Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) was at the heart of the discussion group known as the “Vienna Circle,” and this essay presents his view of the philosophical position—which came to be called “logical positivism”—that is most closely associated with that group.

Assignment for Wed. 2/19: §§1-2, pp. 478-492

The paper begins with §1, whose title, “Preliminary questions,” has dropped out of this translation. These preliminary questions provide the context for section 2, but they are most directly relevant to §3, which we will discuss on Fri. The key ideas in the first part of the paper appear in §2, which presents Schlick’s version of a view about meaning that has come to be called “verificationism.” This is stated near the beginning of the section (mainly on pp. 483f) and elaborated and defended in what follows. The most important part of this later material for the actual content of Schlick’s verificationism is probably his discussion of point (2) on pp. 487f.

Assignment for Fri. 2/21: §3, pp. 492-505

The issues Schick addresses in §3 are worth discussing in their own right, but they also provide an occasion for considering connections between Schlick’s view and others we’ve discussed. Schlick’s topic in this section suggests a connection with Peirce, and you should think about similarities and differences between Schlick’s verificationist view of meaning and Peirce’s pragmatism. (When many of the logical positivists came to the US with the rise of Nazism, they found pragmatists to be their most natural conversation partners, and the question of the relation between the two movements came to be particularly important in the decades after WWII.)

Also, notice Schlick’s insistence (on pp. 493 and 495) that reference must be by way of descriptions and ask yourself why this should be so. Why can’t we just say something like “This is real”? (Russell at one point held that terms like ‘this’ were the only proper names that couldn’t be analyzed as definite descriptions and that they referred to objects of immediate experience—i.e., roughly to ideas in Frege’s sense—which could not be shared.)