I would like to thank Loren Butler, Jordi Cat, Hasok Chang, the IIT philosophy workshop, Robert Richards,Howard Stein, Thomas Uebel and two anonymous referees for suggesting ways to improve earlier drafts of this paper.

¹ Morris, C., ‘Foundations of the Unity of Science’Google Scholar, prospectus, University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections, ‘University of Chicago Press Papers’, Box 347, Folder 2.

² Morris, , op. cit. (1).Google Scholar

³ Popper, K., ‘Memories of Otto Neurath’, in O. Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology (ed. Neurath, M. and Cohen, R. S.; tr. Foulkes, P. and Neurath, M.), Boston, 1973, 52.Google Scholar

⁴ Neurath, O., ‘Experiences of socialization in Bavaria’Google Scholar in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 18–28.Google Scholar

⁵ Neurath was not a graphic artist. He articulated the grammar, syntax and goals of ISOTYPE and had others design appropriate figures. For more on ISOTYPE, see Neurath, O., Modern Man in the Making, New York, 1939Google Scholar; International Picture Language, Psyche Miniatures no. 83, London, 1936Google Scholar; chapter 7 in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 214–48Google Scholar; Müller, K., ‘Neurath's theory of pictorial-statistical representation’, in Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle (ed. Uebel, T.), Boston, 1991, 223–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Joergensen, J., ‘The development of logical empiricism’, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Chicago, 1950, ii (no. 9), 43.Google Scholar

⁷ Neurath's ‘rediscovery’ began in 1973 with the translation and publication of some of his essays in Neurath, , op. cit. (3)Google Scholar. A collection of his complete methodological and philosophical writings was published in 1981, some of which soon appeared in English (Gesammelte Philosophische und Methodologische Schriften (ed. Haller, R. and Rutte, H.), 2 vols., Vienna, 1981Google Scholar; Philosophical Papers: 1913–1946 (tr. and ed. Cohen, R. S. and Neurath, M.), Boston, 1983Google Scholar (herein after Philosophical Papers)). Austrian historians and philosophers have contributed most to the explication of Neurath's ideas. Some of these essays have been recently translated and collected by Thomas Uebel (op. cit. (5)). Uebel describes how Neurath's reputation as ‘the original – confused – neo-positivist caveman’ is being replaced with that of ‘a serious thinker, one whose belated recognition is bound to transform the picture of the past of analytical philosophy’ (5, 3; see also 10–14).

For an extended analysis of Neurath's epistemological views and their development, see Uebel, T., Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within, Atlanta, 1992.Google Scholar

There are no published studies on the Encyclopedia in particular. Zolo discusses it at some length in his study on Neurath and identifies its cooperative, democratic ideal (Zolo, D., Reflexive Epistemology: The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath (tr. McKie, D.), Boston, 1989, especially ch. 5)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nemeth compares Neurath's unified science to his vision of a planned, non-monetary economy in kind but stops short of identifying the logos of economic planning with that of unified science and the Encyclopedia (Nemeth, E., ‘The unity of planned economy and the unity of science’Google Scholar, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 275–83Google Scholar). While some come close, none of these studies sufficiently emphasize and articulate the role planning plays in Neurath's conceptions. Friedrich Stadler, for instance, notes that Neurath

urged the application of the socialist idea of planning on all levels of theory and practice … all the way to the idea of planning for freedom in a humanist world society in which a democratic science was to function according to the form of non-capitalist and collective production processes [‘Otto Neurath – Moritz Schlick: on the philosophical and political antagonisms in the Vienna Circle’, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 159–68, on 165].Google Scholar

More abstractly, Uebel characterizes Neurath's project as one of ‘controllable rationality’ and ‘conceptual responsibility by collective management’ (op. cit. (5), 9, 10). To understand more concretely Neurath's vision of these ‘collective production processes’ and the mechanisms of this ‘collective management’ is, I suggest, to understand the Encyclopedia as the medium of planning in science. I developed this thesis following Marx Wartofsky's discussion of the intimate connection between Neurath's non-foundationalism and his vision of the unified scientist as ‘a servant of the political and social decision making process’. ‘What is at issue’, in Wartofsky's discussion of the Vienna Circle, ‘is the ways in which the “internal” ideational-philosophical content [of the Vienna Circle's scientific philosophy] bears upon the “external” social content and role of the movement’ (‘Positivism and politics: the Vienna Circle as a social movement’, in Schlick und Neurath – Ein Symposion (ed. Haller, R.), Amsterdam, 1982, 79–101, on 100, 93Google Scholar). This relation, I suggest, is nearly identity: for Neurath, unified science was scientific planning much like the social and economic planning that would become de jure in the new enlightenment.

⁸ Neurath appears to have anticipated, for example, certain aspects of (1) the non-foundational, holistic view of theories popularized in the 1950s and 1960s by Quine and Kuhn; (2) a synthetic historical and philosophical approach to understanding theories and scientific change associated usually with Kuhn; and (3) a philosophical naturalism aligned with contemporary naturalistic and evolutionary epistemology. Uebel treats Neurath's anticipation of (3) in Uebel, T., ‘Neurath's programme for naturalistic epistemology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1991), 22, 623–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also note 29, where I list several important ways in which Neurath's views were unlike Kuhn's.

⁹ Neurath, O., ‘The scientific conception of the world: the Vienna Circle’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 299–319Google Scholar. Here, Marie Neurath notes that Otto wrote this paper and later edited it with Carnap, and Hahn, Hans (p. 318).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Neurath, , ‘The scientific conception of the world’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 306.Google Scholar

¹¹ Neurath, O., ‘Physicalism’Google Scholar in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 52–7, on 53–4Google Scholar. Neurath's favourite illustration of this point is a forest fire. See ‘Sociology and physicalism’, in ibid., 58–90, on 59; ‘Individual sciences, unified science, pseudorationalism’, in ibid., 132–8, on 132–3.

¹² Neurath, O., ‘Physicalism: the philosophy of the Vienna Circle’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 48–51, on 49.Google Scholar

¹³ Neurath, , ‘Physicalism’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 54.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Carnap, R., The Logical Structure of the World (tr. George, R.), Berkeley, 1969.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Neurath, , ‘Physicalism’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 55Google Scholar; see also ‘Sociology and physicalism’, in ibid., op. cit. (7), 63–4, 72. These comments suggest the spirit – and not the letter – of Carnap's Aufbau since they depict the terms of all sciences as reducible to (in some unspecified sense) the language of physics instead of constructible out of (not the language of physics, but) ‘elementary experiences’, as Carnap called them. Although Carnap allowed that physicalist statements could be used as a basis in such constructions (op. cit. (14), §62), he came to agree with Neurath that the physicalist basis should be preferred. Carnap, R., ‘Intellectual autobiography’, in The Library of Living Philosophers vol. 11, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (ed. Schilpp, P. A.), LaSalle, Ill. 1963, 3–84, on 50–2.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Neurath, O., ‘Empirical sociology’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 319–421, on 390.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Neurath, O., ‘Departmentalization of unified science’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 200–5, on 203–5Google Scholar; see also Neurath, , ‘The social sciences and unified science’Google Scholar, in ibid., 209–12, on 211.

¹⁸ Neurath, , ‘Departmentalization of unified science’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 204Google Scholar; see also Neurath, O., ‘Unified science as encyclopedic integration’, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Chicago, i (no. 1), 1–27, on 3Google Scholar. On the possibility of achieving local axiomatizations within the larger unified science, see Neurath, O., ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, 145–58, on 145, 148–9Google Scholar; Neurath, , ‘The new encyclopedia of scientific empiricism’Google Scholar, in ibid., 189–99, on 194.

¹⁹ Zolo, , op. cit. (7), 83Google Scholar; Hempel, C., ‘Logical positivism and the social sciences’, in The Legacy of Logical Positivism (ed. Achinstein, P. and Barker, S.), Baltimore, 1969, 163–94, on 172–3.Google Scholar

²⁰ Between 1938 and 1970, the following monographs appeared. Volume I began with ‘Encyclopedia and unified science’ which combined articles and comments by Neurath, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris. Subsequent monographs are: Morris, , ‘Foundations of the theory of signs’Google Scholar; Carnap, , ‘Foundations of logic and mathematics’Google Scholar; Bloomfield, Leonard, ‘Linguistic aspects of science’Google Scholar; Lenzen, Victor, ‘Procedures of empirical science’Google Scholar; Nagel, Ernest, ‘Principles of the theory of probability’Google Scholar; Frank, Philipp, ‘Foundations of physics’Google Scholar; Finlay-Freundlich, E., ‘Cosmology’Google Scholar; Mainx, Felix, ‘Foundations of biology’Google Scholar; and Brunswik, Egon, ‘The conceptual framework of psychology’.Google Scholar

Volume II consists of: Neurath, , ‘Foundations of the social sciences’Google Scholar; Kuhn, Thomas, ‘The structure of scientific revolutions’Google Scholar; Edel, Abraham, ‘Science and the structure of ethics’Google Scholar; Dewey, John, ‘Theory of valuation’Google Scholar; Woodger, Joseph H., ‘The technique of theory construction’Google Scholar; Tintner, Gerhard, ‘Methodology of mathematical economics and econometrics’Google Scholar; Hempel, Carl G., ‘Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science’Google Scholar; de Santillana, Giorgio and Zilsel, Edgar, ‘The development of rationalism and empiricism’Google Scholar; Joergensen, Joergen, ‘The development of logical empiricism’Google Scholar; and Feigl, Herbert and Morris, Charles, ‘Bibliography and index’.Google Scholar

²¹ Neurath's relative, Waldemar Kaempffert, was a science editor for the New York Times and wrote several articles about the Encyclopedia: ‘Toward bridging the gaps between the sciences’, New York Times Book Review, 7 08 1937, 2Google Scholar; ‘Sciences to be unified through a common language’, New York Times, 14 02 1938Google Scholar. Announcements also can be found in various philosophical journals published during these years.

²² Morris, C., ‘On the history of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science’, Synthese (1960), 12, 517–21, on 518, 519–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ Neurath, O., ‘Individual sciences, unified science, pseudorationalism’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (7), 132–8, on 138Google Scholar; on the Encyclopédie, see Neurath, O., ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 172–82, on 179Google Scholar; Neurath, , ‘Unified science as encyclopedic integration’, op. cit. (18), 7.Google Scholar

²⁴ Neurath gives his most extended treatment of the encyclopedic works of Diderot, , Hegel, , Comte, , Letbniz, and Spencer, in ‘Unified science as encyclopedic integration’, op. cit. (18), 2, 7–8Google Scholar. He mentions also Comenius' Orbis pictus and internationalist Paul Otlet's La Cité mondiale, for example, in ‘An international encyclopedia of unified science’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 139–44, on 143.Google Scholar

²⁵ Neurath, , ‘An international encyclopedia of unified science’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 139–44, on 139–40.Google Scholar

²⁶ Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 172–82, on 181.Google Scholar

²⁷ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 145–58, on 155Google Scholar; see also Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’Google Scholar, in ibid., 175, 178; Neurath, , ‘The new encyclopedia of Scientific Empiricism’Google Scholar, in ibid., 191.

²⁸ Neurath, , ‘Universal jargon and terminology’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 213–29, on 214Google Scholar; see also Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’Google Scholar, in ibid., 180; Neurath, O., ‘Orchestration of the sciences by the encyclopedism of logical empiricism’Google Scholar, in ibid., 230–42, on 235.

²⁹ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 146Google Scholar. There is a tendency among Neurath scholars to inflate the degree to which Neurath seems to have anticipated now entrenched, Kuhnian ideas. Heiner Rutte, for example, implies the anticipation is nearly complete in ‘The philosopher Otto Neurath’, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 92Google Scholar (see also Zolo, , op. cit. (7), 90, 92Google Scholar). Neurath, however, did not suggest what are (or at least were) perhaps the most controversial aspects of Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions: (1) Observations are theory-laden. The precise features of sensations and perceptions were not germane to Neurath's account of protocols, much less any gestalt-like or theory-influenced character they might possess (see Neurath, , ‘Protocol statements’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 91–9Google Scholar). (2) Theories as world-views – one meaning of ‘paradigms’ – are monolithic and incommensurable. Neurath's ‘encyclopedias’ share the holistic nature of Kuhn's paradigms whereby each is globally affected by local alterations. For Neurath, however, the relative ease of making such changes (to mitigate inter-theoretic inconsistencies, for instance) concerns the normative heart of his programme. Kuhn, on the other hand, feels that such innovation will often be impeded by epistemic and even perceptual obstacles. Unlike Kuhn's, Neurath's holism sees theoretical wholes as plastic and easily manipulable, as suggested by his proposals to construct unified science by first resolving the sciences into their smallest theoretical parts. (See Neurath, , ‘Departmentalization of unified science’Google Scholar, in ibid., 200–5; Neurath, , ‘The social sciences and unified science’Google Scholar, in ibid., 200–5.) On one occasion, at least, Neurath further denied that (3) there were separate historical encyclopedias that contradict or compete with each other in history (Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’Google Scholar, in ibid., 157). For an opposed statement, however, see Neurath, , ‘Individual sciences, unified science, pseudorationalism’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (7), 137–8.Google Scholar

³⁰ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 155Google Scholar; Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’Google Scholar, in ibid., 175; Neurath, , ‘The new encyclopedia of scientific empiricism’Google Scholar, in ibid., 191, 194.

³¹ Neurath, , ‘The scientific conception of the world’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 304–5.Google Scholar

³² For an account of Neurath's, Carnap's, Morris' and other philosophers' relations with architectural modernism, see Galison, P., ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: logical positivism and architectural modernism’, Critical Inquiry (1990), Summer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³³ For Esperanto inventor L. L. Zamenhofs beliefs to this effect, see Forster, P., The Esperanto Movement, New York, 1982, 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was staffed at one time or another by Einstein, Marie Curie, Henri Bergson and many other intellectuals and internationalists. From 1922 until the Second World War, the Committee concerned itself with issues such as universal languages, exchange scholar programmes, scientific property rights, and bibliography and abstract standardization in scientific publications. Proposals to initiate the standardization and unification of scientific terminology in meteorology, political theory, economics, archaeology and anatomy were also discussed. As did Neurath, the Committee sometimes referred to its work as ‘coordination’ of the sciences and shared his hopes for advancing science by refining scientific language. The Committee, furthermore, aimed to enlist intellectual cooperation in the League's campaign against war. By facilitating scientific communication and progress, and also by promoting science education, the Committee understood itself to be laying necessary foundations for world peace. See League of Nations, International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Minutes. Geneva: League of Nations Publications, 1922–1930.Google Scholar

³⁵ Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 178.Google Scholar

³⁶ Neurath, M., ‘Memories of Otto Neurath’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 68–71.Google Scholar

³⁷ Promotional flyer, University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections, ‘University of Chicago Press Papers’, Box 346, Folder 3. Similar perceptions of the Fifth International Congress, held at Harvard in 1940, can be found in Singer, M. and Kaplan, A., ‘Unifying science in a disunified world’, The Scientific Monthly (1941), 52, 79–80.Google Scholar

³⁸ Neurath, to McNeill, , 24 05 1943Google Scholar, University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections, ‘University of Chicago Press Papers’, Box 346, Folder 3.

³⁹ Neurath, to McNeill, , 9 09 1943, op. cit. (38).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Neurath, to McNeill, , 24 05 1943, op. cit. (38).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Neurath, to Morris, , 7 01 1942Google Scholar. University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections, ‘Unity of Science Movement Papers’, Box 2, Folder 14.

⁴² Neurath, , ‘The scientific conception of the world’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 306Google Scholar. Neurath discusses the ‘metaphysical countercurrents’ in sociology stemming from Dilthey and others in Neurath, , ‘Empirical sociology’Google Scholar, ibid., 353–8.

⁴³ Neurath, O., ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 249–98, on 306.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Neurath, , ‘Departmentalization of unified science’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 204.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ The role Marxism plays in Neurath's agenda for unified science and Aufklärung has yet to receive comprehensive treatment. Here I shall point out only Neurath's beliefs that (1) the contents of a culture are in some way causally shaped by realities of economy and production (see, for instance, Neurath, , ‘Empirical sociology’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 324Google Scholar), or they are at least consistent with a society's ‘Lebenspraxis’ (see Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in ibid., 293; Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 157Google Scholar); and (2) the reality of class struggle informs public and intellectual debate (see Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3)Google Scholar). If these beliefs render Neurath a ‘marxist’, however, he denied for epistemic reasons – the same that underlie his conception of unified science (treated below) – that long-term theoretical predictions of society or economy could be successful (see, for instance, Neurath, ibid., 293; Neurath, O., ‘Foundations of the social sciences’, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Chicago, 1944, ii (no. 1), 1–51, 28–30Google Scholar). In this way, Neurath's beliefs confound Karl Popper's characterization of him as a ‘historicist’ sociologist whose ‘aim is to make forecasts, preferably large-scale forecasts’ (Popper, K., The Poverty of Historicism, New York, 1957, 103 (no. 1), 39).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 292.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 294–5.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Neurath, O., ‘Utopia as a social engineer's construction’Google Scholar, in Neurath, , op. cit. (3), 150–5, on 150.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Neurath, to McNeill, , 9 09 1943, op. cit. (38)Google Scholar. Here Neurath characterized both the Encyclopedia and his ISOTYPE projects as ‘work dealing with education’. The latter, he said, ‘deal[s] with wider circles of the public’ while the Encyclopedia ‘deal[s] with scientific analysis, but with education, too. We want to educate people.’

⁵⁰ In an early essay on Descartes published in 1913, Neurath explains the prevalence of superstition, belief in prophecy, and ‘the striking lack of criticism with which … election speeches of parliamentarians are received’ as a symptom of non-scientific, ‘pseudo-rationalist’ thinking (Neurath, , ‘The lost wanderers of Descartes and the auxiliary motive (on the psychology of decision)’ in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 1–12, on 8Google Scholar). Eckehart Köhler describes how metaphysics, along with irrationalism, obscurantism and spiritualism ‘could not but appear to the Vienna Circle as the intellectual dumping ground of the Western mind’ (Köhler, E., ‘Metaphysics in the Vienna Circle’Google Scholar, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 131–42, on 138).Google Scholar

⁵¹ Neurath, O., ‘Unified science as encyclopedic integration’, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Chicago, (1938), i (no. 1), 1–27, on 1Google Scholar. As Marx Wartofsky put it, Neurath saw unified science as a ‘servant of the political and social decision making process’ (op. cit. (7), 100).Google Scholar

⁵² Russell, B., cited in Monk, R., Ludwig Wittgenstein; The Duty of Genius, New York, 1990, 39.Google Scholar

⁵³ Carl Hempel objected that Neurath's account could not discriminate between science and ‘fairy-tale’ (Haller, R., ‘History and the system of science in Otto Neurath’Google Scholar, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 33–40, on 37Google Scholar). Moritz Schlick felt much the same way (Schlick, M., ‘The foundations of knowledge’, in Logical Positivism (ed. Ayer, A. J.), New York, 1959, 209–27, on 215–16Google Scholar), and Edgar Zilsel felt that, according to Neurath, , ‘all symbolic edifices stay hanging in mid-air and no structure may be distinguished from totally arbitrary other structures as the structure of the experienced world’Google Scholar (Haller, R., ‘The Neurath principle: its grounds and consequences’Google Scholar, in Uebel, , op. cit. (5), 117–29, on 127Google Scholar). Popper succinctly stated that ‘Neurath unwittingly throws empiricism overboard’ (Coffa, J. A., The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (tr. and ed. Wessels, L.), New York, 1991, 365).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁴ Neurath, , ‘Physicalism’Google Scholar, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 53Google Scholar; see also Zolo, , op. cit. (7), 32–4.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Neurath, , ‘Physicalism’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 53Google Scholar; see also Neurath, O., ‘Physicalism and knowledge’Google Scholar, in ibid., 159–71, on 161. Note that ‘existing statements’ must be construed to mean something similar to ‘statements existing and accepted by practising scientists’.

⁵⁶ Neurath, , ‘Lost wanderers of Descartes’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 3.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Neurath, , ‘Lost wanderers of Descartes’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 3.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ The discussion occurs at the beginning of Part 3 of the Discourse.

⁵⁹ Neurath, , ‘Lost wanderers of Descartes’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 3, 3–4.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 157.Google Scholar

⁶¹ For Neurath, this would be one example of how ‘we often still drag with us the traditional absolutistic terminology that allows reference to the “real world”, the “ideal totality of statements” and other similar things’, Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 147.Google Scholar

⁶² See, for example, Neurath, , ‘Departmentalization of unified science’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 204Google Scholar; Neurath, O., ‘The social sciences and unified science’Google Scholar, in ibid., 209–12, on 211; Neurath, O., ‘The unity of science as a task’Google Scholar, in ibid., 115–20, on 116.

⁶³ Neurath's proposal that ‘we should regard the Social Sciences as a collection of a great many scientific units which can be combined in very different ways’ illustrates this mosaical image of the sciences. Neurath, , ‘The social sciences and unified science’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 209–12, on 211.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ In general, ‘planning’ minimally involves applying the sciences to problems of society, economy and other institutions. The term gained currency in the West in the early decades of this century and figured in most alternatives to laissez-faire social and economic philosophies. Neurath most frequently refers to Joseph Popper-Lynkeus as an economic planner who understood the scientific nature of planning and who contributed to the rise of a scientific view of the world in Vienna (Neurath, , ‘The scientific conception of the world’ in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 303Google Scholar; see also Neurath, , ‘Utopia as a social engineer's construction’Google Scholar, in ibid., 151–2; Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’Google Scholar, in ibid., 262; Neurath, , ‘Empirical sociology’Google Scholar, in ibid., 339). Carnap saw ‘the development of an efficient organization of state and economy’ as a pressing need, and saw much of his own philosophical work as ‘language planning’ (see Carnap, , op. cit. (15), 84, on 67–71Google Scholar; for a comparison of Carnapian language planning and Kuhnian revolutions in science, see Reisch, G., ‘Did Kuhn kill logical empiricism?’, Philosophy of Science (1991), 58, 264–77, on 270–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Herbert Feigl, active in the Vienna Circle with Neurath and Carnap, similarly felt that ‘cooperative planning on the basis of the best and fullest knowledge available is the only path left to an awakened humanity that has embarked on the adventure of science and civilization’ (‘The scientific outlook: naturalism and humanism’, in Readings in the Philosophy of Science (ed. Feigl, H. and Brodbeck, M.), New York, 1953, 8–18, on 18).Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Neurath, O., ‘The theory of war economy as a separate discipline’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 125–30, on 125Google Scholar. As Jordi Cat pointed out to me, Neurath appealed to this difference between considering all possible economic orders and actual orders in his essay of 1910, ‘Zur Theorie der Sozial Wissenschaften’ in Neurath, O., Gesammelte Philosophische und Methodologische Schriften, op. cit. (7), 23–46, on 29.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Neurath, , ‘Utopia as a social engineer's construction’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 151.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ See for example, Neurath, , ‘Lost wanderers of Descartes’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 8Google Scholar; Neurath, , ‘The unity of science as a task’Google Scholar, in ibid., 118; Neurath, , ‘Individual sciences, unified science, pseudorationalism’, in Neurath, op. cit. (7), 136–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Neurath, , ‘Utopia as a social engineer's construction’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 152Google Scholar; see also Neurath, O., ‘International planning for freedom’Google Scholar, in ibid., 422–40, on 426.

⁶⁹ Neurath, O., ‘On the classification of systems of hypotheses (with special reference to optics)’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 13–31, on 13Google Scholar. Here ‘insight’ is a translation of Einblick; in his criticism of Cartesian ‘insight’, Neurath used Einsicht.

⁷⁰ Neurath, , ‘On the classification of systems of hypotheses’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 15, 16, 23, 30.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Neurath, , ‘Personal life and class struggle’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 262.Google Scholar

⁷² Neurath, , ‘Utopia as a social engineer's construction’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 151.Google Scholar

⁷³ Neurath referred to the Encyclopedia as a ‘planned collective work’ and unified science as a ‘planned synthesis’ but never articulated in any systematic way precisely how the enterprise could or should be understood as a kind of planning (Neurath, , ‘Protocol statements’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 99Google Scholar; Neurath, , ‘Individual sciences, unified science, pseudorationalism’, in Neurath, op. cit. (7), 132).Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 148, 153.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Neurath, , ‘Encyclopedia as “model”’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 157.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Cat, Chang and Cartwright describe unified science in terms of Neurath's goal of economic socialism and articulate parallels between Neurath's ‘unity’ and current post-modern notions of ‘disunity’ of science. See, Cat, J., Chang, H. and Cartwright, N., ‘Otto Neurath: unification as the way to socialism’, in Einheit der Wissenschaften, New York, 1991, 91–110Google Scholar. For an account of Neurath's evolving conception of unified science, in the light of his political activities, see Cat, J., Chang, H. and Cartwright, N., ‘Otto Neurath: politics and unity of science’Google Scholar, forthcoming. The present account seeks less to identify Neurath's unified science and his politics than to show their common reliance on the notion of planning. Another difference concerns the degree of systematicity Neurath envisioned in unified science. Cat, Chang and Cartwright rightly oppose Neurath's conception to ‘a single overarching’ science but misconstrue it, I think, as ‘a collection [of statements] that lacks intrinsic systematic order’ (op. cit., 95, 99). Neurath surely did not envision unified science as an explicitly systematic structure and the kind of ‘systematization’ (op. cit. (27), 153) involved in its realization he had in mind is not clear. Without attributing some kind of structure or order to his conception, however, it becomes difficult to understand, for instance, the unifying function Neurath ascribed to the universal jargon; his explication of ‘truth’ as agreement among statements; or, in general, that there is any sense in which scientific statements can exhibit more or less ‘unity’.

⁷⁷ Neurath, , op. cit. (51), 25.Google Scholar

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⁸⁴ Neurath, , ‘Unified science and its encyclopedia’, in Philosophical Papers, op. cit. (7), 181Google Scholar. See also Neurath, O., ‘Anti-Spengler’, in Neurath, op. cit. (3), 158–213, on 199.Google Scholar

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¹⁰³ For a different view of Kuhn's philosophical relationship to Carnap, see Reisch, , op. cit. (64)Google Scholar; for an account of how Neurath pre-figured the epistemological naturalism of Quine – whose work is also reputed to have refuted logical empiricism – see Uebel, , op. cit. (8).Google Scholar