Abstract
In what follows I shall speak about many phenomena, but what I wish to convey more than anything else is a combination of positive aspects of the rightly famous seminar headed by Moritz Schlick the years before he was shot on the stairs of the University of Vienna in 1936. These aspects make the seminar unique. I have taken part in a wealth of good seminars before and after 1936, but my experience as a participant of that seminar makes it, for me, stand out as unsurpassed.
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Notes
I have been asked whether the influence of logical empiricists on my thinking limits itself to their wonderful friendly - almost Gandhian - philosophy and technique of communication. Of course not. Their use of symbols! The conceptual structure in Spinoza’s Ethics is much too complicated for me to survey without symbols. There are about 300 important extensional equivalences between terms he uses. That is, he in part answers (as transformation rules) or declares (as “hypotheses” about the actual use of terms) a manifold of relations which should not be neglected in any interpretation of his wonderful text. It is pathetic to see how people shy away from reading my Conceptual Structure… when their eyes fall on the symbolic version of the theorems of Spinoza. Incidentally it has been studied how the proofs of the first part of the Ethics can be made acceptable from the point of view of modern formal logic. Result: the addition of only 164 premises will do the job: The majority are utterly trivial - Spinoza would not have cared to mention them.
Today it is difficult to understand why Schächter’s mildly critical way of assessing material implication was met with indignation. He introduced a sign “-+” to symbolize an if-then relation closer to that of the everyday language. The sign “-” indicates that nothing is said in these cases. It was found intolerable that Schächter (p.176 in his dissertation) flatly denied that logic consists of tautologies: Its rules are obviously not tautologies, nor are its grammatical Konstatierungen - I deplore that he did not explain why material implication was extensively used seemingly with great success.
The dissatisfaction with the treatment of empirical components of philosophical problems within analytical tradition made me work many years on experimental and other procedures to arrive at scientifically testable conclusions on the use of words, in scientific and everyday language. In the preface of a work Interpretation and Preciseness, my last effort to make a new unpretentious, slight, Wende der Philosophie, I state my aims in formulations like the following: “Very roughly, one may distinguish a deductive, an intuitionistic and an empirical component in the writing of analytical philosophers. Even in those cases where deductions and intuitions can help us considerably, consistent neglect of the empirical component will bring research toward stagnation. If empirical studies are neglected, we shall see much intelligent debate along intuitionistic lines, but less of that process which many of us find so inspiring in the history of philosophy and science: the development of new branches of reliable knowledge as a result of combined philosophical and scientific efforts.” My efforts to establish a wide group of “scientifically inclined” philosophers who in close cooperation pursued the empirical components of the problems facing logical empiricists largely failed - for reasons that were not too difficult to unravel. As regards professional studies of language, Noam Chomsky said in about 1955 frankly to me that their interest in the years to come would rather go in a very different direction: that of deep grammar, transformational grammar, generative grammar,…. He was perfectly right. Even if studies of the use of terms like “democracy”, “ideology”, and “objectivity” increased in importance before, during and after the Second World War, especially during the “Cold War”, to perform detailed investigations of the sort I had in mind was not inspiring. In the politically relevant field, Chomsky chose a more fruitful, direct way of cooperation than mine! But some logicians and philosophers have continued, see for instance From an Empirical Point of View, ed. by E.M. Barth, J. van Dormael and F. Vandamme.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Naess, A. (1993). Logical Empiricism and the Uniqueness of the Schlick Seminar: A Personal Experience with Consequences. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Developments. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [1993], vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2964-2_2
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