Philosopher and social theorist, born in Vienna, Austria. A member of the influential Vienna Circle, he was particularly associated with physicalism, which aimed to establish an entirely materialist foundation of knowledge. His best philosophical work was published in the group's journal Erkenntnis, but he also wrote books on sociology, education, and social policy, including International Picture Language (1936) and Modern Man in the Making (1939). Active in public affairs as an independent Marxist, he was an energetic organizer, and was involved with such diverse bodies as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (191113), and the International Unity of Science movement (193440).
Otto Neurath (born December 10, 1882 in Vienna, died December 22, 1945 in Oxford) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was forced to flee his native country for Great Britain in the wake of the Nazi occupation, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
Life
Since Neurath had written about a moneyless "economy in kind" (or barter system) before World War I, the Austrian government of the time assigned him to the planning ministry during the war. When the central German government suppressed these postwar Marxist insurrections, Neurath was arrested and charged with treason, but was released when it became evident that he had no involvement in politics.
Returning to Vienna, he began working on a project that evolved into the "Social and Economic Museum," intended to convey complicated social and economic facts to a largely uneducated Viennese public. With the illustrator Gerd Arntz, Neurath created Isotype, a striking symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. Odum.) Neurath and Arntz designed proportional symbols to represent demographic and social statistics in different countries, and to illustrate changes in these statistics over the 19th and early 20th centuries, so as to help the nonliterate or nonspecialist understand social change and inequity.
During the 1920s, Neurath also became an ardent Logical Positivist, and was the main author of its manifesto. As a member of the "left wing" of the Vienna Circle, Neurath rejected both metaphysics and epistemology.
He was the driving force behind the Unity of Science movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the latter consciously modeled on the French Encyclopedie.
Austria after the Anschluss was no place for Marxists, and so he fled, first to Holland and then to England, crossing the Channel with other refugees in an open boat.
Most work by and about Neurath is still available only in German.
Philosophy of science and language
In one of his later and most important works, Physicalism, Neurath completely transformed the nature of the discussion within the logical positivist movement with regard to the program of the unification of the sciences. the absolute rejection of metaphysics, in the sense of all propositions not translatable into verifiable scientific sentences), Neurath rejects the positivist treatment of language in general and, in particular, some of the fundamental ideas propounded by the early Wittgenstein.
First Neurath suggests that all discussion of an isomorphism between language and reality is nothing more than useless metaphysical speculation, since it brings up the problem of explaining how it is possible for words and sentences to represent things in the external world. To eliminate such dubious semantic considerations, Neurath proposed the idea that language and reality coincide, since the latter simply consists in the totality of previously verified sentences in the language.
In fact, it was Quine, in Word and Object, who made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
Neurath also went on to reject the notion that science should be reconstructed in term of sense data, since perceptual experinces are too subjective to constitute a valid foundation for the formal reconstruction of science.
Finally, Neurath suggested that since language itself is a physical system, because it is made up of an ordered succession of sounds or symbols, it is capable of describing its own structure without contradiction.
These ideas helped form the foundation of the sort of physicalism which is still today the dominant position with regard to metaphysics and, especially, the philosophy of mind.
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