Feyerabend became familiar with the Vienna Circle tradition and Logical Empiricism in his formative years in post-war Vienna. However, since the mid-1950s, he made LE one of his favourite critical targets, articulating his criticism in personal dialogue with some of its most distinguished representatives, in an attempt to expose some conservative and even authoritarian tendencies of contemporary empiricism. This paper accounts for the different stages of Feyerabend’s sustained assault against LE, examining both Feyerabend’s reception of LE and the logical empiricists' responses to Feyerabend’s challenge.
In the second half of the 1950s, Feyerabend found fault with Carnap's two-language model for rationally reconstructing the structure of scientific theories and its assumption of an autonomous and theory-neutral thing-language, while in a series of papers published in the first half of the 1960s, he relentlessly questioned the descriptive adequacy and the normative desirability of the ‘orthodox’, logical empiricist, accounts of reduction and explanation advanced by Hempel and Nagel. Feyerabend’s persistent criticism shook North American philosophy of science and prompted Hempel’s reaction: first in their correspondence and later in print.
Initially, Hempel retorted that Feyerabend’s methodological analysis was ‘completely mistaken’ and Feyerabend could offer ‘no support’ for his allegations. This raises interesting historiographical questions about the later reception of LE, as it seems that Feyerabend, driven by his anti-authoritarian stance and his vantage point notwithstanding, substantially misinterpreted the logical empiricist research programme. On the other hand, Hempel also recognised that the descriptive issues on which Feyerabend insisted, despite having been long acknowledged by LE, could have farther-reaching consequences than previously envisaged. In fact, by the end of the 1960s, Hempel came to make quite radical concessions, admitting that the standard logical empiricist model for rationally reconstructing scientific theories was essentially ‘misleading’, that the logical empiricist account of reduction was ‘an untenable oversimplification’, and that the logical empiricist approach as to the meaning of scientific terms was actually ‘misconceived’. In this respect, there are good reasons to consider the decline of the logical empiricist research programme in the 1970s at least partly as the result of Feyerabend’s stimulating, however misrepresenting, insights.
Matteo Collodel earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and pursued his research at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna. His work focuses on the historical and psycho-sociological dimensions of philosophical research with a special attention to the development of the philosophical movements of logical empiricism and critical rationalism and to the life and work of Paul K. Feyerabend. His most significant publications include “Was Feyerabend a Popperian? Methodological Issues in the Historiography of the Philosophy of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2016) and “Ehrenhaft’s Experiments on Magnetic Monopoles: Reconsidering the Feyerabend-Ehrenhaft Connection,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (2022); he recently co-edited the collections of correspondence and unpublished papers Feyerabend’s Formative Years. Volume 1. Feyerabend and Popper (2020) and Volume 2. Feyrabend on Logical Empiricism, Bohm & Kuhn (2024).