Department of Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Humanities Bridgford Street, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, UK.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2024 Oct;107:107-117. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.08.003. Epub 2024 Sep 5.
The debate between the revisionist and received views of the relationship between Thomas Kuhn and logical empiricism has until now focused on the relationship between Kuhn and Rudolf Carnap. Here, I consider the relationship between Kuhn and two other members of the Vienna Circle's left-wing; Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank. It is argued that the attribution of the historical turn in philosophy of science to Kuhn obscures the historical awareness displayed in important works by members of the Vienna Circle, and thereby distorts its legacy. Both Frank and Neurath recognised the role for history in theorizing about science, and drawing upon these insights lead them to considerations of scientific theory-choice, rational disagreement, and the role of extra-scientific values in science, that anticipate those later made famous by Kuhn. It is also argued that the Left-Vienna Circle's programme for Unified Science, the replacement of traditional philosophy with a bipartite metatheory of science, provides a clearer and potentially more radical role for the history of science within the philosophy of science than Kuhn's. To reach this conclusion, it is demonstrated that some members of the Vienna Circle maintained a far less robust distinction between contexts of discovery and justification than has typically been attributed to them.
托马斯·库恩与逻辑实证主义关系的修正主义与传统观点之间的争论，迄今为止一直集中在库恩与鲁道夫·卡尔纳普之间的关系上。在这里，我将考虑库恩与维也纳学派左翼的另外两位成员奥托·纽拉特和菲利普·弗兰克之间的关系。本文认为，将科学哲学的历史转向归因于库恩，掩盖了维也纳学派成员在重要著作中表现出的历史意识，从而扭曲了其遗产。弗兰克和纽拉特都认识到历史在科学理论化中的作用，并借鉴这些观点，使他们对科学理论选择、理性分歧以及科学中额外科学价值的作用进行了思考，这些思考后来因库恩而广为人知。本文还认为，维也纳学派左翼的统一科学计划，即用一个二分法的科学元理论取代传统哲学，为科学哲学中的科学史提供了一个比库恩更清晰、更激进的角色。为了得出这个结论，本文证明，维也纳学派的一些成员在发现和辩护的语境之间保持的区别，远没有通常归因于他们的那样坚固。
