Concept

Neurath's boat

Overview

Neurath's boat (or Neurath's ship) is a simile used in anti-foundational accounts of knowledge, especially in the philosophy of science. It was first formulated by Otto Neurath. It is based in part on the Ship of Theseus which, however, is standardly used to illustrate other philosophical questions, to do with problems of identity. It was popularised by Willard Van Orman Quine in Word and Object (1960).

Neurath used the simile in several occasions, first in "Problems in War Economics" (1913). In "Anti-Spengler" (1921), he wrote:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

Neurath's non-foundational analogy of reconstructing piecemeal a ship at sea contrasts with Descartes's much earlier foundationalist analogy—in Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)—of demolishing a building all at once and rebuilding from the ground up. Neurath himself pointed out this contrast.

The boat was replaced by a raft in discussions by some philosophers, such as Paul Lorenzen in 1968, Susan Haack in 1974, and Ernest Sosa in 1980. Lorenzen's use of the simile of the raft was a kind of foundationalist modification of Neurath's original, disagreeing with Neurath by asserting that it is possible to jump into the water and to build a new raft while swimming, i.e., to "start from scratch" to build a new system of knowledge.

Prior to Neurath's simile, Charles Sanders Peirce had used with similar purpose the metaphor of walking on a bog: one only takes another step when the ground beneath one's feet begins to give way.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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XLIX. That the eternal truths cannot be thus enumerated, but that this is not necessary. What I have already enumerated we are to regard as things, or the qualities or modes of things. We now come to speak of eternal truths. When we apprehend that it is impossible a thing can arise from nothing, this proposition, EX NIHILO NIHIL FIT, is not considered as somewhat existing, or as the mode of a thing, but as an…
René Descartes, Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
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III. In a somewhat long and wild dream of my own, the chief point of which is apparently a sea voyage, it happens that the next landing is called _Hearsing_ and the one farther on _Fliess_. The latter is the name of my friend living in B., who has often been the objective point of my travels. But Hearsing is put together from the names of places in the local environment of Vienna, which so often end in _ing_…
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
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As a matter of fact, we prefer Hegel's "Encyclopedia," with all its fever phantoms, to the "final truths of the last instance" of Herr Duehring. In the first place, according to Herr Duehring we have the general scheme of the universe which by Hegel is called "logic." Then according to both of them we have the application of this scheme to nature by means of the logical categories, the philosophy of nature, and…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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Philosophers who discussed Neurath's boat

Otto Neurath

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition

Part of Analytic philosophy.

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