Dejan Makovec

Open texture splits our concepts in unpredictable ways when we try to accommodate new discoveries or insights. This property of concepts can best be seen in contexts of standardized language and classification, for example in law or science. In this paper, I contrast open texture with three other historically related observations about the indeterminacy of our concepts: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, Otto Neurath’s Ballung concepts, and Rudolf Carnap’s open concepts. All four of these featured in the history of the philosophy of measurement where they proved to be differently useful. I suggest that points of philosophical departure can be found in a discussion group of the Vienna Circle on measurement in the social sciences as well as in the history of the operationalization of schizophrenia. What makes open texture distinct is that it serves as an irreducible characteristic of empirical knowledge: research and discoveries will perpetually change the very concepts by which we set out to systematically learn about the natural world.

Dejan Makovec suggests that the acquaintance with Gilbert Ryle and his conception of philosophy as cartography around 1945 breathed new life into Waismann’s idea of a multi-layered structure of language. A notebook on language strata from Waismann’s Nachlass shows that the metaphor is explicitly geological in analogy to sedimentary strata, adding depth to Ryle’s two-dimensional view of philosophy and language. Makovec concludes that “Language Strata” is a blueprint for Waismann’s projectionism, an alternative to the reductionist projects of his time.

Open texture splits our concepts in unpredictable ways when we try to accommodate new discoveries or insights. This property of concepts can best be seen in contexts of standardized language and classification, for example in law or science. In this paper, I contrast open texture with three other historically related observations about the indeterminacy of our concepts: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, Otto Neurath’s Ballung concepts, and Rudolf Carnap’s open concepts. All four of these featured in the history of the philosophy of measurement where they proved to be differently useful. I suggest that points of philosophical departure can be found in a discussion group of the Vienna Circle on measurement in the social sciences as well as in the history of the operationalization of schizophrenia. What makes open texture distinct is that it serves as an irreducible characteristic of empirical knowledge: research and discoveries will perpetually change the very concepts by which we set out to systematically learn about the natural world.

Anthropologists of the ontological turn claim that certain entities, processes, and relations are in principle inaccessible to outsiders of specific communities. Philosophers of ethnobiology see a challenge to the integration of scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature in this claim. They propose to negotiate integration within a framework of overlapping ontologies. I explicate the methodology of the ontological turn and claim that it offers a better understanding of knowledge integration than does the philosophers’ framework. Based on two case studies, I argue for a revised notion of knowledge integration that takes scientific change and mutual influence between communities into account.

This edited collection covers Friedrich Waismann's most influential contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of language: his concepts of open texture and language strata, his early criticism of verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction, as well as their significance for experimental and legal philosophy. In addition, Waismann's original papers in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics are here evaluated. They introduce Waismann's theory of action along with his groundbreaking work on fiction, proper names and Kafka's Trial. Waismann is known as the voice of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Vienna Circle. At the same time we find in his works a determined critic of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, who anticipated much later developments in the analytic tradition and devised his very own vision for its future.