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The Heritage From Logical Positivism: A Reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Lindley Darden
Lindley Darden*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Extract

Stephen Toulmin, in assessing the legacy of logical positivism, remarked: “Yet, even though we slay our intellectual parents, we cannot help but inherit from them…. While many of us whose philosophical careers began after 1946 reject the positivism of our forebears, it would be presumptuous for us to deny our inheritance entirely. At the very least, we share with our analytic predecessors a common stock of questions and problems about whose answers and solutions we disagree” ([28], p. 51).

In biological evolution organisms cannot choose which genes to retain, nor can they strive to introduce particular new genes. However, we, as philosophers, can choose which things we wish to inherit from our intellectual parents and which things we wish to eliminate as nonadaptive in our current environment.

Type
Part IV. Logical Positivism, Its Origins and Critics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 242 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Maryland as well as Nancy Maull and David Hull for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This work was supported in part by a Summer. Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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