To the Icy Slopes in the Melting Pot: Forging Logical Empiricisms in the Context of American Pragmatisms

Abstract

Most accounts of “logical empiricism in America” take logical empiricism to be a monolithic, or at least a one-dimensional, philosophical group. This picture of logical empiricism has come under well-reasoned attack during the past two decades, but some of the relevant conclusions for the reception-history of the movement were not drawn, or were not drawn as thoroughly as they could have been. Thus, if we want to understand the reception of logical empiricism, we should not talk about the reception of logical empiricism as such; rather, we should provide a more stratified and differently balanced account. This article aims to draw the contours of one more stratified account by pointing out differences in the reception-history of logical empiricism with respect to pragmatism in particular. Namely, I will examine and defend an account according to which the more pragmatist-naturalist wing of logical empiricism was welcomed by the majority of American pragmatists while the more technical wing came immediately under pragmatist attack from various sides.