Husserl and Schlick on the Logical Form of Experience

Over a period of several decades spanning the origin of the Vienna Circle, Schlick repeatedly attacked Husserl’s phenomenological method for its reliance on the ability to intuitively grasp or see essences. Aside from its significance for phenomenologists, the attack illuminates significant and little-explored tensions in the history of analytic philosophy as well. For after coming under the influence of Wittgenstein, Schlick proposed to replace Husserl’s account of the epistemology of propositions describing the overall structure of experience with his own account based on the structure of language rather than on the intuition of essences. I discuss both philosophers’ accounts of the epistemology of propositions describing the structure of experience. For both philosophers, this epistemology was closely related to the general epistemology of logic; nevertheless, neither philosopher had a completely coherent account of it. Comparison of the two approaches shows that perennial and severe theoretical obstacles stand in the way of giving an epistemology of the structure of experience, a central requirement for both philosophers’ theories. Consideration of these obstacles sheds a new light on the reasons for the historically decisive split between the continental and the analytic traditions, as well as on the subsequent development of the analytic tradition away from the structural description of experience. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the idea that our sensory experience of the world has a specific logical structure or form became the basis for a variety of prominent epistemological projects. Most significantly for the subsequent development of twentieth-century philosophy, the idea of a connection between the structure of experience and the logical form of knowledge was shared between Husserl’s phenomenology and the logical positivism of Schlick and the Vienna circle. But the two schools’ agreement on the outlines of the general project of scientific epistemology concealed the wide differences of philosophical attitude and aim between them; and it was precisely on the question of the epistemology and ontology of the logical form of experience that phenomenology and logical positivism would first publicly diverge, in a dispute between Schlick and Husserl conducted over a long period spanning the origin of the Vienna Circle. In the debate, questions about the logical form of experience increasingly became the source of a web of methodological and thematic disagreements concerning the nature of conceptual analysis, the epistemSynthese 132: 239–272, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.