Essay #22: Rudolf Carnap on False Propositions & Specificity

Abstract

The late Rudolf Carnap attempted to develop in Meaning and Necessity a purely “objective” meaning analysis, which he called the method of extension and intension. One task of the essay is to determine how Carnap understood the relationship between propositions, sentences, subjective mental entities, facts, truth, falsity and the physical world. My major criticisms are directed at Carnap’s notion of the physical interpretability of false propositions and at his further notion of specificity.

The key question that is being addressed in this essay concerns whether Carnap can make a case for there being an objective entity corresponding to a false sentence, that can serve as the intension of that sentence. Carnap’s goal is to offer an “objective meaning analysis” that eschews abstract entities or possible entities. The basic puzzle for Carnap is to make out a case for the objective physical existence (he admits no other kind) of the unexemplified false proposition. This essay argues that in attempting to establish the objective interpretability of false propositions Carnap has committed both the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of equivocation upon the term ‘exemplified’, i.e. ambiguously between ‘in fact exemplified’ and ‘capable of being exemplified.’ A strictly analogous criticism is applicable to Carnap’s attempt to establish an objective interpretation for “empty properties”.

In Meaning and Necessity Carnap followed C.J. Ducasse in identifying facts with true propositions. For a proposition to be a fact it must have three properties, namely be true, be contingent and be specific. The topic in the remainder of this essay is a critical discuss of Carnap’s view of specificity.