Political points or arguments ?

Doc, Thanks for your comment yesterday. I am eagerly awaiting your monday reply. In the meantime, I would just like to share a few thoughts that came to my mind while reading one of your sentences.

You say your impression is that 'the Logical Positivists were largely successful in their arguments, but were unable to score [...] political points'. Naturally, I have exactly the opposite one ! Like so often in a debate between two sincerely held, but widely differing, positions, I have this strange feeling that we are not living in the same world. It seems we are on opposites sides of the mirror : at least one of us is in wonderland.

My own opinion on this matter has been formed quite recently, actually, while reading about Logical Positivism from various sources, some of which I already cited here. All describe the Vienna circle as a closly knit and very industrious group, deliberatly engaged in an energetic effort to popularize their ideas. Says O. Hanfling (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy) :

International conferences were called with a view to disseminating the new 'insights', and a grandiose project, The Encyclopedia of Unified Science, was launched to give definitive expression to the new `scientific' era in which philosophical and other discourse would become part of the discourse of science.

A similar account can be found in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Vienna Circle :

The Vienna Circle was very active in advertising the new philosophical ideas of logical positivism. Several congresses on epistemology and philosophy of science were organized, with the help of the Berlin Circle. There were some preparatory congresses: Prague (1929), Könisberg (1930), Prague (1934) and then the first congress on scientific philosophy held in Paris (1935), followed by congresses in Copenhagen (1936), Paris (1937), Cambridge, England (1938), Cambridge, Mass. (1939).

In another paper (H. Feigl & al. Homage to R. Carnap, 1970), I found the following description of one of the proceedings of the Circle in the 1920s :

I remember vividly Carnap's first lecture (1925) to the Vienna Circle. He presented his Space-Time topology [...] in the manner an engineer might explain the structure of a machine he had just invented. To the non-logicians Carnap indeed seemed to be no philosopher at all.

The reference to an engineer strikes me as a sign of the times. 'Ingenieurs', as they were called both in German and French, were popular then. They seemed to be the wave of the future and that nothing could resist them. This was the era of the Ford Model T, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, the peak of the railroads and of electrification. In a word, Logical Positivism was in sync with the trends of its time, and, indeed, many described it as a new fashionable creed that was sweeping the younger strata of the philosophy, mathematics and science departments.

Echoing this, the tone of the article opposing Logical Positivism published, while it was in full swing, is defensive, but respectful :

'[The] views of [LP] compels us to reexamine the foundations of knowledge and the grounds of validity, the Viennese synthesis should be welcomed as a challenge to all traditional points of view.'

WH Werkmeister "Seven theses of Logical Positivism Critically Examined", The Philosophical Review, 1937.

Some years later, it becomes almost desperate :

"THE most obvious general feature of current philosophy is a negative one, and this is its determined effort to repudiate metaphysics. [...] On this topic professionals and laymen agree; and logical positivists, pragmatists, Cambridge analysts, operationalists, American naturalists, semanticists, and even self-confessed nominalists join hands with political radicals and successful business men in condemning as unnecessary [...] the study of metaphysics."

JK. Feibleman, "A Defense of Ontology", The Journal of Philosophy, 1949.

So, apparently, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Logical Positivism seemed successful; the victorious avant-garde of a host of other philosophical schools. Note that in the example above, the repudiation of metaphysics is described as a general feature of current philosophy. In the eyes of the author, it is the dominant, mainstream view. Is not this situation to be considered a 'political' victory for Logical Positivism in the philosophical arena ?

Then, in the 1950s and 60s, the tides turned and Logical Positivism was thoroughly routed and AJ. Ayer driven to confess defeat as stated earlier. What matters are the reasons for this defeat and, again, we are here at the heart of the matter. Almost all recent accounts of the history of philosophy cite technical reasons : LP was defeated because its argument failed to stand up to criticism.

While, still recently, I had only vague notions about LP, these are the data out of which which I built the impression that LP was a once politically dominant movement in philosophy that eventually collapsed because its argument were not technically waterproof. But again, on a deeper level, I am convinced there is more to it than that.