§65. Scientific Philosophy

In scholastic Latin objectiva meant what we would call subjective, and subjectiva what we would call objective. To be objectiva was to be a mere ob­ject of thought, existing for the mind alone (e.g., Don Quixote), whereas to be subjectiva was to be a subject, a substance, a veritable reality.

From the 1850s, thinkers like Helmholtz and T. H. Huxley enroll what they understand of Kant’s theory in an argument for the superlative objectivity of natural science. For them, Kant showed that the objective is the empirically real, while the subjective is willful, irrational feeling, betrayed in deviations from scientific rigor. '1 his objectivity is the epistemic virtue of empirical sci­ence, which refers to verifiably objective reality unconditioned by the subjec­tive factors that draw perception toward fantasy.

Championing science as the summit of objectivity came to seem im­portant in light of something new in the still early career of modern sci­ence.

What for these philosophers is important about scientific cognition is that it derive as directly as possible from the object, with minimal interference from the necessity of passing through a human sensorium. While proponents probably neither knew nor cared, the idea is originally Epicurean. Everything that is perceived directly without opinion is a real feature of the world, and everything shown directly by the senses is evidence for scientific theory (§17). What these scientific thinkers call objectivity is merely freedom from subjectivity, a selfish willfulness that endangers the formation of scientific knowledge. Inquiry becomes objective when it comes under methods to con­trol the intrusion of subjectivity.

A first method tried to introduce mechanical objectivity into experiments; photography (“the pencil of nature”) was an early paradigm. Objectivity was also behind the demand for quantification and the stereotype of the emo­tionally detached “scientist” (a word coined by William Whewell in 1840). However, mechanical objectivity proved elusive; experiments resist automa­tion, and technical experts were aware of the art required to produce usable scientific photographs. After the disappointment with mechanical methods, methodologists sought a new model of objectivity. Some came to the view that its guarantee lies in the formal properties of the language in which data and conclusions are expressed and inferred.¹⁴⁰

Helmholtz voiced this idea in a lecture at the dedication of a monument to Kant in Konigsberg in 1855.

Our sensations are effects brought forth in our organs by means of exterior causes, and how such an effect manifests itself depends of course quite es­sentially on the nature of the apparatus on which the cause operates. Insofar as the quality of our sensations gives us information about the peculiarities of the external process that excites it, it can count as a sign of that process, but not as a picture.... The relation between them is only that the same object, working its effects in the same way, produces the same sign.... So even if our sense impressions in their qualities are only signs, whose spe­cial nature depends wholly on our internal organization, they are none­theless not to be dismissed as empty appearance, but are in fact a sign of something... and what is most important, they can picture the law of this occurring.¹⁴¹

That was Ernst Mach’s idea too. “Everything we can know about the world is necessarily expressed in the sensations, which can be set free from the in­dividual influence of the observer in a precisely definable manner... by the ascertainment of the functional dependence of the sensational elements on one another. This knowledge exhausts the knowledge of ‘reality.’ ”¹⁴²

The European movement of scientific philosophy began early in the nine­teenth century with Comte’s positivism, and acquired philosophical heft in its German reception at the end the century, with figures like Benno Erdmann, Richard Avenarius, Hans Vaihinger, and Friedrich Albert Lange. Their concerns folded into the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophy, which included Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer.

The neo-Kantians did not feel this problem since they were idealists and thought of “empirical nature” as merely an ideal limit where a historical se­ries of theoretical structures converge. The objects of scientific knowledge are intellectual constructions whose abstraction resembles nothing given to perception. Verifying facts are irrelevant if they exist at all. Hermann Cohen: “The science that most loudly takes its stand on experience in fact constructs that experience.” The facts of interest to science are not gained by reception but sought out to answer questions of theory, and are in that sense created by theory, making sense perception superfluous. Thus Natorp: “The very nature of the sensible excludes definiteness of the sort required and pos­ited by [scientific] theories.”¹⁴³

Writing in 1912, Ernst Cassirer proposed (in effect) to rehabilitate Hobbes’s geometrical approach to physics (§46). “The ‘facts’ of natural sci­ence are henceforth valid only insofar as they can be guaranteed by certain and exact judgments. But this sort of certainty is only attainable if the par­ticular scientific judgments are anchored in the general basic judgments of mathematics. The order of certainty proceeds from mathematics to physics, not the other way around.” Perception is not ultimate evidence, it is just an­other phenomenon, an effect. That “the concept of ‘perception’ reduces to that of ‘stimulus,’ which in turn reduces to the general concept of motion,” was exactly Hobbes’s conclusion.

Helmholtz, Mach, Cohen, and Cassirer were not Vienna Circle logical positivists, and their ideas for securing objectivity in formal qualities of the language of science are not yet the logical empiricism that emerges with the new logic of Frege and Russell and the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein. But the seed is planted. The so-called Vienna Circle began in 1926 when Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, Philip Frank, and Moritz Schlick began meeting with like-minded scientists and philosophers. In 1929, they published their man­ifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World. The original Circle consisted of some thirty adherents, with a core of about twenty. Members had little in common except enthusiasm for science and interest in methodology, which they analyzed with the new instruments of Principia Mathematica (1910-13) and the enigmatic philosophy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), usually defending an epistemology they somewhat nostalgically regarded as empiricism.

The manifesto characterizes their scientific conception of the world in two features: it is empirical, and it is positivist. “There is knowledge only from experience, which rests on what is immediately given. This sets the limits for the content of legitimate science.” As for positivism, the method for acquiring knowledge is essentially the same in all fields of science, which they expect eventually to converge in a single unified science, an expectation to be ad­vanced by their scientific approach to philosophy, applying powerful new methods of logical analysis to empirical material of the different sciences.¹⁴⁵

What these logical empiricists mean by “empiricism” is mostly nega­tive: the rejection of intuition and the synthetic a priori.

It is unfortunate that this idea became the signature thesis of logical em­piricism for anglophone philosophy, as verificationism was not so important among the Circle. It was not unanimously endorsed or considered defini­tive of their effort to establish scientific philosophy, nor did they derive their denunciation of metaphysics from this principle. Lyric poetry is also cogni­tively meaningless by verificationist standards, but the Vienna group never called for its elimination. The problem with metaphysics is not mere non­verifiability or logical nonsense. Metaphysics is a mendacious obstacle to a more consistently scientific civilization.¹⁴⁷