Review
‘LOGICAL EMPIRICISM’ AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OF SCIENCE
George Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To
the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xiv
+ 418 pp., ISBN 0-521-83797-9
‘Philosophy of science’ suggests to many a highly technical project
that offers logical analyses of scientific and metascientific terms – a
perspective that may not greatly appeal to historians, sociologists,
or scientists. This image of philosophy of science owes much to a
common understanding of logical empiricism (ne´ e positivism), a
project that seemed to attempt to force all of science, and all of
our understanding of science, into the Procrustean bed of formal
logic.
George Reisch laments this vision of the philosophy of science,
and seeks to complicate it in a novel way, by arguing that logical
empiricism might have bequeathed to us a very different philoso-
phy of science. In so doing, he conducts us through a history of
logical empiricism in its European phase during the 1920s and
1930s. He recovers the socialist agenda then at the heart of logical
empiricism, and notes its alliances with progressivist wings in early
twentieth-century American philosophy. He then offers a history of
the technical and apolitical project that philosophy of science has
become. As the title telegraphs, Reisch argues that the Cold
War led the logical empiricists – many of them immigrants from
Germany or Austria, often Jewish, and often with socialist
leanings – away from their youthful political engagement, towards
philosophical isolationism.
That there is an important political history to the philosophy of
science in the twentieth century is largely unknown to many in the
profession. Most philosophers of science tacitly endorse a ‘liberal
neutralist’ account of science: they believe that scientific knowledge
Minerva (2007) 45:357–360
Springer 2007
DOI 10.1007/s11024-007-9048-9

is important exactly because, by serving no political ends in itself, it
can serve as a disinterested input into political decision-making.
Often implicit, this commitment becomes visible as righteous indig-
nation when, for example, philosophers of science think they hear
sociologists saying that scientific evidence merely disguises political
power and ambition, or when they perceive ‘faith-based’ people
seeking to force Intelligent Design into high school curricula.
Since his early work on the relations between Thomas Kuhn and
logical empiricism, George Reisch has been one of the most inter-
esting and scholarly of researchers working in the history of the
discipline.
1
He reminds us that, in the 1920s and 1930s, philoso-
phers of science theorized and promoted the political roles of sci-
ence more richly than they have of late. His premier example is
Otto Neurath’s vision of ‘unified science’.
Neurath (1882–1945) was a member of the Vienna Circle, a
prominent socialist, and a leader in the visual representation of sta-
tistical information as a form of public education. He was also an
economic planner who, in 1919, served in the governments of the
short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria. His philosophy of science
included the promotion of an international effort to unify the
sciences in support of ‘planning for freedom’.
2
Reisch indicates the ways in which, in the 1930s, when many
logical empiricists emigrated to America, Neurath’s vision was
attractive, and the ways in which it was unattractive to John
Dewey and his followers (Neurath himself finished his life in the
United Kingdom). The decline into isolation and irrelevance of log-
ical empiricism is, for Reisch, largely the story of the decline of
Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in favour
of the more technical projects that logical empiricist philosophers
of science, such as Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, and Carl
Hempel, favoured.
3
Reisch, unlike most of the scholars currently interested in the
history of the philosophy of science, has professional training in
history. He draws his account of the pressures of the Cold War
1
George Reisch, ‘Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?’, Philosophy of Science, 58 (2), (1991),
264–277.
2
Otto Neurath, ‘International Planning for Freedom’, in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen
(eds.), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 422–440.
3
For examples of such projects, see Hans Reichenbach, Philosophical Foundations of Quantum
Mechanics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944); Rudolf Carnap,
The Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); and Carl
G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New
York: The Free Press, 1965).
358 ALAN RICHARDSON