Edmonds has written a short, but detailed, group biography of the Vienna Circle, including its precursors, origin, heyday, and, eventually, where its members scattered to after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. Edmonds calls the Circle’s members logical-empiricists, although they are also commonly known as positivists. Ludwig Wittgenstein was never a member and never even attended a meeting as a guest. However, his legacy over the Circle looms large. His Tractatus-logico-philosophicus was studied sentence by sentence by the Circle every week, over a number of years (1925-27), to parse out its exact meaning.
On August 5, 1924, Moritz Schlick, the head of the Vienna Circle, wrote to a fellow German philosopher, Hans Reichenbach, about discovering the Tractatus, “The author lives close to Vienna, and is highly original, also as a human being; the more one studies his treatise, the more one is impressed by it. The English translator [Frank Ramsey], a mathematician from Cambridge, whom I met in the summer, is also a very intelligent and sophisticated mind.” (The Circle first read the book in its English translation because Wittgenstein could not find a German language publisher.) Edmonds continues, “Within the Circle the Tractatus acquired a status of almost biblical significance…. The Tractatus is a work impatient of explanation and skinned to the bone. It can be seen as a pursuit of an ornament-free language—in which every element expressed the logic of language and thereby of the world (unlike ordinary language, which obscures its structure with its many redundancies—or ornaments)…. Wittgenstein, in the tradition of Frege and Russell, held that the tools of modern logic could be used to dissect the nature of language. He thought that philosophy should be limited in ambition: the task of philosophy was the clarification of propositions…. The Circle also embraced Wittgenstein’s discussion of logical truths. Wittgenstein held that logical truths were tautologies; they are true, but not in the way that empirical propositions can be true…. [Logical truths] are the essential frame to permit propositions to picture the world. They are the limits of sense…. The Vienna Circle found what they regarded as the ultimate solution (to the problem of how mathematical knowledge is compatible with a strict empiricism) in their interpretation of the Tractatus…. The Circle believed the same line should be applied to mathematical truths: they too served as tautologies…. The reason we do not need to refer to the world to establish their veracity is because the meaning is built into the terms themselves.”
The beginning of the end of the Vienna Circle was actually when its leading members decided to publish a manifesto to honor Schlick, upon his return from a sabbatical at Stanford. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl were the authors, but they purported to expound the philosophy of the Circle as a whole. It was actually in this document that the name Weiner Kreis appeared for the first time. “The Circle’s basic orientation was science free from metaphysics.” The manifesto stated, “The scientific world-conception knows no unsolvable riddle.” Furthermore, the Circle’s mission was “removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia.” The manifesto ended, “The scientific world conception serves life, and life receives it.” Phillip Frank, a physicist in Prague and frequent guest to Circle meetings, stated, “The whole original Viennese group was convinced that the elimination of metaphysics not only was a question of better logic but was of great relevance for the social and cultural life.”
Schlick, himself, was not entirely pleased with his return gift. Edmonds explains, “Although he had now presided over the Circle for five years—and in a 1923 letter to Bertrand Russell he described the Circle as a working union of philosophers—he had become perturbed by the idea of philosophy as a team sport. He viewed the Circle as a set of like-minded philosophers meeting to thrash out problems but without losing their individuality…. He was the Circle’s most apolitical member, whilst the manifesto was a blatantly political document…. Until the publication of the manifesto, those who attended Circle discussions had no need to see themselves as belonging to a movement. But from that moment, fissures within the Circle began to deepen.”
However, Schlick was in no way opposed to the project of removing any trace of metaphysics from philosophy. He stated, “Philosophy is the activity by means of which the meaning of statements is clarified and defined.” Carnap had asked, “Can it be that so many men, of various times and nations, outstanding minds among them, have devoted so much effort, and indeed fervor, to metaphysics, when this consists in nothing more than words strung together without sense?” Metaphysics was about feelings, whereas philosophy was about science and truth. Neurath claimed, “Metaphysical terms divide, scientific terms unite.” Carnap felt it was the province of poets, not philosophers, to deal with metaphysics. He quipped, “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.” Edmonds states that Schlick felt, “Empiricists do not tell metaphysicians that they are wrong but rather that they assert nothing of any meaning. That is, they do not contradict the metaphysicians, rather, they simply fail to understand them.”
With the rise of the nationalist right in Austria after WWI, the positivists faced a growing backlash at home, even within academic walls. The University of Vienna itself was a bastion of reactionary conservatism. “Although there was nothing explicitly pro-democratic about logical empiricism, it was implicitly anti-elitist. The priestly caste claimed some special insight into God, while the metaphysician claimed some special understanding of the world beyond appearance…. Logical empiricism was also skeptical about the ontological status of the group: the base unit for explaining action was thought to be the individual.” The Circle’s espousal of methodological individualism and belief in the paramount truth of empirical facts ran foul of the fascistic currents of the day.
Edmonds goes into some detail about two philosophical problems that divided members of the Circle. The first was the issue of protocol sentences. “The logical positivist project can be seen as having two components. On the one hand, there was an investigation into the link between words and propositions…. But beyond the analysis of language, there is the link between language and the world…. There must be some way words get their meaning not from other words but from the world…. Words get their meaning in the context of a sentence or proposition and the way that proposition stands in relation to the world…. There was mostly agreement that the protocol sentences on which knowledge and meaningful language were to be constructed were fundamental observation statements…. [But] what was to count as a protocol sentence? Did protocol sentences really exist? Were they open to doubt? What was the relationship between protocol sentences and the empirical world?… Foundationalism means (roughly) that there are propositions that are true and certain, independently of other propositions…. Within the Circle there was a dispute about whether protocol sentences provided solid foundations…. The idea was that with valid inferences, we could move from these secure basic statements, these protocol sentences, to more complicated ones…. Carnap’s initial view was that protocol sentences captured immediate experiences and required no further justification or public confirmation. They were sense data—the things that are immediately present to the mind…. Neurath maintained that the observations had to be about the observable attributes of objects and the properties on which we could publicly agree…. [Eventually] Carnap was forced to acknowledge what Neurath had long asserted, namely that rock-bottom certainty was beyond reach. If protocol sentences were about the physical world (as opposed to sensations and impressions of that world), then it was always possible that they were mistaken.” Schlick did not concede to Neurath, like Carnap. He “insisted that protocol sentences had to be about how objects appeared to a particular person and take the form of here, now, this…. The advantage of the Schlickian framework is that it begins with statements that cannot be refuted and that require no further confirmation…. The drawback is that it is unclear how one can make the move from subjective statement about me and my experience to a statement to which we all can assent…. Schlick’s radical subjectivism, Neurath claimed, took protocol sentences down a cul-de-sac.” Neurath’s solution has come to be called Neurath’s Boat. Edmonds explains, “We have to presume existing knowledge…. We cannot overturn all our assumptions at once—that would be nonsensical. But neither can we assume that there are any rock-solid foundations. We can always jettison bits of “knowledge” as we progress.” Neurath, himself, stated, “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”
The other major issue amongst members of the Circle was the verification problem. “If a statement was not analytic—true or false in virtue of its terms—then, according to the verification principle, it was only meaningful if verifiable…. It is what made many statements about ethics, aesthetics, and religion nonscientific and neither true nor false…. The Carnap version stated that whether a synthetic sentence was cognitively meaningful depends on whether there is criteria for verifying it. The Wittgenstein version [embraced by Schlick and Waismann] was that the meaning consists in the criteria…. A satisfactory account of the principle—which excludes ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysical assertions but includes scientific theories about nonobservable entities—continues to prove elusive. All attempts to tighten the principle have let in either too little or too much. It is also self undermining, for the principle itself seems neither analytically true nor verifiable.”
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