Andreas Vrahimis

In some of her earliest writings, Susan Stebbing developed a hitherto overlooked response to the scientific realism debate. This paper reconstructs Stebbing’s objections against different forms of scientific anti-realism defended by Pragmatism, Bergson, and his ‘New Positivist’ followers. Within the broader context of her critique of ‘anti-intellectualism’, Stebbing argues that the different forms of epistemic instrumentalism upheld by each side lead to widely divergent views of scientific theory choice. F.C.S. Schiller’s Pragmatism maintains that scientific hypotheses are arbitrary postulates, partly confirmed by their ‘workings’. By contrast, drawing on Bergson’s method of intuition, the New Positivists radically divorce the practical utility of scientific hypotheses from their truth-value. While both sides rely on Poincaré’s conventionalism, Stebbing argues that he not only rejected their brands of instrumentalism, but also defended a version of structural realism. Stebbing demonstrates the opposition between these purported allies by applying their views to the question of theory choice between Euclidean and non-Euclidean axioms in geometry. In doing so, she expresses her own preference for a realist alternative, thus paving the path to her better-known later defences of realism.

Maria Rosa Antognazza's work has issued a historical challenge to the thesis that the analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) attacked by epistemologists from Gettier onwards was indeed the standard view traditionally upheld from Plato onwards. This challenge led to an ongoing reappraisal of the historical significance of intuitive knowledge, in which the knower is intimately connected to what is known. Such traditional accounts of intuition, and their accompanying claims to epistemological primacy, constituted the precise target of Moritz Schlick's critique. Schlick engages with this topic throughout his oeuvre, from some of his early epistemological writings, to his anti-metaphysical stance as a leading Logical Empiricist. Schlick crucially distinguishes knowledge from mere acquaintance, denying that the latter has epistemic status. He therefore argues that the very notion of ‘intuitive knowledge’ is a contradictio in adjecto.

During the 1930s, while both movements were fleeing from persecution by the Nazis, the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School planned to collaborate. The plan failed, and in its stead Horkheimer published a critique of the Vienna Circle in “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” (written in collaboration with Adorno, though he is not credited as an author). This paper will analyse Horkheimer’s (and Adorno’s) article, and the ensuing dialogue with Neurath. The Frankfurt School’s critical stance towards the Vienna Circle can be traced back to Adorno’s earlier objections to the ‘positivist’ myth of the given. In response to Carnap’s attack on Heidegger, Horkheimer (and Adorno) criticized both metaphysics and its ‘scientistic’ overcoming. Their critique employs a number of overgeneralisations about ‘logical positivism’. Neurath’s unpublished reply proposes corrections to the Frankfurt School’s portrayal of ‘positivism’, pointing towards a partly conciliatory direction within the framework of Unified Science. The attempted collaboration between the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School ended when Horkheimer refused to publish Neurath's reply to his article in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Horkheimer subsequently made anti-positivism a central concern for critical theory, setting the tone of subsequent polemics in the Positivismusstreit of the 1960s.