Mousa Mohammadian, PhD

2023 April, 1 - June, 29

Affiliation: Ahmedabad University, School of Arts and Sciences

Research for a study about:

Charles Sanders Peirce and Logical Empiricism

Scholars of the history of philosophy of science read and hear a lot about Pierre Duhem, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach. Charles Sanders Peirce, however, is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. Although it might seem that Peirce has always been absent from the mainstream philosophy of science, a more apt description is that at some point in the development of philosophy of science in the twentieth century, Peirce disappears. For in the early stages of logical empiricism in the United States, Peirce’s philosophy received a warm reception from prominent representatives, proponents, and sympathizers of this movement, such as Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, and W.V.O. Quine. But this reception was short-lived and in the course of the development of the twentieth-century philosophy of science, Peirce became a marginal figure while logical empiricism turned into a formidable movement.
In this research project, I focus on the interactions between early logical empiricism in the United States and Peirce’s philosophy, especially his philosophy of science. The project has two aims: (i) to better understand the marginalization of Peirce’s philosophy of science and (ii) to bring to the foreground some of Peirce’s valuable insights that were missed by the mainstream philosophy of science due to this marginalization.

Lecture

Peirce Disappears: (Non-)Reception of Peirce as a Philosopher of Science

This talk is going to be a in-person and hybrid event, at NIG (SR 2i) and can be followed via online Plattform.

Date: 2023, April 27

Time: 3-4.30 pm CET

Online Plattform  access:

univienna.zoom.us/j/63035484129
Passcode: 226427 

No registered accounts are required, it's enough to click on the link and enter your name. Chrome or Firefox browsers work best.

Abstract:

Charles Sanders Peirce is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. But in the early years of the logical empiricist movement in the United States, Peirce’s philosophy, especially his philosophy of science, received a warm reception from prominent representatives, proponents, and sympathizers of this movement including Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, and W.V.O. Quine. This reception, however, was short-lived and Peirce gradually disappeared from the mainstream philosophy of science while logical empiricism turned into a formidable movement.
In this talk, first I discuss some examples of the early reception of Peirce’s philosophy of science by proponents of the logical empiricist movement. In this section, I primarily focus on Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel and his student Justus Buchler, and A.J. Ayer. Through these examples, I also reveal the peculiar position of Peirce in the philosophy of science literature of the time. Some (e.g., Morris) describe him as a relatively unsophisticated logical positivist with some extra metaphysics while others (e.g., Ayer) describe his philosophy as an anticipation of falsificationism. I use this peculiar position to provide an explanation for the later marginalization of Peirce as a philosopher of science. Second, I discuss two of Peirce’s interesting insights that were not received the attention that they deserved due to this marginalization: (i) Peirce’s dynamic and evolutionary view of scientific method that can be contrasted with the right-wing logical empiricists’ static view of scientific method and (ii) Peirce’s view about the limitations of the intuition-based method of scientific inquiry when the object of inquiry is the “deep” structure of nature.

Report

The topic of the project that I was working on in Vienna was very different from my previous works which mainly focused on the general philosophy of science. So I needed the kind of freedom that an explorer of a new territory requires: to observe the new terrain and change the pace and direction accordingly. And one of the many excellent characteristics of the Institute Vienna Circle fellowships is the freedom that it provides for IVC fellows.
In my three-month stay in Vienna as an IVC fellow, I was able to achieve several goals. First, I put my project “Charles Sanders Peirce and Logical Empiricism” on track. I collected and studied the relevant works of Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, Philipp Frank, and Justus Buchler. I also had fruitful conversations with Friedrich Stadler and Thomas Ubel about the early history of logical empiricism in the United States. Second, I secured another fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, to continue my work on this project in 2024. Thirdly, besides my IVC Colloquium Talk, I presented my works in the following conferences and workshops: (i) “Naturalism in Philosophy” at Sofia University, Bulgaria, (ii) “Physics meets Philosophy in Vienna Workshop” at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), University of Vienna, and (iii) Fifth International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life, Tohoku University, Japan. And finally, I received a tenure-track offer from the Department of Philosophy of the American University of Beirut which became my new home institution after the University of Vienna.

2023, August 30