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Most Significant Philosophers of Science of the 20th-Century: the Results

Brian Leiter

So in the second iteration of our earlier poll, more than 340 votes were cast.   Only two of the new inclusions (Duhem and Ramsey) cracked the top ten.  The results:

1. Rudolf Carnap  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Thomas Kuhn  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 186–123
3. Karl Popper  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 207–101, loses to Thomas Kuhn by 167–118
4. Carl Hempel  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 236–62, loses to Karl Popper by 154–131
5. W.V.O. Quine  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 231–78, loses to Carl Hempel by 171–117
6. Hans Reichenbach  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 251–38, loses to W.V.O. Quine by 149–126
7. Pierre Duhem  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 238–52, loses to Hans Reichenbach by 147–114
8. Paul Feyerabend  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 246–52, loses to Pierre Duhem by 157–106
9. Imre Lakatos  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 254–46, loses to Paul Feyerabend by 137–121

10. Frank Ramsey  loses to Rudolf Carnap by 270–20, loses to Imre Lakatos by 137–126

Ramsey really tied Goodman, who lost to Ramsey by just one vote (119-118).  David Lewis was further behind (lost to Goodman 132-113), and then Ernest Nagel (lost to Lewis 138-116).

Thoughts from readers?  Please, before commenting, make sure you actually understand the criteria for inclusion and see who was included.  I've just listed the 'top ten' plus the runners-up.  Signed comments will be quite strongly preferred.

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14 responses to “Most Significant Philosophers of Science of the 20th-Century: the Results”

  1. Chris Bateman

    I have always had the impression that Quine was more popular than Carnap, so it's heartening to see him on top.

    Also, while Kuhn's contribution to 20th century philosophy of science is inestimable, it's easy to forget sometimes that professionally he was a physicist and historian – it's kind of amusing to see him outrank professional philosophers in a popularity contest. 🙂

    Finally, I'm delighted the much maligned Feyerabend (and his friend Lakatos) make the list – I do so wish Lakatos had been able to publish his part of the argument on method properly.

    BL COMMENT: I sincerely hope no one was voting on this as a matter of "popularity," but as a reflection of their judgment of significance of the contributions of these philosophers.

    Reply
  2. Jonathan Tsou

    The top four seem about right to me. The rest down the list seem pretty arguable (although Reichenbach should certainly be up there). Of course this all depends on how one conceives of influence.

    While Duhem (and Ramsey) are 20th Century philosophers of science, I question the inclusion of philosophers who wrote prior to 1930. I take it that analytic philosophy of science started sometime in the 1930s (Erkenntnis was established in 1930, Philosophy of Science was established in 1934, and Synthese was established in 1936). So if you are going to include earlier thinkers who influenced that tradition, then people like Henri Poincare and Bertrand Russell (or even Wittgenstein given the influence of the Tractatus on the Vienna Circle) should also be included.

    BL COMMENT: The poll was premised on the thought that there is a difference between having an "influence" on philosophers of science and actually making "significant" contributions to philosophy of science. The Poincare issue is different: dates.

    Reply
  3. Christopher Hitchcock

    I voted for Reichenbach and Hempel as 1 and 2, respectively. If you look at the range of problems that philosophers of science today work on, and trace those problems back, you will find them originating or at least tracing through those two more than any others. Think about it: confirmation, realism, causation, explanation, theoretical terms, foundations of probability, philosophy of space and time, foundations of QM,…

    If the criteria were broader intellectual influence, then Kuhn and Popper come in 1 and 2. But fewer philosophers of science today work in the problem areas they initiated, such as the nature of scientific progress, the demarcation problem, than in the areas mentioned above.

    Reply
  4. Dave Patt

    The influence of both Neurath (Neurath in particular has never been particularly well served in English) and Nagel on perhaps the most significant trend in 20th century philosophy of science – naturalism – doesn't seem to be well reflected here. I am glad however about Carnap – it shows the reassessment of the Vienna Circle/Unity of Science movement is having some impact.

    Reply
  5. Benj Hellie

    It is perhaps noteworthy that Carnap was the beneficiary of lobbying on Facebook (this is discussed at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=36046384246; members of this group were also sent messages).

    Reply
  6. David Wallace

    It's interesting to ask where Einstein should go. He's comfortably the most philosophical of the 20th century's great physicists, and the philosophical impact of his work on our understanding of space and time is pretty dramatic. But then, possibly that doesn't count as philosophy of *science* (I can't think of a non-institutional reason not to label him a philosopher of physics, in which case he wins "most significant philosopher of physics" by a fairly fat margin. But philosophy of physics isn't exactly a sub-branch of philosophy of science.)

    Reply
  7. gradstudent

    It is saddening to see Kuhn ranked as second, or even in the top ten for that matter. The loose language of the "Structure" alone should be sufficient for it to be rejected as a philosophical text. As far as substance is concerned, of course, anything in that book that is not trivial or already known is patently false.

    Reply
  8. Justin Vlasits

    I think that Kuhn's influence now is much greater than one might think–even among those who disagree with his views, which is certainly the majority as I understand it. Kuhn's great contribution was methodological and because of him, I think philosophers of science today frame many debates through the history and actual practice of science. You see appeals to scientific practice in nearly every major disagreement in general philosophy of science and especially philosophy of the special sciences. Even granting all of the problems of Structure (and there are many), I think that this merits Kuhn being one of the top few philosphers of science of the 20th century.

    Reply
  9. gradstudent

    I would take issue with the claim that it was Kuhn who started the tradition in the philosophy of science of appeal to the history of and practice in science. I think Norwood Russell Hanson, Paul Feyeraband and many others had emphasised this well before Kuhn. It is thus unfortunate that positive contributions not original to Kuhn are being attributed to him.

    Reply
  10. Justin Vlasits

    While I grant you that Hanson was doing this in the 50s, I found no evidence from a Google Scholar search that Feyerabend published anything before Kuhn that used such a methodology. Regardless, I did not say that Kuhn "started the tradition" but rather that he was a cause of this methodology's current popularity, which is surely the case. I don't want to argue over details–suffice it to say that Structure made popular and accessible a way of doing philosophy of science very different from Carnap, Hempel, etc. and this is not a bad thing.

    Reply
  11. Allen Hazen

    I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I DID vote in this one. Even as I voted, I had the feeling that my choices were more random, less principled, than in your earlier polls. The problem, as I perceived it, was that "philosophy of science" has vague borderlines, so the question of whether to count someone as a great "philosopher of science" or merely a great philosopher who wrote, inter aliis, about science has no principled answer.

    This certainly made me feel some of my rankings were effectively coin-tosses. I would say that, e.g., David Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars are clearly more important philosophers than Thomas Kuhn or Hans Reichenbach, but since much of their philosophical work was outside the philosophy of science, I'm not sure how they compare (or, now, how I compared them a few days ago) as philosophers of science.

    Sorry to be so negative.

    —

    (As a separate question, what philosophers of science have the greatest name recognition outside professional philosophy of science? I think Kuhn ("Structure" is one of the most highly cited works of the last half century in the humanities) and Popper (when an actual scientist refers to a philosopher in, say, the correspondence section of "Nature" it's almost always Sir Karl) win hands down! But ranking them as philosophers of science, with a philosopher's "expert" judgment, I'd certainly put them both below Carnap, as the voters did.)

    Reply
  12. gradstudent

    @ Vlasits

    Yes, I am claiming precisely that Hanson and Feyerabend were doing this in the 50s. Specifically, my reference was to Patterns of Discovery (1958) by Hanson, and Feyerabend's papers on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in the mid-fifties.

    Granted that Kuhn popularised this tradition, does that make him one of the most "significant" philosophers of science, or one of the most "popular"? I see quite a difference in meaning between the two words.

    Reply
  13. Chris

    Dear all,

    I am fascinated by the number of people who express the view that Kuhn has been 'discredited' or that he is no longer taken seriously or that he is irrelevant or that what he was doing was already old news. What exactly is the basis for these claims?

    While analytic philosophy certainly seems to have been reticent to embrace Kuhn, he is well connected to the Continental tradition via Vattimo and others. I can well believe he has prior precedents (although Feyerabend categorically did not precede Kuhn on any point), and I accept that (as a non-philosopher) Kuhn's contribution is not as rigorous as one might wish, but the denial of his influence in philosophy is something that I find very hard to comprehend.

    There is a growing recognition that the Quinean ontological programme is in trouble – Stephen Yablo offers excellent observations in this regard – and this being so I believe Kuhn's core argument must still be taken seriously. The mythology that science "evolves towards truth" which Kuhn critiques evokes ill-warranted assumptions. His contention that we should view it instead as evolving *from* a current state of knowledge fits well into the Continental tradition from Merleau-Ponty to Bourdieu.

    If Kuhn's approach has been "discredited" I am keen to know why the ever-anal Wikipedia lacks a "Criticism" section for him – if the collective trivia of the geeks of the internet sediments anywhere, it is in the wiki pages. 🙂 I am more open to the charge that he merely popularised thoughts already in train, but it would be nice to see this argument properly developed.

    Perhaps this is another of those situations where an exuberant "faith in science" requires that Kuhn be labelled a heretic. >:)

    Best wishes!

    Chris.

    Reply
  14. David Mathers

    Chris, do you think you can know something that isn't true. Because if science doesn't 'evolve towards truth' how can it have anything to do with knowledge? Or do you mean that Kuhn showed that there's just as MUCH truth (and knowledge) in any paradigm as any one that might replace it? What's the evidence for that exactly?

    BL COMMENT: I approved Chris's comment while on the road, and without looking at it carefully. Sorry about that. He also did not submit a valid e-mail, so given that and the content, I should not have approved it. Folks are welcome to continue discussing Kuhn, but please do not get derailed into a debate with "Chris."

    Reply

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