Realism and Empiricism The Key Question

Abstract What is our chief inheritance from logical positivism? The answer is simple— logical empiricism. Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach were two of the most prominent early exponents of logical empiricism. Indeed, the volume de- voted to Carnap in The Library of Living Philosophers (Schilpp 1963) was originally planned as a volume on logical empiricism, which would have dealt with Carnap and Reichenbach. This plan had to be abandoned because of Reichenbach’s untimely death in 1953. Given the degree to which formal logic has flourished in the twentieth century, I think we can say that the logical part—at least the deductive logical part—of logical empiricism is alive and well. The empiricism part is another story, and that is what I intend to discuss in this chapter.