Friedrich Stadler

Der interdisziplinäre "Wiener Kreis" (der "Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung", des "Logischen Empirismus") entstand um Moritz Schlick im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit. Er ist bis heute nicht nur in den exakten Wissenschaften und der analytischen Philosophie allgegenwärtig. Er hat darüber hinaus Forschungsfelder wie Ökonomie, Architektur (Werkbund und Bauhaus), Psychologie (Gestalttheorie) oder moderner Literatur mitbestimmt. Seine Wirkung reicht von sozialen Reformbewegungen (Siedlerbewegung) bis in die Kunst der Neuen Sachlichkeit.

How can perceptual experience reveal the truth to us? How can it bear for us on what (or how) to think? Consider a way for something to relate to something such that, depending on how A is, for A so to relate to B may be, eo ipso, for B to be true. There is such a relation, for example, between the thought that Sid drinks and Pia writes and the thought that Pia writes. Here the way that first item must be is specifiable. The way it is: being true. The relation is thus truth-transmitting. In such a relation B, a potential truth, must be something conceptually structured. Now an idea: So, too, A; there are such relations only between conceptually structured things. An idea with some currency. On it, the conceptual is, so to speak, unbounded. In Wittgenstein’s mocking words, “one cannot step outside it, one must always turn back again. There is no outside, outside there is no air to breathe” (Investigations §103). But this idea misconceives radically the business of representing-as, and it is disastrous. For, first, it erases the conceptual altogether. Second, it encourages a sort of desperate reverse-psychologism, with which empirical psychological theses masquerade as conceptual necessities. So the conceptual is bounded. Some relations are, not truth-transmitting, but truth yielding. All this the present brief.

Millikan’s teleosemantic approach constitutes a powerful framework for what evolutionary biologists call an “ultimate” (as opposed to a “proximate”) explanation of the continued reproduction and proliferation of intentional conventional linguistic signs. It thereby aims at explaining the stability of human verbal ostensive communication. This evolutionary approach needs to be complemented by particular proximate psychological mechanisms. Millikan rejects the kind of mentalistic psychological mechanisms posited by the Gricean tradition in pragmatics, according to which the task of the hearer is to recognize the speaker’s intentions. Instead Millikan has persistently argued that verbal understanding is an extended form of perception. My paper is a critical assessment of Millikan’s thesis that verbal understanding of a speaker’s utterance enables the hearer to perceive whatever the speaker’s utterance is about. I argue that Millikan’s thesis rests on two fundamental assumptions. First, Millikan’s notion of extended perception of the world is itself an extension of her semiotic approach according to which the process of ordinary perception (in humans and non-human animals) involves the translation of what she calls locally recurrent natural signs. Secondly, Millikan argues that only humans have the further capacity for flexible extended perception of what she calls detached signs, as opposed to attached signs or location-reflexive signs.

Die Welt ist ein zentrales Anliegen der Frühphilosophie Wittgensteins. In seinen Notizbüchern von 1914-18, im Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, und in seiner „Vorlesung zur Ethik“ kommt Wittgenstein immer wieder auf den Begriff der Welt zurück. Dann wird es vergleichsmäßig still zu diesem Thema. Aber auch in Wittgensteins späteren Denken spielt der Begriff der Welt eine Rolle, insbesondere in Über Gewissheit, wo von anderen Welten und Weltbildern die Rede ist. „Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.“ Was bedeutet der erste Satz des Tractatus? Was heißt es, dass die Welt meine Welt ist? Warum kommt das Subjekt nicht in der Welt vor? Warum kann es in der Welt keine Werte geben? Was sind die ethischen Implikationen dieser Weltauffassung? Was heißt es, wie Wittgenstein zum Abschluss des Tractatus schreibt, die Welt richtig zu sehen? Und wieso muss man dazu erst einmal die philosophischen Sätze aufgeben?

Traditional accounts of the perception/cognition divide tend to draw it in terms of subpersonal psychological processes, processes into which the subject has no first-person insight. Whatever betides such accounts, there seems to also be some first-personally accessible difference between perception and thought. At least in normal circumstances, naïve subjects can typically tell apart their perceptual states from their cognitive or intellectual ones. What are such subjects picking up on when they do so? This paper is an inconclusive search for an answer. At its end, I conclude, without joy, that we may have to simply accept the perception/cognition distinction as a primitive and inexplicable bright line within the sphere of conscious phenomena.

How do you know the posture of your limbs? Do I feel it or do I directly know it? In this paper I will describe Wittgenstein´s and Anscombe’s theory, according to which bodily sensations play no epistemic role. They famously claimed that the sense of position - the ability to report how the limbs are located - does not depend on sensations of position. In this sense, bodily knowledge differs from perceptual knowledge. I know that the sky is blue in virtue of having a visual experience of the blueness of the sky but I know that my legs are crossed independently of the sensation I may have of them being that way. Why is there such a difference? What reasons do Wittgenstein and Anscombe have to deny that bodily sensations play an epistemic role? They claim that the kind of content that bodily sensations are endowed with cannot explain the beliefs that we form about our bodily posture. On their view, it is not fine-grained enough compared to the richness of our bodily knowledge. In addition, it would not be separately describable from the beliefs themselves. I will argue that these objections do not suffice to show that bodily sensations play no epistemic role.

I have argued that early vision is cognitively impenetrable because its processes do not operate over cognitive contents. Recently it has been argued that pre-cueing guided by cognitively driven attention affects early vision rendering it cognitively penetrated. Since the signatures of these effects are found in early vision, early vision is directly affected by cognition since its processes use cognitive information. Here, I defend the cognitive impenetrability. First, I define early vision and cognitive penetrability. I argue that a set of perceptual processes is cognitively penetrated only if cognition undermines the epistemic role of these processes in grounding empirical beliefs. Second, I discuss the problems cognitive penetrability causes for the epistemic role of perception and relate them to the impact of cognitive penetrability on the sensitivity of perception to the data. Third, I examine the epistemic role of early vision and argue that the cognitive effects underpinning pre-cueing do not undermine this role and, thus, do not render early vision cognitively penetrable. In addition, they do not entail that early vision uses cognitive information; they are indirect effects similar to the shifts of overt or covert attention.

The present volume contains primarily the invited papers of the 28th Inter-national Wittgenstein Symposium that was held in Kirchberg am Wech-sel (Lower Austria) in August 2005. It was dedicated to the topic Time and History (Zeit und Geschichte) in an interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from the philosophy of time, in the narrower sense, the approaches of the single scientific disciplines, in so far as they are informed by foundational and philosophical issues, to culture and art. As usual, the contributed papers (Beitr age) were already published prior to the symposium. While the latter volume contains, in a special section, papers dedicated to all aspects of Wittgenstein's work, the present volume focuses on his views about time. The editors are well aware that both time and history are prominently discussed within the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions in philosophy. This was well reflected in the contributed papers, as can be seen in the Beitr age volume, and in some papers dealing with time and history from a cultural perspective. For reasons of thematic coherence and as a consequence of the general orientation of this book series, however, the editors have given priority to philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition in the broad sense. The editors nonetheless hope to have succeeded in presenting an equally focused and comprehensive picture of the contemporary debate.

This edited volume on the philosophy of perception is based on the papers presented at the Wittgenstein Symposium 2017 (Kirchberg, Austria). It covers a wide range of recent topics in the philosophy of perception, from realism and objectivity in perception, intentionality and content, the distinction between perception and cognition, the cognitive penetrability of perception to the epistemology of perception. The volume contains papers by Tyler Burge, Howard Robinson, Olivier Massin, Michael Schmitz, Michael Tye, Marcello Fiocco, Guillaume Frechette, Sofia Miguens, Uriah Kriegel, Pierre Jacob, Mark Kalderon, Berit Brogaard, Athanassios Raftopoulos, Ophelia Deroy, Charles Travis, Johannes Roessler, Philipp Berghofer, Harald Wiltsche, Frederique de Vignemont, Romana Schuler, Ulrich Arnswald, David Stern and Hans Sluga.

In the text, published in the Hebrew book On the Way to Faith (בדרך לאמונה, Yachdav, Tel Aviv 1978, 81–89), Schächter advances his linguistic-philosophical project; as a religious intellectual, he rejects purely descriptive statements of reality in the tradition of the Vienna Circle. As he states, by giving his lecture about pessimistic statements in Vienna in 1937, he aimed to turn the remaining followers of the Vienna Circle away from their sole focus on descriptive statements only. (Compare Chap. 10 of the first volume of this edition.)

This paper was written in 1937 by Josef Schächter und Heinrich Melzer—who like Schächter was a student of Schlick and died in the Second World War—; it was almost simultaneously published in Synthese 64 (1985), 359–374, in English and in Zurück zu Schlick. Eine Neubewertung von Werk und Wirkung, ed. by Brian McGuinness, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Wien 1985, 92–103, in German. Schlick and Melzer describe a physicalism which they claim corresponds to Schlick’s view (and the view of the Vienna Circle in general) and which amounts to saying that “certain correspondences between our experiences and physical events render our science possible and make it a system of propositions that are intersensually and interpersonally testable”.

In this essay, published in Hebrew in his book Studies in Contemporary Thought (עיונים במחשבת זמננו, Yachdav, Tel Aviv 1977, 41–49), Schächter harshly criticizes the current philosophical practice and teaching at universities, which in his opinion is antiquated and adheres unquestioningly to dogmas and idols of the history of philosophy. According to Schächter, the Vienna Circle is the only philosophical movement that succeeds, at the crossroads of time, in doubting what had been unanimously accepted until then due to a breach caused by new scientific developments. As an outright revolutionary philosophical method, logical empiricism does not establish any new laws but rather conducts an analysis of the philosophical question posed.