“That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism”: Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, no one is a logical empiricist. There are, to be sure, more than a few philosophers whose work resembles in important ways the work of the logical empiricists, indeed, whose work, if it had been done in the 1950s, would be logical empiricist work. But, no one presents such work under the rubric “logical empiricism.” Nor, really, could anyone plausibly attempt to do so - being a logical empiricist really is not a live option for a twenty-first century philosopher. It is a matter of some historical and philosophical interest to think about why and how logical empiricism came to lose its status as a philosophical project to be pursued. After all, as this volume amply demonstrates, logical empiricism was a leading project in analytic philosophy in the not too distant past and, indeed, the preeminent project within certain branches of philosophy, such as philosophy of science. Something substantial must have happened for such a project to decline so importantly in influence that even the most technical work in areas such as confirmation theory or philosophy of physics cannot today be said to be examples of logical empiricist philosophy of science.

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