So the Logical Positivists, coming out of Viennese cultural politics, had strong incentives to
(1) adopt the view that rationality plays by only a single set of rules;
(2) make that view, in the specific form of the Principle of Verification, central to their philosophy; and
(3) to fight for it tooth and nail.
This whole stance, in the Viennese context, was entirely understandable. And when the Empiricists moved to America and became known as the Logical Positivists, it fit right in with a debate that was going on in the new country.
Remember what Morris Judd found out when, in 2002, he finally got to see his file? The exact words of the Boulder Daily Camera’s story were:
It confirmed what many people had suspected was the real reason for Judd's dismissal: His name had been added to a list of suspected subversives because he wouldn't give a straight answer to former CU President Robert Stearns' questions, "Are you a member of the Communist Party," and "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
Morris Judd later said the answer to these questions was No. But he did not believe it was proper for the University to ask them. Unfortunately, everybody was asking them, especially in the case of a Philosophy Department where background checks had been ordered on every single member.
Morris Judd may well have been asked such questions by his Department chair, for example, or the promotion and tenure committee at Colorado. But when he was asked it by the President of the University, the context was very different, and his refusal to answer propelled him into a situation where he could not survive.
That context is complex but important, and it will take a moment to explain.
In the McCarthy Era, Communists were never fired simply for being Communists—this is a free country, after all. Americans are dedicated to open inquiry and critical thinking, etc., etc. Americans aren’t afraid of ideas!
So the rationale for firing Communists, supplied by philosopher Sidney Hook, was that the Communist Party had nothing to do with ideas—it was, in fact, an assault on them.
Marxism and other heresies were acceptable for critical discussion within academia. But being a member of the Communist Party meant that you were following, not truth, but the Moscow line. You had sold your soul to Moscow; were therefore not a respectable scholar; and were therefore undeserving of academic employment.
This argument, I should note, did not sound as bad then as it sounds today; it gained a lot of currency from the Hitler/Stalin Pact. Anybody who stayed in the Communist Party after that was about as politically astute as Martin Heidegger.
So: Professor X is a Communist, but we can’t fire him for being a Communist, so we’ll fire him for not being a “respectable scholar.” The next question was, who decides who is or is not a respectable scholar?
A lot of American academics felt that this should be up to individual departments, who alone had the expertise in their fields to decide such things.
In their view, the rules of rationality are at the disciplinary level, and there are many (or at least several) different sets of them. Somebody in one discipline could not be presumed able to judge the scholarship of someone in another, and non-scholars could not be presumed able to judge anyone.
This view amounts to a tightening-up of Kant's battle cry of academic (i.e. philosophical) freedom: Über Gelehrte können nur Gelehrte urteilen!
But it was intolerable to a man named Raymond B. Allen.
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