Logical empiricism seemed to be a viable form of empiricism in general and to provide a fruitful philosophy of science. A couple of generations of English-speaking philosophers cheerfully adopted it and worked on the details: a logic of induction, specifying frameworks in detail for actual pieces of science, integrating a view of "mind" (behaviorism), and so forth.
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That lasted until two critics took the theory apart: <ul>
<li> Quine
</li> <li> Kuhn
</li></ul> 
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Today, Quine.
<p /> <ol>
<li> Holism: No observation is ever directly connected with just one theoretical hypothesis. Thus, the idea that there are rule connecting observations with confirmation of particular hypotheses just isn't going to work.
</li></ol> 
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<a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000108/fob2.asp" target="_top">Iguana example</a>.
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Calorimetry.
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1. Failure of the analytic-synthetic distinction. (Ohm's law example.)
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Holism and the failure of the analytic-synthetic distinction are not two separate things: The tidy separation of truths into analytic truths (definitions) and synthetic truths produces a tidy separation in what one would need to do to see whether a synthetic sentence is true or not, that is, it would show holism false.
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If holism is correct, then no word or sentence has an observational meaning or interpretation on its own: only a web of sentences (a framework, a theory) can be confirmed by observation, never a single sentence, and so no sentence, alone, is synthetic.
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Why are these problems devastating to logical empiricism, instead of mere difficulties to be solved like the problem concerning dispositional terms?
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To be an empiricist is to claim that knowledge comes from experience. To be a logical empiricist was to claim that there are certain logical connections between particular observation sentences and the (scientific) claims we make.
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But, while there may be a web of logical interconnections between our claims, truth and knowledge do not start at the observational periphery and work their way in. Theory can confirm observations, not just the other way around, and no particular sentences ("observation sentences") acquire their meaning independently of theory via a connection with experience. The foundational picture of experience at the bottom is just gone, and that was what made logical positivism empiricist.
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-- <a href="../Main/ShaughanLavine.html" class="twikiLink">ShaughanLavine</a> - 12 Sep 2005 - 10 Sep 2007[