Circle alive shifted to points at issue between the programs of Carnap and
Neurath.
For Neurath, science can be sufficiently demarcated from meaningless
philosophies by the program of the unification of science, with Carnap-like
protocol sentences at the core and the laws of physics as connections. Undis-
turbed by the critiques of Popper and Gödel, Neurath jettisoned the search for
a verification principle; science does not start from absolute foundations but
rebuilds constantly, like a ship being repaired while sailing on the open sea.
Even observational sentences are revisable, and all beliefs are fallible (Coffa,
1991: 363). After Neurath died in 1945, Quine inherited Neurath’s slot within
the array of oppositions of the late Vienna Circle. Quine was Carnap’s longtime
correspondent, but reputations are made by disagreement, and Quine made
his by pushing onward to surprising consequences for the formalist program:
the endless adjustability of languages to avoid falsification on particular em-
pirical points, the indeterminacy of exact translation among languages, and
even denial of the distinction between empirical and logical-analytic proposi-
tions. The first two of these points were paralleled a generation later by Kuhn’s
theory of conservative scientific paradigms and their incommensurability.
Yet a further legacy of the Vienna Circle to the post-positivist philosophy
of the next generation was to come. Neurath had always been the organiza-
tional mover of the Vienna Circle; in the 1930s, as the group began to emigrate
under the Nazi threat, Neurath transferred most of their publication efforts
from Erkenntnis into the Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Eventually he trans-
planted this to the United States, where he joined forces with Charles Morris,
and thus with the pragmatist lineage of Peirce and Mead. The last notable act
of the Encyclopedia, and hence of the Vienna Circle’s organizational core, was
to commission Thomas Kuhn, a physicist turned historian, to write The Struc-
ture of Scientific Revolutions.^28
The aftermath shows the fruitfulness of the Vienna Circle’s vein of puzzles
even in the failure of almost every item in its program. The radical conse-
quences which Neurath and Quine turned up could be seized on by anti-for-
malists and anti-positivists, just as Kuhn was to become the darling of student
Marxists and deconstructionists. But the underlying thrust of the movement
was in the methods of philosophy rather than its contents. An array of formal
logics was created to explore the rich vein of problems; analytical techniques
became dominant, above all at American universities, in the midcentury gen-
eration. What made the logical positivist movement so effective in capturing
philosophical attention space was not its solutions but the puzzles turned up
by its formal methods. The real discovery of the Vienna Circle was the location
of deep problems, and the conundrums of logical formalism were just what
gave them the materials on which to continue their work.
730 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths