| Canadian
Society for the History and Philosophy of Science / Société canadienne d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences Annual Meeting / Congrès annuel |
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Steed,
Sheldon (University of British Columbia) Otto
Neurath, a Vienna Circle colleague of Rudolph Carnap, bears an interesting
relation to the Carnap-Quine debate over analyticity because he was both a
naturalist and a logical empiricist. By identifying his likeness to Quine
and affiliation with Carnap, one can clarify some differences between the
former’s naturalism and the latter’s logical empiricist approach to
philosophical inquiry. And perhaps even more importantly, Neurath’s
intellectual position affords one the means to show how Quine’s and
Carnap’s projects might be more subtly linked. Indeed, and this marks
the thesis of the present paper, Quine’s naturalism loses steam as a
critique of logical empiricism in light of Neurath’s work, which asserts
that clarifying what we say about the world through the logical analysis
of language introduces naturalistic concerns about the psychology
of inquirers. Neurath argues that one important accomplishment of the
philosophical approach that was to become logical empiricism is to
articulate the limits of reason. Beyond those limits he concludes that our
path of inquiry must ultimately rely upon a decision, the details of which
can be informed by an understanding of the psychology of inquirers making
that decision. Thus, in Neurath, one sees naturalism not as a refutation,
but rather finds its germination in the clarification project within
logical empiricism. |
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