UNCORRECTED PROOF SPB-189582 Chapter ID 6 September 6, 2010 Time: 06:17pm Proof 1 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Chapter 6 Principles and Practices of Neurath’s Picture Language Ahti -Veikko Pietarinen Otto Neurath (1882–1945) might never have been the pet philosopher of the log- ical empiricists’ influential movement. For instance, he appears never to have assumed any distinctively genial and agreeable position in the mainstreams of the movement. 1 His clash with Rudolf Carnap is especially poignant. 2 Concerning the publication of the Encyclopedia series that was to promote the Unity of Science movement, Neurath feared that Carnap was not “only irritated by [his] formula- tions”, but that between them “there are much more deeper [sic] differences”. 3 In his 1944 letter to Charles Morris, Neurath identifies these differences in his attempt, already there in the Antispengler, 4 to present empiristically his Protokollsätze, which are “statements about statements”. His attempts to convince Carnap or the mathematician Hans Hahn on the value and worthiness of his ideas were neverthe- less frustrated, Neurath recalls, because “in the Wittgenstein period the statements of statements seemed to be taboo”. Neurath recollects the Wiener Kreis readings of Wittgenstein, in which he frequently remarked how metaphysical some statements were, only to be advised by Hahn that Neurath should make a comment only when he “is satisfied by saying ‘NM’ [‘No Metaphysics’]”. The subsequent emergence of Tarski semantics was “praised” by Neurath, as it indeed was by Carnap and Karl Menger. Neurath applauded its meta-level way of arguing but did not accept the “comparison of thing and statement”. Because by the mid-1930s Carnap had accepted Tarski’s point of view pretty much whole- sale, which Neurath thought then implied a commitment to obsolete Aristotelian metaphysics, “certain differences” between him and Carnap were unavoidable. I suggest that the “certain differences” leading to a conflict between Neurath and AQ1 Carnap can be explained, at least partly, in terms of the van Heijernoort–Hintikka dichotomy of language as calculus vs. language as the universal media. 5 Neurath promoted meta-theoretical systematisations early on, while for Carnap, the adoption of that point of view required a long incubation period. 6 I shall argue, furthermore, A.-V. Pietarinen (B ) Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland J. Symons et al. (eds.), Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science, Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science 18, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0143-4_6, C  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011