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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
In recent years empiricism has been under persistent attack, and serious questions have been raised about the ability of empiricism to provide the basis for a viable philosophy of science. The attack has been sufficiently vigorous, and in some quarters sufficiently successful, that many now maintain that empiricism is dead. My aim in this paper is to argue that, rather than being ready for embalmment and emplacement in the museum of philosophic oddities, empiricism is very much alive, and the central thesis of empiricism remains the cornerstone for any viable philosophy of science. This is not to say that the recent attacks on empiricism have been without a point, rather, they have put anyone who would defend empiricism in the position of having to rethink many datails of the empiricist viewpoint. But it is the details, the way in which empiricism has been elaborated by its proponents, not the central empiricist insight, that must be reconsidered.
1 Paul Churchland, "Two Grades of Evidential Bias," Philosophy of Science 42, 1975, pp 250-259. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, ch. 2.
2 I have discussed these attempts in Harold I. Brown, Perception, Theory and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979, ch. 3.
3 Cf. George Abell, Exploration of the Universe 2nd edition, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, pp. 319-320.
4 Alvin Goldman, "Epistemology and the Psychology of Perception," American Philosophical Quarterly 18, 1981, p. 50.
5 Paul Churchland, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes," Journal of Philosophy 78, 1981, p. 88.
6 Gerald Feinberg, What is the World Made Of?, Garden City, New York, Doubleday Books, 1978, p. 160.
7 See Dudley Shapere, "The Concept of Observation in Science and Philoso phy," Philosophy of Science 49, 1982, pp. 485-525 for an analysis of the continuing solar neutrino experiment. Shapere's results are completely consistent with the position developed here.
8 The problem derived from the fact that the Copernican view predicted much greater variations in the brightness of the planets over the course of a year than was predicted by Ptolemaic astronomy. Naked eye observation was consistent with the Ptolemaic prediction, while telescopic observation supported the Copernican predic tion. Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei VII, ed. Antonio Favaro, Florence, G. Barbera, 1897, pp. 361-364.
9 In Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. op. cit., pp. 14-15, Churchland draws a distinction between "objective intentionality" and "subjective intentionali ty" that is, in many ways, analogous to the distinction between the ontological and epistemic senses of "information."
10 See Alan Franklin, "The Discovery and Nondiscovery of Parity Nonconserva tion," Stuclies in History and Philosophy of Science 10, 1979, pp. 201-257.
