PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS VIENNA CIRCLE COLLECTION Editorial Committee HENK L. MULDER, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University, Boston, Mass., U.S.A. BRIAN McGUINNESS, The Queen's College, Oxford, England Editorial Advisory Board ALFRED J. AYER, New College, Oxford. England t Y. BAR-HILLEL, The Hebrew Universitv, Jerusalem, Israel ALBERT E. BLUMBERG, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A. HASKELL B. CCRRY. Pennsylvania State University, Pa., U.S.A. HERBERT FEIGL, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn., U.S.A. ERWIT\ N. HIEBERT, Harvard University, Camhridge, Mass., U.S.A. JAAKKO HIC\iTlKKA, Academy of Finland, Helsinki, Finland t VIKTOR KRAFT, Vienna, Austria KARL ME:-':GER, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, /11., U.S.A. GABRIEL NlCIIELMAI\:S. University of Leyden, Leyden, The Netherlands AC\iTHONY M. QUINTON, New College, Oxford, England J. F. STAAL, University of California, Berkeley, Calif, U.S.A. VOLUME 8 EDITOR: BRIAN McGUINNESS FRIEDRICH WAISMANN (1896-1959) FRIEDRICH WAISMANN PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS Edited by BRIAN McGUINNESS With an Introduction by ANTHONY QUINTON D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT -HOLLAND I BOSTON-U .S.A. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Waismann, Friedrich. Philosophical papers. (Vienna circle collection) 'Bibliography of works by Friedrich Waismann': p. Includes index. CONTENTS: Editor's note. - The nature of the axiom of reducibility. - A logical analysis of the concept of probability [etc.] I. Philosophy-Collected works. I. Title. II. Series. B1669.W41 1976 100 76-41280 ISBN-13: 978-90-277-0713-0 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1144-0 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-1144-0 Chapters I, /I, III. V, VI, and /III/ translated/rom the German h.l' Hans Kaal Chapter IV translated from the Dutch h.l' Arnold Burm.\· and Philippe I'an Par.l's. Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, Dordrecht, Holland Sold and distributed in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Inc. Lincoln Building, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, Mass. 02043, U.S.A. All Rights Reserved Copyright c 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland and copyrightholders as specified on appropriate pages within No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner CONTENTS Introduction by Anthony Quinton IX Editor's Note XXI I. The Nature of the Axiom of Reducibility (1928) II. A Logical Analysis of the Concept of Probability (1930) 4 III. The Concept of Identity (1936) 22 IV. Moritz Schlick's Significance for Philosophy (1936) 30 V. Hypotheses (before 1936?) 38 VI. Is Logic a Deductive Theory? (1938) 60 VII. The Relevance of Psychology to Logic (1938) 68 VIII. What is Logical Analysis? (1939) 81 IX. Fiction (1950) 104 X. A Note on Existence (1952) 122 XI. A Remark on Experience (1950's) 136 XII. The Linguistic Technique (after 1953) 150 XIII. Belief and Knowledge (1950's) 166 XIV. Two Accounts of Knowing (1950's) 179 Bibliography of Works by Friedrich Waismann 186 Index of Names 189 INTRODUCTION Friedrich Waismann was born in Vienna in 1896 and lived there until the time of the Anschluss in 1938. From then until his death in 1959 he lived in England; this, apart from a brief period at Cambridge early on, was almost wholly at Oxford, \,Vhere he held the posts, first, or reader in the philosophy of mathematics and then of reader in the philosophy of science. He was of Jewish descent - his father being Russian, his mother German. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and attended the lec­ tures of Hahn. Beginning his career as a teacher of mathematics he soon be­ came an unofficial assistant to Moritz Schlick. It was Schlick's concern to see that the new philosophical ideas developed by Wittgenstein from the time of his return to philosophy in the later 1920s were made public that de­ termined the subsequent shape of Waismann's activities. Until the out­ break of the war in 1939 his main task was the preparation of a book in which Wittgenstein's thought was to be systematically expounded. Be­ tween 1927 and 1935 this project was carried on in close personal conjunc­ tion with Wittgenstein. A first version of the planned book, Logik. Sprache. Philosophie seems to have been completed by 1931. A very differ­ ent version came to England with Waismann in 1938. It finally appeared, in an English translation, as Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. in 1965, six years after Waismann's death. Had it been published when it was ready, fif­ teen years before the publication ofWittgenstein's Philosophicallnvesliga­ lions. it would have had the most notable impact. As it happened it at­ tracted comparatively little notice. By the time it did come out the main content of Wittgenstein's later thought was already publicly available in Wittgenstein's own words and the publication.of all Wittgenstein's unpu­ blished material was already well advanced. Furthermore Wittgenstein's philosophy had to some extent lost its hitherto indisputably commanding position in the centre of interest of the English-speaking philosophical world. Behind this set of objective historical facts lies a story of great pathos, x INTRODUCTION even a tragedy, a philosophical analogue of Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple. Under the influence of his admiration for Wittgenstein and his personal de­ votion to Schlick, Waismann, at the crucially formative stage of his career, gave himself over wholly to the task of organising and expounding the ideas of someone else. By 1935 Wittgenstein was no longer willing to collab­ orate directly on the task. When Waismann came to England and sought to renew the collaboration Wittgenstein rebuffed him. The other source of Waismann's self-denying commitment, Schlick, had been murdered in 1936 and before his death his interests were already moving away from the area of Wittgenstein's main concern. Waismann. thus had to undergo a double intellectual and personal deprivation in addition to the ordinary spiritual dislocations of exile. Waismann was not the only person to suffer from Wittgenstein's capri­ ciously dictatorial temperament. But Waismann's achievements are such as to add a sense of loss as well as of sympathetic pain to the contemplation of his life. It seems clear that Wittgenstein benefited from all the work that Waismann did on his behalf. Waismann, despite a cultural predilection for the poetically indefinite and impressionistic, was a lucid and coherent ex­ positor. In his drafts Wittgenstein would have found, not misinterpreta­ tion, which would have been understandable enough, given the profound originality and constitutional inchoateness of Wittgenstein's thinking, but as faithful a reflection of what it actually was at the time as could have been provided. If at first he could properly reprove Waismann for supposing that his thought in the late 1920s had not moved as far from the doctrines of the Tractatus as it had, in rejecting Waismann's work after that error had been corrected he was really expressing dissatisfaction with himself. It was as ifWaismann was a kind of human notebook in which Wittgenstein could see, and respond critically to, the results of his own reflection. The articles collected in this volume fall into two historical groups: the first, those written or published between 1928 and 1939, being with one ex­ ception the work of his time in Vienna, in close collaboration for a time with Wittgenstein and throughout with Schlick; the second composed en­ tirely of unpublished work written in England in the 1950s. This feature of the selection gives a misleading impression of discontinuity. As his Aristo­ telian Society symposium paper of 1938, on the relevance of psychology to logic suggests, he was continuously productive from the moment of his ar- INTRODUCTION XI rival in England. It is just the fact that his main writings in the period from 1945 to 1952 (the articles 'Verifiability' and 'Alternative Logics' of 1945, his 'Analytic/Synthetic' series in Ana~)'sis between 1949 and 1952 and his paper 'Language Strata') are already easily accessible that excludes them. Waismann's philosophical career falls into three main stages. The first runs from 1927, when the frequent discussions with Wittgenstein, often in the company of Schlick, began, until Wittgenstein broke offthe collabora­ tion in 1935. The chief published fruit of the work of this stage was Wais­ mann's very Wittgensteinian Einfiihrung in das mathematische Denken of 1936. During this period the first version ofWaismann's general account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, Logik. Sprache. Philosophie seems to have been completed by 1931. During the previous year it had been announced as the forthcoming first volume of the Vienna Circle series Schrijien zur wissenschafilichen WeltauJfassung. The advertisement described it as a cri­ tique of philosophy through logic. 'This work', it went on, 'is in essentials a presentation of the thoughts of Wittgenstein. What is new in it and what essentially distinguishes it is the logical ordering and connection of these thoughts'. The contents were set out as follows: I. Logic (meaning, refer­ ence, truth, truth-functions, essence of logic); 2. Language (analysis of statements, atomic sentences, logical representation, limits oflanguage); 3. Philosophy (application of results to philosophical problems). No copy seems to have survived. In the period from the middle 1930s to his departure for England, the sec­ ond stage, Waismann published a number of articles in Erkenn(nis (those on identity, logic as a deductive theory and logical analysis that are chap­ ters III, VI and VII in this volume) but was mainly concerned with complet­ ing the revised version of Logik.