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Why Should the Science of Nature be Empirical?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

L. Jonathan Cohen
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Extract

In the past empiricist philosophy has urged one or other or both of two interconnected, and sometimes interconfused, theses. The first has been a thesis about the causal origins of certain beliefs, the second a thesis about the proper criteria for appraising these beliefs. The causal thesis is that all beliefs about the structure and contents of the natural world are the end-product of a process that originates wholly in individual experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. The criterial thesis is that all these beliefs are ultimately to be appraised for their truth, soundness or acceptability in terms of the data afforded by such perceptual acts. Of recent years the causal version of empiricism has been much attacked, primarily in regard to its implications about language-learning. The language in terms of which our beliefs are constructed is heavily conditioned, we are told, by certain congenital features of the human brain. But, whenever Chomsky and his followers have assailed the causal version of empiricism, they have always been careful to claim for their doctrines the warrant of empirical evidence. They have never questioned the correctness of the criterial version of empiricism.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 9: Impressions of Empiricism , March 1975 , pp. 168 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1975

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References

page 168 note 1 I use this term in the sense in which it is normally used by modern historians of philosophy, not in that in which both Bacon and Mill condemned empiricism: cf. Cohen, J. Jonathan, The Diversity of Meaning, 2nd ed. (London 1966) p. 326.Google Scholar

page 172 note 1 There are difficulties in working out the implications of this analogy, as Coady, C.A.J., ‘The Senses of Martians’, Philosophical Review, 83 (1974) pp. 107ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar., has shown, criticising Grice, H. P., ‘Some Remarks about the Senses’, in Butler, R. J., (ed), Analytical Philosophy (Oxford 1962) p. 133ffGoogle Scholar. But these difficulties need not concern us here, since they tend to reinforce, rather than weaken, the tenor of my own argument.

page 176 note 1 The immunity to Hempel's objection is obvious. Church supposed three observation-statements, O1, O2 and O3, such that none of them alone entailed any of the others. He then argued, for any S, that by Ayer's definition (—O1&O2) v(O3&—S) is directly verifiable, because with O1 it entails O3. Then this directly verifiable sentence when conjoined with S entails O2. So S is indirectly verifiable (unless it happens that (–O1&O2)v(O3&—S) alone entails O2, in which case –S&O3 entails O2, so that –S is directly verifiable. My proviso blocks such a move, (–O1&O2)v(O3&–S) becomes not directly verifiable unless S is observational, because O1&((–O1&O2)v(O3&–S)) has an equivalent, O1 &O3&–S, from which one conjunct, –S, can be dropped without omitting any observational content. There are, of course, problems about whether verifiability is effectively computable, but these apply to Ayer's conditions as well as to my own. Cf. Church, A. in Jour. Symb. Log., 14 (1949) pp. 52–3.Google Scholar

page 178 note 1 No doubt this often conformed to many people's subjective sense of time. But no one supposes that sense to be a reliable source of empirical data: hence the need for clocks.

page 181 note 1 For present purposes it suffices to distinguish between relatively observational and relatively theoretical entities, as M. Hesse does in her The Structure of Scientific Inference (London 1974) ch.1.Google Scholar

page 182 note 1 Cf. Cohen, Jonathan, ‘The Inductive Logic of Progressive Problem-Shifts’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 95–6 (1971) pp.62ffGoogle Scholar., and, for inductive reasoning outside natural science, see Cohen, L. Jonathan, The Implications of Induction (1970) sections 17–18.Google Scholar