Carnap and the Semantical Explication of Analyticity

Abstract

Despite the progress made for some time now in understanding Carnap’s work, owing in particular to the concerted efforts of a certain number of distinguished Carnap scholars, his work in semantics still does not seem to be understood well and Carnap continues to be, just as in the good old days, misunderstood, caricatured, accused of sins he did not commit. One good example is a thesis defended not so very long ago by the champion of the ‘model theoretical’ spirit, Jaakko Hintikka (1973), and recently taken up again by one of the Carnap scholars just alluded to, Steve Awodey (2007). Hintikka essentially drew upon Meaning and Necessity (1947), Awodey, upon Introduction to Semantics (1942), but the diagnosis is essentially the same. According to them, in his semantical investigations of intensional concepts like, for example, analyticity, Carnap did not fully succeed in making his way to the viewpoint of contemporary model theory, an essential characteristic of which is being a semantics with variable domain and interpretation.