Reichenbach’s Concept of Logical Analysis of Science and his Lost Battle against Kant

Logical empiricists claimed that following modern mathematical logic and math-ematical physics, they resolutely abandoned the Kantian synthetic a priori. Recently, this claim was challenged by Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson who have argued that Kant’s scientific legacy in the twentieth century philosophy was much more complex and subtle. Even before them, Quine insisted that the logical empiricists still followed Kant, above all, in preserving the sharp distinction between the underlying a priori framework of logic, on the one hand, and the empirical laws formulated within this framework, on the other hand. In this paper we are going to demonstrate, with the example of Hans Reichenbach, that this was only the tip of the iceberg of latent Kant-ianism in the works of the logical empiricists. Indeed, despite his anti-Kantian rhetoric, Reichenbach failed to purify his philosophy from the ghost of Kant at least in three respects: (i) He never became what he claimed to be: a “radical empiricist”. In fact, he often relied on a priori principles, or “definitions”. (ii) Reichenbach continued to think in Kantian terms. In particular, he took over from Kant the strong distinction between analytic and synthetic knowledge, and between propositions of ethics and propositions of logic. (iii) A third point that Reichenbach took over from Kant was the practice of criticism: he transformed it in critical investigation of our knowledge, in particular, of science. (cf. Reichenbach 1938: 7) In this paper we shall concentrate on (i) and shall not discuss (ii) and (iii). In other words, we shall criticize Reichenbach’s claim that he was a radical empiricist. Furthermore, we shall see that Reichenbach employed two conceptions of empiricism, both embedded in Kant’s theoretical heritage.