Otto Neurath
This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2021) |
Otto Neurath | |
---|---|
Epistemic coherentism[1] | |
Theses |
|
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath (German: [ˈɔtoː ˈnɔʏʁaːt]; 10 December 1882 – 22 December 1945) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE 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 the Vienna Circle.
Early life
Neurath was born in
He married Anna Schapire in 1907, who died in 1911 while bearing their son, Paul, and then married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga 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.
Career in Vienna
Neurath taught political economy at the
In
To make the museum understandable for visitors from all around the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, Neurath worked on graphic 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.[6] In the late 1920s, graphic designer and communications theorist Rudolf Modley served as an assistant to Neurath, contributing to a new means of communication: a visual "language."[7] With the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister (who he would marry in 1941), Neurath developed novel ways of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. The forerunner of contemporary Infographics, 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.[8] 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 like Esperanto, 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 ardent logical positivist, and was the main author of the Vienna Circle manifesto. He was the driving force behind the Unity of Science movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science.[9]
Exile
Netherlands
During the
British Isles
After the
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.
Ideas
Philosophy of science and language
Neurath's work on
One of Neurath's later and most important[according to whom?] 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:
- the construction of a universal system which would comprehend all of the knowledge furnished by the various sciences, and
- the absolute rejection of metaphysics, in the sense of any propositions not translatable into verifiable scientific sentences.
He then rejects the positivist treatment of language in general and, in particular, some of
First, Neurath rejects 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 in simply the totality of previously verified sentences in the language, and "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 internal coherence 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 (see semantic holism) and not to single sentences. Such ideas profoundly shaped the holistic verificationism of Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine's book Word 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.
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, the phenomenological 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 a physicalistic 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.
"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."[citation needed]
These ideas helped form the foundation of the sort of
]Economics
In economics, Neurath was notable for his advocacy of ideas like "
Otto Neurath believed it was 'war socialism' that would come into effect after capitalism.[16] 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 etc. as advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Neurath believed that socio-economic theory and scientific methods could be applied together in contemporary practice.
Neurath's view on socioeconomic development was similar to the
Selected publications
Most publications by and about Neurath are still available only in German. However he also wrote in English, using Ogden's Basic 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 the University of Reading in England.
Books
- 1913. Serbiens Erfolge im Balkankriege: Eine wirtschaftliche und soziale Studie. Wien : Manz.
- 1921. Anti-Spengler. München, Callwey Verlag.
- 1926. Antike Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner.
- 1928. Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf. Berlin: E. Laub.
- 1933. Einheitswissenschaft und Psychologie. Wien.
- 1936. International Picture Language; the First Rules of Isotype. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd., 1936
- 1937. Basic by Isotype. London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd.
- 1939. Modern Man in the Making. Alfred A. Knopf
- 1944. Foundations of the Social Sciences. University of Chicago Press
- 1944. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. With Rudolf Carnap, and Charles W. Morris (eds.). University of Chicago Press.
- 1946. Philosophical Papers, 1913–1946: With a Bibliography of Neurath in English. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, with Carolyn R. Fawcett, eds. 1983
- 1973. Empiricism and Sociology. Marie Neurath and Robert Cohen, eds. With a selection of biographical and autobiographical sketches by Popper and Carnap. Includes abridged translation of Anti-Spengler.
Articles
- 1912. The problem of the pleasure maximum. In: Cohen and Neurath (eds.) 1983
- 1913. The lost wanderers of Descartes and the auxiliary motive. In: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1916. On the classification of systems of hypotheses. In: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1919. Through war economy to economy in kind. In: Neurath 1973 (a short fragment only)
- 1920a. Total socialisation. In: Cohen and Uebel 2004
- 1920b. A system of socialisation. In: Cohen and Uebel 2004
- 1928. Personal life and class struggle. In: Neurath 1973
- 1930. Ways of the scientific world-conception. In: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1931a. The current growth in global productive capacity. In: Cohen and Uebel 2004
- 1931b. Empirical sociology. In: Neurath 1973
- 1931c. Physikalismus. In: Scientia : rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica, 50, 1931, pp. 297–303
- 1932. Protokollsätze (Protocol statements).In: Erkenntnis, Vol. 3. Repr.: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1935a. Pseudorationalism of falsification. In: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1935b. The unity of science as a task. In: Cohen and Neurath 1983
- 1937. Die neue enzyklopaedie des wissenschaftlichen empirismus. In: Scientia: rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica, 62, 1937, pp. 309–320
- 1938 'The Departmentalization of Unified Science', Erkenntnis VII, pp. 240–46
- 1940. Argumentation and action. The Otto Neurath Nachlass in Haarlem 198 K.41
- 1941. The danger of careless terminology. In: The New Era 22: 145–50
- 1942. International planning for freedom. In: Neurath 1973
- 1943. Planning or managerial revolution. (Review of J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution). The New Commonwealth 148–54
- 1943–5. Neurath–Carnap correspondence, 1943–1945. The Otto Neurath Nachlass in Haarlem, 223
- 1944b. Ways of life in a world community. The London Quarterly of World Affairs, 29–32
- 1945a. Physicalism, planning and the social sciences: bricks prepared for a discussion v. Hayek. 26 July 1945. The Otto Neurath Nachlass in Haarlem 202 K.56
- 1945b. Neurath–Hayek correspondence, 1945. The Otto Neurath Nachlass in Haarlem 243
- 1945c. Alternatives to market competition. (Review of F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom). The London Quarterly of World Affairs 121–2
- 1946a. The orchestration of the sciences by the encyclopedism of logical empiricism. In: Cohen and. Neurath 1983
- 1946b. After six years. In: Synthese 5:77–82
- 1946c. The orchestration of the sciences by the encyclopedism of logical empiricism. In: Cohen and. Neurath 1983
- 1946. From Hieroglyphics to Isotypes. Nicholson and Watson. Excerpts. Rotha (1946) claims that this is in part Neurath's autobiography.
References
- ^ a b c Cat, Jordi. "Otto Neurath (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2017-05-26.
- ^ Wussow, Philipp von (January 2021). "The Political Ideas of Otto Neurath: Science, Judaism, and the Rise of Expertocracy". Azimuth Ix (2021) 18: Mother-Tongue and Father-Land: Jewish Perspectives on Language and Identity.
- )
- D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973
- ^ The actual museum's website: http://www.wirtschaftsmuseum.at/wminorg.htm
- ISBN 9780691164908.
Worte trennen, Bilder verbinden.
- S2CID 147279431.
- ^ Berko, Lex. "Isotype, the Proto-Infographic You Probably Didn't Know Existed". Vice. No. 12 September 2013. Vice Media. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
- ISBN 9780691164908.
- ISBN 0-226-77089-3.
- ^ John O'Neill, "Socialist Calculation and Environmental Valuation: Money, Markets and Ecology," Science & Society, LXVI/1 (Spring 2002); Joan Martinez-Alier and Klaus Schlupmann, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment, and Society (1987), 212-218.
- ^ Günther Chaloupek, "Otto Neurath's Concepts of Socialization and Economic Calculation and his Socialist Critics"(2006), at www.chaloupek.eu/work/NeurathFin.pdf
- ^ Otto Neurath, ed. T. Uebel and R. S. Cohen, Economic Writings (2004), 304.
- ^ "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth by Ludwig von Mises". Ludwig von Mises Institute. Archived from the original on 17 November 2014. Retrieved 1 December 2013.
- ^ John O'Neill (Nov–Dec 1995). "In partial praise of a positivist: The work of Otto Neurath". Radical Philosophy (74). Retrieved 16 October 2018.
- ^ Desai, Meghnad (2002). Marx's Revenge. Verso. pp. 190–195.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ^ Jacobs, Straun; Otto, Karl-Heinz. "Otto Neurath: Marxist member of the Vienna Circle" (PDF). Retrieved September 7, 2014.[permanent dead link]
Further reading
- Cartwright, Nancy, J. Cat, L. Fleck, and T. Uebel, 1996. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics. Cambridge University Press
- Cohen R. S. and M. Neurath (eds.) 1983. Otto Neurath: Philosophical Papers. Reidel
- Cohen, R. S. and T. Uebel (eds.) 2004. Otto Neurath: Economic Writings 1904–1945. Kluwer
- Dale, Gareth, The Technocratic Socialism of Otto Neurath, Jacobin Magazine.
- Dutto, Andrea Alberto, 2017, "The Pyramid and the Mosaic. Otto Neurath’s encyclopedism as a critical model," Footprint. Delft Architecture Theory Journal, #20.
- Matthew Eve and Christopher Burke: Otto Neurath: From Hieroglyphics to Isotype. A Visual Autobiography, Hyphen Press, London 2010
- ISBN 978-3-902-81107-3.
- Holt, Jim, "Positive Thinking" (review of Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science, Basic Books, 449 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 74–76.
- Kraeutler, Hadwig. 2008. Otto Neurath. Museum and Exhibition Work – Spaces (Designed) for Communication. Frankfurt, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Vienna, Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften.
- Nemeth, E., and Stadler, F., eds., "Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945)." Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 4.
- O'Neill, John, 2003, "Unified science as political philosophy: positivism, pluralism and liberalism," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.
- O'Neill, John, 2002, "Socialist Calculation and Environmental Valuation: Money, Markets and Ecology," Science & Society, LXVI/1.
- Neurath, Otto, 1946, "From Hieroglyphs to Isotypes".
- Symons, John – Pombo, Olga – Torres, Juan Manuel (eds.): Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science. (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, 18.) Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. ISBN 978-94-007-0142-7
- ISBN 978-90-5662-350-0
- Sandner, Günther, 2014, Otto Neurath. Eine politische Biographie. Zsolnay, Vienna. ISBN 978-3-552-05676-3. (German)
- Danilo Zolo, 1990, Reflexive Epistemology and Social Complexity. The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath, Dordrecht: Kluwer
External links
- Shalizi, C R, "Otto Neurath: 1882–1945". Includes references and links.
- Gerd Arntz Web Archive with more than 500 Isotypes
- Bibliography Pictorial Statistics
- Mundaneum in Netherlands
- Article discussing Gödel's Incomplete theorems as a refutation to Neurath and the Vienna Circle's logical Positivism
- Austrian Museum for Social and Economic Affairs (Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum)
- Guide to the Unity of Science Movement Records 1934-1968 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center