The other day, I was reading an piece titled What we can learn about Philosophy's diversity problems by comparing ourselves to Music Theory. In it, the author throws out a claim that I find very intriguing, but without providing any substantial discussion or sources for further reading. They write:
Mainstream analytic philosophy and music theory/composition share a route out of McCarthyism and through the postwar academic industrial complex. Both fields presented themselves as specialist practices modeled on the sciences. These specialist practices had nothing to say to or about politics or public affairs.
This was a very interesting idea to me: that philosophy and music theory (my field!) adopted the discursive trappings of the hard sciences in order to present themselves as being non-political, perhaps as a response to the threat of McCarthyism.
Is there any truth to that? Does McCarthyism provide a compelling lens through which one might productively view the development of certain modern academic discourses? How threatened did the academy feel? Did different institutions / disciplines evidence certain interesting trends in responding to McCarthyism?
If you're looking to the relationship between philosophy and science, it goes much, much further back than McCarthyism. If you're looking to see when philosophy tried to become "scientific", it still goes back before McCarthyism.
Up until the mid-19th century, the words "philosophy" and "science" were effectively synonymous. Case in point: Newton's work on physics, for example, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the naturalist-theologian William Whewell coined the word "scientist", with its modern meaning in 1834.
That is not to say that there was no distinction between what we call philosophy and science. For ancient philosophers, there was a distinction between theoretical philosophy (such as metaphysics and mathematics) and practical/natural philosophy (such as physics and biology). Some philosophers gave significant precedence to the one over the other (e.g. Plato), while others practised both (e.g. Aristotle--note that while Aristotle did maintain that theoretical knowledge was superior to practical knowledge, this did not prevent him from making significant leaps in physics and biology).
Yet natural philosophy did not start to gain prestige until the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus, Newton, etc). Francis Bacon wrote his Novum Organum to laud the use of inductive reasoning so as to derive empirical knowledge.
When the fruits of science (formerly natural philosophy) became prevalent and celebrated, philosophers from the Enlightenment onwards began to call their work "scientific" so as to borrow its reputation. Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, John-Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx (to name a few), all described their political philosophy as "scientific", in one way or another. This further cemented the appeal of science to those who followed such philosophers.
This appeal culminated in the Logical Positivists, philosophers who held that any proposition that could not be empirically verified was ultimately meaningless. Many of the Logical Positivists of Jewish heritage fled Germany in the 1930s and settled in England and the United States, bringing their ideas with them.
While McCarthyism may have furthered this trend of making philosophy appear as science, it was already happening, and would have happened without McCarthyism.
Plato, Charmides
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
Oxford English Dictionary Online
J.H. Bridges, A General View of Positivism
Emile Durkheim, Socialism and Saint-Simon
Cohen, H. Floris. The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History
Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions