¹ “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, 63 (12, 1969), 1051–1061CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In adopting Easton's term “postbehavioralism,” I follow him in emphasizing the fundamental difference between the movement in question and those currents of opposition to behavioralism that favor the revival of political philosophy in its classical mode. Some writers are now using the term “postbehavioralism” to refer to these latter currents. This usage risks blurring the distinction between historicist and non-historicist opposition to behavioralism and obscuring the fact that epistemological debate in contemporary political science has three major sides, not two.

² Braybrooke, David and Rosenberg, Alexander, “Getting the War News Straight: The Actual Situation in the Philosophy of Science,” American Political Science Review, 66 (09, 1972), p. 818CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ They suggest, for example, that my essay is the source of rumors that positivists have “vanished” from the philosophy of science, although at other times I am made only to say that the fall of positivism is “impending.”

⁴ “Logical Positivism” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), V, 56Google Scholar. In the Preface to The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969)Google Scholar, the editors, Peter Achinstein and Stephen F. Barker, write: “Today logical positivism no longer exists as a distinct movement, yet its effects, direct and indirect, recognized and unrecognized, continue to be felt” (p. v). As for European philosophy, Ludwig Landgrebe states: “If we want, first of all, to describe the common ground on which European philosophy and the thinkers determined by it rest, we may say that it is characterized throughout by the elimination of an attitude which had gained its maximum momentum at the end of the nineteenth century, an attitude which can be designated as positivistic in the most comprehensive sense of the term.” In Major Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy, trans, by Reinhardt, Kurt F. (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 6Google Scholar, italics in the original. If necessary, one could produce a great number of statements by competent observers attesting to positivism's decline as a philosophical force.

⁵ Braybrooke, and Rosenberg, , “Getting the War News Straight,” p. 825Google Scholar.

⁶ See Rosen, Stanley, Nihilism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 1–27Google Scholar.

⁷ Braybrooke, and Rosenberg, , “Getting the War News Straight,” pp. 820–821Google Scholar.

⁸ See Toulmin, Stephen, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” Encounter, 32 (01, 1969), 58–71Google Scholar. Spranger's association with the school of Dilthey is noted by Brock, Werner, Contemporary German Philosophy (Cambridge: University Press, 1935), p. 92Google Scholar.

⁹ See Apel, Karl-Otto, Analytic Philosophy and the Geisteswissenschaften, trans, by Holstelilie, Harald (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Naess, Arne, Four Modern Philosophers: Carnap, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, trans, by Hannay, Alastair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 167–171Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Braybrooke, and Rosenberg, , “Getting the War News Straight,” p. 824Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

¹¹ It is clear that Shapere, in using the term “revolution,” has in mind the radical break that the new anti-positivism makes with established views in the philosophy of science and the intense debate that the anti-positivist critique has occasioned, not any overwhelming victory that the movement has achieved. I believe that it is equally clear in my essay that I have the same meaning in mind on those few occasions when I follow Shapere in using the term. I adopt Easton's term “post-behavioral revolution” in much the same way.

¹² Popper, Karl, “Normal Science and its Dangers,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), p. 55, italics in the originalGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Braybrooke, and Rosenberg, , “Getting the War News Straight,” p. 825Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Rudner comes close to the truth when he speaks of my essay as a “dialectical analysis.” His mistake is to regard it as dialectical in an Hegelian rather than a Platonic sense.

¹⁵ Rudner, Richard S., “On Evolving Standard Views in Philosophy of Science,” American Political Science Review, 66 (09. 1972), p. 827CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 828Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 827Google Scholar. The word “and” not italicized in the original.

¹⁸ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 828Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

¹⁹ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 832Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 839Google Scholar.

²¹ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 841Google Scholar.

²² Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 840Google Scholar.

²³ Kuhn, Thomas S., “Reflections on my Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, p. 265Google Scholar. See also pp. 261–264. My other critics also cite this recent essay of Kuhn's but they, like Rudner, skip over this crucial statement.

²⁴ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, edited by Schilpp, Paul Arthur (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1963). pp. 3–84Google Scholar.

²⁵ See Naess, , Four Modern Philosophers, p. 43Google Scholar.

²⁶ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 52Google Scholar.

²⁷ Reprinted in Ayer, A. J., ed., Logical Positivism (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 60–81Google Scholar. The essay first appeared in 1932 in Erkenntnis under the title “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.”

²⁸ Carnap, , “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” p. 69Google Scholar.

²⁹ Carnap, , “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” p. 63Google Scholar.

³⁰ Carnap, , “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” p. 78Google Scholar. Italics in the original.

³¹ Carnap, , “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” p. 79Google Scholar.

³² Naess, , Four Modern Philosophers, pp. 41–47Google Scholar. Naess brings out very clearly the areas of agreement and disagreement between Carnap and Dilthey in this area.

³³ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 57Google Scholar.

³⁴ It would take us too far afield to explore the issue of whether Carnap, in his later writings, succeeds in upholding the distinction between science and metaphysics and thus in maintaining the nonhistoricist character of scientific knowledge. Karl Popper argues that Carnap's “testability” (or “confirmability”) criterion of meaning is no more successful than his earlier verifiability criterion in distinguishing science from metaphysics. See Popper's, “The Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, pp. 183–226Google Scholar. See also, in the same volume (pp. 99–158), Robert S. Cohen's “Dialectical Materialism and Carnap's Logical Empiricism,” which characterizes Carnap's confirmation criterion as “a form of relativist conventionalism” because it leaves to chance, or simply treats as axiomatic, the intersubjective agreement of scientists about observation statements. Again in this volume (pp. 227–267), Herbert Feigl, in an essay entitled “Physicalism, Unity of Science and the Foundations of Psychology,” gives the following interpretation of his friend Carnap's fundamental principle of empiricism: “Statements are to be regarded as scientifically meaningful only if they are in principle inter-subjectively conformable or disconfirmable. If a statement, by the very interpretation imposed upon it, is in principle incapable even of the most indirect sort of intersubjective test, then though it may have meaning of a purely logical sort, or may be significant in that it carries pictorial, emotional or motivative appeals, or may even be testable in an exclusively subjective manner, it cannot be accepted as an answer to a scientific question” (p. 247, italics in the original). Yet Carnap makes the following comment about Feigl's interpretation: “At the present time I prefer not to emphasize the requirement of intersubjective confirmability as much as we used to do previously, but rather to consider it to be of secondary importance. I regard as meaningful for me whatever I can, in principle, confirm subjectively. This statement may be taken as a rough formulation of the principle of empiricism” (p. 882, italics in the original). If cognitive meaningfulness is relative to individual experience, is it not possible, as Feigl recognizes, for the metaphysician to claim that his statements are confirmable by his own experience and are thus meaningful to him? It is significant also that Carnap has proposed, as a solution to the debate over the admissibility of abstract terms in mathematics and physics, a “principle of tolerance” according to which “everyone is free to choose the rules of his language and thereby his logic in any way he wishes” (“Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 55). In the essay “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” in Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, Linsky, Leonard, ed., (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), pp. 208–228Google Scholar, Carnap holds that the choice of a linguistic framework, along with rules for framing statements and for testing, accepting, or rejecting them, is to be made on practical or pragmatic grounds, that is, according to whether the framework is expedient and fruitful for the purposes at hand. Here again, one must wonder if Carnap's later position is not so loose or liberal as to destroy any possibility of distinguishing between science and metaphysics on epistemological grounds.

Karl-Otto Apel concludes that Carnap's later position on language and fact comes very close to that of the Dilthey-Heidegger tradition. He interprets it as implying that “not even the facts of science are facts for the unchanging ‘subject as such’ (of “the language as such”), but they are constituted in a concrete and therefore historically determined human horizon of meanings.” Analytic Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften, p. 33. The favorable attention that Carnap is now receiving from continental thinkers may be due to his turn in their direction and not, as Braybrooke and Rosenberg suppose, a more conciliatory attitude on their part towards positivism.

³⁵ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 41Google Scholar.

³⁶ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 841Google Scholar.

³⁷ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 827Google Scholar.

³⁸ “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” p. 816. Emphasis added.

³⁹ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 844Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See “Hume's Contribution to Behavioral Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 12 (04, 1971), 154–168Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 59Google Scholar.

⁴² Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 842Google Scholar.

⁴³ Rudner, , “On Evolving Standard Views,” p. 841Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ What my essay says is that the epistemological roots of the behavioral approach “lie in positivism and, ultimately, in classical British empiricism.” Inasmuch as there has been strong disagreement within this tradition on the respective roles of reasoning and experience in scientific method, a disagreement among behavioralists on this matter cannot be taken as evidence that the disputing parties do not have a common indebtedness to the empiricist-positivist tradition. Landau suggests that innovations in research design and statistical techniques were more important for the rise of behavioralism than the logical positivists' writings about the nature of science. It must be remembered, however, that these techniques embody presuppositions about human knowledge that are elaborated and justified in the empiricist-positivist tradition. Furthermore, it was chiefly to writings in the logical positivist tradition that behavioralists turned in attempting to understand and explain what science is.

⁴⁵ Landau, Martin, “On Objectivity: Comment on ‘Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry’,” American Political Science Review, 66 (09, 1972), p. 846CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ My own understanding of this “theoretical” or “contemplative” historicism has been greatly enhanced by reading Kojève's, AlexandreIntroduction to the Reading of Hegel, edited by Bloom, Allan and trans, by Nichols, James H. Jr., (New York: Basic Books, 1969)Google Scholar. In the “Editor's Introduction,” Bloom says of Kojève: “From him one can learn both the implications and the necessary presuppositions of historicist philosophy” (p. viii). Bloom here comments on Kojève's relationship to Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. Kojève is among a number of proponents or friends of Marxism who oppose epistemological relativism (see especially pp. 100–149 of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel), For a Marxist theory of cognition that tends toward relativism, see Kolakowski, Leszek, “Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth,” in Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans, by Peel, Jane Z. (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 38–66Google Scholar. The tension within the Marxist tradition between theoretical and radical historicism is of utmost importance for our present inquiry.

⁴⁷ In assessing an author's statements about historicism, it is essential that one be clear about the meaning that the author attaches to the term. At the conclusion of an important new study of nineteenth-century thought—Mandelbaum's, MauriceHistory, Man, and Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)Google Scholar—the author states that historicism “has been abandoned” in our time (p. 371). Closer inspection shows, however, that he means something akin to what I have called “theoretical” or “contemplative” historicism, as the following passage suggests: “Historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development” (p. 42). My essay agrees, of course, that historicism in this sense has been largely repudiated. On the other hand, Mandelbaum agrees with my argument that the rebellion against reason associated with writers such as Nietzsche (Mandelbaum calls their view “radical voluntarism”) “has subsequently become a powerful intellectual influence on our time” (p. 364). Mandelbaum and I disagree as to whether or not the term “historicism” can properly be applied to the thought of Nietzsche and to the existentialism of our century. I would say in defense of my usage of the term that these latter views, no less than the earlier “contemplative” historicism,” arose from the insistence that man must be understood as a radically historical being. Another usage of “historicism” that contrasts with my own can be found in Tinder, Glenn, “The Necessity of Historicism,” American Political Science Review, 55 (09, 1961), pp. 560–565CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tinder defines historicism as “the ascription to history of an overall direction and goal” (p. 560). He concludes that since “a rationally demonstrable theory of history is impossible,” “the final basis of any particular philosophy of history must be faith” (p. 563).

⁴⁸ Landau, , “On Objectivity,” p. 851Google Scholar. Nietzsche uses the term “immaculate perception” (unbefleckten Erkenntnis) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to disparage traditional views of knowledge. See Kaufmann, Walter, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 233–236Google Scholar. I do not know if Landau is aware of Nietzsche's use of this term or if he is prepared to accept the historical connotations that Nietzsche gives it.

⁴⁹ Landau, , “On Objectivity,” p. 855Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Landau, , “On Objectivity,” p. 853Google Scholar.

⁵¹ An urgent task for those concerned with the epistemological foundations of political inquiry is the exploration of what it means to “see” political things. Among the sources that I have found helpful in this regard are the following: Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar; Efron, Robert, “What is Perception,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, IV, 137–173Google Scholar; Rosen, Stanley, Nihilism, pp. 140–235Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 120–164Google Scholar; Klein, Jacob, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 108–172Google Scholar; Berns, Walter, “The Behavioral Sciences and the Study of Political Things: The Case of Christian Bay's The Structure of Freedom,” American Political Science Review, 55 (09, 1961), pp. 550–559CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sinaiko, Herman L., Love, Knowledge and Discourse in Plato (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 119–190Google Scholar.

⁵² Compare Jaffa, Harry V., Equality and Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 190–211Google Scholar.

⁵³ Carnap, Rudolf, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 57Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Carnap declares that “[a]ll empiricists have abandoned the earlier belief that there is a fundamental difference, a ‘difference in kind’, between man and the other animals, and between organisms and the inorganic world. Nobody denies that there are differences and that they are of very great importance both theoretically and practically. But these differences have no sharp boundary lines; they are differences of degree within a continuum. It is possible, of course, to draw a line by definition between human beings and other animals; but any such line is to some extent arbitrary, that is to say, the line might be drawn with just as good reasons somewhat later or somewhat earlier.” The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p. 884.