Herbert Feigl

(1902-1989)

Herbert Feigl was an Austrian philosopher of science who studied physics and philosophy under Moritz Schlick. His 1927 thesis was on Chance and Law. Feigl always maintained that it would be impossible to tell whether the chance was epistemic (human ignorance) or ontological and real, whether the universe was basically random or determined, because there always might be a lower-level explanation. In this he followed Schlick and most importantly perhaps Albert Einstein.

He joined Schlick's Vienna Circle and suggested a better term than "logical positivism" would be "logical empiricism," with its emphasis on scientific evidence. Feigl visited Harvard in 1930, where he met Willard van Orman Quine, author of the famous essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."

Feigl was at the University of Minnesota for many years, where he founded the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science with Wilfrid Sellars and Paul Meehl.

Feigl and Meehl wrote a paper in 1974 entitled "The Determinism-Freedom and Mind-Body Problems,"for Paul Schilpp's festschrift volume on Karl Popper. Popper had for many years been a Dualist and Interactionist.

Following Popper's usage, they called these problems Compton's problem and Descartes' problem.

They argued that determinism could not be rejected simply because of the practical difficulty carrying out predictions of the future that in principle could be done by a Laplace super-intelligence. They called the accomplishments of such a prediction the "World Formula."

They frame a pseudo-logical argument that the World Formula requires 1) determinism and predictability, specifically 2) measurability and 3) calculability. But because we cannot accomplish a World Formula, we do not invalidate determinism.

Now, as is agreed on all hands, the idea of the World Formula is to be understood as a logical conjunction of three propositions: (1) the doctrine of the deterministic form of all basic natural laws, (2) the precise, complete (and simultaneous) ascertainability of all initial and boundary conditions, (3) the mathematical feasibility of the hopelessly complex computations necessary for precise and complete predictions (or retrodictions). Now, as no one knows better than Popper (though this is really a matter of the most elementary propositional logic), if a conjunction of several independent propositions entails a false or absurd conclusion, not every one of the conjuncts is (necessarily) false... There are excellent reasons for regarding propositions (2) and (3) as false at any rate, thus leaving the hypothesis of determinism at least open for further consideration.
("The Determinism-Freedom and Mind-Body Problems.", reprinted in Paul E. Meehl, Selected Philosophical and Methodological Papers, 1991, p. 98-99)

Feigl and Sellars founded the journal Philosophical Studies, a major publication for the new field of analytic philosophy. They compiled two major reference books of readings in philosophical analysis. Sellars was Robert Kane's thesis adviser in the 1960's and assigned him to work on the problem of free will. Kane worked on the problem for over 40 years, but ultimately found the solution.

Like most analytic philosophers, Feigl thought philosophical problems were reducible to problems of language.

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