From Wittgenstein’s Prison to the Boundless Ocean: Carnap’s Dream of Logical Syntax

Abstract

The Logical Syntax is a revolutionary book. How did the author of the Aufbau, whose viewpoint is so very different, come to write such a book? It was a drama in two acts, comprising not one but two major breakthroughs within less than two years. The first of these, in January 1931, was the one Carnap describes vividly in his autobiography:

After thinking about these problems for several years, the whole theory of language structure and its possible applications in philosophy came to me like a vision during a sleepless night in January 1931, when I was ill. On the following day, still in bed with a fever, I wrote down my ideas on forty-four pages under the title ‘Attempt at a Metalogic’. These shorthand notes were the first version of my book Logical Syntax of Language.(Carnap 1963a, p. 53)