Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

152 J.P. Van Bendegem et al.
A good indication of the seriousness with which Neurath tried to give concrete
form to this project of a universal language is to be found in his attempts to start a
museum. His first attempt was the Museum für Siedlung und Städtebau 11 (Museum
for City Planning). This was followed by the creation of the Gesellschaft- und
Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum for Economy and Society). As must be clear, these
were not meant to be museums in the sense of an archive of selected parts of cultural
memory, such as paintings, sculptures, art products in general, but rather as
places for education – and here we have a first connection to the challenging problem
of statistical literacy – of the general public, in such a way as to allow full-blown
participation of all citizens in the societal process.
From a more general perspective, the most intriguing aspect of Neurath’s work is
that it is best characterised not so much as a logico-mathematical way of approaching
the problem, but rather as a semiotic approach. Perhaps it would not be a bad
idea to describe Neurath’s view as semiotic empiricism, rather than logical empiricism.
Seen from this perspective, Neurath’s project has deeper connections with the
work of Charles Morris 12 and Charles S. Peirce than with his fellow philosophers of
the Wiener Kreis. Indeed, in Neurath’s intentions, all ingredients for a triadic semiotic
interpretation are present. For Peirce, all semiotic relations are triadic relations,
involving a sign (or representation), an object and the interpretant. Only combinations
of these elements offer and produce meaning. In one sense, they offer a
representational insight: a sign represents something for somebody – this is Peirce’s
(1998) sense.
I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and
so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is
thereby mediately determined by the former. (p. 478)
But let us turn the semiotic triangle, as in diagrammatic reasoning, the other way
round.
sign
sign
object
object
interpretant
interpretant
The triangle then offers even more: a sign, only by being interpreted and as part
of this (specific) realm of interpretation, signifies something. As such it implies
socially embedded knowledge: a sign is embedded in a representational (cultural/conventional)
system allowing the interpretation of something. It follows from
this that sign systems and their tools are not just ‘out there’; they are ‘human’
elements of creation and reasoning. As Hoffmann (2007) writes,