N.R. Hanson’s Fusion of Ordinary Language Philosophy, Logical Positivism, and Pragmatism

Abstract

Norwood Russell Hanson is primarily remembered as a critic of logical empiricism, despite never having mounted explicit philosophical critiques of logical positivism or falsificationism. Hanson viewed his own thought as a via media between different forms of analysis and distinct theoretical persuasions. Rather than putting forward a distinctive model or theory of how science does, or ought to, function, Hanson performed philosophical analyses of key concepts in science. Hanson’s eclectic philosophical toolbox drew most heavily from ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and pragmatism. He championed concepts as indispensable, and irreducibly philosophical, elements of all science, pushing conceptual analysis into domains that his predecessors had avoided. For instance, his arguments that observation is theory-laden and that there is a logic of discovery resulted from the application of philosophical and empirical analysis to subjects previously defined as off-limits.