As a logical construction, his work seems to capture the world in its totality, but even the very description brings up the need to go beyond the logically secure. He necessarily has to talk about what is deemed to be passed over in silence.

  (p.214) The possibility of a closed consistent logical framework was supposed to be demonstrated by the establishing of mathematical systems by Russell, White‐ head, and Frege. The path, however, turned out to be littered with stumbling blocks. Gödel put the final hurdle in the way of progress. The hoped‐for certainty evaporated when investigated in detail.

  The loss of naive understanding was even more patent in natural science. First, Einstein destroyed the permanence of space and time; then quantum physics removed the remaining vestige of the hope to capture reality in a nexus of logically introduced symbols. The extremely successful quantum theory does not provide a description of our experience as a closed totality. Modern science does not provide a world where humans can live.

  The classical universe of Newton and Maxwell has been replaced by Bohr's ephemeral description of human knowledge as an epistemological construction whose relation to reality is diffuse at best. The world of quantum physics must have some existence, but its character seems to be given entirely through its reactions to human decisions.

  In this book, I consider Wittgenstein's conversion from strict logical analysis to an investigator of human communication, with all the potentialities and limitations of ordinary language. This process I put up against the transformation of nineteenth‐century mechanistic science into the present pragmatically oriented world image of modern physics. The prophet of this move has been Niels Bohr, who has advocated the incomplete ambience of the quantum world. His epistemological view has proved its utility, but it has regularly been questioned in many ways. However, no competitor has been able to replace it.

  In this book, I have tried to map the path of the nineteenth‐century certainty into the shattered world image of the dawn of the twenty‐first century. This is manifest in the confusing progress of science and the disappointing attempts to order the worlds of logic and mathematics. My contention is that the conversions of Wittgenstein and Bohr are analogous reformations of the methodology of research. Both end up with the conviction that all real knowledge must be based on ordinary language working as communication device between individuals. Without language, outcomes of experiments cannot be declared publicly and no private language can be of value in human intercourse. I find that, in spite of no direct communication between them, Bohr and Wittgenstein make very similar declarations of their vision of the epistemic activity by humans.

  Ideas presented here are closely similar to some opinions found in works by earlier writers. In philosophy, the pragmatism of William James is remarkably like the modern philosophy of science. But then both Wittgenstein and Bohr are influenced by him, at least to some degree. Wittgenstein was to have studied with Ludwig Boltzmann; this opportunity was lost because of Boltzmann's death. His essay writings, however, seem to foreshadow some central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Remarkable support for my opinions are to be found in the essays written by the scientist and mathematician Hermann Weyl.

  (p.215) Along the way, we consider also a multitude of different intellectual systems, mostly finding them relevant but mainly only marginally. Even mathematics gives no final certainty, phenomenological approaches fail to deliver, and realism turns out to be doubtful. What is left is a fuzzy but comprehensible nexus of separated maps, only partly covering the terrain, but containing enough information for us to travel safely and arrive comfortably, at least most of the time.

  The development from ordered certainty leaves us with a world uncertain and semantically ill defined, but in many ways it seems to describe the totality of human experience in an efficient way. Many of us regard its structure as logically unsatisfactory, epistemologically hazy, and ontologically open. What there exists cannot be inferred from the signs on the map. Ontology is not determined by even the most successful epistemology. This leaves the scene open to various models of so‐called “reality”. Nothing excludes even the most esoteric creeds and religions. What we know does not support all we think we know.

  The situation is far from satisfactory, but it may, in the end, be the best world image available to our limited human intellect. If that is so, we have to be grateful for what we get. Chasing rainbows has never uncovered the treasures. But the display of colors is magnificent.

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  (p.221) Index

  Anscombe Elizabeth, 131

  assertibility, 76, 77

  behaviorism, 20

  binary description, 186yes‐no question, 110

  Carnap, 154

  Church‐Turing thesis, 169

  common language, 2

  Conferences, 64

  conservation laws, 60

  Copenhagen interpretation, 22, 48positivismpragmatism, 77

  correspondence, 61

  correspondence rules, see projection

  counterfactual, 64, 65, 194

  dialectic, 38, 40, 50Hegel, 39

  method, 189materialism, 18

  Socrates, 38

  dialectical materialism, 83

  doubt, 2, 160, 161, 163

  eidic scienceepoché, 200

  Einstein‐Podolsky‐Rosen, see Solvay

  EKLIPTIKA, 55

  epistemology, 4, 6, 12, 50, 69

  excluded middle, see intuitionism

  existentialism, 5, 23, 30, 36European, 30

  extensive abstraction, 113

  forms of life, see life world

  forms of perception, 58, 59

  Freud, 26

  God, 6, 33, 151, 208existence, 178

  metaphysical attributesmoral attributes, 6

  underdetermined, 211

  Goethe, 33, 34, 40, 172

  Heisenberg, 77

  hypothesis, 57, see proposition

  indeterminity, 67, see uncertainty

  instrumentalism, 196

  intuitionism, 166

  Jew, 134, 138, 154

  Jewish, 130

  Jung, 20

  knowledge, 7, 50, 87, 188antiquity, 32

  belief, 54

  empirical, 115

  foundations, 204

  Jews, 25

  Marx, 68

  Kraus, 29

  language, 21, 62, 82, 173, 192approach to reality, 23

  common, 2

  language game, 2

  leap of faith, 54

  Lenin, 8

  life world, 201, 202

  logical multiplicity, 174

  logical space, 150quantum system, 186

  Mach, 132

  mapintention of, 176

  of reality, 150

  projection, 173

  Marxist, 68

  measurementquantum, 51, 58

  unlearning, 63

  measurementsBohr measurements, 63

  Bohr's description, 63

  complementary, 65

  quantum, 51

  metaphysics, 12

  (p.222) modelphysicsphilosophy, 170

  Musil“Kakania”, 25

  Nachlass, 146, 161, 171, 180

  nonlocalityquantumprobability, 64

  NORDITA, 69

  ontological, 57

  ontology, 100

  Penrose, 9

  phenomenon, 49, 51, 164closed, 63

  life, 71

  natural, 15

  physical, 2

  quantum, 62

  positivismVienna Circle, 51

  possible world, 87, 92, 115

  pragmatism, 4, 5, 52, 77American, 76

  philosophy of science, 214

  tenets of, 197

  preparation, 118

  private language, 159

  probabilityconfirmedverified, 190

  hypothesis, 190

  objective, 188

  projection, 173

  provability, 104

  quantumknowledge, 15

  quantum systempreparationentanglement, 118

  primary propertiessecondary properties, 63

  reality, 2, 60, 80, 83, 84, 94, 99, 100, 189, 206, 215correspondence, 56

  empiricalbinary description, 110

  theoretical, 12

  exist, 8

  external, 9

  features of, 59

 

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