Thought economy
In positivist philosophy, the principle of the economy of thought is an instrument for evaluating scientific theories and explanations. The most economical theory, which makes do with the fewest additional assumptions, is to be preferred in each case, according to the concise, but still meaningless formulation from an economic point of view. In the computer context (from 1935) this task became comprehensible: as costs of computing time and expenditure on computer architecture (see Turing machine , problem splitting and simultaneous processing ). Finally, the economy of thought is also researched in biochemical and brain-physiological contexts (bio-information processing, biosemiotics ). Obvious tasks and areas of application are public education ( Otto Neurath ), knowledge presentation ( diagrams ) and information storage.
history
From the nominalism and the universal dispute of the 13th and 14th centuries, questions arose that led to Occam's Razor : Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem . This sentence does not come from Ockham himself, but was coined by Johannes Clauberg in 1654. Philosophical entities - mechanisms of action, substances, transcendent actors - should not be introduced (in explanations) unless they are essential. Of several theories that explain the same facts, the simplest is preferable.
But Kant also wants to give this frugality a deeper meaning. The "saving of principles" is not just "an economic principle of reason, but an inner law of nature", not "a mere economic manipulation of reason in order to save as much effort as possible" writes Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason.
Richard Avenarius is classically considered to be the father of the economy of thought , even if the term probably does not apply to him. The date of birth is the habilitation with its programmatic title: 'Philosophy as thinking of the world according to the principle of the smallest measure of force. (Leipzig 1876) t. Ernst Mach continues such questions in a scientific application context: Knowledge and Error (1905) sounds almost like trial and error , like the program - or in Mach's folk high school style: the foundations of creation - an economy of the evolution of knowledge.
Mach and Avenarius were also used in a scientific context (Einstein, Schrödinger). The controversy was reproduced millions of times through Lenin's criticism of empirical criticism in the context of dialectical materialism .
Richard Hönigswald , a Meinong student, adapted the current questions for his conceptual and system structure. Before the First World War he published his principles of thought psychology (1913). Here, in a transcendental philosophy infected with the philosophy of intent, questions of economics of thought are discussed explicitly.
The Vienna Circle - Mach had already moved to Munich and died in the war - took up such ideas again, and there they also returned to Occam and Bacon. Popper and Wittgenstein , two antipodes there, continued their research on this subject in England. Popper's Logic of Research, which appeared before his exile, was the basis of the program of a fallibilistic and competitive economy of thought, so - for example via Feyerabend and Kuhn - the way was also open to an economy of science, or - in criticism against it - to empirical science research .
Wittgenstein taught in Cambridge from 1937 to 1939 on the basics of mathematics (1939). Alan Turing takes part in the lectures. As early as 1935 he worked with computers made from human beings ("paper machines"), simply because they were cheaper and faster than complicated machine developments at the time, and yet offered sufficient material to differentiate between a) possible and b) recursively possible thinking. The struggle of the giants of knowledge architecture, between the philosopher of the mystery of life and the cognitive practitioner of logical-technical feasibility, came to an end when Turing no longer went. Wittgenstein insisted against such bourgeois thinkers with their commercial goals on an unimaginably next higher dimension of all logic in order to crunch as sand in the process of analytical thinking. Turing counters Wittgenstein's fun-dada-mentalism of fundamental mathematical questions by stating that it depends on whether the hostile code can be cracked or not, whether the bridge carries the burden or collapses due to a calculation error or a wrong formula.
literature
- Rudolf Carnap : Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy. The alien psychic and the realism dispute. Weltkreis-Verlag, Berlin-Schlachtensee 1928.