Not so Ivory After All

I've been reading this book slowly since I went to a session about it at the PSA (Philosophy of Science Association) meeting in November. I went to the session, in part because someone I knew was speaking there, and in part because I actually do have a professional interest in the subject matter (shameless plug goes here), even though it's not what I primarily work on. But after the session, I really really wanted to read the book.

But first some background about what it's actually about. Despite the title, it has almost nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with how the Cold War climate in the US managed to eliminate the social and political side of academic philosophy of science. The cover picture is from the Second International Conference for the Unity of Science, in Copenhagen, 1936. (I know this, because the back cover says so. Don't be too impressed.) Pictured are several prominent philosophers of science, like the wonderful Otto Neurath, who is largely the subject of my co-authored paper, and scientists, like Niels Bohr (front right), as in the Bohr model of the atom you learn in highschool physics class.

The Unity of Science movement was associated with a group of philosophers of science, most of whom had training in at least one scientific discipline such as physics, mathematics, logic, or in Neurath's case, economics, called the Vienna Circle, who have been much misrepresented. Several members of the Vienna Circle were instrumental to a project known as the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, one of whose principal goals was to foster communication and cooperation among scientists of different nations and across different scientific disciplines. The project was conceived with an awareness of the social value of science,
and of the role that science and technology could play in shaping society. The political background informing these projects was largely left-wing; but this caused many of them a great deal of trouble when they immigrated to North America during the war.

And that's the story Reisch tells in the book: how the anti-communist fervor and McCarthyism of the Cold War climate managed to eliminate this social and political aspect from philosophy of science. Several members of the Vienna Circle were investigated by J. Edgar Hoover under suspicion of being communist collaborators, due to their European political backgrounds, and left-wing sympathies. The internationalism built in to the encyclopedia project was viewed as dangerously "red". Left-wing supporters of the unity of science movement were professionally attacked and then marginalised. Unity of science was seen as a totalitarian communist movement - not something to which an academic would want to be linked (if he wanted to keep his job, that is).

But what makes this even more interesting is how timely the book is now, given the current (anti)intellectual climate of the US, as a cautionary tale about how we don't want things ending up again. I really don't think academia is such an ivory tower as it's made out to be in the first place, but it's fascinating to see the political pressure at work trying to force it to be that kind of isolated institution.

This is an excellent book, and a good reminder to those of us in academia to take a lesson from the unity of science movement, that academia does not have to be that isolated institution. And that given that we're lucky enough to have a lot of academic freedoms which these philosophers of science did not have in the 40's and 50's, to be socially responsible about what we do with it.