Abstract
The revival of interest in Carnap’s philosophy over the past two decades has shed much light on particular aspects of his intellectual development and its context. We now have a better appreciation of the background and motivation of the Aufbau. 1 The radical nature of the Syntax program has fmally, more than half a century after its first publication, begun to be acknowledged.2 And the later Carnap has also been re-assessed; the previously widespread impression that Quine was “right” and Carnap “wrong” in the analytic-synthetic debate has yielded to a more balanced view3, and the broad outlines of Camap’s late philosophy have begun to emerge.4
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Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, esp. Part Two (Ch. 5 and 6); Alan Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World; TheAufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998.
Thomas Ricketts, “Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism”, in: P. Clark and B. Hale (Eds.), Reading Putnam. Oxford: Blackwell 1994; Warren Goldfarb, “Introductory Note to *1953/9”, in: K. Gödel, Collected Works, Vol. III, ed. by S. Feferman et. al. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995, pp. 324–334.
Daniel Isaacson, “Carnap, Quine, and Logical Truth”, in: D. Bell and W. Vossenkuhl (Eds.), Science and Subjectivity. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1992, pp. 100–130; Richard Creath, “Introduction”, in: R. Creath (Ed.), Dear Carnap, Dear Van; The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work. Berkeley: University of California Press 1990, pp. 1–43.
Howard Stein, “Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?”, Synthese93, 1992, pp. 275–95; Richard Jeffrey, “Camap’s Voluntarism”, in; D. Prawitz, B. Skyrms, and D. Westerstàhl (Eds.), Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science IX. New York: Springer 1994, pp. 847–866.
Abraham Kaplan, “Rudolf Carnap” in: E. Shits (Ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991, p. 40.
Robert Musil, Briefe 1901–1941. Hamburg: Rowohlt 1981, vol. 1, p. 664 (draft of a letter to Martin Flinker, 29 October 1935); the question was actually which book had made the “deepest impression”, and Musil’s published response criticized the question, deleting the mention of Carnap.
Rudolf Carnap, “Replies and Systematic Expositions”, in: P. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court 1963, p. 912.
H. Stein, toc. cit., pp. 280–281; Camap’s own most detailed exposition of his view of explication is in Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1950, Section I (Ch. 1–6, pp. 1–18). Mormann’s survey of Carnap’s idea of explication (p. 160) does not bring out the aspects stressed here; he appears rather to imply that explication is a purely semantic task.
H. Stein, toc. cit., pp. 291–292.
Most explicitly spelled out on p. 255 of Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna: Springer 1934; p. 327 of the English translation).
That is, in the language of the Axiomatics, a “content-related” [inhaltliche] consequence; space prevents a discussion of the significance of these terms here, but see S. Awodey and A.W. Carus, “Catnap, Completeness, and Categoricity: The Gabelbarkeitssatz of 1928”, in: Erkenntnis, 54, 2001, pp. 145–172, esp. pp. 155–156.
They claim, indeed (p. 14), that Catnap introduced it, along with the “explicit concept” [Explizitbegriff) of an axiom system, in “Eigentliche and uneigentliche Begriffe”. This requires some elucidation, as neither term appears in that paper.
Which sounds obviously false in view of Gödel’s theorem about the incompleteness of elementary number theory published soon after Carnap abandoned the Axiomatics. As Awodey and I (loc. cit.) have shown, it is not straightforwardly false, but answers a different question from that addressed by Gödel — on whom, however, it evidently had an influence. Nearly the whole of the Axiomatics leads up to this theorem; it is decidedly odd to epitomize Catnap’s “philosophy of axiomatics” without any reference to it.
As articulated, for instance, in what Mormann calls the Vienna Circle “manifesto”, the 1929 pamphlet Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung.
H.G. Bohnert, “Catnap’s Logicism”, in: J. Hintikka (Ed.), Rudolf Carnap, Logical Empiricist. Dordrecht: Reidel 1975, pp. 183–216; Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, Ch. 15; Warren Goldfarb, “The Philosophy of Mathematics in Early Positivism”, in: R.N. Giere and A.W. Richardson (Eds.), Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996, pp. 213–230; Awodey and Cams, loc. cit, parts I and 11. Bonk and Mosterin saw the latter as a technical report, and generously acknowledge it. But they neither mention nor respond to the theory put forward there about the relation between logicism and Catnap’s Axiomatics.
Not only by the mainstream of analytic philosophy, but even by more radical critics like Rorty.
Jeffrey, loc. cit.
In the same way, as Ricketts (loc. cit.) has shown, empiricism, often regarded as a metaphysical foundation for the Vienna Circle, is rather a proposed constraint on the language of science.
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Carus, A.W. (2002). The Philosopher without Qualities. In: Heidelberger, M., Stadler, F. (eds) History of Philosophy of Science. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [2001], vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1785-4_28
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