What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Any remaining hope of reviving a unified movement around positivism was dashed by the postwar political environment in the United States. Anticommunist hysteria in the United States rose sharply after World War II, and the nascent Cold War had chilling effects on all arenas of intellectual discourse, including philosophy. To some, the Unity of Science movement, with its left-wing politics, its antireligious philosophy, and its internationalist aspirations, sounded suspiciously like a Communist Party front. During the “red scare” that effectively exiled David Bohm, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI compiled dossiers on Carnap, Frank, and other leading positivist lights. Under enormous pressure to refrain from all political activity, the positivists were forced to focus solely on issues in logic and the philosophy of science—pushed to what their now-distant manifesto had called “the icy slopes of logic

Politics and environment of logical empiricism