ABSTRACT
In the middle third of the twentieth century logical positivism was a dominant strand of analytic philosophy. Positivism began with a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists-associated with the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Society for Scientific Philosophy-interested in philosophical understanding of modern science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, especially Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap, came briefly to espouse a form of Humean empiricism incorporating the techniques of the mathematical logic developed by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. On this view, call it classical positivism, language is not only a central subject of philosophy but also the principal instrument of philosophizing. Classical positivism, as popularized by Ayer (1936), became identified with positivism tout court. But the positivists themselves were aware of an array of difficulties with the classical doctrines, and soon moved away in a number of diverging directions. Carnap, in particular, reached a thoroughgoing deflationary and pragmatic anti-metaphysical view, advocating the replacement of traditional philosophy by the construction of formal languages. W. V. O. Quine, student and friend of Carnap, engaged in a more than decade long debate with Carnap over Carnap’s mature views. Quine’s arguments came to be widely accepted as a decisive refutation of positivism, thereby helping to end its influence in the analytic tradition. Recent work has increasingly shown how little their debate has to do with classical positivism, and how inconclusive Quine’s arguments against Carnap are, thereby opening the way to a better appreciation of the depth and philosophical interest of their disagreements (see, inter alia, Awodey and Carus 2007, Creath 2003, Ebbs 1997, and Ricketts 2003).
