This latest volume in the longest-standing and most influential series in the field of the philosophy of science extends and expands on the discipline’s recent historical turn. These essays take up the historical, sociological, and philosophical questions surrounding the particular intellectual movement of logical empiricism—both its emigration from Europe to North America in the 1930s and 1940s and its development in North America through the 1940s and 1950s. With an introduction placing them in their philosophical and historical context, these essays bear witness to the fact that the history of the philosophy of science, far more than a mere repository of anecdote and chronology, might be able to produce a decisive transformation in the philosophy of science itself.

Contributors: Richard Creath, Arizona State U; Michael Friedman, Stanford U; Rudolf Haller, U of Graz; Don Howard, Notre Dame; Diederick Raven, U of Utrecht; George Reisch; Thomas Ricketts, Northwestern U; Friedrich K. Stadler, U of Vienna; Thomas E. Uebel, U of Manchester. 

A renowned philosopher’s final work, illuminating how the logical empiricist tradition has failed to appreciate the role of actual experiments in forming its philosophy of science.

The logical empiricist treatment of physics dominated twentieth-century philosophy of science. But the logical empiricist tradition, for all it accomplished, does not do justice to the way in which empirical evidence functions in modern physics.

In his final work, the late philosopher of science William Demopoulos contends that philosophers have failed to provide an adequate epistemology of science because they have failed to appreciate the tightly woven character of theory and evidence. As a consequence, theory comes apart from evidence. This trouble is nowhere more evident than in theorizing about particle and quantum physics. Arguing that we must consider actual experiments as they have unfolded across history, Demopoulos provides a new epistemology of theories and evidence, albeit one that stands on the shoulders of giants.

On Theories finds clarity in Isaac Newton’s suspicion of mere “hypotheses.” Newton’s methodology lies in the background of Jean Perrin’s experimental investigations of molecular reality and of the subatomic investigations of J. J. Thomson and Robert Millikan. Demopoulos extends this account to offer novel insights into the distinctive nature of quantum reality, where a logico-mathematical reconstruction of Bohrian complementarity meets John Stewart Bell’s empirical analysis of Einstein’s “local realism.” On Theories ultimately provides a new interpretation of quantum probabilities as themselves objectively representing empirical reality.

Establishes a historical framework for the study of logical empiricism. Logical empiricism remains a strong influence in the philosophy of science, despite the discipline's shift toward more historical and naturalistic approaches. This latest volume in the eminent Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science series examines the main features of the intellectual milieu from which logical empiricism sprang, providing the first critical exploration of this context by authors within the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy. These articles challenge the idea that logical empiricism has its origins in traditional British empiricism, pointing instead to a movement of scientific philosophy that flourished in the German-speaking areas of Europe in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The intellectual refugees from the Third Reich who brought logical empiricism to North America did so in an environment influenced by Einstein's new physics, the ascension of modern logic, the birth of the social sciences as rivals to traditional humanistic philosophy, and other large-scale social, political, and cultural themes. The contributors, including some of our most distinguished philosophers and historians of science, emphasize the connections among members of the logical empiricist movement as well as their connections with members of other major intellectual movements of the time. Focusing on the continuing influence of logical empiricism and the vitality of the issues with which its proponents struggled, this important volume provides valuable context to contemporary philosophers of science. Contributors: Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Richard Creath, Michael Friedman, Peter Galison, Warren Goldfarb, Don Howard, Thomas Oberdan, Thomas Ricketts, Thomas Ryckman, Joia Lewis Turner, Thomas E. Uebel. Ronald N. Giere is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Explaining Science (1988) and editor of Cognitive Models of Science (1992). Alan Richardson is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia.