ABSTRACT

One reason the Unity of Science Movement thrived in 1930s America was that most intellectuals at the time were socialist. Agreeing that comprehensive scientific planning required a comprehensive, or unified, science, most of these intellectuals automatically respected Neurath and the Unity of Science Movement as ideological allies. The need for social action demands that social science be unencumbered by doctrines which have no active, operative significance. Twenty years later, at the end of the 1950s, American philosophy of science was quite a different business. Politics had nothing to do with philosophy of science, and the Unity of Science Movement was effectively dead. Philosophy of social science, in other words, was the closest professional philosophy of science could get to social philosophy, but it still did not get there. Philosophy of science was about structural, semantic and pragmatic features of scientific theories, which in turn had nothing to do with debates or theories concerning 'the worth of some social arrangements'.