Criticisms and controversies
Logical positivism and logical empiricism were from their very beginnings subjected to searching criticisms. At first it was the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness that produced a storm of opposition. One group of critics asked whether the criterion was meaningful in the light of its own standard. Carnap replied that the criterion itself was not intended as a factual assertion but rather as a proposal for a better and clearer use of language. Nevertheless, the logical empiricists felt that the (tolerant-liberal) formulation of the meaning criterion—far from being an arbitrary injunction—came rather close to what enlightened common sense, and especially the scientific attitude, intended by the difference between sense and non-sense.
Other criticisms concerned the logical empiricist views regarding the nature of scientific explanation, in regard to which matters are not as simple as they were originally conceived to be. Closer attention to the history of scientific theories revealed important discontinuities, or revolutions, in the conceptual schemes of the sciences. The significant role of statistical (or probabilistic) explanations in most modern sciences, for example, received increasingly sophisticated analyses.
Nevertheless, the prevalence of scientific revolutions and anarchism or subjectivism in scientific method has been exaggerated in differing ways by several scholars. As has been conceded by all competent philosophers of science and even by the greatest scientist-philosophers of the 20th century—Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and others—there is no straight logical path, no standard recipe, by which to move from observational data to scientific theory. It may also be admitted that, though scientific creativity has psychologically much in common with artistic creation, the criteria of appraisal are certainly quite different. And, although, from the critical point of view, all and any scientific assertions are in principle subject to revision, it is nonetheless felt to be grotesque to deny the relative stability of the empirical laws that serve as the testing ground of alternative theories.
Herbert Feigl