Otto Neurath^§MS1.1.3h had another theoretical project, political in a more general way, and this was “the search for a neutral system of formulae, for a symbolism freed from the slag of historical languages.” And, beyond this, “also the search for a total system of concepts. Neatness and clarity are striven for, and dark distances and unfathomable depths are rejected. In science, there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere: all experience forms a complex network.”¹¹³

Here we begin to catch a glimpse of a larger agenda for conceptualization. Neurath was a leading member of the Vienna Circle, inspired by the same “bourgeois” philosopher that got Alexander Bogdanov^§MS0.2.9a into trouble with Lenin, Ernst Mach. Among its members were the mathematician Kurt Gödel, and one of the founders of Analytical Philosophy, Rudolf Carnap.^§AS3.2b In 1929, the Vienna Circle published a manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World. Neurath wrote the first draft, which Hahns Hahn and Rudolf Carnap extended and revised, but the authorship was simply credited, “The Vienna Circle.”¹¹⁴

The problem, said the manifesto, with “the form of traditional languages [is that they create] a confusion about the logical achievement of thought. Ordinary language for instance uses the same part of speech, the substantive, for things (‘apple’) as well as for qualities (‘hardness’), relations (‘friendship’), and processes (‘sleep’); therefore it misleads one into a thing-like conception of functional concepts.” The “scientific world conception,” by contrast, knows with clarity just two things: “empirical statements about things of all kinds, and analytic statements of logic and mathematics.”

On this basis, “the aim of scientific effort is to reach the goal, unified science, by applying logical analysis to the empirical material … For us, something is ‘real’ through being incorporated into the total structure of experience.” By these means it will be possible to gain “the required precision of concept definitions and of statements, and in formalizing the intuitive process of inference of ordinary thought, that is to bring it into a rigorous, automatically controlled form by means of a symbolic mechanism.”¹¹⁵

This sounds rather like the relationships in the digital era between empirical objects named in the internet of things (instantiations),^§MS1.1.1 their classification schemes (conceptualizations),^§MS1.1.3 and the algorithmic processes of symbol manipulation via “artificial intelligence” that overlie them.

The Vienna Circle’s project was “the arrangement of the concepts of the various branches of science into the constitutive system.” It would be an incremental project, though its general shape Neurath thought evident already. “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.”¹¹⁶

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¹¹³ Vienna Circle, 1929 [1973], “The Scientific Conception of the World,” pp. 299–318 in Empiricism and Sociology, edited by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, p. 318.

¹¹⁴ Ibid.; Thomas Uebel, 2008, “Writing a Revolution: On the Production and Early Reception of the Vienna Circle’s Manifesto,” Perspectives on Science 16(1):70–102; Jacob Struan and Otto Karl-Heinz, 1990, “Otto Neurath: Marxist Member of the Vienna Circle,” Auslegung: A Journal of Philosophy 16(2):175–89.

¹¹⁵ Vienna Circle, 1929 [1973], “The Scientific Conception of the World,” pp. 299–318 in Empiricism and Sociology, edited by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, pp. 307–09.

¹¹⁶ Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, p. 199.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 117-118. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

The Vienna Circle’s "Scientific Conception of the World" §MS1.1.3i