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Logicism, Pragmatism, and Metascience: Towards a Pancritical Pragmatic Theory of Meta-level Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

G.S. Axtell
G.S. Axtell*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii
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Extract

Both inside and outside philosophy of science, the past 25 years has seen a remarkable increase in the epistemic importance attached to the role of background beliefs and values of agents engaged in cognitive inquiry. Emphasis on the role of background commitments has been beneficial in bringing philosophy of science back into closer relation with the varied forms of science. But at present there cannot be said to be any clear consensus among philosophers on issues of the theoretical status of such commitments, or of their import upon conceptions of scientific meta-methodology.

The situation worsens when one considers widespread suspicion today among many historicists and sociologists of science of the viability of philosophy of science as a normative enterprise. This marks the ground between normative epistemology and its critics. But to understand the skeptical attitude towards normative theory, one must attend to the background assumptions about normative discourse imbedded in logical empiricism, and in particular to the state of logical empiricist metascience just prior to the revolution of sorts that occurred in the 1960’s.

Type
Part I. Logical Empiricism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 39 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

I would like to express thanks to Lenn Goodman, Larry Laudan and Jim Tiles for patient and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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