With characteristic brevity, Tom Oberdan pointedly drew attention to some of the ways in which we misunderstand and underestimate so-called Logical Positivism. While its legacy is strong and persists today, so do our caricatures of its central tenets. Physicalism, reductionism, operationalism, testability and meaning, the unity of science and scientific method, the theory-observation distinction, the logical structure or architectonic of the language of science in which operational definitions serve to bridge observational reports and theoretical statements -- all this still resonates in our first introductions to scientific method. While all this is remembered, we tend to forget not only the political radicalism of many members of the so-called Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, but also their radical critique of metaphysics - a critique which Rudolf Carnap and others extended to the rejection even of the correspondence theory of truth (according to which a claim is true if and only if it corresponds to what is observed). Yes, Carnap did develop a syntactic artifice for the language of physics, but much of Tom's work has been to show that this was part of a more fundamental struggle to comprehend and account for the relation between experience and language.
If apriorism and metaphysics are dead, the members of the Vienna Circle asked, what then is the normative force of scientific knowledge (and of the Philosophy of Science)? According to Moritz Schlick and Ludwig Wittgenstein, experience must play a role, it provides guarantuees, foundations, warrants for our beliefs. Once apriorism and metaphyics are defeated, empiricism must step into the void - it needs no justification since it justifies itself. Against this view, Carnap and Neurath maintained that all knowledge is conventional and that empiricism is just one convention among others.
It is in the context of these kinds of debates that questions about observation and observation-reports become controversial and important. Some positivists have argued that observation statements are like reflexes to nature: when we observe we make ourselves part of a natural process, and the observation statement derives its meaning from natural occurrences and must then be translated into the language of theory. For Carnap and Neurath this is a metaphysical view, if ever there was one: by what magical process can natural facts issue in linguistic meaning? Meaning, according to them, derives only from within the body of language - and only conventional choices can link the usage of terms to certain empirical tests or operations. And thus these reflections on the history of the Philosophy of Science elucidate contemporary philosophical issues (they explain, for example, how it is that the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap published and promoted Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
I have simplified or caricatured here what Tom elaborated most recently in "Postscript to Protocols: Reflections on Empiricism" (in Ronald Giere and Alan Richardson, eds. Origins of Logical Empiricism, vol. 16 of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 269-291). A more extensive treatment can be found in his book Protocols, Truth and Convention (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); and to recommend just one more of numerous articles: "Positivism and the Pragmatic Theory of Observation" (A. Fine, M. Forbes, and L. Wessels, eds. PSA 1990, East Lansing: PSA, vol. 1, pp. 25-37).
Alfred Nordmann
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