To continue with the analogy, here is a rhetorical question: If a doyen of a philosophical movement worked for Joseph Goebbels’s State Ministry for Propaganda without any of his fellow philosophers ever batting an eye, can we imagine a historian of philosophy claiming that members of that philosophical movement were “always on the side of the angels” and that they rejected Nazism?
1 According to Karl Menger, also a Vienna Circle member, Hahn was “a convinced socialist” and he “always articulated his unpopular leftist convictions freely and forcefully” (Menger 1994, 58).
2 Physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was involved on the side of the forces that crushed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, later said: “Pillage and robbery, of which I myself once had direct experience, made the expression ‘Räterepublik’ [Soviet Republic] appear to be a synonym for lawless conditions” (Cassidy 2009, 53).
3 Max Weber was a witness at the trial, and although he had put in many good words for Neurath in the hope of making a lighter sentence more probable, he still couldn’t help expressing surprise that Neurath did not admit the obvious and simply say: “Yes, that corresponded to my beliefs and I stayed because the government wanted to realize those ideas that I regarded as correct” (quoted in Neider 1999, 307).
4 VOKS was an abbreviation (in Russian) for All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which was “primarily a propaganda arm of Soviet power working in close contact with the Party hierarchy, Comintern, Commissariat Ministry of Foreign Affairs and secret police” (Clark 2011, 39; emphasis added).
5 Departing Moscow, Neurath could not return to Vienna because the police were looking for him there. He received a warning in a coded message sent to him from Vienna that said “Carnap is waiting for you.” This meant he should avoid Austria and Germany and go to Holland via Prague, where Carnap was teaching at the time (Sigmund 2015, 264).
6 Robin Kinross (1994, 73) thinks that since the graph is not signed “Institut IZOSTAT” and is not up to their usual standard in some other respects, it should not be taken to represent the work of Neurath’s group. But his view is refuted by the fact that Neurath’s main collaborator, Gerd Arntz, did include this very graph in the book describing the approach to symbols and statistics that he developed together with Neurath (Arntz et al. 1979). Let me add that in order to reprint the graph (Figure 2.1) here, I had to ask Gerd Arntz Estate for permission. It was also reproduced in Stadler 1982 (259).
7 This was not an isolated case. Neurath and his associates used to include in their graphs similar projections based merely on the wishful thinking of the Soviet government: “This visual statement of future success was a typical feature in IZOSTAT charts” (http://isotyperevisited.org/2009/09/the-second-five-year-plan-in-construction.html)
8 There is evidence that the scales finally fell from Neurath’s eyes in 1939 when he became “completely depressed” after the Hitler-Stalin pact (Neider 1999, 330). But we should also remember that those who were completely depressed by Stalin’s becoming Hitler’s ally in 1939 were typically those who had placed blind faith in Stalin and the Soviet Union up until the signing of the pact.
9 Interestingly, Nancy Cartwright tried the same “Look, it’s not all as bad as it could have been!” defense in another philosophico-political scandal in which she was also involved. When Saif Gaddafi (son of the Libyan satrap Muammar Gaddafi) applied to a PhD program at the London School of Economics in 2003, Cartwright urged the Department of Government to accept his application although she herself said at the time that Saif could do a PhD only if he “agreed to hiring a tutor again [!] and to having lessons to improve his English” (www.woolflse.com/dl/woolf-lse-report.pdf, 32). After the Department of Government rejected Saif’s application, he was nevertheless accepted by the Philosophy Department and Cartwright agreed to be his main supervisor, although the topic of his dissertation was outside her academic competence. She insisted later, rather oddly, that “there is nothing objectionable about a situation where a main supervisor is an academic who confesses she is not an expert on the matters in the thesis” (ibid., 37). And when it turned out subsequently that parts of Saif’s dissertation were plagiarized, Cartwright commented: “I can hardly be confident that nobody else helped him since there’s evidence that he lifted bits, but I’m confident that it isn’t in the sense done by anybody else start to finish” (www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/lse-insider-claims-gaddafi-donation-was-lsquoopenly-joked-aboutrsquo-2240488.html). Again, is this easily detectable instance of academic dishonesty supposed to be somehow less worrying and embarrassing (especially for the principal supervisor)just because the plagiarism did not amount to 100 percent? It would be hard to deny that Cartwright and other philosophers bear a large degree of responsibility for this whole affair and for the fact that LSE was later ridiculed and referred to as the “Libyan School of Economics” and “the London School of Useful Idiots” (Martins 2011, 287).
How Philosophers of Science Promoted Leftist Pseudoscience
“Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.”
—ROBERT CONQUEST
Otto Neurath was just one member of the Vienna Circle. What were the political views and activities of other logical positivists? It is well known that the majority clearly leaned to the left. As Rudolf Carnap stated: “All of us in the Circle were strongly interested in social and political progress. Most of us, myself included, were socialists” (Carnap 1963, 22). We should remember that declaring oneself to be a socialist in the 1920s and 1930s was often associated with either open or tacit support for the Soviet Union, or at least reluctance to criticize it harshly.
As a curiosity, the first-ever use of the term “logical positivism” is associated with the philosopher Albert Blumberg, who had an interesting philosophical–political career path (Blumberg & Feigl 1931). Blumberg was initially connected with the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s he became a professor in the department of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was also on the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, established in 1934. In 1933 he joined the American Communist Party and was appointed the chairman of its Agitprop Committee. His commitment grew so strong that he resigned from his university position and became the secretary of the Maryland/District of Columbia branch of the Communist Party of the United States. When Blumberg was tried in 1956 for an attempt to overthrow the American government, a witness, who at one point had been interested in joining the Party, reported that Blumberg had scoffed at his suggestion that social change could be a peaceful process. The witness claimed that Blumberg insisted that bloodshed is inevitable in a revolution and then asked him: “Are you prepared to take a rifle and fight in the streets of Baltimore?” (Pedersen 2001, 114). Another witness testified as well that Blumberg advocated violence (Belfrage 1973, 250).
Let us briefly look at the journal Philosophy of Science, which was (and still is) published by the Philosophy of Science Association and in which many of the classic articles of logical