean? Edmonds gives an important partial answer at the end of chapter 9, "[Neurath] saw the existing division of science, into biology, chemistry, physics and so on, as purely practical. Fundamentally these various branches were engaged in the same enterprise -- understanding the physical world."

The order in which Edmonds lists those three specific sciences is important there: biology first, then chemistry, then physics. He is conveying and I think attributing to Neurath the idea that biology is applied chemistry and chemistry is applied physics. To go a bit further: perhaps physics is applied mathematics? The sciences are separate in that some are less fundamental than others, and the distinction of the less fundamental from the more is a concession of ignorance: we don't know enough to complete the "A is nothing but B" reductions. But we know enough to know that in principle some day we might know enough to do so.

Another member of the circle, Felix Kaufmann, published a book in 1936 called METHODENLEHRE DER SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTEN (The Methods of the Social Sciences). This extends the chain suggested by Edmonds' first list. The social sciences are applied biology.

Interestingly, too, Kaufmann was a mathematician interested in the philosophical foundations of THAT field. He took a constructivist view of the field, closer to Brouwer than to Russell/Whitehead.

Beyond the substantive issue of reductionism, there is the methodological issue of whether there is a single "scientific method" that applies to a certain group of fields in scholarship and not others, a method that can be defined independent of substantive conclusions and that demarcates science from both non-science and pseudo-science. Of this "demarcation problem" I will speak next week, when we continue these series of posts.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog