The Lowlands-Geneva trading zone: Microcosm for the intuitionistic crisis of logic and reason, maths and science
What is truth such that scientific knowledge could be said to be true? Is it a property of the universe? Or is it a human construction? This is the crux of the intuitionistic crisis of logic and reason, maths and science, that was being examined at the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva. Or so argued Leo Apostel (of Belgium) in an unpublished letter to the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a peer review conducted while they contemplated cutting their support to the institute founded by Jean Piaget just a few years earlier. Tracing the broader social network, however, reveals a much more complex set of interactions and relations than one would expect given the contemporary understanding; there’s much more here than a new insight regarding the inspiration for Piaget’s later experiments as he generalized from studying child development to investigating the evolution of knowledge. Indeed, we get a glimpse of what remained after WWII of the interests that inspired European logical positivism and after its Americanization as logical empiricism: an enclave in Neutral Switzerland, facing pressure from American patrons and peer reviewers, persisted in arguing for a different perspective of scientific knowledge and understanding than what we now have (esp. via Evert Beth of the Netherlands). So I propose the simplification of “the Lowlands-Geneva trading zone” as a way to focus a new investigation informed by an otherwise too-complex series of archival discoveries.