In 1906, he gained his PhD in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin with a thesis entitled Zur Anschauung der Antike über Handel, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft (On the Conceptions in Antiquity of Trade, Commerce and Agriculture).

Neurath then joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918–19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich.

Julius Tandler, city councillor for welfare and health, served at the first board of the museum together with other prominent social democratic politicians.

[7] To make the museum understandable for visitors from all around the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, Neurath worked on graphic design and visual education, believing that "Words divide, pictures unite," a coinage of his own that he displayed on the wall of his office there.

"[9] With the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister (who he would marry in 1941), Neurath developed novel ways of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons.

As Marie Reidemeister reported later, after receiving the telegram "Carnap is waiting for you," Neurath chose to travel to The Hague, the Netherlands, instead of Vienna, to be able to continue his international work.

After the Luftwaffe had bombed Rotterdam, he and Marie Reidemeister fled to Britain, crossing the Channel with other refugees in an open boat.

Neurath's work on protocol statements tried to reconcile an empiricist concern for the grounding of knowledge in experience with the essential publicity of science.

Neurath suggested that reports of experience should be understood to have a third-person and hence public and impersonal character, rather than as being first person subjective pronouncements.

First, Neurath rejects isomorphism between language and reality as useless metaphysical speculation, which would call for explaining how words and sentences could represent things in the external world.

Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf.

Such a physicalistic approach to the sciences would facilitate the elimination of every residual element of metaphysics because it would permit them to be reduced to a system of assertions relative to physical facts.

"Finally, Neurath suggested that since language itself is a physical system, because it is made up of an ordered succession of sounds or symbols, it is capable of describing its own structure without contradiction.

"[citation needed] These ideas helped form the foundation of the sort of physicalism which remains the dominant position[weasel words] in metaphysics and especially the philosophy of mind.

In the 1920s, Neurath debated these matters with leading Social Democratic theoreticians (such as Karl Kautsky, who insisted that money is necessary in a socialist economy).

[16][17] In response to these ideas, Ludwig von Mises wrote his famous essay of 1920, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth".

[20] For Neurath, war economies showed advantages in speed of decision and execution, optimal distribution of means relative to (military) goals, and no-nonsense evaluation and utilization of inventiveness.

Neurath's view on socioeconomic development was similar to the materialist conception of history first elaborated in classical Marxism, in which technology and the state of epistemology come into conflict with social organization.