Friedrich Waismann is a key figure in logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Remarkably, he rejected both. Waismann’s contribution to the analytic tradition was initially defined by his twin role as Moritz Schlick’s assistant and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s spokesperson in the Vienna Circle. Following his emigration to England and arrival at Oxford in 1939, he published a series of criticisms of verificationism, reductionism, the analytic-synthetic distinction, philosophy’s therapeutic or clarifying role, and the very idea of ordinary language philosophy. Waismann’s writings were very well received in the philosophical community at the time. Today, however, he is mostly known for his documentation of Wittgenstein’s work and the particular kind of semantic indeterminacy for which he coined the term open texture .
Waismann’s writings span well beyond the philosophy of language. One purpose of this compilation is to cover as many new aspects of Waismann’s philosophy as possible. Several of his original papers are discussed here for the very first time. These are “Ethics and Science”, “Will and Motive”, “Fiction”, “A Note on Existence”, “Belief and Knowledge”, “Two Accounts of Knowing”, and “A Philosopher Looks at Kafka”. Waismann’s distinctive views in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the theory of action are worked out accordingly. Often he would anticipate developments appreciated later in analytic philosophy, as he did with his criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction or with his trailblazing work on fiction and proper names. And, perhaps most surprisingly, we see Waismann’s philosophical outlook put into action with his literary study of Kafka.
The other purpose of this volume is to reconsider Waismann’s somewhat better known contributions at great detail as well. These include his writings in the philosophy of mathematics, his metaphilosophical essay “How I See Philosophy”, and of course his signature work in the philosophy of language. The positions Waismann develops enter interesting relationships with their next of kin, the works of Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine and Wittgenstein. Due to the impact his notion of open texture had on legal philosophy, two chapters on the philosophy of law and legal language complement this compilation.
To represent this vast variety of topics, the volume is organized into three parts. Each part begins with a chapter featuring historical and biographical context and ends with a more metaphilosophical chapter. Part I shows Waismann’s beginnings in the Vienna Circle and contrasts Waismann’s and Wittgenstein’s work on mathematics, ethics, epistemology and metaphilosophy. Part II is focused on Waismann’s most significant contributions in the philosophy of language and its chapters provide in-depth discussions of open texture and his views on language and analyticity. Part III comprises chapters on legal philosophy, theory of action and fiction as well as the study of literature. These topics are quite diverse, but together they paint a most coherent picture of Waismann’s philosophy: The extensive analysis of a scene from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that Waismann placed at the center of his book-length essay “Will and Motive” and that is also discussed in the third chapter of Part III, associates all topics in this final part of the volume.
In the first section of this introduction I put together some glimpses into Waismann’s intricate relationship with the analytic tradition that is mirrored in his main work, The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, as well as in his notion of open texture. In Vienna, Waismann was the first to publish the famous principle that the sense of a proposition is the method of its verification (Waismann 1930/1931). Fifteen years later at Oxford, Waismann’s open texture would identify important limitations of verificationism. For Waismann, many of our concepts are open textured in that they are only defined in certain more or less familiar contexts and remain open to surprising but yet conceivable applications. Waismann’s notion of open texture is productive for its restrictive and at once liberating implications. It allows for the continuous development of language to accommodate new discoveries.
In the second section, I present my own reconstruction and interpretation of the other term Waismann coined: language strata . Waismann conceptualizes natural language as stratified into layers of different character, none of which is more “basic” or reducible to any other. The idea can be found in many of Waismann’s writings and a word on its history adds to the synoptic purpose of this introduction. I try to shed some light on Waismann’s puzzling choice of metaphor that may be the reason why the term open texture enjoyed significantly more uptake in analytic debates, although it forms a part of the theory of strata. In the remaining three sections, I introduce and contextualize each chapter in the three parts of this compilation in turn.
1 Waismann and the Analytic Tradition
Waismann was born in 1896; his mother was Austrian and his father a Russian hardware manufacturer from Odessa. Because of his father’s background, he entered the University of Vienna with the status of a foreigner. He studied mathematics with Hans Hahn, physics with Hans Thirring, and some philosophy with Robert Reininger. Even then it was clear that matters well beyond the natural sciences would interest him. Waismann’s student John R. Lucas recalled:
He once told me that he had originally intended to read classics at the university, but the first lecture on Horace was all about textual cruces and not, as he had expected, about Horace’s poetry at all; and so he switched to mathematics. (Lucas, in: McGuinness 2011, 23)
Schlick’s arrival in Vienna and the initiation of the Vienna Circle would lead to Waismann’s momentous decade with Wittgenstein and the production of a massive manuscript that was only published after his death, in English as The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (1965) and in German as Logik, Sprache, Philosophie (1976). Drawing on conversations they had since the 1920s, the book was intended to be a clear exposition of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Waismann had it almost finished when they decided to work on the manuscript together in the 1930s. But Wittgenstein’s demands for revisions and constantly changing views soon led to the end of their cooperation. Rom Harré, who was also a student of Waismann at Oxford, writes in the preface to his edition of Waismann’s late philosophical works, How I See Philosophy:
In his Principles of Linguistic Philosophy Friedrich Waismann was concerned to expound in as fully explicit and developed a form as possible, the ideas of Wittgenstein. But even though that book was meant as a textbook of Wittgensteinian philosophical method, careful read...