It's striking nowadays to hear a philosopher say that 'we want a unified account of our knowledge'; even more striking to hear him say 'I think we can get it'; very striking indeed to hear this from a philosopher of language. That wouldn't always have been so. A hundred years or so ago, there was great enthusiasm for looking closely at the structure of sentences and at the distinction Frege had drawn between their sense and reference (the difference between saying that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying that Samuel Clemens did - Clemens was Twain's real name - where the sense, the cognitive significance, is different but the reference is the same); a great will, too, to separate sentences that were true by definition from those that weren't, and among those that weren't, to admit only those that could be independently verified. This was at the heart of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle for which Otto Neurath wrote the manifesto in 1929. And Neurath persuaded his colleagues (and the University of Chicago Press) that it was possible to bring all that was positively known into an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The unification would be provided by the purified language of meta-theoretical propositions. (Twenty monographs for the encyclopedia appeared between 1938 and 1969 but only two of the foundational volumes were published before the project eventually lapsed.)

LRB 20 January 2011 | PDF Download