Otto Neurath

Dzieła

• 1929Naukowe ujęcie świata. Koło Wiedeńskie

  Manifest Koła Wiedeńskiego, podpisany przez Hansa Hahna, Ottona Neuratha i Rudolfa Carnapa: nauka zunifikowana, analiza logiczna, żadnej metafizyki – i sojusz z reformą społeczną.

• 1932Zdania protokolarne

  Nie ma skały pewnego doświadczenia: nawet zapisy obserwacji można odrzucić – esej ze statkiem, który trzeba przebudować na morzu.

Stanowisko

Neurath gave the empiricism of the Vienna Circle a social and anti-foundational turn. “Unified science” meant for him not a pyramid that reduces all sciences to physics but an encyclopedia of sciences that share a physicalist language of statements about observable events in space and time, so that predictions from economics, biology and physics can be combined. In “Protocol Sentences” (1932) he denied that knowledge rests on a bedrock of certain experience: even protocol statements, which record an observation together with the observer’s name and the time, may be discarded if they conflict with the rest of the system. Hence his image of sailors “who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to take it apart in dry dock”. This brought him into dispute with Carnap over phenomenalist foundations, with Moritz Schlick, who defended indubitable “affirmations” (Konstatierungen), and with Karl Popper over basic statements. He regarded Marxism as a model for an empirical sociology and argued for a planned “economy in kind” calculated without money; Ludwig von Mises replied in 1920 with his essay on economic calculation, the beginning of the socialist calculation debate. Isotype was meant to make social and economic facts readable for everyone. Carnap took over physicalism from him, and W. V. O. Quine put the ship at the head of Word and Object (1960).

Życie i kontekst

Otto Neurath was born in Vienna on 10 December 1882, the son of the economist Wilhelm Neurath. He studied mathematics, economics and history in Vienna and Berlin and took his doctorate in Berlin in 1906 with Gustav Schmoller and Eduard Meyer, on ancient economic history. In 1917 he qualified as a lecturer at Heidelberg. In 1919 he headed the central planning office of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic; after its fall he was imprisoned, wrote Anti-Spengler in prison and returned to Austria after the Austrian government intervened. In “Red Vienna” he worked for the settlers’ movement and from 1924 to 1934 directed the Social and Economic Museum, where he developed, with Marie Reidemeister and the artist Gerd Arntz, a method of picture statistics later called Isotype. He co-founded the Ernst Mach Society in 1928 and wrote the Vienna Circle’s manifesto of 1929 with Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap. In 1934 he fled to The Hague, in 1940 to England, where he was interned for nine months. With Carnap and Charles Morris he edited the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science from 1938. He married Marie Reidemeister in 1941 and died in Oxford on 22 December 1945.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Anti-Spengler (1921)
• The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis, with Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap, 1929)
• Empirical Sociology (Empirische Soziologie, 1931)
• “Protocol Sentences” (“Protokollsätze”, 1932)
• International Picture Language (1936)
• Foundations of the Social Sciences (1944)