The activities of the Vienna Circle opened a special stage in the development of philosophical positivism – neopositivism. Evolving, the Vienna Circle largely determined the problems of various trends in modern thought – from logical positivism in the versions of B. Russell and A. Ayer and the post-positivism of K. Popper, formed as a critic of the Vienna Circle, to the latest analytical philosophy. Initially, the term “logical positivism” was directly related to the Vienna Circle and denoted a critical attitude to traditional (metaphysical) philosophy and the use of logical methods of language analysis as a universal method for constructing empirical science. It is unlikely that the influence of these ideas on science can be considered fundamental, but in philosophy, the ideas of the Viennese had a noticeable impact.
The Vienna Circle is a unique phenomenon in 20th century philosophy of stable and organized membership in a scientific philosophical seminar, held since 1922 at the Department of Inductive Sciences of E. Mach at the University of Vienna. Although many researchers date the beginning of the circle’s activity two years earlier, to 1920. The organizer was the new head of the department, physicist
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), who studied Einstein’s theory of relativity and was the author of the circle’s manifesto, “The Revolutionary Turn in Philosophy,” and permanent members included
Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and logician and mathematician
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970). German scientists
Carl Hempel (1905-1998) and
Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) were also represented . There were also temporary members of the circle, who worked for about half a year – the Englishman
Alfred Julius Ayer (1910-1989), the American
Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000). The circle was visited by such celebrities as mathematicians Gödel and Hahn. The historian of the circle was Viktor Kraft. Philipp Frank, the author of “Philosophy of Science”, translated into Russian, also participated in the work of the circle. Most had a liberal political past: for example, Neurath was the Minister of Culture in the Bavarian Republic, a communist.
At the first stage, the Vienna Circle put forward the task of creating a syntax of scientific knowledge. This period saw the publication of Carnap’s work “The Logical Structure of the World” (1928), which is considered to have been greatly influenced by Wittgenstein. In his work “The Logical Syntax of Language” (1934), Carnap also rejected the project of an ideal language and criticized Russell’s “metaphysical” logical atomism, taking a position on this issue similar to Wittgenstein. However, it should be noted that the positivism of the Vienna Circle was characterized by an understanding of language primarily from the point of view of its representative functions, in contrast to Russell and the early Wittgenstein, for whom language was primarily signs of a system of universal logic.
At the next stage, the semantic one, they used the apparatus of mathematical logic of G. Frege (1848-1925), changing the terminology to better suit the specific problematic. Thus, Carnap uses the terms “intension” and “extension” to separate the problems of how it is designated and what is designated, respectively. It was at this stage that the Viennese came close to such a topical problem for the philosophy of language today as the theory of possible worlds. In 1930-1939, the Vienna Circle published the journal “Erkenntnis” (“Cognition”), which promoted the ideas of logical positivism.
The circle existed until 1938, until the annexation of Austria, most of the scientists moved to the USA and, from 1938 until the 60s, they talk about the physicalist stage of the Vienna Circle. They work on the idea of creating a unified science. At this point, more than ever, the return to the original claim of positivism – to synthesize scientific knowledge – becomes obvious. The language of physics, which has an intersubjective character, becomes universal for scientists. That is, the language of science records the “objective” state of things, without a “subjective” assessment of the experiences of the observer. This is what distinguishes physics. Unlike, for example, the language of biology, theological and anthropological. The ideas of physicalism had a significant impact on philosophy and partly on science in the 50s – 60s. The discovery of the physics of the microworld poses the problem of intersubjectivity as an internal problem of physics itself.
The Viennese were interested in defining the criterion of scientific meaningfulness of knowledge – it can be false. But it should be distinguished from scientifically meaningless knowledge, which cannot even be false, since it is meaningless. In science, two classes of scientific propositions should remain – analytical truths that have no subject content, and factual truths, empirical facts of specific sciences, the value of which can be verified in a special way – the principle of verification. Representatives of the Vienna Circle proceed from the division of knowledge into analytical and synthetic, which was proposed by Hume and, unlike Kant, did not assume the existence of a priori-synthetic knowledge. Analytical knowledge is a priori in the logical sense, i.e. all logical-mathematical knowledge is not informative and has an explanatory nature, as described by Kant. Synthetic – all empirical knowledge, which constitutes inductive science.
The original idea of the Viennese is that knowledge is based on simple observational statements. And since the form of expression of scientific ideas is linguistic, a strong means of their analysis should be the logical analysis of the meaning of protocol sentences – direct recordings of lived experience. Even E. Mach wrote about something similar, speaking about “facts of experiences”. The philosophy of science should be oriented precisely towards such direct statements.
The criterion for including protocol sentences in a scientific theory, in other words, the criterion of truth, should be the principle of verification (confirmation): protocol sentences can be reproduced. Those sentences that can be reduced to protocol ones according to logical rules of inference can also be considered scientific. Thus, verification was a criterion of truth, but at the same time a way of identifying meaning, and a principle of distinguishing between empirical meaningful knowledge and metaphysical, speculative, meaningless knowledge.
However, it soon became obvious that such direct verificationism is impossible in cases where we are dealing with past events, general judgments, etc. Then this criterion was weakened and a criterion of fundamental verification, or verifiability, appeared: the conditions for the practical verification of a particular fact were stipulated. A typical example in those years was the discussion of the far side of the Moon, which in principle could be confirmed when a flying machine was built that would fly around the Moon.
The very concept of protocol sentences was also vulnerable. K. Popper was an external critic, who believed that the principle of falsification (refutation) should be introduced as a criterion of truth. But there was also internal criticism: for example, Neurath believed that in science there is no pure statement of perceptions, just as there can be no “pure experience”, i.e. there can be no experience free of any conceptual theoretical forms.
The main target of the Vienna Circle was metaphysics, the sphere of scientifically unintelligible knowledge. Philosophy had created too many speculative systems. At the same time, Carnap used Freudian images: he defined metaphysics as an expression of the unconscious feeling of life, suppressed by consciousness. Incidentally, the problematic of some concepts of analytical philosophy, at first glance dissociated from the positivism of the 20s-50s of the 20th century, is in one way or another connected with the problem of expressing (representing) the unconscious in the spirit of this statement by Carnap.
Literature
1. Kraft V. Vienna Circle. Moscow, 2003.
2. Shvyrev V. S. Neopositivism and problems of empirical substantiation of science. Moscow, 1966.
3. Philosophy, Wisdom, Achievement: Behavior about the History and Development of the Vienna States. V., 1985.