Abstract:
The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the
Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and
inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific
philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the
logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of
the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only
half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us
appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical
dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions to
Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our
current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those
terms were used in a much more open-ended way.
The
paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting
from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective
positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the
nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions,
and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent
secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed
examination of a turning point in their relationship. That
turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a
recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the
Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged
use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it
in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall
be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of
Carnap’s."
While
the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the
primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant
languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual
understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of
the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later,
we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them
than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of
historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared
that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s.