ABSTRACT
The first decades of the twentieth century were shaken by scientific crises in the foundation of mathematics and in physics to which the logical empiricists tried to respond. This chapter looks specifically at their response to the crisis of the mechanistic worldview generated by statistical mechanics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, but it also emphasizes more generally the challenge of scientific modernism triggered by these scientific changes. This chapter aims to put both into a broader historical context and to investigate: (1) how did the logical empiricists combine the diagnosis of crisis with the demand for a new construction; (2) how did their historiography of this process oscillate between close-ups and long shots; (3) how combining both perspectives enabled them to have a scientific philosophy flexible enough to address distinct scientific, philosophical, and social challenges.
