Utopianism, Rationality, and Thought Experiments in Viennese Late Enlightenment

Addendum to the International Conference „International Planning for Freedom“. Otto Neurath's democratic planning theory in the context of the current climate crisis:

Institute Vienna Circle Philosophy of Science Colloquium Special Panel:

Utopianism, Rationality, and Thought Experiments in Viennese Late Enlightenment

June 14th, 1500-1700
tba, Vienna

Contact: [email protected]

15:05 Introduction
Alexander Linsbichler (Johannes Kepler University Linz and University of Vienna)
15:20 Otto Neurath's Scientific Utopianism as Thought Experimenting
Ivan F. da Cunha (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
15:40 Josef Popper-Lynkeus's Utopian Social Program as Universal Basic Income
Marco P. Vianna Franco (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business)
16:00 Break
16:10 Discussion

The panel highlights and critically discusses ideas of the two most prominent protagonists of scientific utopianism in Viennese Late Enlightenment: Otto Neurath and Josef Popper-Lynkeus. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: 1) Neurath’s and (to a lesser degree) Popper-Lynkeus’s epistemology invokes a cautionary notion of rationality. 2) Neurath’s notion of rationality and his strict empiricism inspire a constructive refinement of Häggqvist’s template for thought experiment in contemporary philosophy of thought experiments. 3) Popper-Lynkeus’s social program pioneers topical issues such as calculation-in-kind and universal basic income.
In the first talk, Ivan F. da Cunha will offer a presentation of Otto Neurath's scientific utopianism as a methodology for thought experimenting in the social sciences. Neurath conceives scientific proposals for the transformation of society in a continuum with the utopian tradition. In this sense, Neurath's utopias can be regarded as centerpieces of thought experiments, opening a new front for contemporary discussions in philosophy of science.
In the second talk, Marco Vianna Franco will present Josef Popper-Lynkeus's utopian social program as a peculiar form of universal basic income and discuss the underlying ethics which centers on the right to live and which Popper-Lynkeus claims to be rational and objective. Popper-Lynkeus's contribution to debates on in-kind accounting and provisioning systems bears broader implications for social and environmental issues in contemporary economic and political thinking.

Selected References

• Cunha, I.F. (2022). Objectivity in social inquiry: a discussion between pragmatism and logical empiricism. Cognitio 23(1): e56666. https://dx.doi.org/10.23925/2316-5278.2022v23i1:e56666

• Cunha, I.F. (2022). Experimentos de Pensamento na Crise das Ciências Humanas e Sociais: Articulando Duas Ideias de Kuhn e o Utopianismo de Neurath. Em Construção 11: 73-85. https://dx.doi.org/10.12957/emconstrucao.2022.65663

• Cunha, I. F. d., Linsbichler, A. (2023). Ciência, Imaginação e Valores na Virada Energética Alemã: um exemplo da metodologia de Neurath para a tecnologia social, manuscript.

• Linsbichler, A. (2021). Rationalities and Their Limits: Reconstructing Neurath’s and Mises’s Prerequisites in the Early Socialist Calculation Debates, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (RHETM), 39B, pp. 95-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-41542021000039B008

• Linsbichler, A. (2021). Viennese Late Enlightenment and the Early Socialist Calculation Debates: Rationalities and Their Limits. Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University Working Paper Series, 2021-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3904011

• Linsbichler, A. (2022). Otto Neurath and Ludwig Mises: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in Viennese Late Enlightenment, Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 14(2), pp. 204-210. https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v14i2.623

• Linsbichler, A. (2023). Jan Tinbergen and the Rise of Technocracy, in: F. Stadler (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. 100 Years After the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 28 (pp. 597-604), Springer, Wien, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07789-0_19

• Linsbichler, A., Cunha, I. F. (2022). Otto Neurath’s Scientific Utopianism Revisited: A Refined Model for Utopias in Thought Experiments, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, online first. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-022-09630-5

• Linsbichler, A., Vianna Franco, M. P. (2023). Universal Basic Income in Viennese Late Enlightenment: rediscovering Josef Popper-Lynkeus and his in-kind social program, manuscript.

• Vianna Franco, M. P. (2020). The factual nature of resource flow accounting in the calculation in kind of the “Other Austrian Economics”. OEconomia – History / Methodology / Philosophy, 10(3), 453-472. https://doi.org/10.4000/oeconomia.9296

• Vianna Franco, M. P., Missemer, A. (2022). A History of Ecological Economic Thought. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429345623