Background
Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz was born on April 14, 1882 in Berlin.
Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz was born on April 14, 1882 in Berlin.
Berlin 1900-1904, Heidelberg 1901, Lausanne 1902. PhD in Physics, Berlin, 1904: Habilitation, Rostock. 1911 (concept of truth).
Rostock 1911-1921. Kiel 1921. Chair of the History and Theory of the Inductive Sciences. University ofVienna. 1921-1936.
Moritz Schlick was the key figure in the later development of the neo-positivist Vienna Circle. An early exponent of Einstein's relativity theory he was brought, at the suggestion of Hans Hahn, from Kiel to the Vienna Chair orginally created for Ernst Mach. At least initially, though, his work shows no trace of the verilicationist doctrines usually associated with the Vienna Circle. Schlick’s approach also differed from that of his associates in that there was little of their obvious left-wing and anti-clerical politics. Schlick’s antimetaphysical programme sought a more scientific and rigorous philosophy, depending on a logical analytic approach. In this, no doubt, he was one source of the anti-historical attitude that so marked off the neo-positivists from even their hero Mach among their predecessors. In his early work the general theory of knowledge was to be modelled on the abstract sciences, particularly physics and mathematics. It was to be purely discursive, consisting of the knowledge of the relations between things, not the acquaintance with things in themselves, which he regarded as metaphysical. Such purely propositional knowledge was to be attained by conjectural systems of concepts set up as signs to represent things, to symbolize them and their mutual relations, and be verified after the fact. Truth, not rejected by Schlick but regarded as easily obtainable compared with the more valuable generality of relations, is defined by the existence of unambiguous reference to the facts. In this discursive propositional system concepts were defined implicitly by their place in the system, and theory was thought of as a kind of net giving each concept and thus object its place. It thus functioned as a classification of reality. It is hard to assign the detailed influences behind Schlick’s work. He shows acquaintance with most of the empiricists and rationalists among his predecessors, in French and English as well as in German, including the nineteenthcentury positivists and neo-Kantians. His system, however, has much in common with that of Duhem of the early 1890s, no doubt because of their mutual dependence on nineteenth-century physicists like Kirchhoff and acquaintance with highly formalized mathematical systems. It has also, with its strongly fallibilist tendency, much that would have been more acceptable to Popper than the later verificationist and probabilistic theories associated with neo-positivism. Its one feature in common with later neo-positivism is its insistence that analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori are mutually exclusive, and on the principle of contradiction. The verifiability theory of meaning was very much a later development, possibly under the influence of •he Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. It is difficult to see how Schlick could have acquiesced in anything like the doctrine, possibly misrepresented by Ayer, that meaningful sentences were logical constructions out of sense data. For if sense data are genuine sensations, signs could never be logical constructions of what they signify, and if not, it remains unclear how concepts and propositions do in fact represent the actual sensations.