Science: Toward Unity

Off the University of Chicago’s presses last week came two blue-covered pamphlets whose importance to the present and future progress of science and scientific philosophy was belied by their size and price (75 pages and 59 pages; $1 each). The title of the first was Encyclopedia and Unified Science; of the second, Foundations of the Theory of Signs. The two are forerunners of 18 more to be published by August 1939. The first 20 pamphlets, comprising two “volumes,” are to be the starting point for other volumes. Editor-in-chief of the project is Otto Neurath.

Hulking, booming Otto Neurath, who gives the impression of oozing vitality from every pore, is a social scientist of international distinction. Son of the late Economist Wilhelm Neurath, he was born about 50 years ago in Vienna, became a professor of economics at Vienna’s commercial Hochschule. In that city he founded and directed for nine years a museum of social and economic sciences. Of strong socialist leanings in politics, he now lives in The Hague, is writing a book to be called The Life of Modern Man. Some years ago. Dr. Neurath devised a method of conveying social and economic statistics by means of quantitative symbols called “pictographs” or “isotypes”—a method which has been widely adopted in factual journalism.

In Vienna, Otto Neurath headed a group of thinkers known as the “Viennese Circle,” who decided that Science with a capital S should have a unified language and should be in fact a unified human endeavor. Out of this grew a series of yearly congresses on unified science, held in Prague, Paris, Copenhagen, Cambridge, and attended by scholars from many lands. Dr. Neurath’s plan of an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science moved toward fruition. This large project was not intended to impose an arbitrary super-system on all the branches of learning, or to suppress honest controversy over the interpretation of facts, which is a potent stimulus to scientific progress. The Encyclopedia was rather to build bridges from one science to another, to show the unity of the scientific attitude, purpose and method. It was to be a scientific study of science — an encyclopedia of “Metascience.” Says Dr. Neurath of his project: “[It] so aims to integrate the scientific disciplines, so to unify them, so to dovetail them together, that advances in one will bring about advances in the others.”

Dr. Neurath’s associate editors are Professors Rudolph Carnap and Charles W. Morris of the University of Chicago. The introductory pamphlets contain articles by these three and by Denmark’s Niels Bohr, England’s Bertrand Russell, Columbia University’s John Dewey. Scores of other savants will sound off on “Metascience” in the pamphlets and volumes yet to come.