Philosophy of Science Colloquium TALK: Matteo Collodel (IVC Fellow)

Criticism, Misrepresentation, and Decline: Feyerabend and Logical Empiricism

Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.

Date: 21/11/2024

Time: 16h45

Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, HS 2G

Abstract:

Feyerabend became familiar with the Vienna Circle tradition and Logical Empiricism in his formative years in post-war Vienna. However, since his early intellectual trajectory, he made LE one of his favorite critical targets, articulating his criticism in personal dialogue with some of its most distinguished representatives. This paper focuses on the second stage of Feyerabend's sustained assault against LE, examining both Feyerabend's reception of LE and Hempel's response to Feyerabend's challenge.
In a series of papers published between 1962 and 1966, Feyerabend relentlessly questioned the descriptive adequacy and the normative desirability of the 'orthodox', logical empiricist, accounts of reduction and explanation advanced by Hempel and Nagel. Feyerabend's persistent criticism shook North American philosophy of science and prompted Hempel's reaction, which appeared in print in the second half of the 1960s. Initially, Hempel retorted that Feyerabend's methodological analysis was 'completely mistaken' and Feyerabend could offer 'no support' for his allegations. This raises interesting historiographical questions about the later reception of LE as it seems that Feyerabend, driven by his anti-authoritarian stance, substantially misinterpreted the logical empiricist research programme, his vantage point notwithstanding. On the other hand, Hempel also recognised that the descriptive issues on which Feyerabend insisted, despite having been long acknowledged by LE, could have more far-reaching consequences than previously envisaged. In fact, by the end of the 1960s, Hempel came to make quite radical concessions, admitting that the standard logical empiricist model for explicating the structure of scientific theories was essentially 'misleading', that the logical empiricist account of reduction was 'an untenable oversimplification', and that the logical empiricist approach as to the meaning of scientific terms was actually 'misconceived'. In this respect, there are good reasons to consider the decline of the logical empiricist research programme in the 1970s at least partly as the result of Feyerabend's stimulating, however misrepresenting, insights.