Otto Neurath
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath 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 Vienna, the son of Wilhelm Neurath, a well-known Jewish political economist at the time. Otto's mother was a Protestant, and he would also become one. Helene Migerka was his cousin. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. In 1906, he gained his Ph.D. in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin with a thesis entitled Zur Anschauung der Antike über Handel, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft.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 New Vienna Commercial Academy in Vienna until war broke out. Subsequently, he directed the Department of War Economy in the War Ministry. In 1917, he completed his habilitation thesis Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft at Heidelberg University. In 1918, he became director of the Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum in Leipzig. There he worked with Wolfgang Schumann, known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles. During the political crisis which led to the armistice, Schumann urged him to work out a plan for socialization in Saxony. Along with Schumann and Hermann Kranold developed the Programm Kranold-Neurath-Schumann. Neurath then joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918–19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison, he wrote Anti-Spengler, a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West.In Red Vienna, he joined the Social Democrats and became secretary of the Austrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens, 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 it Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien 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-mayor Karl 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 the Vienna City Hall.
Neurath was a contributor to the Social Democrat magazine Der Kampf.
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. 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." With the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister, 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. 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.
Neurath was a proponent of Esperanto, and attended the 1924 World Esperanto Congress in Vienna, where he met Rudolf Carnap for the first time. In 1927 he became Secretary of the Ernst Mach Society.
Exile
Netherlands
During the Austrian 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 to The Hague, the Netherlands, 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.British Isles
After the Luftwaffe had bombed Rotterdam, he and Marie Reidemeister fled to Britain, crossing the Channel with other refugees in an open boat. He and Reidemeister married in 1941 after a period of being interned on the Isle of Man. In Britain, he and his wife set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford and he was asked to advise on, and design Isotype charts for, the intended redevelopment of the slums of Bilston, near Wolverhampton.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.
Contributions
Philosophy of science and language
Neurath's work on protocol statements tried to reconcile an empiricist 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 a third-person and hence public and impersonal character, rather than as being first person subjective pronouncements. Bertrand Russell took issue with Neurath's account of protocol statements in his book An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, 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:
- 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.
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" 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 and not to single sentences. Such ideas profoundly shaped the holistic verificationism of Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine's book Word and Object 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 :
Keith Stanovich discusses this metaphor in context of memes and memeplexes and refers to this metaphor as a "Neurathian bootstrap".
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.