著者

後藤 邦夫

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

国際文化論集 (ISSN:09170219)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.22, pp.131-148, 2000-12-20

---

The third, and final, part of this series deals with theoretical thinking of Otto Neurath, especially concentrating to his discussion on basic problems of scientific learning. This gives also an explanation of philosophical diversification of people of the Vienna Circle, or logical empiricism, which is often thought as a monolithic, rigorous, inflexible rationalist group. On the contrary, Vienna Circle was a movement, opened to all anti-metaphysical people. Influenced by Weber, Simmel and others, who bore the best tradition of German social science in the last phase of the German Empire, Neurath developed his early theoretical activity. He pursued an ideal of pure science on the one hand, and wanted to realize the social reform on the other. It was the common attitude of young scholars who were to join First Vienna Circle. Responding to the evident decline of the mechanistic world picture in the end of the nineteenth century, these young scholars tried to establish a bridge between Machian empiricism and conventionalism of Poincare. Through an intensive study of Duhem's work, Neurath and Hahn reached an assertion, which was an extension of Duhem's thesis from physics to science in general. In the Second Vienna Circle, which had started in early 1920s, Neurath worked as an active member of this group. Several critical discussions or debates, with which he concerned, are discussed: "protocol sentence debate", "Neurath's Boat", "Ballungen", and etc. While he was the hardest critic against all kind of metaphysical thought and preferred the Enlightenment, he was also the left wing critic against the inflexible pattern of logical empiricism. In a sense, he was a forerunner of the post-WWII science studies, which were developed by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feuerabend and other scholars.