Research

In this chapter, I reconstruct and interpret Mary Hesse’s work on scientific language from 1952–1961. I begin by looking at her criticisms of views that hold theoretical concepts and statements are made meaningful by reduction or translation into phenomenal concepts and statements. The shortcomings Hesse identifies with these views inform her positive account of scientific language, which pays close attention to the ways scientists talk about and use models. I highlight three aspects of her account: (1) Hesse’s use of Friedrich Waismann’s notion of open texture; (2) the role she thinks models drawn from more familiar experience play in making theories intelligible; and (3) her claim that the relationship between the theoretical and phenomenal statements of our theories involves interpretation rather than translation. I then offer preliminary remarks about Hesse’s use of history in developing this account. Finally, I close with a very brief suggestion about the continuity between Hesse’s early use of open texture and the later parallels she draws between metaphors and models.

I pursue Matt Brown’s (2020) and James Leach’s (1968a) historical suggestions that there is a relationship between metaethical noncognitivism and certain arguments for the value neutrality of the sciences. In particular, I relate C.L. Stevenson’s emotivism to arguments by Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, and Ernest Nagel for the sciences’ value neutrality. I also consider whether these arguments can be disentangled from their controversial metaethical claims by looking at Robert Alexander’s (1974) account of value neutrality based on the view that a scientist’s aims are discharged by making empirical statements. Drawing upon Leach’s (1968a; 1969b) defense of the argument from inductive risk, I argue Alexander fails to offer a metaethically neutral version of the value neutrality of the sciences. Though I do not explicitly explore this, I think the history I sketch is relevant to recent calls for philosophers of science to more fully characterize the ‘values’ in ‘values and science.’

In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism from ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how logical positivism came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work.

I explore three points about the relationship between C.I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism and W.V. Quine's naturalized epistemology inspired by Robert Sinclair's Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction . First, I highlight Lewis’s longstanding commitment to Platonism about meaning and its connection to his reflective philosophical method and rejection of a linguistic account of analyticity. Second, I consider Sinclair’s claim that “Lewis’s epistemology provides no indication concerning how, despite different sensory experiences, we still come to agree on what we are talking about and what counts as evidence” (2022, 113). I find more hints, especially in Lewis’s account of how we verify when two people share meaning in common. However, some of the pragmatic and broadly empirical factors Lewis appeals to are not part of Quine’s naturalism. Finally, I relate these points to Quine’s claim to advance a more “thorough pragmatism” than Lewis (1953/1980, 46). Quine does not say much about action, value, and ethics, but these are central parts of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and a source of reluctance to abandon those parts of his epistemology that Sinclair argues Quine found dispensable.

Taking a cue from remarks Thomas Kuhn makes in 1990 about the historical turn in philosophy of science, I examine the history of history and philosophy of science within parts of the British philosophical context in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, ordinary language philosophy’s influence was at its peak. I argue that the ordinary language philosophers’ methodological recommendation to analyze actual linguistic practice influences several prominent criticisms of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation and that these criticisms relate to the historical turn in philosophy of science. To show these connections, I primarily examine the work of Stephen Toulmin, who taught at Oxford from 1949 to 1954, and Michael Scriven, who completed a dissertation on explanation under Gilbert Ryle and R.B. Braithwaite in 1956. I also consider Mary Hesse’s appeal to an ordinary language-influenced account of meaning in her account of the role of models and analogies in scientific reasoning, and W.H. Watson’s Wittgensteinian philosophy of science, an early influence on Toulmin. I think there are two upshots to my historical sketch. First, it fills out details of the move away from logical positivism to more historical- and practice-focused philosophies of science. Second, questions about linguistic meaning and the proper targets and aims of philosophical analysis are part and parcel of the historical turn, as well as its reception. Looking at the philosophical background during which so-called linguistic philosophers also had a hand in bringing these questions to prominence helps us understand why.

In this paper, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis as concerns their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practical approaches to the philosophy of science. 

I draw upon speech act theory to understand the speech acts appropriate to the multiple aims of scientific practice and the role of nonepistemic values in evaluating speech acts made relative to those aims. 

In this paper, I fill out the received view of logical positivism within professional philosophy against which Thomas Kuhn’s Structure appeared. To do this, I look at the methodological dimensions of ordinary language criticisms of logical positivist analysis from P.F. Strawson and J.L. Austin. I show how these methodological criticisms run parallel to points Kuhn makes against logical positivist approaches to the study of scientific knowledge. The parallels I draw emphasize methodological, rather than doctrinal dissatisfaction in mid-20th century philosophy with logical positivism’s perceived neglect of linguistic and scientific practices.

Certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for non-epistemic values in scientific practice concern how to characterize the acceptance of empirical hypotheses by individuals or groups of individuals and what values should or should not inform such acceptance. In this paper, I motivate a shift in perspective in this debate from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance towards an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis to others.

Sympathetic commentators on Kant’s account of physical knowledge agree that while philosophy of science has much to gain from Kant’s notion of constitutive a priori principles, Kant’s conceptual and methodological resources are inconsistent with the possibility of scientific change. In this article, I argue that this received view is lacking since Kant’s claim that a unique set of a priori principles structures our knowledge for all time is not central to his account of the constitutive a priori.