Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The pursuit of a definitive explanation of how scientists produce knowledge and what kinds of knowledge they produce became more urgent in the early twentieth century as science became increasingly important to society in the form of society-transforming technologies. As the century proceeded, philosophy of science emerged as a subdiscipline within philosophy, coordinate with the elusiveness of the goal of explaining science. By mid-century, philosophers, many trained in the physical sciences, had displaced scientists as the dominant figures in this effort. Henri Poincaré proposed a Mach-like relationalist theory of science, Bertrand Russell defended a logical atomism theory indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Percy Bridgman defended a theory he called operationalism. Concurrently, William James and John Dewey developed the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce into an action- and belief-based explanation of science. But the dominant philosophy of science from the 1920s through the 1950s was logical positivism/empiricism.