As some loyal readers may recall, I have promoted Moritz Schlick (one of the great martyrs to philosophy) as the rightful father of analytic philosophy (against the misguided, partisan claims by those that point to Frege, who is often held up by those that wish to emphasize either the so-called linguistic turn or the significance of the developments in symbolic logic, or Sidgwick, who is often held up by those that wish to emphasize a number of intellectual virtues that are supposedly emblematic of analytic philosophy or who wish to promote the significance of particular set of questions in moral philosophy).
Now my advocacy of Schlick turns on four aspects of his thought. First, his recognition of coining concepts as a distinct philosophic activity within and outside the sciences. Second, when these concepts are quantitative they are part of a possible of science; when the concepts are qualitative they are part of a possible philosophy. (This is a view that he defended in 1910 and, perhaps, not later.) Third, Schlick's willingness throughout his life to embrace a vantage point for philosophy that while being scientifically very informed could reflect on science from without, without accepting its claims merely on authority. The mature Schlick did so as an “unrelenting” or “true” “empiricist.” In particular, he explicitly contrasted his “true” empiricism with the presumably false empiricists.(See See Moritz Schlick (1935) “Facts and Propositions” Analysis, 2(5): 65-70.) As I have argued on this blog, philosophic prophets tend to deploy a dialectic between true and false philosophies.
Fourth, Schlick did not defend the distinction between within and without science in terms of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Rather, he seems to rely on a distinction between the authority of first-person experience and the authority of text-book experience. Anyway, let me quote a passage that provides some evidence for this latter claim as well as his characterization of the false philosophers [For whom] "Science is a system of propositions; and-without being aware of it-these thinkers substitute science for reality; for them facts are not acknowledged before they are formulated in propositions and taken down in their notebooks. But Science is not the World. The universe of discourse is not the whole universe. It is a typical rationalistic attitude which shows itself here under the guise guise of the most subtle distinctions. It is as old as metaphysics itself, as we may learn from a saying of old Parmenides…Our good friends and opponents think of the system of truths as the mathematician thinks of theoretical physics: for him it is quite true that his only task is to make all scientific statements coherent among each other ; and it is also true that if there are several coherent systems his choice of the " true " one is solely determined by " the scientists of his culture circle " (p.57); he has no other canon because they furnish the " protocol statements" which he uses as his material without submitting them to an experimental test. It is true, therefore, that the system of protocol statements which he calls " true " is " the system which is actually adopted by mankind." But the matter is different for the experimenting observer and for unrelenting empiricists like myself. It is one thing to ask how the system of science has been built up and why it is generally believed to be true, and another thing to ask why I myself (the individual observer) accept it as true...If anyone should tell me that I believe in the truth of science ultimately because it has been adopted " by the scientists of my culture circle," I should-smile at him. I do have trust in those good fellows, but that is only because I always found them to be trustworthy wherever I was able to test their enunciations....I should not call the system of science true if I found its consequences incompatible with my own observations of nature, and the fact that it is adopted by the whole of mankind and taught in all the universities would make no impression on me.” (69-70; Hempel is the target of Schlick's criticism here.)
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