The Lives and Ideas of the Vienna Circle

Josh Landy
Is metaphysics just a bunch of nonsense?

Ray Briggs
Is it okay to believe something you could never prove?

Josh Landy
Could logic be a solution to the world’s problems?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about the lives and ideas of the Vienna Circle.

Josh Landy
Oh right, you mean that group of Viennese philosophers from the 1920s people like Max Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, Kurt Gödel?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, they believed that science and logic are the best tools for understanding the world. And that meaningful claims are the ones that can be verified by experiment. And a lot of metaphysics is meaningless, like all that stuff about God.

Josh Landy
All that stuff, but I get it, we can’t verify whether God exists or not. But does that really mean it’s nonsense? I mean, you know, if you’re talking about God saying this, or that, you might people might disagree, but they understand what you mean. And how could it be meaningless?

Ray Briggs
Well, you just said it yourself. We can’t verify whether God exists. So that means the existence of God doesn’t change anything. The philosophers in the Vienna circle thought that for something to be meaningful, it had to make a difference to what we can see and hear and touch.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, maybe, but none of that proves that God doesn’t exist.

Ray Briggs
That’s exactly the point. You can’t prove or disprove God’s existence, any more than you could prove or disprove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. That’s the whole problem.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you’re starting to sound like Karl Popper.

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, he was a friend of the Vienna circle.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s not making more me more of a fan. I mean, Popper had this weird idea that good theories must always be falsifiable. Like, if nothing could ever possibly disprove them, they’re clearly bogus, like, like astrology or something.

Ray Briggs
Well, what’s wrong with that? Theories are only meaningful if they can be tested through observation.

Josh Landy
That’s a nice idea. I’m just not convinced it’s true. I mean, okay, you like math? Right?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, you bet. It’s one of the few sources of certainty in my life.

Josh Landy
Okay. Well, would you say that maths can be tested through observation? Is there any experiment that could ever possibly convince you that two plus two doesn’t equal four?

Ray Briggs
Well, okay, no, but that’s, that’s because mathematical statements are true by definition.

Josh Landy
Whose definition? I mean, what if two different mathematicians have different ways of defining the terms?

Ray Briggs
Well, they could both be right. A lot of philosophers in the Vienna Circle thought that truth was relative.

Josh Landy
Wait a minute, I thought you were saying that they’re all about science and objectivity. Now you’re telling me they’re a bunch of pomorelativists?

Ray Briggs
Not exactly, I didn’t think that just any old way of looking at things was as good as any other? Look, a theory is better if it makes more observable predictions. So for example, like the periodic table is a really good scientific framework, because it lets us predict the weight of a beryllium atom before we could even measure it.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And that was very cool. I grant you that. The problem is, though, I’m not sure it’s strictly speaking, observable. I mean, you can’t like weigh an atom in your hand, you have to use all this fancy scientific instrument stuff and do all kinds of complicated calculations, you practically need a whole theory of chemistry just to interpret the results.

Ray Briggs
Okay, there there are definitely some details to iron out. But the philosophers in the Vienna Circle had a lot to say about these issues. And I bet our guest David Edmonds can fill us in. His new book is “The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle.”

Josh Landy
But who were these Vienna Circle people anyway? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede find out. She files this report.

Holly McDede
In a nutshell, the Vienna Circle was a group of scholars who got together in Vienna to talk. And at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a lot to talk about.

Jordi Cat
Theories, for example, Einstein’s theory of relativity in the world were making a splash.

Holly McDede
Jordi Cat is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. In 1915, Albert Einstein had published his general theory of relativity.

Jordi Cat
So that’s the truck with all these sciences and intellectually informed and curious and ambitious scientists to actually become also a bit of philosophers.

Arthur Eddington
You’re late. Well, I was invited precisely the time I was supposed to arrive here. Therefore, it was impossible for me to be here when I left.

Holly McDede
That’s from the film Einstein and Eddington. Arthur Eddington was an English scientist who championed Einstein’s ideas, even as England stood by their beloved Isaac Newton. England and Germany were at war, and Britain had banned the circulation of German scientific literature.

Unknown Speaker
The stupid and futile wall killed him. Expelling German scientists, it won’t bring any one of the Cambridge was back. Evington, the pursuit of truth in science transcends national boundaries. It takes us beyond hatred and anger and fear. It is the best of us. What truth? That there are no rules, no standards, no moral absolutes, that you break all the rules of science and replace them with nothing? What does your Einstein what? He wants what I want: a new theory of gravity.

Holly McDede
The members of the Vienna Circle were also grappling with the horrors of war.

George Reisch
Which I think motivated members of the Vienna circle to say, you know, we really need to dig deep here and start rebuilding our culture.

Holly McDede
George Reisch is the author of “How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic.” He says the idea was this: devastation beyond all imagination could have been avoided if people were more prone to thinking clearly and scientifically.

George Reisch
And we are going to handle the philosophical side by promoting a new philosophy.

Holly McDede
But lies were also spreading rapidly. Nazism swept through Europe and many members of the Vienna Circle fled, some to the United States. But during World War Two and its aftermath, there was little appetite for philosophers who wanted to shake up American higher education and philosophy. Loose lips, they say, sink ships.

George Reisch
In times of war, people change, something happens to culture and one thing that happens as people don’t like anything that could be perceived as subversive, or disunifying, to the national mission.

Holly McDede
Instead, the movement focused on the nature of language. And Reisch says the Vienna circle can still teach us a lot about how to grapple with false and dangerous ideas

George Reisch
To see how this this movement of philosophers and allied intellectuals were grasping in their dealing in their own ways, with you know, as we would call it, now, misinformation, propaganda.

Holly McDede
But then again, if most people switched from reading propaganda online to reading the philosophy at the Vienna Circle, we’d probably be living in a different reality right now. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede,

Josh Landy
That would indeed be a great improvement. Thanks for that fascinating report. Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the lives and ideas of the Vienna Circle.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by David Edmonds. He’s a senior research associate at the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He’s also a co-producer of the “Philosophy Bites” podcast, and the author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle.” Dave, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

David Edmonds
Thanks, Ray. And hi, Josh.

Josh Landy
Hi, Dave. So Dave, you have this fantastic podcast that talks about all kinds of topics from freewill to paradoxes, even swear words. So what get you interested in a group of philosophers from 1920s Europe?

David Edmonds
I guess there are two reasons. The first is that my first book which was called Wittgenstein’s Poker was about a clash between two brilliant philosophers, Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. And Vienna was kind of the background to the dispute between them and so that’s when I first got into the Vienna Circle. The second reason is more personal. And that’s because I have Viennese relatives. My grandmother was Viennese, and was actually at university at roughly the same time as members of the Vienna Circle. So I had a very personal interest in Vienna of the 1920s and 30s.

Ray Briggs
So today, people often think of the Vienna circle is apolitical, but many of them fled Europe to escape the Nazis, was there something about their ideas that Hitler found particularly upsetting?

David Edmonds
Yeah, they almost all fled Europe. In fact, only two of them remained in Vienna during the course of World War Two. Most of them had fled by the time the Nazis arrived in 1938. But Austria had been under fascist control since 1934. I guess, there are several reasons why the fascists and the far right oppose them first, and most obviously, at least a half of them were Jewish, or, you know, fully Jewish or Jewish extraction. They were mostly, not all, but mostly they were socialists, and all of them were anti metaphysics. And they were the anti the metaphysics that was part of Nazi doctrine. So there were aspects of Nazi doctrine that they thought were untestable and unverifiable unfalsifiable. There are various ways of describing it. And that made them natural enemies of the Nazis and the fascists.

Josh Landy
So what’s an example of that some, some metaphysics that the Nazis were fans of?

David Edmonds
Well, for example, a relationship which the Nazis felt that the German people had to the soil, a sort of blood relationship to the soil, or the idea that there was a folk that there was a people over and above the set of individuals within a community or within a country, they had this mythical idea of the German folk. And that was another idea which the Vienna circle said was untestable unverifiable. And so as I say, they were very natural critics of the Nazis. And as soon as the fascists came to power in 1934, in Austria, the Vienna Circle was effectively closed down, it stumbled on for another few years. But, you know, the first kind of endpoint of the Vienna circle is 1934, and the arrival of the fascists.

Ray Briggs
I definitely see how those Nazi ideas are opposed to an anti metaphysical worldview. Do you think socialism followed in any sense from the Vienna Circle’s anti metaphysical views? Or was it just another commitment that a lot of them happened to have?

David Edmonds
No, it didn’t follow at all. In fact, it was a great controversy, how you get politics back into the worldview of the Vienna Circle, because there were aspects of politics, namely, normative values that were themselves untestable unverifiable. So it was a great problem for them, why they should be of a particular political persuasion, and not another political persuasion, and they have to try and smuggle politics back in, it’s worth saying that the founder of the Vienna circle, Moritz Schlick, his name is in the title of the book, and was murdered in 1936. He was not a socialist, he was a conservative with a small c, and he was very opposed to the idea that the Vienna circle should have a political agenda. But there was a left wing faction within the Vienna circle, which moved into a Marxist wing. One of the main members of the Vienna circle was a chap called Otto Neurath, who was a Marxist, there was a left wing faction, who was agitating for the Vienna circle to take a political stance, and the leader of the circle Moritz Schlick opposed them on that. So they didn’t by any means have a uniform attitude towards politics.

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the Vienna circle with David Edmonds, author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle.”

Ray Briggs
Should we always judge theories by their testable predictions? Where do we draw the line between sense and nonsense? Can logic help?

Josh Landy
Science, metaphysics and the limits of language along with your comments and questions when Philsophy Talk continues?

Today, we’re dancing to the Venus schnitzel waltz. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the lives and ideas of the Vienna circle with David Edmonds, author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick.”

Josh Landy
Moritz Schlick survived the Spanish flu and we are making our way through COVID, which means unfortunately, we’re still pre recording the program from the safety of our respective homes and we can’t take your phone calls today. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Dave, at the beginning of the show, Josh and I were arguing about whether a statement can be meaningful if it doesn’t have any observable consequences. I know the Vienna circle would back me up here. What do you think they’d say in my defense?

David Edmonds
Yeah, we want to say probably that astrology is not science, we want to draw a distinction between science and astrology. So I read my, you know, if I read my horoscope, today, I would say something like, I will meet a person who will open up new opportunities or I don’t know I will suffer a temporary setback but overcome it. you’d notice sort of during this low? Yeah, I’ve got about 45 minutes to achieve that, you know, the kind of, you know, the kind of rubbish you get in horoscopes. It’s nonsense. And it seems to be of a different kind to the sort of assertion that a scientist will make. But we want to try and highlight what the difference is, it turns out that’s quite a difficult distinction to draw. And it’s one of the projects that the Vienna circle set themselves was to try and draw that distinction. You mentioned Karl Popper. Karl Popper, who was never a member of the circle, but was associated with it. That was his main project to try and draw a demarcation between what was science and what wasn’t science.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s really interesting. And gee, we could do with that right around now. Right?

One of the things I found fascinating in your book, actually, is that they they didn’t agree entirely among themselves, but seems like psychoanalysis ended up falling on the side of pseudoscience, which gratified me. Can you say a little bit about that?

David Edmonds
Well, Vienna, of course, was the home of psychoanalysis. And many of them were psychoanalyzed. So they were operating at roughly the time that Sigmund Freud was in town, and he began the whole school of psychoanalysis. Several of them had had psychoanalysis, other philosophers from the UK, travelled all the way to Vienna to get psychoanalyzed a very, very important philosopher, Frank Ramsey, had gone to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed. So there were many philosophers who took psychoanalysis very seriously. The question was, was it a science? They were confused about this, conflicted about this. Wittgenstein, who himself wasn’t a member of the circle, but was a great inspiration for the circle, Wittgenstein had a lot of time for psychoanalysis, and particularly, for the writings of Sigmund Freud. The question was, could it be tested? If you made a claim about, let’s say, the reason you put that rather aggressive question to me was because your mother had smacked you when you were seven years old? Well, in what sense is that testable? Are there ways of saying one psychoanalytic claim makes more sense than another? And what would the difference be between good psychoanalysis and bad psychoanalysis? So that was the debate that they had internally.

Ray Briggs
Right, I’m particularly curious about psychology, because some of it seems like it’s about biological things and drugs. But some of it seems like it’s not about things that are as easy to manipulate, as what chemicals somebody is taking. So parts of psychology that study how people’s childhoods affects them in adulthood, for instance, it’s not ethical to manipulate children to see if you give them psychological problems by stressing them out when they’re kids. So if I have a theory, that hypothesis is about how somebody has childhood affects them in adulthood, does it count as testable or not?

David Edmonds
Well, I certainly think there are lots of ways you could test certain claims like that. So if you said that, if you treated a child, if you abused a child in a particular way, there was a massively increased chance that they would go on to be abusive in adulthood, you could make that claim. And then you could look at stats, and we’ve got lots of stats now more than we ever had before. And you could see well, does that claim make sense? Is it borne out by the stats? Is it the case that if you’ve been abused as a child that that is predictive of whether you will become abusive? So I think lots of those claims do definitely fall within the scientific realm. And often people draw a distinction between science and social science. In other words, between the natural sciences, the sciences like physics and chemistry, and the social sciences, which are to do with human beings. And I think they’re both within the realm of science. The only difference is that social sciences are much harder, because humans are very complicated creatures, but they can be put in a laboratory and tested or you can make these observations about them in various ways. So I think claims about human beings and the social sciences do fall within the realm of science and are open to various kinds of tests and predictions and falsifications.

Josh Landy
So you’re making a really attractive case for the Vienna circle. I mean, this idea that we should, you know, combine empiricism and logic, right, and base your beliefs on observations you can make about the natural world, including, I guess this the social world, the psychological world. Plus, you know, whatever follows logically from those observations. One of the things I found really intriguing in your presentation of it, Dave, is, you know, the claim that it’s really relevant now. You know, now in this age of fake news and post truth, do you think that, you know, we should be bringing the Vienna circle way of thinking back? Can it help us?

David Edmonds
I definitely think it can. I think they had all sorts of problems. So they try to define what counted as verification. But I think the spirit was right that they were trying to do something important, which was to distinguish between scientific claims and claims which had had no link at all with truth or falseness, or just bad science. So I mean, just to take an obvious contemporary example, if Donald Trump claims that at his inauguration ceremony, there were more people than there were at Obama’s inauguration ceremony. He makes that claim, and many people believe it. Well, I think we should take the claim seriously. And the claim is either true, or it’s false. And there are ways of assessing whether it’s true or false. You can find out roughly in various ways, how many people attended Obama’s inauguration, how many people attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, you can look at photo evidence, there’s all sorts of evidence that you can produce to test that proposition. And people somehow shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making those claims, and then not being open to scrutiny. So as you say, we live in a world of fake news. This is a new term fake news that we’ve always had propaganda. But we ought to be able to hold claims up, hold propositions up to the microscope or the magnifying glass, and analyze them, and be able to distinguish those which have some basis in reality, and which can be tested, and those which are just false, or BS.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the Vienna circle, with David Edmonds from the University of Oxford.

Ray Briggs
So Dave, I wanted to ask more about verification. You said the Vienna circle, got themselves into all sorts of trouble about what looks like a pretty intuitive concept. You want to be able to test something by doing an experiment. Why is it a troublesome concept?

David Edmonds
Yeah, so it seemed like it was very straightforward when they first raised it, something to be meaningful had to fall into one of two conditions. Either it has to be true in virtue of the meaning of the terms. So for example, all triangles have three sides. All bachelors are unmarried men. You mentioned mathematical truths. That was a very interesting one, because they really were puzzled about how to understand mathematics and whether mathematics was empirical, or whether as they eventually decided, inspired by Wittgenstein, or perhaps by Ramsey, that mathematics had nothing to do with the world out there. It was had nothing to do with observation. It was another linguistic conceptual domain, so that two plus two equals four was just true in virtue of the meaning of the terms. So there are those kinds of propositions to do with concepts and language and logic. And then there are claims about the world such as water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. So that seems like a very straightforward, two sided claim. The problem was what counts as verification? Just take history, for example. If I said that, I don’t know Abraham Lincoln ate a boiled egg on October the fifth 1843 at 8:05am. Presumably, that’s either true or its false. He either did eat a boiled egg at that moment, or he didn’t. But there may be no data, no documentation to check whether or not that is true. I mean, perhaps lawyers, perhaps a historian will ring in and tell me exactly what Abraham Lincoln was doing on that day. But but assume there isn’t any documentation about it. It doesn’t seem to be a meaningless claim. And as I say, it seems to be either true or false, but it doesn’t necessarily seem to be verifiable. So one issue was whether things are in principle verifiable or whether they are practically verifiable and that was one thing they disagree about.

Ray Briggs
So I actually have a question from a listener, which I think is meaningful, but I’m not sure whether the answer is verifiable. Tim in Portland asks, what if Professor Schlick had taken another appointment and hadn’t been shot? Would it have changed the development of logical empiricism had Schlick lived?

David Edmonds
That is a very interesting question. As you say, counterfactuals, one doesn’t know how to deal with them. Because was it possible that Shlock was not shot? If you’re determinist, and I have a determinist instincts actually, I kind of think well, it was inevitable that Shlick was going to be shocked at that moment at that time. Did it make a big difference? It almost certainly did. Shlick was the key figure in the Vienna circle had he lived on then the Vienna circle might have stumbled on a bit longer. Having said that, I mentioned earlier on that the fascists had arrived in Austria in 1934. And that was four years before the Angelus and the Nazis arrived. But the Vienna circle had effectively been closed down and many of the Vienna circle had already fled by the time Shlick was murdered. What was so interesting about Shlick’s murder, of course, is how it was interpreted by the Austrian fascist press, who all welcomed it as a blow against logical positivism or logical empiricism. Sometimes it’s called logical positivism. Sometimes, it’s called logical empiricism. The two terms are more or less interchangeable. And Shlick, they said was a Jewish professional, which was not true. He wasn’t Jewish. But it was broadly welcomed in parts of the fascist press in Austria, just because he was the main representative of logical positivism.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s horrifying. And it brings us back to the really fascinating relationship between the Vienna circle and politics, as you said earlier, they officially were supposed not to have ethical and political stances, all of that stuff is is technically speaking nonsense from their point of view. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking reading your wonderful book that Otto Neurath ends up being sort of the secret hero. He’s kind of a rock star, right? This guy who, who was involved in the Munich socialist government in 1998. He had this amazing museum for teaching even illiterate people important facts about society through pictures, he invented the ISO type these universally recognizable understandable images. He said words divide pictures unite. He was campaigning in his own way against racism. Did you end up sort of developing a soft spot for him too?

David Edmonds
I loved that. I know that I think it’s a total scandal, that there isn’t a proper biography of auto noisette existing so if there any biographers listening, please write a biography of Otto Neurath that he is an extraordinary character. He’s an economist. He’s a political scientist. He’s an activist, he’s a Marxist, he has the most extraordinary life where he’s constantly sort of on the run, because he’s both Jewish and a communist. That is not a good combination in Austria in the 1930s. He goes to Moscow, and he has a hard time with the Stalinists. He escapes by the skin of his teeth. When the Nazis enter Holland, because he’s fled to Holland, when the fascists take power in Austria, he then comes to England. He has the energy of 15 human beings.

Josh Landy
Do you agree with you know, we heard in Holly’s Roving Philosophical report at the beginning? You know, George Reisch, saying scientific thinking could have averted World War One maybe, you know, and the manifesto of the Vienna circle was calling for various reforms. Do you think, you know if the Vienna circle had continued to flourish? I mean, could you really get a good politics out of Vienna circle thinking?

David Edmonds
I don’t think you could read off any politics from the Vienna circle. What happened was that Moritz Schlick was thinking of leaving Austria in the late 1920s and decided to stay in Vienna. And to thank him, some of the other members of the Vienna circle, including Neurath that you just mentioned, wrote a manifesto. Shlick was really annoyed about this manifesto, because it was an extremely political manifesto. And he wanted politics kicked out of Viennese circle thinking, and partly because I think he was slightly cowardly about it. He was worried about the implications of getting too political and quite rightly, as it turned out, but they wrote a manifesto for him, which was much more radical than he would have wanted, what some of the circle get out of their approach to the world is a kind of utilitarian approach. So they can’t derive many normative consequences. Because the problem with saying, making ethical statements like murder is wrong, is that that is neither true by definition, nor is it open to being tested. So it looks like you can’t get normative judgments within an Vienna circle framework. So there were a group of Vienna circle thinkers, who went down at sort of utilitarian view, and said, well, what you can do is measure whether people are happy, you can sort of quantify well being. And so knowing that, although he was a Marxist had a utilitarian dimension to him, and Karl Menger, who was an economist who was associated with the circle, that’s how he gets politics into the Vienna circle framework, he becomes a utilitarian and he analyzes society by dimensions such as well being.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the lives and ideas of the Vienna circle, with David Edmonds, author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick.”

Ray Briggs
How did the Vienna circle influence today’s philosophers and scientists? Which of their lessons should be carried forward into the 21st century? Does philosophy have a place in a scientific world?

Josh Landy
Philosophical foundations for the future, plus a conundrum from one of our listeners when Philosophy Talk continues.

Please stop doing metaphysics said the Vienna circle philosophers to anyone who would listen. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is David Edmonds, author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick.” And we’re thinking about the lives and ideas of the Vienna circle.

Josh Landy
And we have another email from a listener. This one’s from Nancy in Altadena. Nancy says, as I understand it, when early modern scientists began using the term laws of nature, it was a metaphorical way of saying that just as God has given laws to humans for their behavior, so also has God given laws that natural processes must follow. However, during the later modern period, for example, [unintelligible] the laws came to be seen as something of a force on their own. But let me get to logical neopositivists, the laws were mathematized, wherever possible. So the laws came to entail logically, and therefore necessarily the events that could be deduced from them. Is this anywhere close to an accurate account?

David Edmonds
Gosh, you have some very intelligent listeners. Well, laws of nature, they were exactly the sorts of things that the Vienna circle wanted to test. So I mean, that’s what scientists do, don’t they? They, they derive laws of nature, they say, so long as the following conditions are met, you will get the following result if you do X, Y, and Z. And the verification principle said, let’s see whether that’s true. Let’s see whether this particular law of nature holds. Let’s test it. Let’s test it again. Let’s test it under new conditions. Let’s test it again. And it occurred many times, well, that we could determine that law of nature held on planet Earth. Now, a number of things to be said about that. One is, it’s based on inductive reasoning. So you say, you spot it, once you spot it twice, you spot it three times, you assume therefore the law of nature holds. Karl Popper’s criticism was that there was a problem with the logic of induction. Namely that let’s say you say all swans are white. You see a white swan you see another white swan, you see a third white swan, you see white swans everywhere. That seems to suggest that all swans are white. That’s not quite a law of nature, but you can see the parallel with laws of nature. The problem is, you might eventually see a black swan. And that’s why popper wanted to say that you shouldn’t have verification, you should have falsification. But you should set up a claim about a law of nature, whatever. And you could see whether it held and you could assume maybe it does help hold until it’s falsified. And popper wanted you to be All about that he, the bigger the claim, the better as far as he was concerned, the Vienna circle didn’t quite know how to deal with this criticism, but they ended up coming up with a view about confirmation. So they didn’t say that something was proved, if you claimed a law of nature, and you tested it 1000 times, that didn’t prove it. But every time something seemed to support your scientific hypothesis that provided confirmation, not proof, but confirmation. And that led to a whole set of complicated arguments about what counted as confirmation, what confirmation was, and so on.

Ray Briggs
So it seems to be like a lot of scientific theories in the real world can’t be definitively verified or falsified because a lot of them are statistical. So even in physics, you have quantum mechanics, making statistical predictions about sort of frequencies and experiment outcomes. And so if you, if you see a frequency that doesn’t match your theory, it seems like it could just be a fluke. So does that have to do with the move to confirmation rather than verification or falsification?

David Edmonds
Well I mean, yes, and no, quantum mechanics was fascinating for the circle. And it was precisely why so many of them got into the philosophy of science, they were writing and thinking at precisely the time that Heisenberg was coming up with the uncertainty principle, and you had Einstein’s theory of relativity. And none of these were intuitive theories. But I mean, there are lots of statistical claims that can easily be tested. So if I say if I rolled a dice, there’s a chance of one in six, that it will land on the number four, that is a statistical claim which can be tested. So you can see over a large number of throws whether it does land, one in six times. So they certainly also argued about the nature of probability. But probability claims can be tested in the same way that other claims can be tested. There are some problems where you talk about one off events. So suppose I say, there’s a 10% chance that before this program ends, well, let’s 10% is a bit of an exaggeration. Let’s say I say there’s a naught point naught naught naught naught naught naught naught 1% chance that before this program ends, the world will be extinguished. Let’s hope it doesn’t, because, you know, that will be the end of a great series, but if I make that claim, how would you test that? That’s a one off claim. And, you know, there is a big problem with that. So there are, there are lots of problems with it. There’s also if I can just throw in one more. If you come up with something that seems to falsify a claim, it may be that that particular experiment was done under incorrect conditions, and that you want to stick to the theory and reject this particular case, which seems to condemn or falsify the theory. So that’s an added complication, because sometimes it’s just not simply the case. That something which seems to falsify, it does falsify, it may be that you’ve got something wrong with the test tube, or the atmospheric conditions are all wrong or something like that. So there were many, many complications. And what seemed like a straightforward project, when the Vienna circle started, you can already see is full of complications.

Josh Landy
Dave, you mentioned in your book that, you know, not every circle of philosophers of this period had women in you know as as members, but the Vienna circle did. Rose Rand, Olga Hahn, [unintelligible] in England was later influenced by it. Can you say a little bit about these figures?

David Edmonds
Yes, it is interesting. I mentioned my grandmother. So she was another woman who was at the University at the same time, there were women, undergrads at a time when there were very, very few women undergrads. And, you know, all around the world, basically. And these these students were not just undergrads, they went on to get PhDs. And they themselves were fascinating figures. Olga Hahn, was the sister of a mathematician called Hans Hahn, who was a key figure, and one of the founders of the circle and she has an interesting life. She goes blind, very young, and she marries Otto Neurath, who we talked about earlier. Rose Rand had a very tragic life. She was a interesting logician who took sexist connotations in this of course, but she took some of the minutes of the Vienna circle which became quite valuable later. Neurath wanted to get hold of them later stage and she had a very difficult life never quite finding an academic establishment that would take her. But they were these female members of the circle, they played a very important role. And it was interesting. They all had similar backgrounds, actually. So they were of Jewish, assimilated background. So they were from families, who believed in education, wanted to educate their daughters wanted their daughters to get on encouraged their daughters. And that’s why you get this surprising number of women in the circle.

Ray Briggs
Dave, if we wanted to pick one lesson that contemporary scientists and philosophers should carry forward from the Vienna circle, what would you pick?

David Edmonds
I think I would go for clarity. The Vienna circle had many virtues. But one of their chief virtues was a desire to make everything as clear as possible. They were dealing with very, very complicated questions, very complicated philosophy. There’s lots of squiggles and equations in Vienna circle philosophy, which is very hard to understand. But they did their best to make everything as clear as possible. And that is something that we still see in Anglo American philosophy today. And I think that’s probably one of the most important legacies of the Vienna circle, this drive to clarity, and their criticism of metaphysics. And many of the, what we now regard as continental philosophers was, it was often very difficult to work out what they were claiming. And they strove to try and make their opponents statements as clear as possible, and when they couldn’t they sort of rejected them. But it was this drive to, to be clear, not to be pretentious to be understood, which I think is a very important lesson. I think that’s should be a virtue for contemporary philosophers. You know, I think that it’s very anti democratic, for contemporary philosophers to write in such a way that other people can’t understand them. Some of the best philosophers in the history of philosophy, write beautiful, beautiful English, David Hume is a prime example. You can write very brilliant philosophy. And you can write it in clear terms that people can understand. And I think the Vienna circle would endorse that message.

Josh Landy
I couldn’t agree more. This has been extremely clear and unpretentious, but also incredibly illuminating and inspiring. So thank you so much for joining us today, Dave.

David Edmonds
I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much indeed, for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been David Edmonds, co-producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast, and author of “The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So at the beginning of the show, Holly talked to George Reisch. And I would really recommend his book, “How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic.” So this kind of follows the next chapter in the lives of the Vienna circle philosophers after they had fled Europe and immigrated to America, and started dealing with America’s own kind of Cold War politics. And it says both how this transformed them and how they transformed sort of some of the discourse in the US in ways they persist to this day.

Josh Landy
Brilliant. I’m gonna reread Dave’s Wittgenstein’s Poker, the other great book. And we’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And now let’s check in with the listener looking for a little philosophical advice. It’s time for a conundrum. Dan, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Dan
Thank you for having me.

Ray Briggs
Where are you calling from Dan?

Dan
I’m from Davis, California.

Josh Landy
Excellent, so what’s your conundrum for us?

Dan
Well, I have a friend who I admire. She’s a thoroughgoing vegan, and she aims to be consistent in her veganism, but she keeps a carnivorous pet. And I think every time she feeds her dog, how can she do this while she’s not eating meat? She’s giving her dog meat every day. And so I thought, is she been inconsistent? Or am I being too harsh?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a doozy. Ray, you have a dog, a lovely dog named Blossom. Do you feel guilty about this? What’s your take on this?

Ray Briggs
Oh yeah, I absolutely feel guilty about this, but this has not compelled me to behave in a consistent way. So I just tried to reduce the amount of animal products I consume, rather than trying to abstain from consuming animal products. One of the things I just consume, not for myself, but for my dog is dog food. Um, and so then I think like I’m being inconsistent about this, but at least I’m being better than I would be if I tried to be consistent, so I could be consistent in a way that, so I guess, like the best way to be would be to be consistently vegan in every aspect of my life. And then I either am not able or not willing to do that, which is definitely a flaw in me. And your friend sounds more admirable because she’s just consistently vegan. But then if you can’t be consistently vegan, maybe it’s better to be inconsistently, mostly vegan, rather than consistently not caring about animals at all.

Dan
Right, the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good, right?

Josh Landy
I love that way of thinking about things. I mean, you know, I remember reading a stat about how much how much of a good impact would have on the world, just if people ate meat one time, less per week. You know, and, and so I wonder if that I’m very tempted by this, not that we of course, that we should lower our standards for ourselves. But, you know, maybe your friend would be really lonely without dogs, and her life would be so much the worse that, you know, she, it’d be harder for her to do all the other good things she does contributing to the world. So, you know.

Dan
Yeah, that’s one thing I’ve noticed is she has an excessively happy pet. So its, its utility is very high. For her, it makes her very happy. And it’s small. So maybe this is an argument, if you got to keep it at and it’s carnivorous, keep a smaller one. So it’s going to eat other fewer animals than it would otherwise. My friend has one other factual argument. She says dog food is mainly byproducts. And so these were animals that were being killed anyway. And this was food that was or flesh that was going to waste because humans wouldn’t need it. And so that’s that’s another argument.

Josh Landy
That classic, good consequentialist argument. I mean, I’ve got a friend who is a vegan, but will wear a second hand leather shoes, right? Because, you know, he didn’t cause them to be made. And I can see the argument there.

Ray Briggs
Actually, I mean, no animal product that you buy is one that you cause to be made, because you’re buying it is downstream from it being made. I think there is like a really interesting question about what is your causal impact when you use animal products, because you didn’t, you didn’t kill that animal. And maybe you made it more probable that one more animal would be killed by creating a market for it. But it looks like it really looks like this is a collective harm. That’s hard to pin on individuals, but still kind of messed up to participate in.

Josh Landy
I’m feeling better and better about your friend. And I’ve got to tell you, she’s a wonderful person. She’s a strict vegan. She buys the pet food that’s mostly made of byproducts. This is a small pet. It makes her happy, fills her with joy.

Dan
Yeah, she’s definitely a better person than I am. So that’s not the question. And I guess maybe if you set your ideals high enough, it makes it harder to be consistent. So that’s the price you pay for, for lofty ideals.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I liked what you said about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I also, one thing I said to Josh, when you sent your question was, look, do you want to be consistent? Or do you want to be better? Because sometimes that’s the choice you have.

Josh Landy
Right. Well Dan, I hope that we’ve provided- and I hope we haven’t sounded like we judged your friend, your wonderful sounding friend. And I hope we’ve brought some clarity in this really interesting and difficult topic.

Dan
This is helpful, this is helpful, I appreciate it, and keep up the good work.

Ray Briggs
If you got a conundrum that’s got you in a bind, a dilemma in your personal life that might benefit from some philosophical insight, send it to us at conundrums@philosophytalk.org and maybe we can think through it together.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy,

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.