Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/164

 cedure, for instance, as the showing of yellow; it cannot be given in a proposition. Philosophy, the “pursuit of meaning”, therefore cannot possibly consists of propositions; it cannot be a science. The pursuit of meaning consequently is nothing but a sort of mental activity.

Our conclusion is that philosophy was misunderstood when it was thought that philosophical results could be expressed in propositions, and that there could be a system of philosophy consisting of a system of propositions which would represent the answers to “philosophical” questions. There are no specific “philosophical” truths which would contain the solution of specific “philosophical” problems, but philosophy has the task of finding the meaning of all problems and their solutions. It must be defined as the activity of finding meaning.

Philosophy is an activity, not a science, but this activity, of course, is at work in every single science continually, because before the sciences can discover the truth or falsity of a proposition they have to get at the meaning first. And sometimes in the course of their work they are surprised to find, by the contradictory results at which they arrive, that they have been using words without a perfectly clear meaning, and then they will have to turn to the philosophical activity of clarification, and they cannot go on with the pursuit of truth before the pursuit of meaning has been successful. In this way philosophy is an extremely important factor within science and it very well deserves to bear the name of “The Queen of Sciences”. The Queen of Sciences is not itself a science. It is an activity which is needed by all scientists and pervades all their other activities. But all real problems are scientific questions, there are no others.

And what was the matter with those great questions that have been looked upon — or rather looked up to — as specific “philosophical problems” for so many centuries? Here we must distinguish two cases. In the first place, there are a great many questions which look like questions because they are formed according to a certain grammatical order but which nevertheless are not real questions, since it can easily be shown that the words, as they are put together, do not make logical sense.

If I should ask, for instance: “Is blue more identical than music?” you would see immediately that there is no meaning in this sentence, although it does not violate the rules of English grammar. The sentence is not a question