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LIFE Since Neurath had written about a moneyless "economy in kind" (or Barter system) before World War I , the Austrian government of the time assigned him to the planning ministry during the war. After the war, the Marxist governments of Bavaria and Saxony employed him to help socialize their economies, projects he undertook with enthusiasm. When the central German government suppressed these postwar Marxist insurrections, Neurath was arrested and charged with treason, but was released when it became evident that he had no involvement in politics. Returning to Vienna, he began working on a project that evolved into the "Social and Economic Museum," intended to convey complicated social and economic facts to a largely uneducated Viennese public. This led him to work on graphic design and visual education. With the illustrator Gerd Arntz , Neurath created Isotype , a striking symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. This was also a visual system for displaying quantitative information of the sort later advocated by Edward Tufte . (Related ideas can be found in the work of Buckminster Fuller and Howard T. Odum .) Neurath and Arntz designed proportional symbols to represent demographic and social statistics in different countries, and to illustrate changes in these statistics over the 19th and early 20th centuries, so as to help the nonliterate or nonspecialist understand social change and inequity. This work has had a strong influence on Cartography and Graphic Design . During the 1920s, Neurath also became an ardent Logical Positivist , and was the main author of its manifesto. He wrote on the Verification Principle and "protocol statements." As a member of the "left wing" of the Vienna Circle , Neurath rejected both Metaphysics and Epistemology . He viewed Marxism as a type of science, and science as a tool for social change. He was the driving force behind the Unity Of Science movement and the ''International Encyclopedia of Unified Science'', the latter consciously modeled on the French Encyclopedie . His collaborators included Rudolf Carnap , Bertrand Russell , Niels Bohr , John Dewey , and Charles W. Morris . The objective of the ''Encyclopedia'' was the systematic formulation of all intellectual inquiry along lines acceptable to the Vienna Circle and its allies. Only two volumes appeared. Part of his dream for unified science was to put the social sciences on a causal, predictive footing similar to that of physics and chemistry. Austria after the Anschluss was no place for Marxists, and so he fled, first to Holland and then to England, crossing the Channel with other refugees in an open boat. In England, he happily worked for a public housing authority. He died in 1945. Most work by and about Neurath is still available only in German. His papers and notes are archived at the University Of Reading in England . PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND LANGUAGE In one of his later and most important works, ''Physicalism'', Neurath 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 of Wittgenstein's early fundamental ideas. 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. Either a sentence failing to "concord" (or cohere) with the totality of the sentences already verified, should be considered false, or that some of that totality's propositions must in some way be modified. He thus views truth as a question of 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 applied to the system as a whole (see Semantic Holism ) and not to single sentences. Such ideas exercised a profound influence over the ''holistic verificationism'' of W.V.O. Quine . In fact, it was Quine, in ''Word and Object'' (p. 3f), who 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:
Neurath also went on to reject the notion that science should be reconstructed in terms of sense data, since perceptual experiences are too subjective to constitute a valid foundation for the formal reconstruction of science. The Phenomenological language that most positivists were still emphasizing was to be replaced, in his view, with the language of mathematical physics. This would allow for the objective formulations required because it is based on spatio-temporal coordinates. Such a ''physicalistic'' approach to the sciences would facilitiate 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. These ideas helped form the foundation of the sort of Physicalism which is still today the dominant position with regard to metaphysics and, especially, the Philosophy Of Mind . SEE ALSO BY NEURATH
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