Otto Neurath | |
|---|---|
 Photo of Neurath published in 1919 | |
| Born | Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath (1882-12-10)10 December 1882 |
| Died | 22 December 1945(1945-12-22) (aged 63) Oxford, England |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Vienna (no degree) University of Berlin (Ph.D., 1906) Heidelberg University (Dr. phil. hab., 1917) |
| Theses |
|
| Doctoral advisor | Gustav Schmoller Eduard Meyer |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy Logical positivism Vienna Circle Epistemic coherentism[1] |
| Institutions | New Vienna Commercial Academy Heidelberg University[1] |
| Main interests | Philosophy of science,sociology,political economy,logic,pedagogy,museology |
| Notable ideas | Physicalism[1] Protokollsatz (protocol statement) Neurath's boat Isotype |
| Part of a series on | ||||||
| Logical positivism | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||||
Origins and context
| ||||||
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath (/ˈnɔɪrɑːt/;[2]Austrian German:[ˈɔtoːˈnɔʏraːt]; 10 December 1882 – 22 December 1945) was anAustrian-bornphilosopher of science,sociologist, andpolitical economist. He was also the inventor of theISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of theVienna Circle.
Neurath was born inVienna, the son ofWilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-knownJewish political economist at the time.[3] Otto's mother was a Protestant, and he would also become one.[4]Helene Migerka was his cousin.[5] He studied mathematics and physics at theUniversity of Vienna (he formally enrolled for classes only for two semesters in 1902–3). In 1906, he gained hisPh.D. in the department ofPolitical Science andStatistics at theUniversity of Berlin with a thesis entitledZur Anschauung der Antike über Handel, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft (On the Conceptions in Antiquity of Trade, Commerce and Agriculture).
He married Anna Schapire in 1907, who died in 1911 while bearing their son, Paul, and then married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopherOlga Hahn. Perhaps because of his second wife's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, Paul was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with both of his parents when he was nine years old.
Neurath taught political economy at theNew Vienna Commercial Academy in Vienna until war broke out.[6] Subsequently, he directed the Department of War Economy in the War Ministry. In 1917, he completed hishabilitation thesisDie Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for the Future) atHeidelberg University. In 1918, he became director of the Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the "Deutsches Wirtschaftsmuseum") inLeipzig. There he worked withWolfgang Schumann, known from theDürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles. During thepolitical crisis which led to thearmistice, Schumann urged him to work out a plan for socialization in Saxony.[7] Along with Schumann andHermann Kranold developed theProgramm Kranold-Neurath-Schumann. Neurath then joined theGerman Social Democratic Party in 1918–19 and ran an office for central economic planning inMunich. When theBavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison, he wroteAnti-Spengler, a critical attack onOswald Spengler'sDecline of the West.
InRed Vienna, he joined the Social Democrats and became secretary of theAustrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens (Verband für Siedlungs-und Kleingartenwesen), a collection of self-help groups that set out to provide housing and garden plots to its members. In 1923, he founded a new museum for housing and city planning called Siedlungsmuseum. In 1925 he renamed itGesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna) and founded an association for it, in which the Vienna city administration, the trade unions, the Chamber of Workers and the Bank of Workers became members. Then-mayorKarl Seitz acted as the first proponent of the association.Julius Tandler, city councillor for welfare and health, served on the first board of the museum together with other prominent social democratic politicians. The museum was provided with exhibition rooms in buildings of the city administration, the most prominent being the People's Hall at theVienna City Hall.
Neurath was a contributor to the Social Democrat magazineDer Kampf.[8]
To make the museum understandable for visitors from all around the polyglotAustro-Hungarian Empire, Neurath worked ongraphic design and visual education, believing that "Words divide, pictures unite," a coinage of his own that he displayed on the wall of his office there.[9] In the late 1920s, graphic designer and communications theoristRudolf Modley served as an assistant to Neurath, contributing to a new means of communication: a visual "language."[10] With the illustratorGerd Arntz and withMarie Reidemeister (who he would marry in 1941), Neurath developed novel ways of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. The forerunner of contemporaryinfographics, he initially called this the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. As his ambitions for the project expanded beyond social and economic data related to Vienna, he renamed the project "Isotype", an acronymic nickname for the project's full title: International System of Typographic Picture Education.[11] At international conventions of city planners, Neurath presented and promoted his communication tools. During the 1930s, he also began promoting Isotype as an International Picture Language, connecting it both with the adult education movement and with the Internationalist passion for new and artificial languages likeEsperanto, although he stressed in talks and correspondence that Isotype was not intended to be a stand-alone language and was limited in what it could communicate.
In the 1920s, Neurath also became an ardentlogical positivist, and was the main author of theVienna Circle manifesto. He was the driving force behind theUnity of Science movement and theInternational Encyclopedia of Unified Science.[12]
Neurath was a proponent ofEsperanto, and attended the 1924World Esperanto Congress in Vienna, where he metRudolf Carnap for the first time.[13] In 1927 he became Secretary of theErnst Mach Society.[14]
During theAustrian Civil War in 1934, Neurath had been working in Moscow. Anticipating problems, he had asked to get a coded message in case it would be dangerous for him to return to Austria. As Marie Reidemeister reported later, after receiving the telegram "Carnap is waiting for you," Neurath chose to travel toThe Hague, theNetherlands, instead of Vienna, to be able to continue his international work. He was joined by Arntz after affairs in Vienna had been sorted out as best they could. His wife also fled to the Netherlands, where she died in 1937.
After theLuftwaffe hadbombed Rotterdam, he and Marie Reidemeister fled to Britain, crossing theChannel with other refugees in an open boat. He and Reidemeister married in 1941 after a period of being interned on theIsle of Man (Neurath was inOnchan Camp). In Britain, he and his wife set up theIsotype Institute inOxford and he was asked to advise on, and design Isotype charts for, the intended redevelopment of the slums ofBilston, nearWolverhampton.
Neurath died of a stroke, suddenly and unexpectedly, in December 1945. After his death,Marie Neurath continued the work of the Isotype Institute, publishing Neurath's writings posthumously, completing projects he had started and writing many children's books using the Isotype system, until her death in the 1980s.
Neurath's work onprotocol statements tried to reconcile anempiricist concern for the grounding of knowledge in experience with the essential publicity of science. Neurath suggested that reports of experience should be understood to have athird-person and hence public and impersonal character, rather than as being first person subjective pronouncements.[1]Bertrand Russell took issue with Neurath's account of protocol statements in his bookAn Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (p. 139ff), on the grounds that it severed the connection to experience that is essential to an empiricist account of truth, facts and knowledge.
One of Neurath's later works,Physicalism, completely transformed the nature of the logical positivist discussion of the program of unifying the sciences. Neurath delineates and explains his points of agreement with the general principles of the positivist program and its conceptual bases:
He then rejects the positivist treatment of language in general and, in particular, some ofWittgenstein's early fundamental ideas.
First, Neurath rejects the isomorphism between language and reality as useless metaphysical speculation, which would call for explaining how words and sentences could represent things in the external world. Instead, Neurath proposed that language and reality coincide—that reality consists simply of the totality of previously verified sentences in the language, and the "truth" of a sentence is about its relationship to the totality of already verified sentences. If a sentence fails to "concord" (or cohere) with the totality of already verified sentences, then either it should be considered false, or some of that totality's propositions must be modified somehow. He thus views truth as internalcoherence of linguistic assertions, rather than anything to do with facts or other entities in the world. Moreover, the criterion of verification is to be applied to the system as a whole (seesemantic holism) and not to single sentences. Such ideas profoundly shaped theholisticverificationism ofWillard Van Orman Quine. Quine's bookWord and Object (p. 3f) 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 (cf.Ship of Theseus):
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this, the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
Keith Stanovich discusses this metaphor in context ofmemes andmemeplexes and refers to this metaphor as a "Neurathian bootstrap".[15]
Neurath also rejected the notion that science should be reconstructed in terms of sense data, because perceptual experiences are too subjective to constitute a valid foundation for the formal reconstruction of science. Thus, thephenomenological language that most positivists were still emphasizing was to be replaced by the language of mathematical physics. This would allow for the required objective formulations because it is based on spatio-temporal coordinates. Such aphysicalistic approach to the sciences would facilitate the elimination of every residual element of metaphysics because it would permit them to be reduced to a system of assertions relative to physical facts.
In economics, Neurath was notable for his advocacy of ideas like "in-kind" economic accounting in place of monetary accounting. In the 1920s, he also advocatedVollsozialisierung, that is "complete" rather than merely partial "socialization".[16] Thus, he advocated changes to the economic system that were more radical than those of the mainstream Social-Democratic parties of Germany and Austria. In the 1920s, Neurath debated these matters with leading Social Democratic theoreticians (such asKarl Kautsky, who insisted that money is necessary in a socialist economy. While serving as a government economist during the war, Neurath had observed that "As a result of the war, in-kind calculus was applied more often and more systematically than before ... war was fought with ammunition and with the supply of food, not with money" i.e. that goods wereincommensurable. This convinced Neurath of the feasibility of economic planning in terms of amounts of goods and services, without use of money.[17][18] In response to these ideas,Ludwig von Mises wrote his famous essay of 1920, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth".[19][20]
Otto Neurath believed it was 'warsocialism' that would come into effect after capitalism.[21] For Neurath, war economies showed advantages in speed of decision and execution, optimal distribution of means relative to (military) goals, and no-nonsense evaluation and utilization of inventiveness. Two disadvantages which he perceived as resulting from centralized decision-making were a reduction in productivity and a loss of the benefits of simple economic exchanges; but he thought that the reduction in productivity could be mitigated by means of "scientific" techniques based on analysis of work-flows as advocated byFrederick Winslow Taylor. Neurath believed that socioeconomic theory and scientific methods could be applied together in contemporary practice.
Neurath's view on socioeconomic development was similar to thematerialist conception of history first elaborated inclassical Marxism, in which technology and the state of epistemology come into conflict with social organization. In particular, Neurath, influenced also byJames George Frazer, associated the rise of scientific thinking and empiricism/positivism with the rise of socialism, both of which were coming into conflict with older modes of epistemology such as theology (which was allied withidealist philosophy), the latter of which served reactionary purposes. However, Neurath followed Frazer in claiming that primitive magic closely resembled modern technology, implying aninstrumentalist interpretation of both.[22] Neurath claimed that magic wasunfalsifiable and thereforedisenchantment could never be complete in a scientific age.[23] Adherents of the scientific view of the world recognize no authority other than science and reject all forms of metaphysics. Under the socialist phase of history, Neurath predicted that the scientific worldview would become the dominant mode of thought.[24]
Most publications by and about Neurath are still available only in German. However, he also wrote in English, using Ogden'sBasic English. His scientific papers are held at the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem; the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection is held in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at theUniversity of Reading in England.
Worte trennen, Bilder verbinden.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
