At one point, Reichenbach (1925/1978, p. 291) even declared that “[w]e must get it clearly in our heads that our knowledge of nature stands or falls with the probability inference”. As our knowledge of nature stands or falls on the recognition of possi-ble actions within society, for Reichenbach all goes back to probability with utmost importance. But does probability indeed play such an important role in the broader context, beyond the mere technical admission of the fact? Though Reichenbach’s stance on this issue may not be obvious, there are various hints in his writings.
In her recollections on Reichenbach, Cynthia Schuster (back then a young col-league of his at UCLA) recalled a time when she defended Reichenbach’s non-cog-nitivism in ethics by claiming that his philosophy is concerned only “with logic and epistemology, not with social reform.” To her amazement, Reichenbach quickly cor-rected her and stated his own point of view:
But no! That is not true. The whole movement of scientific philosophy is a crusade. It is not clear that only by ending the dogmatism of irresponsible claims to know moral truth, that only by clarity and integrity in epistemology, people can attain tolerance and get along with one another? Don’t be misled by the frequency with which others mention their concern for mankind and the infrequency with which I use such words. I dare say I care as much about the future condition of man as anyone you’ll ever meet, and what I’m doing aims as directly at social consequences as the programs of those who call them-selves ‘social reformers’. (Schuster, 1978, pp. 56–57)
This passage is very much in line with the late enlightenment, socio-ethical pro-ject of the Viennese logical positivists (Uebel, 2004). In the United States, Reichen-bach did not engage personally in socio-political debates as a scientific philoso-pher. Rather, he thought scientific philosophy could cleanse the public discourse of pseudo-scientific elements, of irresponsible subjective methods not submitted to intersubjective control, of misleading generalizations, and of misuses of actual sci-entific theories.
Before we move on, one important issue needs to be highlighted. In his 2017 book, The Philosophy Scare, John McCumber devotes many pages to Hans Reichen-bach, especially to The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). McCumber argues that the so-called rational choice theory (RCT) functioned as an economic and political guideline for American policy during the Cold War, as it purports to predict how individuals determine their economic and other preferences (such as voting). For McCumber, the scientific philosophy embedded in Reichenbach’s Rise is the philo-sophical counterpart of RCT, extending RCT’s restricted domain of application to the human mind and reason in general and thus giving it an ideological underpin-ning. In Rise, Reichenbach presents a unified scientific method and reason (a monis-tic view) that excludes “emotions, history, culture, impositions, and dictatorship”
and “thus accords with RCT” on many levels, providing “the kind of philosophy America needed to fight the intellectual Cold War” (McCumber, 2017, p. 102).
It has to be admitted that Rise indeed shows, at first glance, a more monistic view of scientific reason and the human mind than one would expect from a socially engaged philosophy of science. In that sense, Rise could be seen as sharing the let-ter, perhaps, at certain points, even the spirit, of RCT. Nonetheless, certain reserva-tions apply, and McCumber’s account, as important as it may be for the challenges to historians and philosophers of analytic philosophy that it contains, thus has to be supplemented. It is often claimed that non-cognitivism in ethics dethrones morality from its superior position in the human mind and reduces it to some non-truth-apt, emotionally-driven domain. But for many logical empiricists, Reichenbach included, non-cognitivism presented a liberating approach to human life and reasoning; one that is freed from archaic, unchallengeable, socio-politically inherited dogmas. For Reichenbach, the emotional, “tenacious, malleable, indefatigable will” (Reichen-bach, 1928/1978, p. 244) within the subject is always present behind numbers, func-tions, and preferences (cf. Richardson, 2005; Damböck, 2021).
Furthermore, McCumber, besides one small note (2017, p. 96), never considers Reichenbach’s overall philosophical and cultural pedigree in detail [for such a dis-cussion of the German cultural background, see the essays in Damböck, Sandner, and Werner (2021)]. Consequently, our paper should be supplemented by a compre-hensive historical study of how Reichenbach’s thought changed over time and across places. Finally, McCumber is right that Rise is mainly an epistemological work that offers psychological explanations where the issue of the legitimacy of obscure and old philosophies arises. Reichenbach indeed says that an idealist is someone who
“resorts to daydreaming because he is unable to enjoy reality in all its moral and aes-thetic imperfections” and thus engages in a “philosophical brand of escapism”, espe-cially at times of “social catastrophes” (1951, p. 254). But as we will show below, quoting Donata Romizi, in certain times and circumstances, epistemological notions also acquire a socio-political dimension, which is why Reichenbach’s epistemologi-cal work could, at the very least, be read as evidence of a wider social concern (and this social concern is not necessarily only the domain of the market-oriented Cold War warrior, but also that of the socially inclined enlightener).
As mentioned previously, one way of considering the social dimension within scientific philosophy—or better, the place and role of the social dimension for scien-tific philosophy—may be found in Reichenbach’s popular work. In the introduction
to Atom and Cosmos, he justifies his agenda by calling attention to the conceived interests of human beings. He notes that “[t]he urge to knowledge is so deeply rooted in man that it can scarcely be omitted from a list of life’s important needs”
(Reichenbach, 1932b/1957, p. 18). Nonetheless, Reichenbach does not expect the sciences to deliver any practical knowledge in propositional form; rather, for him, the field of the practical is the realm of “the tenacious, malleable, indefatigable, and yet, eternally modifiable will” (Reichenbach, 1928/1978, p. 244). Or as he put it with a remarkable Kantian overtone, “science gives no answer to such questions as
‘What should I do?’” (Reichenbach, 1932b/1957, p. 18).
How then could science, the collection of propositional knowledge, be relevant for citizens besides some obvious technological innovations and implementations?
“And yet there is,” continues Reichenbach, “a certain psychological connection between science and fundamental human attitudes, between understanding life and assigning values to it. Knowledge as to reality and its laws places us in such a situa-tion that quessitua-tions about the meaning and value of human doing and being take on a new aspect” (ibid, p. 19). Having an accurate picture of how science works and what its results are would yield certain clues as to how an ethical point of view should be developed—but this is a question for psychology and not for logic.
The psychological question should, of course, be understood quite broadly.
Reichenbach’s somewhat dated and simplistic, though enlightening, example is the Copernican turn. The actual result and work of Copernicus was of a scientific and technical nature; it concerned the astronomical question whether the Sun moves around the Earth or the other way around. But the whole question also encompassed a moral and a social dimension, as it conveyed the idea of “dethroning the Earth,”
demoting it from its alleged unique status and role in the universe. This seemingly technical question thus acquired a moral coloring; whether this was right or wrong is immaterial—as humans inevitably strive for knowledge, it is unavoidable that our approaches also take on a moral dimension. As Reichenbach (ibid.) formulates it,
“[w]henever science succeeds in combining multitudinous reality in one grand per-spective, in which the many single bits of knowledge are united in a picture of the world as a whole, science exerts enormous influence over man’s feeling toward life, his fundamental emotional attitude.”
That “grand perspective” is of utmost importance; laypeople are not (always) interested in the special technical results and developments of science, but in the
“totality of views revealed by science […], science rounded out to a panorama.” But the sciences in general are not interested in this panorama per se; this constitutes an additional task that needs to be done by someone else. Depending on how the picture is drawn, moral life (or at least moral guidance) can be influenced in cer-tain directions. Therefore, it is not at all irrelevant how science is disseminated in a popular form, which lends a definite social value and relevance to Reichenbach’s undertakings.23
23 This ideal of political and social engagement simply by means of pursuing philosophy in a specific context and by specific means is elaborated by Donata Romizi (2012).
Being a naturalist is not a necessary prerequisite for this task; Eddington and Jeans, the famous popularizers of the early twentieth century, were idealists, for example. But being a naturalist means accepting the continuation and harmoniza-tion of science, common sense, and philosophy and thus the constant revision of our worldview. As science—which for Reichenbach simply means physics—develops, its cultural projections have to be revealed and discussed as well. The liberation of life from old dogmas and ballasts is thus strongly and inherently connected to the philosophy of science.
In fact, in Atom and Cosmos, Reichenbach explicitly claims that modern science is in a special position “to do without that ballast of traditional conceptions with which historical development has encumbered thought” (1932b/1957, p. 286). This is so because modern science aims only to predict future experiences on the basis of previous ones instead of summarizing and forcing nature into pre-established cat-egories. Viewing science in such a purified and ascetic way, so to speak, may bring with it the charge of ‘dehumanizing nature,’ given that such an approach allegedly
“takes the soul out of physical nature and thus makes it lifeless and uninteresting”
(ibid.). In this context, it is useful to recall the early warning in Sect. 2 of Clark (2016, p. 1) who claims that “defined too narrowly, [naturalism] leaves out wide swaths of human thought and experience”.
This is indeed a widely shared fear of many critics and defenders of naturalism, which makes it necessary to account for the losses emerging from this process of
“naturalization.” One option is to simply try to annex more and more of the world by means of the sciences regardless of the intuitive costs (this approach could be attrib-uted, most notoriously, to the Churchlands). Another option would be to fall back on the surface of the matter, claiming that science (and thus philosophy) does not have to deal with any “depths” (Carnap et al. 1929/1973, p. 326). Whatever can be said could be delivered scientifically. Reichenbach thought that the charge of dehumani-zation came from the worldview of poetry and thus amounted to an inadmissible mixing of the spheres. As he put it, “Such a rejection of the emotional attitude in our acquisition of knowledge of nature does not mean that we would deny the value of the artist’s world; it means simply that we decline to bring the artist’s concepts into a sphere to which they do not belong” (Reichenbach, 1932b/1957, p. 287).
Why is this important? Because Reichenbach (ibid.) thought that metaphysics is just another form of enlivening nature with supernatural entities such as gods and demons. Substance, time and space, force and law, “all of them [are] of unmistak-ably anthropomorphic origin” (ibid.)24:
Only the [empirical] experiences, however, and their integration in a prophetic mathematical theory, form the content of modern natural research. Perhaps there has been no greater revolution in the history of mankind than this gradual transition, from the nature, full of gods, of primitive peoples, through the
met-24 Naturalism also tries to place us in the world, in the complex web of this-worldly affairs. Since many naturalists would refer to their work as demystifying the universe or cleansing the world from its anthro-pomorphic stains, we could perhaps make a distinction here and say that naturalism aims to achieve all these domestications by introducing humanizing strains into the world.
aphysical nature of the philosophers, to the dispassionate nature of the physics of today, in which there are only facts and conceptual relations between them.
(Reichenbach, 1932b/1957, pp. 287–288)
During the twentieth century, science and philosophy went through many, often quite radical and overwhelming changes, some of which gave rise to new fields and methods. But as science radicalized its own picture of the empirical world, philoso-phy did not keep pace. Translating the latest results regarding small- and large-scale phenomena into the discourse of philosophers and regular citizens “was perhaps the hardest step of all”—it was the “last step in the liberation of nature from the gods”
(Reichenbach, 1932b/1957, p. 288, emphasis added).
The liberation of nature and the inhabitants of the natural world was not just a cognitive or epistemological issue. As Donata Romizi (2012, p. 221) has noted in the context of the Vienna Circle, “some epistemological values can acquire a politi-cal meaning in certain historipoliti-cal contexts”. Reichenbach’s own liberation from the old philosophy and the absolutistic and self-justifying view of common sense in the domains of science and philosophy also emerged in a context in which scientific phi-losophy gained an immediate social function.
Reichenbach considered the transition from “absolute truth” to probability to be his most important contribution to scientific philosophy: the liberation from truth—
one of the most hotly pursued and yet ultimately elusive goals of science and philos-ophy—thus also represented a big step toward a more accountable and democratic stance in living and acting in a new world that is at least as shaped by science as the other way around. Recently, the epistemological reasoning and various cognitive debates about Reichenbach’s foundations and technical reconstructions have gained a lot of attention. In this paper, our only aim was to call attention to the wider con-text of Reichenbach, in order to show him as a compelling but underrated naturalist in the history of analytic philosophy. And, last but not least, to demonstrate, in the midst of the various political turns in analytic philosophy, that even logical empiri-cists such as Reichenbach—who was often considered a special realist, a developer of quantum logic, or a philosopher of physics with actual physical knowledge—can offer new perspectives and paths to liberation for socially engaged philosophers of science.
Acknowledgements Both authors were supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research Group and by the “Empiricism and atomism in the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy” NKFI project (124970). László Kocsis was additionally supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/00216/20) and the ÚNKP-20-5 New National Excellence Pro-gram of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Develop-ment and Innovation Fund, while Adam Tamas Tuboly was supported by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship. We are truly grateful to Jan Faye, Christian Damböck, Charles T. Wolfe, Matthias Neuber and our referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Funding Open access funding provided by University of Pécs.
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