Otto Neurath Quotes on Politics
Otto Neurath, a leading member of the Vienna Circle, brought a strongly social and democratic spirit to philosophy and science, and the quotes gathered here reflect it. A committed socialist, Neurath designed pictorial systems for visual education precisely so that knowledge could be made accessible to all, and he held that philosophy itself should be practiced as a public, cooperative activity. His most famous image rejects the dream of absolute foundations: we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship, rebuilding it plank by plank without ever starting afresh from the bottom. Knowledge, on this view, is a system of statements always open to discussion and revision, compared with other statements rather than with some unmediated reality. Drawn from his writings on science and society, these passages present inquiry as a public, collaborative, and never-finished enterprise.
Quotes
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Attributed to Otto Neurath:
“Statistics are the foundation of social science.”
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Attributed to Otto Neurath:
“Visual education makes knowledge accessible to all.”
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Attributed to Otto Neurath:
“Philosophy must be practiced as a public, cooperative activity.”
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“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
Otto Neurath (1921), "Spengler's Description of the World," as cited in: Nancy Cartwright et al. Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 28 Apr. 2008 p. 191 -
“Science as a system of statements is always an object of discussion. Statements are to be compared with statements, and not with 'experience', or with 'the world', or with something else. All that meaningless doubling belongs to more or less subtle metaphysics and as such must be rejected. Every new statement is to be confronted with existing ones, already brought to a state of harmony between themselves. A statement will be considered correct if it can be joined to them.”
Otto Neurath (1931), "Soziologie im Physikalismus", in Erkenntnis , Vol. 2. p. 403; as cited in: Schaff (1962;84) -
“Quite a few political economists advocate the thesis that a Robinson Crusoe — or what amounts to the same thing, a controlled economy — calculates in terms of profits and losses.”
1930s | Otto Neurath (1935) "What is Meant by a Rational Economic Theory?" 1935/1987, p. 95; as cited in Cat (2014)