ABSTRACT
Although phenomenalism was a dominant view in the early years of the twentieth century, it began to lose ground in the 1930s and was generally abandoned twenty years later. Different groups of philosophers abandoned the view for different reasons. Some, like Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, came to believe that the quest for certainty is a delusion, that solipsism is as impossible to believe as it is impossible to refute, and that the claims of physical science should be accepted as approximately true even though they cannot be verified by standard empiricist methods.l Others, finding their inspiration in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, became convinced that the sUbjective basis of classical empiricism is demonstrably incoherent and that "theories" such as solipsism and phenomenalism actually do not make sense. I shall devote the bulk of this chapter to the claims of the second group; I shall comment on the others' view in Chapters VI and VII.
