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Form and Content In Empirical Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Herbert L. Searles
Herbert L. Searles*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

Philosophers investigating the nature of knowledge from Bacon and Descartes to logical empiricism, have sought to understand its character by means of the distinction between the content of knowledge, and the abstract logical and mathematical principles which regulate its structure or form. The nature of the distinction, the relative roles of content and form, and the relationships between the two, however, have been given widely divergent interpretations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 1951 , pp. 223 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 1951, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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Footnotes

∗

This paper was read at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association at Stanford University, December 1948.

References

1 Carnap, R. “Testability and Meaning” Philosophy of Science, Vol. IV, No. 1, p. 12.

2 Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic, p. 214.

3 Carnap, R. Op. cit. p. 33.

4 Carnap, R., The Logical Syntax of Language, p. 1.

5 Ayer, A. J., The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, p. 86.

6 Ibid. p. 112.

7 Carnap, R., The Logical Syntax of Language, p. 332.

8 Ibid. p. 332.

9 In his Introduction to Semantics, published in 1942, page 250, referring to The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap says: “The chief thesis of Part V, if split up into two components, was like this: a. ‘(Theoretical) philosophy is the logic of science.’ b. ‘Logic of science is the syntax of the language of science.’ (a) remains valid. … Thesis (b), however, needs modification by adding semantics to syntax. Thus the whole thesis is changed to the following: the task of philosophy is semiotical analysis; the problems of philosophy concern—not the ultimate nature of being but—the semiotical structure of the language of science, including the theoretical part of everyday language. We may distinguish between those problems which deal with the activities of gaining and communicating knowledge and the problems of logical analysis. Those of the first kind belong to pragmatics, those of the second kind to semantics or syntax—to semantics, if designata (”meaning“) are taken into consideration; to syntax, if the analysis is purely formal.”

10 Lewis, C. I., Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. p. 37.

11 Ibid. p. 133.

12 Ibid. p. 138.

13 Margenau, Henry, “Methodology of Modern Physics,” Philosophy of Science, April 1935.

14 Ibid. p. 173.

15 Ibid. p. 175.

16 Northrop, F. S. C., The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 119.

17 Ibid. p. 144.