Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to (...) show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America, discussing its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science, and assessing its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future. (shrink)

Verificationism has had a bad press for many years. The view that the meaning of our words is bound up with the discernible difference it would make if what we say, think or write were true or false, nowadays is scorned as “positivist” though it was shared by eminent empiricists and pragmatists. This paper seeks to sort through some of the complexities of what is often portrayed as an unduly simplistic conception. I begin with an overview of its main logical (...) empiricist varieties before considering which aspects of it fall victim to which of the three major types of objection that have been raised against it. I will conclude that what is left standing is a modest proposal that seems worth further investigation. (shrink)

Chapter INTRODUCTION: OTTO NEURATH, THE VIENNA CIRCLE AND THE PROTOCOL SENTENCE DEBATE Everybody familiar with contemporary analytical philosophy is likely ...

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the ...

The tendency to attribute foundationalist ambitions to the Vienna Circle has long obscured our view of its attempted revolution in philosophy. The present paper makes the case for a consistently epistemologically anti-foundationalist interpretation of all three of the Circle's main protagonists: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. Corresponding to the intellectual fault lines within the Circle, two ways of going about the radical reorientation of the pursuit of philosophy will then be distinguished and the contemporary potential of Carnap's and Neurath's project explored.

The question of the political potential possessed by the philosophies of the Vienna Circle is complex for more than one reason. It is so partly due to the politically heterogeneous membership of the Circle, partly due to the difficult if not extreme political circumstances under which they had to operate, and partly due to the variable meanings of the parameter "political," some of which are and some of which are not compatible with, in turn, variable versions of the doctrine of (...) the value-neutrality of science. For instance, philosophies of science may steadfastly be standing guard against pseudo-scientific nonsense being paraded as worthy of credence in public discourse, this concern for intellectual hygene... (shrink)

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified (...) affirmative answer. (shrink)

Do the terms “logical positivism” and “logical empiricism” mark a philosophically real and significant distinction? There is, of course, no doubt that the first term designates the group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, headed by Moritz Schlick and including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann and others. What is debatable, however, is whether the name “logical positivism” correctly distinguishes their doctrines from related ones called “logical empiricism” that emerged from the Berlin Society (...) for Scientific Philosophy around Hans Reichenbach which included Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin and a young Carl Gustav Hempel.1 The .. (shrink)

the ready availability of wittgenstein's previously unpublished writings from his so-called middle period of 1929 to 1936 has greatly enriched our understanding of the development of his thought. For obvious reasons, however, it has had little effect on the interpretation of Wittgenstein's contemporaries. At the time, few, even amongst those who had by then taken note of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were apprised of the new avenues Wittgenstein's thought had begun to take. One such rare exception was Moritz Schlick, the nominal (...) head of the Vienna Circle and an eminent philosopher of science. Even before Wittgenstein's return to... (shrink)

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

Logical Empiricism is commonly regarded as uninterested in, if not hostile to sociological investigations of science. This paper reconstructs the views of Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank on the legitimacy and relevance of sociological investigations of theory choice. It is argued that while there obtains a surprising degree of convergence between their programmatic pronouncements and the Strong Programme, the two types of project nevertheless remain distinct. The key to this differences lies in the different assessment of a supposed dilemma facing (...) post-Mertonian sociologists of science. (shrink)

Considerable unclarity exists in the literature concerning the origin and authorship of Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle’s manifesto of 1929 and on the extent of and the reasons for the mixed reception it received in the Circle itself. This paper reconsiders these matters on the light of so far insufªciently consulted documents.

Two points are argued for. The first is that the Neurath-Haller thesis tends to be criticised for contentions far more extreme than those its advocates asserted. The second is that advocacy of the thesis has to be considered in its historical context. It is a consequence of the first point that numerous supposed refutations of the Neurath-Haller thesis are rendered void by refinements, some of which it has received long ago. It is a consequence of the second point that the (...) thesis has not yet outlived its significance, despite the further modifications it requires. (shrink)

This paper concerns the issue of whether the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle (Carnap, Neurath, Frank) can be understood as having provided the blueprint for a bipartite metatheory with a formal-logical part (the “logic of science”) supporting and being supported by a naturalistic-empirical part (the “behavioristics of science”). A claim to this effect was recently met by a counterclaim that there was indeed an attempt made to broaden Carnap’s formalist conception of philosophy by the pragmatist Morris, but that (...) this initiative failed and that Carnap showed no interest in it. To defend the original claim this paper provides an analysis of Carnap and Morris on the subject matter of pragmatics in order to show that and how Carnap adopted Morris’s proposals in so far as they agreed with bipartite metatheory conception. (shrink)

I examine the thesis that Otto Neurath anticipated the programme of naturalised epistemology already at the time of the Vienna Circle and consider the relation between Neurath's proposals and those of two contemporary theorists whose research programmes he would thus have broadly anticipated. The thesis is confirmed by reference to Neurath's own writings. The connection between Neurath's programme and the programmes of his two successors considered here, however, is found to be highly indirect in one case and nonexistent in the (...) other — despite their undeniable overlap. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Neurath's proposal for the form of protocol statements explicates the multiple embedding of a singular sentence as specifying different conditions for the acceptance of such a sentence as a bona fide scientific datum. Before theories are accepted or rejected in the light of such evidence, however, a further condition must be met which Neurath did not formalize. The different conditions are discussed and shown to constitute a naturalistic theory of scientific data and a pragmatic theory of theory acceptance.

The Vienna Circle was, as the research of recent decades made abundantly clear, far from a homogeneous group of philosophers (nor an always harmonious one). This can be shown with regard to the way different general philosophical and cultural influences affected the views of different members, but also with regard to the way in which the doctrines of specific philosophers closely associated with the origin of logical empiricism were received. Wittgenstein is a case in point. This paper sets out, with (...) the help of a few indicative examples, how the critical reception of the Tractatus by Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath—former members of an informal pre-World War 1 discussion group, the so-called first Vienna Circle—and by Rudolf Carnap reflected their pre-existent theoretical interests. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contributed to their developing philosophy but was far from its foundation, contrary to what has often been presumed about the relation of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

The development of Carnap’s views on knowledge of other minds from 1928 to about 1935 is tracked here in order to clear up a widespread misunderstanding. Early on and well into the 30s their failure is undeniable but it has been badly misdiagnosed. I argue that Carnap was not only not a logical behaviorist but also aimed for a largely non-reductive approach to mental state ascriptions in principle already in Scheinprobleme. The reason for the failure of his anti-reductionist ambition and (...) what it took to overcome it are then investigated in some detail. In the process, it will be shown, Carnap anticipated, in a limited fashion, certain moves familiar from the Wittgensteinian tradition, albeit with the difference that he attempted to naturalize mind talk. (shrink)

This volume, the second in the Springer series Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, contains selected papers from the workshops organised by the ESF...

This paper considers the charge that—contrary to the current widespread assumption accompanying the near-universal neglect of his work—Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) cannot count as one of the founders of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. In order to elucidate the matter, Jerusalem’s “sociology of cognition” is here reconstructed in the context of his own work in psychology and philosophy as well as in the context of the work of some predecessors and contemporaries. It is argued that while it shows clear discontinuities with (...) the present-day understanding of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, Jerusalem’s sociology of cognition was not only distinctive in its own day but also anticipated in nuce a much-discussed theme in current history of science. (shrink)

The topic of the philosophical relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is of considerable interest both to interpreters of the work of Wittgenstein and of the Circle. Answers to questions concerning the nature and extent of the influences between them have long been thought to inform the systematic understanding of the philosophies involved. Importantly, the knowledge of the relation between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle has an interesting history of its own, reflecting in part the perceived relative standing (...) of the two parties; each of whom, after all, prescribed a radical reorientation of philosophy as traditionally practiced. This chapter presents the historical facts against which the philosophical relations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle have to be assessed and gives an overview of the Circle's reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Important corollaries follow for the assessment of the Circle's Tractatus reception. (shrink)

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

This paper rejects as unfounded a recent criticism of research on the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle and the claim that it sported a political philosophy of science. The demand for ‘specific, local periodized claims’ is turned against the critic. It is shown (i) that certain criticisms of Red Vienna’s leading party cannot be transferred to the members of the Circle involved in popular education, nor can criticism of Carnap’s Aufbau be transferred to Neurath’s unified science project; (ii) (...) that neither with regard to Carnap nor to Neurath does the criticism raise points that either engage with the thesis proposed or stand up to closer scrutiny; (iii) that the main thesis attacked is just what I had warned the claim that the Vienna Circle had a political philosophy of science should not be understood as. The question whether theirs is ‘political enough’ today can and should be discussed without distortion of the historical record. (shrink)

This paper responds to the generous comments by Alexander Klein and Cheryl Misak on my “American Pragmatism and the Vienna Circle: The Early Years”. First, besides offering some clarification of my original thesis, I argue that Jerusalem was not liable to the anti-Spencerian criticisms by James that Klein adduces in the course of defending James against the charge of psychologism. Then I investigate the impact of Wittgenstein’s Ramsey-derived pragmatism, importantly foregrounded by Misak, on the Vienna Circle and argue that it (...) was mainly limited to Schlick but not recognized as pragmatist, also leaving unaffected the impact of James’s pragmatism on Frank, Hahn and Neurath specified in my original paper. That said, Klein’s and Misak’s comments add significantly to our understanding of long-neglected transatlantic philosophical connections in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

This article considers the development of Philipp Frank’s opposition to metaphysics in the light of the contention that there also was a long-standing pragmatic strand to the theorizing about science in the Vienna Circle. It is argued that the later Frank did not only distinguish metaphysical statements from those deemed simply cognitively meaningless by a substantive criterion but that in order to identify the latter he also sought to employ a practical rather than a formal criterion with which he and (...) Neurath had long been acquainted. (shrink)

Is there anything new that can be learnt about Carnap and his philosophy from recent findings about Carnap’s participation in the production of the Circle’s inofficial manifesto of 1929, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis? “More than one might think”, is my answer. To be sure, what there is to be learnt is not something radically new, but that is still enough to make a difference in an ongoing dispute over whether Carnap’s philosophy was of a purely academic nature. What there (...) is to be learnt is enough to contradict the quite common picture of Carnap as quietist.1 Instead, Carnap emerges as an activist and his philosophy as part of his activism. Accordingly, the thesis to be defended here is that throughout his life, though perhaps most strongly so during his Vienna Circle period, Carnap intended his philosophy to make a difference to everyday life: it was to be political in the broadest sense. (shrink)

This fourth volume of the Programme “The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective” deals with new challenges in this field. In this regard, it seeks to broaden the scope of the philosophy of science in two directions. On the one hand,...

Faced with anti-foundationalist revisionism on part of recent Vienna Circle scholarship, veterans of the struggle against the so-called dogmas of logical empiricism could be forgiven were they to fail to recognize their old adversaries. Clearly everything depends on how the logical empiricists are read: their record does not speak for itself. That already in their day the logical empiricists faced the declaredly friendly fire that nearly sealed their fate suggests, however, that the reconstructive explication and contextualization required be exceedingly subtle. (...) For if that fire really missed its target, then what was missed was something that escaped notice from close quarter. Perhaps no one of the logical empiricists places more challenging demands of this sort on their historiographers than the longest-surviving senior member of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap. (shrink)

Ernst Mach’s positivism, it is argued in this paper, may be regarded as a version of pragmatist philosophy of science. Already James’s biographer Perry detected such tendencies in Mach and this is confirmed here by close attention to Mach’s early works, esp. History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy and The Science of Mechanics. Both Mach’s principle of the economy of thought and his principle of scientific significance are shown to bear out his pragmatism. A similar (...) conclusion is shown to hold for the philosophy of Wilhelm Jerusalem already long before he became the translator of James’s Pragmatism into German. But while Jerusalem early on relied perhaps even more than Mach on evolutionary theory for promptings of pragmatist insights, he soon too linked them, as Mach had all along, to broadly sociological observations concerning the condition of human cognition. (shrink)

Carnap’s lectures at the 1935 Paris Congress for the Unity of Science marked the beginning of his mature metaphilosophy. This paper considers what role remained for epistemology once it was “purified” of all psychological elements as Carnap there demanded. It is argued that while this did mean the end of traditional epistemology, room was found for nontraditional versions in the course of the further development of Carnap’s logic of science.

In this paper I wish to bring together two investigations undertaken elsewhere. These are, first, a study of the reception that American pragmatism found among members of the Vienna Circle prior to the process of internationalization of logical empiricism that had set in by the time of the 8th International Congress of Philosophy in Prague in September 1934; and, second, a study of some of the ideas and doctrines arrived at by some of the few Central European philosopher-scientists with whom (...) American pragmatism had found an at least partially sympathetic reception prior to World War I. The result of the first study was that it was not until late in the 1920s—but still before 1934—that selected aspects of American pragmatism were explicitly endorsed by certain members even though some similarity in outlook already seems to have been discerned by them in the years before World War I. The result of the second study was that to the very limited extent that there was a positive reception of American pragmatism by German or Austrian philosophers and scientists before World War I it was one that sprang from the recognition on their part that pragmatism agreed with conclusions they had arrived at independently. The thesis I wish to present for consideration here is that the early sympathies for pragmatism on the part of some Vienna Circle members were based to a large extent on their appreciation of the work of these Central European philosopher-scientists rather than merely the then prominent key text of pragmatism. One question looms large and will be addressed in due course: what caused the members in question to delay their (partial) endorsement of pragmatism for so long? On this count too we will find the Central Europeans to be implicated. (shrink)

This paper considers the question whether the notion of the relative apriori, central to Michael Friedman’s transcendentalist programme for philosophy of science, is available also to philosophers who reject appeals to a synthetic a priori. After tracing the rediscovery of the relative a priori and delineating its potential, the question is considered whether Friedman’s arguments against Quinean naturalism and Carnap’s attenuated logicism tell against a conception of philosophy as scientific metatheory that combines logical and empirical inquiries. Finding an opening here (...) it is argued that this conception can also help itself to the notion of a relative a priori which, it is agreed, is central to historically informed theorising about science. (shrink)

Is logical empiricism incompatible with a critical social science? The longstanding assumption that it is incompatible has been prominent in recent debates about welfare economics. Sen’s development of a critical and descriptively rich welfare economics is taken by writers such as Putnam, Walsh and Sen to involve the excising of the influence of logical empiricism on neo-classical economics. However, this view stands in contrast to the descriptively rich contributions to political economy of members of the left Vienna Circle, such as (...) Otto Neurath. This paper considers the compatibility of the meta-theoretical commitments of Neurath and others in the logical empiricist tradition with this first-order critical political economy. (shrink)