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Ernst Mach

The following ycar hc irwited Moritz Schlick, who in 1918 had written an imprcssive book 011 scientific mcthodology, to comc to Vicnna to fili Ernst Machs old chair in the philosophy of the inductivc Sciences.⁴

Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) was born in Berlin, stiidiccl under Max Planck, and rcccivcd his doctor’s degrcc in 1904. Bcforc coming to Vicnna hc had taught at Rostock and Kici. His philosophy of naturc front about 1910 to 1925 was dosc to that of Hermann Hclmholtz in that hc bclicvcd that sensory objeets gavc symbolically informativc clues about the naturc of the rcal world outsidc cxpcricncc.^&

Schlick, who had an agrccablc conversational personality, started with smali informal chats and by 1925 had collcctcd a number of gifted professors and students into a circlc which met cvcry Thursday. Somc of thosc who attended the sessions induded Viktor Kraft, Herbert Feigl, Friedrich Waismann, and later the mathematicians Karl Menger, Kurt Godeł, and Gustav Bergmann.⁰

Bela Juhos, a member of the Vicnna Circlc who, with Viktor Kraft, bccamc a leader of what remaincd of the movcment in Yicnna after World War II, has dcscribcd Schlick’s intcllectual transformation from “realism” to “phenomenalism" and front an interest in ontology to one in linguistic philosophy:

Schlick’s staiting point was the analyscs carricd out by Ernst Mach, Hermann von Hclmholtz, and Henri Poincarć of the basie concepts and pre-suppositions of the individu.il Sciences. . . .

Under the influence of Wittgenstein and Carnap, Schlick'$ philosophical views underwent a profound modification, which hc later charactcrizcd by saying that hc no longcr saw the goal of philosophy as acquiring knowl-edge and preseming it as .1 system of presuppositions but rather as the ap-plications of a method. . . . Schlick no longcr treated realism and idcalism as factually contradictory ihescs but, rather, as alternativc ways of speaking.⁷

The arrival of Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) for a short stay in Vicnna in 1025 and pcrmanently the following ycar added another Mach-oriented physicist-philosophcr to Schlick’s circle. Carnap had studied at Jena and Freiburg and had becn a student of Hugo Dinglcr at Mnnich. The lattcr had hoped that Carnap would become a disciplc or follower, but this notion was rudcly shattered when Carnap ac-ccpted Einstein’s theory of rclativity and firmly opposcd Dinglcr’s stand:

My strongly convcntionalist attitudc in rbis aniele (1924) and in (1923) was influcnccd by Poincares books and by Hugo Dinglcr. However, I did

not sharc Dinglers radical convcntionalism and still less his rejection of Einstcin’s generał theory of rclativity.^s

Poincarć had alrcady provcn that the quc$tion of whether naturc is Euclidean or non-Euclidean is mcaninglcss.®

Carnap’s debt to Mach came out clcarly in his first major work, The Logical Structure of the World (1928): “Thus the analysis led to what Ernst Mach callcd the elements. My usc of this method was probably influcnccd by Mach and phenomenalist philosophers. But it secmed to mc that I was the first who took the doctrincs of thesc philosophers seriously. I was not contcnt with their customary statements likc ‘a materiał body is a complex of visual, tactilc, and other sensations,’ but tried actually to construct thesc complexcs in order to show their structure.” ¹⁰

Rudolf Carnap was a classic cxample of a widespread contcniporary limitation. Hc was simply unablc to distinguish between presentation-alist and represent atlona li st philosopliy With the resiilt thaTlic in terpreted all philosophy in prcsentatibnalist terms, thereby distorting representationalist philosophy and making it literally impossible for him to understand the history of ideas or any point of vicw significantly difTerent from his own. IJnder the influence of Wittgenstcin’s ap-proach to languagc during the middle 1920S hc completed his intel-lectual solipsism by dcclaring that all philosophy was merely a "ńn-guistic variation” of his own approach, that is, of his own epistemologi-cal presentationalism. But sińce for him his position had no “nonlin-guistic” alternativc hc felt safc in concluding that hc held no ontology or cpistemology at all! ¹¹ In this sense hc agreed with Augustę Comte that he was advocating a methodology and not a philosophy. And it is for this reason along with the Circle’s “scientism" that one may cor-rcctly consider “logical positivism” to be a historical extension of “positivism" as it was understood in the ninctccnth century.

The primary reason for Carnaps inability to understand rcpicscnta-tionalist points of vicw was his theory of rcfercnce, his phcnomenalisdc opinion that rcfercnce implied cxistcncc, at least phcnomenal or con-scious cxistencc.¹~ He insisted on treating rcferencc as a form of cxpcricncc as if we could not refer to or talk about what we could not consciously notice. For most pcople rcfercnce is not a form of experi-ence but allows for charactcristics which could or do exist outside possible consciousness. Sensations and ideas are normally not what

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