Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: couched in the historical mode.It is not mannered and mandarin enough to be written by Quine.The obvious alternative is Popper.Yet the piece lacks the faux naif blandness of Unended Quest.It might be culled from The Open Society and Its Enemies, which includes a critique of positivist dogma in the notes, but in that case one would expect it to be written in the present tense.After all, in the early forties most of the logical positivists were still alive, and still true believers.Neurath had escaped the Nazis in an open boat, and the universal jargon was still one of his pet projects 2 .Give up?Then how about this?From the beginning we shall teach children Newspeak -purged completely of crimethink or anything that can lead to crimethink -as the language of Ingsoc which has been historically provided.Each child will thus be 'trained' to start with a simplified Newspeak and gradually advance to the Newspeak of adults.... The child does not learn a primitive version of Newspeak from which the grown-ups' Newspeak derives; the child learns a 'poorer' Newspeak which is gradually enriched.Well that's easy!The words 'Newspeak' and 'crimethink' are a dead giveaway.Obviously this passage comes from Orwell's 1984.Some unusually frank Party member -probably O'Brien -is expounding party policy.The idea is to induce ideological conformity by means of linguistic reform. Neurath and Newspeak.Actually you would be wrong.But I must confess that I have cheated.Though both quotations are genuine, and both are derived from eminent authors, both have been doctored to suit my purposes.It is the first not the second that comes from 1984.I have simply substituted 'universal jargon' for 'Newspeak', 'logical empiricism' for 'Ingsoc' and made one or two other minor changes.In the original it reads as follows:The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make other modes of thought impossible.It was intended that when the Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and the Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -that is a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -should be literally unthinkable, at least in so far as thought is dependent on words.Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party Member could properly wish to express, 2 He died in December 1945 of a heart attack.while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.This was to be done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.To give an example, the word 'free' still existed in Newspeak but it could only be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is free from weeds'.It could not be used in the old sense of 'intellectually free' or 'politically free' since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.(Orwell, 2008: 312-313.)To be precise this extract comes from the Appendix in which Orwell, in his authorial persona, explains the principles of Newspeak.What about the second passage?This is vintage Neurath, from his famous essay 'Protokollsatze'.In fact the passage occurs shortly after the famous simile of the ship of knowledge.All I had to do was switch 'Newspeak' for 'universal jargon', and 'crimethink' for 'metaphysics' and the task was almost done.The unadulterated text reads as follows:From the beginning we shall teach children the universal jargon -purged completely of metaphysics -as the language of unified science which has been historically provided.Each child will thus be 'trained' to start with a simplified universal jargon and gradually advance to the universal jargon of adults.... The child does not learn a primitive universal jargon from which the grown-ups' universal jargon derives; the child learns a 'poorer' universal jargon which is gradually enriched.(Neurath, 1983: 82-83) Note how easy it was to make the switch.By swapping a word here and a phrase there I am able to convert Orwell's account of the linguistic policies of the Party into a description of Neurath's program.It was a hostile description to be sure, but not, I think, an inaccurate one.By swapping a phrase here and a word there I was able to convert Neurath's modest proposals for linguistic reform into a Party manifesto for the principles of Newspeak.And the reason is obvious -the two programs are indeed alike 3 .Like the devotees of Ingsoc Neurath looked forward to a future in which heretical thoughts -metaphysical thoughts as he supposed -could not be expressed.He had his personal Index verborum prohibitorum
Author: Charles Pigden
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2120823084