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Remarks Concerning the Epistemology of Scientific Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Gustav Bergmann
Gustav Bergmann*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
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Extract

The present paper purports partly to reexamine and partly to summarize several points which occupied and still occupy a central position in more recent discussions among empiricist philosophers. As such discussions are essentially attempts at the clarification of terms, it might also be said that this essay intends to contribute to the analysis of certain very general and highly ambiguous expressions. The words in question are, first and mainly, ‘hypothetical’ and, more incidentally or by the way of exposition, ‘atomic', ‘elementaristic', and ‘extensional.’ In general, it is an attempt to show the impact of some of the ideas developed in the work of Carnap; within a prevailingly logical frame of reference in The Logical Syntax of Language and, in a more epistemological setting, in Testability and Meaning. In particular, it wants to eliminate some ambiguities which could arise from an oversimplified reading of certain passages in TM, as for instance: “If by verification is meant definitive and final establishment of truth, then no (synthetic) sentence is ever verifiable” (p. 420). If this passage is understood to assert that every synthetic sentence is hypothetical, then it is either false or several meanings of ‘hypothetical’ are to be distinguished. This distinction, implicit in TM, will upon closer examination prove to be related to the fundamental distinction between statements within and statements about a linguistic structure.

Type
Technical Scientific Section
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1942 , pp. 283 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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References

1 The Logical Syntax of Language. Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937; Testability and Meaning, Phil. Sci., 3, 1936; 4, 1937, quoted as LSL, and TM respectively. Some familiarity with Carnap's work will be presupposed throughout this paper. Use will also be made of the frame of reference developed in the writer's article An Empiricist Schema of the Psychophysical Problem, Phil. Sci., 9, 1942, quoted ES.

2 Certain terminological clarifications seem indispensable at this point. The predicate ‘atomic', as here defined, does not quite coincide with the usage of this term in TM. Furthermore, what is here called ‘basic’ and ‘basicality’ has been referred to as ‘primitive’ and ‘primitivity’ in ES. This latter change makes for better agreement with the usage of other writers, and eliminates the ambiguity introduced by the connotation of the original term in the phrase ‘primitive sentence'. The next paragraph of this essay itself contains an instance of the other meaning of ‘primitive'.

Terminological conventions, arbitrary as they are in themselves, reflect, at least, the author's bias as to the relative importance of various distinctions. This observation applies particularly to this writer's preference for the restriction of the term ‘consequence’ to ‘logical consequence', which deviates from Carnap's usage and, finally, to the circumstance that he follows Reichenbach in using ‘sentence', ‘proposition’ and ‘statement’ as synonyms throughout this paper.

3 There are, to be sure, several other possible interpretations of the terms ‘atomistic’ and ‘elementaristic’ as they loosely and ambiguously occur in emergentist, holistic, and Gestaltist writings. But these have no bearing on the argument at hand and are, moreover, either patently speculative or revolve around rather obvious confusions and misunderstandings.

The meaning of the phrase “complete sense data analysis of the empirical language” is discussed in ES.

4 R. B. Braithwaite, B. Russell, F. Waismann, Symposium: The Relevance of Psychology to Logic. Aristot. Soc, Suppl. Vol. 17, 1938.

5 A certain analogy to this situation can be found in pure syntax. The definiteness or decidability of a syntactical property must be distinguished from the property itself, from other properties of it and of the calculus as a whole. The system of the Principia Mathematica, for instance, justified certain special provisions for impredicative statements by what was then conceived as some kind of undecidability or, loosely speaking, some sort of impossibility to determine their truth value. Even if this reason had stood up to later criticism (LSL §44), the provision would have been in a certain sense unnecessary and not to be lumped with the (unramified) type rule which secures consistency.

6 To forest all a possible misunderstanding: Independent variation of the various attributes of a sensory dimension must not be confused with their independence as defined by Boring. See E. G. Boring, The Relation of the Attributes of Sensation to the Dimensions of the Stimulus. Phil. Sci., 2, 1935.

7 We are not here concerned with the confusion between ‘this is green’ as a sentence of the meaning basis or, for that matter, of the phenomenological protocol and the apparently contradicting statement ‘at that time at that place nothing green', which in the same language is a highly derived structure obtained by P-laws from information including the doctor's report about hallucinatory afflictions. The apparent paradox can be obtained no matter what meaning basis one chooses. See also the symposium quoted in footnote (4).