Otto Neurath

3.1. Academic and Professional Activities

Before the outbreak of World War I, Neurath taught political economy at the New Vienna Commercial Academy in Vienna. During the war, he became a leading expert in war economics, directing the Department of War Economy in the War Ministry. In 1917, he completed his habilitation thesis, Die Kriegswirtschaftslehre und ihre Bedeutung für die Zukunft (War Economics and Their Importance for the Future), at Heidelberg University.

In 1918, Neurath was appointed director of the Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later renamed "Deutsches Wirtschaftsmuseum") in Leipzig. Here, he collaborated with Wolfgang Schumann, who was known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles, and Hermann Kranold to develop the Programm Kranold-Neurath-Schumann, a plan for socialization in Saxony. Between 1918 and 1919, Neurath joined the German Social Democratic Party and managed an office for central economic planning in Munich. Following the defeat of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he was imprisoned on charges of treason but was released and returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While incarcerated, he wrote Anti-Spengler, a critical response to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.

In Red Vienna, Neurath joined the Social Democrats and became the secretary of the Austrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens (Verband für Siedlungs-und Kleingartenwesen), an organization dedicated to providing housing and garden plots through self-help initiatives. In 1923, he founded the Siedlungsmuseum, a new museum focused on housing and city planning. In 1925, he renamed it the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna) and established an associated organization. This association included the Vienna city administration, trade unions, the Chamber of Workers, and the Bank of Workers, with then-mayor Karl Seitz serving as its first proponent and Julius Tandler, city councillor for welfare and health, on its initial board. The museum's exhibitions were housed in city administration buildings, notably the People's Hall at the Vienna City Hall. This museum can also be found at [http://www.wirtschaftsmuseum.at/oegwm.htm Austrian Museum for Social and Economic Affairs]. Neurath also contributed to the Social Democratic magazine Der Kampf.

3.2. Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism

During the 1920s, Otto Neurath emerged as an ardent logical positivist and was a central figure in the Vienna Circle, co-authoring its influential manifesto. He was a driving force behind the Unity of Science movement, which sought to unify all branches of knowledge under a single scientific framework. This ambition culminated in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a project he spearheaded alongside collaborators like Rudolf Carnap, Bertrand Russell, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, and Charles W. Morris. Although the encyclopedia aimed to systematically formulate all academic disciplines, it ultimately published only two volumes. Neurath's involvement in the Unity of Science movement reflected his belief that social sciences could achieve the predictive accuracy of physics and chemistry by adhering to causal principles.

Neurath became Secretary of the Ernst Mach Society in 1927. As a member of the "left wing" of the Vienna Circle, he rejected both metaphysics and epistemology, viewing Marxism as a paradigm of scientific thought and science itself as a tool for social change. He was also a strong proponent of Esperanto, attending the 1924 World Esperanto Congress in Vienna, where he first met Rudolf Carnap.

3.3. ISOTYPE and Visual Communication

To make the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum understandable to the diverse, polyglot population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Neurath focused on graphic design and visual education. He famously coined the phrase "Words divide, pictures unite" (Worte trennen, Bilder verbinden^German), which was displayed in his office. In the late 1920s, with the assistance of graphic designer Rudolf Modley and in collaboration with illustrator Gerd Arntz and Marie Reidemeister (whom he would later marry), Neurath developed innovative methods for representing quantitative information using easily interpretable icons.

This pioneering system, a forerunner of modern infographics, was initially called the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. As its scope expanded beyond Vienna's social and economic data, Neurath renamed it "Isotype" - an acronym for "International System of Typographic Picture Education." The symbols designed by Neurath and his team aimed to help illiterate or non-specialist individuals understand social changes and inequalities by visually representing demographic and social statistics. This work significantly influenced cartography and graphic design. Neurath actively promoted these communication tools at international conventions for city planners.

During the 1930s, he also promoted Isotype as an International Picture Language, linking it to both the adult education movement and the internationalist enthusiasm for new artificial languages like Esperanto. However, he consistently emphasized that Isotype was not intended as a stand-alone language and had limitations in what it could convey. Marie Reidemeister's role in transforming data and statistics into visual forms, known as the "transformer," was particularly influential in museum and exhibition practices.

5.1. Netherlands and British Isles

In 1934, while working in Moscow during the Austrian Civil War, Neurath received a coded message, "Carnap is waiting for you," signaling that it was unsafe for him to return to Austria. Consequently, he chose to travel to The Hague, Netherlands, to continue his international work. He was later joined by Gerd Arntz after affairs in Vienna were settled. His first wife, Olga Hahn-Neurath, also fled to the Netherlands, where she died in 1937.

Following the Rotterdam Blitz by the Luftwaffe, Neurath and Marie Reidemeister fled to Britain, crossing the English Channel in an open boat with other refugees. After a period of internment on the Isle of Man (Neurath was held in Onchan Camp), he and Marie Reidemeister married in 1941. In Britain, they established the Isotype Institute in Oxford. Neurath was also invited to advise on and design Isotype charts for the planned redevelopment of the slums in Bilston, near Wolverhampton, demonstrating the adaptability of his methods to new social contexts.

6.1. Philosophy of Science and Language

Neurath's work on protocol statements sought to reconcile the empiricist emphasis on grounding knowledge in experience with the fundamental public nature of science. He proposed that reports of experience should be understood as having a third-person, public, and impersonal character, rather than being subjective, first-person pronouncements. This view was challenged by Bertrand Russell in his book An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, who argued that Neurath's account severed the essential connection to experience required for an empiricist understanding of truth, facts, and knowledge.

One of Neurath's most significant later works, Physicalism, profoundly reshaped the logical positivist discourse on the program of unifying the sciences. Neurath agreed with the general principles of the positivist program and its conceptual foundations: the construction of a universal system encompassing all knowledge from various sciences, and the absolute rejection of metaphysics, defined as any propositions not translatable into verifiable scientific sentences. However, he rejected the positivist treatment of language in general and, in particular, some of Ludwig Wittgenstein's early fundamental ideas.

Neurath dismissed the idea of isomorphism between language and reality as useless metaphysical speculation, arguing that it would necessitate explaining how words and sentences could represent external world objects. Instead, he proposed that language and reality coincide, with reality consisting simply of the totality of previously verified sentences within the language. For Neurath, the "truth" of a sentence was determined by its relationship to this totality of already verified sentences. If a sentence failed to "concord" or cohere with this totality, it should either be considered false, or some of the totality's existing propositions would need modification. Thus, he viewed truth as an internal coherence of linguistic assertions, rather than something connected to external facts. Furthermore, the criterion of verification, according to Neurath, should be applied to the system as a whole (a concept known as semantic holism) rather than to individual sentences. These ideas significantly influenced the holistic verificationism of Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine's book Word and Object popularized Neurath's famous analogy comparing the holistic nature of language and scientific verification to the reconstruction of a boat already at sea (similar to the Ship of Theseus paradox): We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
Keith Stanovich discusses this metaphor in the context of memes and memeplexes, referring to it as a "Neurathian bootstrap".

Neurath also rejected the notion that science should be reconstructed in terms of sense data, arguing that perceptual experiences are too subjective to form a valid foundation for the formal reconstruction of science. He proposed that the phenomenological language emphasized by most positivists should be replaced by the language of mathematical physics. This shift would allow for the necessary objective formulations because it is based on spatio-temporal coordinates. Such a "physicalistic" approach to the sciences would facilitate the elimination of any residual metaphysical elements by reducing them to a system of assertions related to physical facts. Neurath further suggested that since language itself is a physical system, composed of an ordered succession of sounds or symbols, it is capable of describing its own structure without contradiction.

6.2. Physicalism

These ideas, particularly Neurath's physicalistic approach, were instrumental in forming the foundation of the kind of physicalism that remains a dominant position in metaphysics and especially the philosophy of mind. His emphasis on language as a physical system and the reduction of scientific assertions to physical facts aimed for a unified scientific worldview, free from metaphysical speculation.

9.1. Books

• 1913. Serbiens Erfolge im Balkankriege: Eine wirtschaftliche und soziale Studie. Wien: Manz.
• 1921. Anti-Spengler. München: Callwey Verlag.
• 1926. Antike Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner.
• 1928. Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf. Berlin: E. Laub.
• 1933. Einheitswissenschaft und Psychologie. Wien.
• 1936. International Picture Language; the First Rules of Isotype. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd.
• 1937. Basic by Isotype. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd.
• 1939. Modern Man in the Making. Alfred A. Knopf.
• 1944. Foundations of the Social Sciences. University of Chicago Press.
• 1944. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. With Rudolf Carnap and Charles W. Morris (eds.). University of Chicago Press.
• 1946. Philosophical Papers, 1913-1946: With a Bibliography of Neurath in English. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, with Carolyn R. Fawcett, eds. (Published 1983).
• 1946. From Hieroglyphics to Isotypes. Nicholson and Watson.
• 1973. Empiricism and Sociology. Marie Neurath and Robert Cohen, eds. Includes abridged translation of Anti-Spengler.

9.2. Articles

• 1912. "The problem of the pleasure maximum."
• 1913. "The lost wanderers of Descartes and the auxiliary motive."
• 1916. "On the classification of systems of hypotheses."
• 1919. "Through war economy to economy in kind."
• 1920a. "Total socialisation."
• 1920b. "A system of socialisation."
• 1928. "Personal life and class struggle."
• 1930. "Ways of the scientific world-conception."
• 1931a. "The current growth in global productive capacity."
• 1931b. "Empirical sociology."
• 1931c. "[http://amshistorica.unibo.it/diglib.php?inv=7&int_ptnum=50&term_ptnum=309&format=jpg Physikalismus]". In: Scientia: rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica, 50, pp. 297-303.
• 1932. "Protokollsätze" (Protocol statements). In: Erkenntnis, Vol. 3.
• 1935a. "Pseudorationalism of falsification."
• 1935b. "The unity of science as a task."
• 1937. "[http://amshistorica.unibo.it/diglib.php?inv=7&int_ptnum=62&term_ptnum=317&format=jpg Die neue enzyklopaedie des wissenschaftlichen empirismus]". In: Scientia: rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica, 62, pp. 309-320.
• 1938. "The Departmentalization of Unified Science." Erkenntnis VII, pp. 240-46.
• 1940. "Argumentation and action."
• 1941. "The danger of careless terminology." In: The New Era 22: 145-50.
• 1942. "International planning for freedom."
• 1943. "Planning or managerial revolution." (Review of J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution). The New Commonwealth 148-54.
• 1943-5. Neurath-Carnap correspondence, 1943-1945.
• 1944b. "Ways of life in a world community." The London Quarterly of World Affairs, 29-32.
• 1945a. "Physicalism, planning and the social sciences: bricks prepared for a discussion v. Hayek."
• 1945b. Neurath-Hayek correspondence, 1945.
• 1945c. "Alternatives to market competition." (Review of F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom). The London Quarterly of World Affairs 121-2.
• 1946a. "The orchestration of the sciences by the encyclopedism of logical empiricism."
• 1946b. "After six years." In: Synthese 5:77-82.
• 1946c. "The orchestration of the sciences by the encyclopedism of logical empiricism."