Carnap and Grice on Deviant Logics

--- by J. L. S.
------ for the Carnap Corner

G. RESTALL HAS provided an instantiation of the 'disyunctive syllogism', and R. B. Jones was then rightly moved to reminisce about that encounter with Restall at the Cambridge Centre of Mathematics.

It has to do with 'or'

The dog went to the right or to the left.
The dog didn't go to the right.
----
Ergo, the dog went to the left.


----

It was Quine, I would think, who all started it (sic). "Deviant" logics -- later taken up by Susan Haack in her manual. It had, I think, in Quine, to do with 'changing the subject'.

Quine noted that the way to compare the 'classical' logic framework with alternative ones was not an easy one: there were some incompatibilities or incommensurabilities of paradigms (or 'language frameworks', as Carnap would call them in "LSO").

---

The point may be Lockean:

"the meaning is what you keep in your head". So, two parrots (to use his example) may be talking 'or', and yet for one parrot it means 'v' and for another it means 'w'. While 'w' can be defined in terms of 'v' (vel), the parrot may not! (do it).

How Grice would react:

I think he would abide by 'language frameworks' alla Carnap, only perhaps would call them 'idiosyncratic' procedures. The word, 'idio-', Grice uses specifically in WoW:
124:

This is Grice's nominalist strategy, as misunderstood by Bennett ("Foundations of Language" -- "The Meaning-nominalist Strategy"):

Grice:

it will be convenient first to
consider the idea of [a gesture, signal]
timeless meaning for an individual
(within a signalling IDIOLECT so to speak)

I prefer idiosyncratic since the signal should not be vocalised (as 'lect-' suggests).

So, when he goes to define his System Q (in honour of Quine) for the Quine festschrift -- and later turned onto System G by Myro -- it's best to regard the introduction of 'or' (and its elimination) as idiolectal, or idiosyncratic. Philosophical problems, for Grice (vide his "Wellesey" lecture in WoW:Part II on 'conceptual analysis') arise from individual problems for a philosopher -- not to respond to a 'social' or 'collective' one:

my philosophical puzzles
have arisen in connection with my
use of [an expression or concept], and my
conceptual analysis will be of value to
me

-- and it is in this context where he does mention 'idiosynrasies', including linguistic, and I'd say, logical ones.

I would asume that "nobody as pluralistic as Carnap" would yield that the System C will have quite a few subdivisions: C', C", C"', etc.

Carnap scholarship - a curates egg?

I searched on the internet today for a copy of the manifesto
of the Vienna Circle.
Though I failed to find it, I did find an article on the
Vienna Circle in the Stanford Encyclopaedia which looked as
if it might provide something new for me on Carnap.
.
I have noticed of late the huge amount of material on Carnap
which now comes up in a Google search. When I first put up
my modest offering on Carnap (which was not so very long ago,
1998) I was partly provoked by there being almost nothing on
Carnap on the web. The situation is now much transformed.
.
The article at Stanford begins by referring to the great
amount of historical research which has contributed to our
understanding of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle over
the last 25 years, and how this has improved the critical
assessment of these philosophers.
.
I read the introductory general material and then went to
see what he had to say about the analytic/synthetic
distinction. Here I was instantly dismayed, for it seemed
to me that the account (which might possibly be an accurate
account of the contemporary assessment/debate) was
conspicuously lacking in understanding of some elementary
but fundamental points.
.
It has occurred to me in the past, and it does again, what
good painstaking and thorough historical research if those
who undertake it don't actually understand what they are
reading?
.
Possibly I may follow up with some specifics under separate
headings.
.
RBJ

Carnap and Wittgenstein : Truth Functional ~ Truth Conditional

I have been digging into Carnap's Autobiography (in the

Schilpp volume) paying attention to what he says (which is a

great deal) about the sources of his ideas, while trying to

progress the biographical parts of the Carnap/Grice

conversation I am working on with J.L. Speranza.

.

I found a nice way of thinking about one of the issues which

I have recently been discussing on hist-analytic.org with

Speranza.

.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein presents a couple of ideas about the status of logical truths. He is working with Hume's fork which separates true propositions in to those which are logically true and those which are empirically true. He has some insights into the nature of propositions and of logical truth which allow this to be explained more fully than was possible for Hume.

.

Two separate ideas contribute to a satisfactory explanation.

The first is that the relevant part of the meaning of a proposition can be captured by its truth conditions which tell you the truth value of the proposition in every possible situation. This idea suffices to distinguish between analytic and synthetic truths, the analytic truths being those which are true under all conditions, synthetic propositions are true under some and false under others.

This is Wittgenstein's insight that logical truths are tautologous.

.

The second idea is that of a truth function.

It was well known that the classical propositional connectives are "truth functional", that the truth value of a complex proposition formed using them depends only on the truth value of the constituent propositions. Quantification is more complicated. A quantifier operates on a propositional function rather than a proposition, so cannot be truth functional in quite the same way as the connectives. Nevertheless in an appropriately augmented sense it too is "truth functional", and the effect is that any complex proposition formed from "atomic propositions" by

the propositional connectives or quantifiers is truth functional. It is not quite trivial to make this precise, but with some minor caveats this is what Wittgenstein does

in the Tractatus and this is what is done in a rather different way in the semantics of first order logic which we find (subsequently) at the beginnings of model theory.

.

The second insight is more definite than the first, in that it takes us from the idea that a logical truth has tautologous truth conditions, to the idea that it is a tautologous truth function of its atomic propositions.

We have added the idea that the "possibilities" relative to which the truth conditions are defined are assignments of truth values to the constituent atomic propositions.

One step more and we get into trouble.

That step is to answer the question "but which assignments ot truth values are possible" and give the obvious answer:

well they are all logically possible.

.

We have now moved from a truth conditional account of logical truth which can correctly account for that notion of logical truth which is complementary to the notion of empirical truth (i.e. the truths of reason in Hume's fork, by contrast with "matters of fact") to an essentially narrower conception which corresponds closely to that of first order validity (not yet defined at the time of the Tractatus).

.

The problem then is for Wittgenstein that the conception of logical truth in the Tractatus fails to take account of "determinate exclusion" which is the possibility that two atomic propositions are not logically independent.

This according to Hacker was the primary consideration which undermined the Tractarian conception of the status of logic

(for Wittgenstein, in about 1930).

.

So what has this to do with Carnap?

.
Carnap gives several accounts of logical truth or L-truth (by which he almost always means analyticity).
The early ones in his syntactic phase don't concern us here, but in his later semantic phase we find in "Meaning and Necessity" that his semantic characterisation of L-truth

explicitly follows the Tractatus. He defines a state description as (effectively) an assignment of truth values to atomic propositions.

The semantics is then given as rules which tell us whether any proposition "holds" in any state description, i.e.which gives the truth conditions in terms of state descriptions (these are the "possibilities").

A proposition is L-true if it holds in every state description.

Carnap makes no provision here for restricting the possible state descriptions, though he is explicit in declaring L-truth to be an explication of Leibniz's "necessary truth" and Kant's "analytic truth", and goes on himself to define necessity in terms of L-truth.

.

Though I see no aknowledgement of an error in "Meaning and Necessity" Carnap later offers another explication of analyticity in "Meaning Postulates". In this paper he again uses the term L-truth, but he now distinguishes two kinds of logical truth a narrow and a wide, identifies L-truth with the narrow conception (which has the same definition as was given in "Meaning and Necessity", ostensibly for the broad notion) identifies the broader conception with analyticity, and gives an explication using meaning postulates to restrict the states of affairs which count as possibilities in determining whether a proposition is tautologous.

.

So far as I am aware this is the only place where he uses L-truth intending to explicate a narrow conception of logical truth.

When we come to his reformulation for the Schilpp volume he simply drops L-truth and introduces A-truth for analyticity, effectively removing the conflict with Quine over the scope of logical truth by giving him the concept.

.

Meanwhile, seemingly by accident, Carnap has given, in "Meaning Postulates", a more precise characterisation of the narrow concept than I have seen elsewhere,

Carnap may be thought of here as defining analyticity in terms of tautological truth conditions, and logical truth in term of tautological truth functions. He has implicated that the logical connectives are the truth functional connectives (in the broad sense in which quantifiers count as truth functional). Nowhere does he explain this or offer it as a characterisation, (that I am aware of), it just falls out by accident.

.

In fact the feature of his semantics out of which it falls is in other terms undesirable. for it prejudices the division of the semantics into evaluation rules (defining the truth conditions) and constraints on possibilities ("Meaning postulates"), forcing all but the truth functional aspects to be covered in the latter rather than the former.

.

I should mention one other fly in the ointment, which I have glossed over and should be dealt with more carefully. That is the need for the semantics of quantification to know the domain of discourse. This makes quantification a truth function of the propositional function only if the domain of quantification is either fixed in advance or is somehow recoverable from the collection of true atomic propositions (e.g. if every value is known to have a name).

.

RBJ

Ramsey, Carnap, and Grice on the ι-operator

------ By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
------------- For the Carnap Corner

----

As Psillos says, elsewhere, Carnap "re-invented" the Ramsey sentence. This is interesting. Apparently, it was Feigl who brought Ramsey to Carnap's attention. Unnecessarily, for Carnap had thought up the whole thing independently.

Philosophical credits were properly due in due time

This below, to distinguish Ramsified things. For Grice it's 'way of Ramsified naming' versus 'way of Ramsified definition': the latter operates with iota.

JL

---

Looking for structure in all the wrong places: Ramsey sentences ...by A Cei - 2006 - If the Ramsey sentence describes a class of realisers for the relevant ...... Ramsey sentences with the 'uniqueness' operator or ι-operator. ...

Grice Refines Carnap's Ramsey Sentences (?)

------------ By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
---------------------- For the Carnap Corner:

Grice distinguishes two types of Ramsifications:


Method In Philosophical Psychology (From the Banal to the Bizarre) *by P Grice - 1974
be to adopt the first alternative (that of Ramsified naming) and to ..... sible solution of the Selection problem (D). Only those laws which ...
www.jstor.org/stable/3129859

Ramsey, Carnap, and Grice on Θ

------------- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club.
---------------------- For the Carnap Corner.

----- WHILE in the treatment of these topics (e.g. by Schiffer, "Ceteris Paribus Laws") I've seen "T" to symbolise Theory (and cfr. the interesting generalisations by Rescher using T as theory of everything in "Theory of everything (philosophy)", wiki, I would follow this link below, and call me pedantic if I find the Greek letter, theta, a good one to signal "theory", too.

JLS

Ref.:
Empirical Adequacy and Ramsificationby J Ketland - 2004

realist who accepts a scientific theory Θ thinks that Θ is empirically .... gically interpreted (e.g., by Carnap-Bridgman style correspondence rules).

Grice on Ramsification

---- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Circle
------------ For the Carnap Corner.


Gr75 (repr. Gr91) explicitly mentions Ramsification, and obviously, no Ramsification without Carnap. Grice, who could have credited Carnap at that point, doesn't. (It was a lecture, so there was perhaps no need). In any case, here for the closer Carnap connection.

From wiki, "Carnap-Ramsey sentence". (Grice is strictly concerned with T: psychological theoretical concept, and O: input of perception and output of sensoriness.

---- But Carnap's original goal was, interestingly, more general -- or as general as it can get:

The wiki entry goes:

"In the theories of Ramsey, Carnap found the method he

needed, which was

1. to substitute variables

for each T-term

2. to quantify existentially all T-terms

in both T-sentences and correspondence rules."


"The resulting "Ramsey sentence" effectively

eliminates the T-term as such, while still

providing an account of T’s empirical

content."

"The evolution of the formula proceeds thus:

Step 1 (empirical theory, assumed true):

TC ( t1 . . . tn, o1 . . . om)

Step 2 (substitution of variables for T-terms):

TC (x1 . . . xn, o1 . . . om)

Step 3 (-quantification of the variables): .

"Step 3 is the complete Ramsey sentence, expressed "RTC," and to be read as follows:

"There are some (unspecified) relations such that TC (x1 . . . xn, o1 . . . om) is satisfied when the variables are assigned these relations.""

"(This is equivalent to an interpretation as an appropriate model."

"There are relations r1 . . . rn such that TC (x1 . . . xn, o1 . . . om) is satisfied when xi is assigned the value ri, and .)

"The Ramsey sentence captures the factual content of the theory."

"Though Ramsey believed this formulation

was adequate to the needs of science,

Carnap disagreed."

"In order to delineate a distinction between

analytic and synthetic content,"

--- cfr. Grice on 'analytic psychological laws': he who wills the end, wills the means', and such. Caeteris paribus in character.

"Carnap thought the reconstructed sentence

would have to satisfy three desiderata."


"The factual (FT) component must be
observationally equivalent to the original theory (TC)."

"Second, the analytic (AT) component
must be observationally uninformative."

"Third, the combination of FT and AT must be
logically equivalent to the original theory."

"Desideratum 1 is satisfied by RTC

in that the existential quantification

of the T-terms does not change the

logical truth (L-truth) of either statement,

and the reconstruction FT has the same

O-sentences as the theory itself,

hence RTC is observationally equivalent to TC:

(i.e., for every O-sentence: O, )."

"As stated, however, Desiderata 2 and 3 remain unsatisfied. That is, taken individually, AT does contain observational information (such-and-such a theoretical term is observed to do such-and-such, or hold such-and-such a relation); and AT does not necessarily follow from FT."

"Carnap’s solution is to make the
two statements conditional."

"If there are some relations
such that [TC (x1 . . . xn, o1 . . . om)]
is satisfied when the variables are assigned some relations,
the relations assigned to those variables by the original theory will satisfy [TC (t1 . . . tn, o1 . . . om)] – or: RTC → TC."

"This brilliant move satisfies both
remaining desiderata and effectively
creates a distinction between the total
formula’s analytic and synthetic components."

"Specifically, for Desideratum 2: The conditional sentence does not make any information claim about the O-sentences in TC, it states only that if the variables in are satisfied by the relations, the O-sentences will be true."

"This means that every O-sentence in TC that is logically implied by the sentence RTC → TC is L-true (i.e., every O-sentence in AT is true or not-true."

Examples:

"The metal expands or it does not; the chemical turns blue or it does not, etc.)."

"Thus TC can be taken as the non-informative (i.e., non-factual)
component of the statement, or AT."

"Desideratum 3 is satisfied by inference: given AT, infer FT → AT. This makes AT + FT nothing more than a reformulation of the original theory, hence AT Ù FT ó TC."

"Finally, the all-important requirement for an analytic-synthetic distinction is clearly met by using two distinct processes in the formulation: drawing an empirical connection between the statement’s factual content and the original theory (observational equivalence), and by requiring the analytic content to be observationally non-informative."

"Of course, Carnap’s reconstruction as it is given here is not intended to be a literal method for formulating scientific propositions."

"To capture what Duhem would call the entire holistic universe relating to any specified theory would require long and complicated renderings of RTC → TC."

"Instead, it is to be taken as demonstrating logically that there is a way that science could formulate empirical, observational explications of theoretical concepts – and in that context the Ramsey-Carnap structure can be said to provide a formal justificatory distinction between scientific observation and metaphysical inquiry."

"The Ramsey-Carnap formulation is, of course, not inviolate."

"Among its critics are John Winnie, who extended the desiderata to include an "observationally non-creative" restriction on Carnap’s AT – and both Quine and Hempel attacked Carnap’s initial assumptions by emphasizing the ambiguity that persists between observable and non-observable terms."

"Nonetheless, the Carnap-Ramsey construct was an interesting attempt to draw a substantive line between science and metaphysics."

INDEED -- and was much respected by Grice. (And while VERY GENERAL, it's yet not an external 'thingy').

---

Refs

Carnap, R. Theoretical Concepts in Science, with introduction by Psillos, S. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Carnap, R. (1966) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (esp. Parts III, and V), ed. Martin Gardner. Dover Publications, New York. 1995.

Carnap, R. (1950) Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, in Moser & Nat, Human Knowledge Oxford Univ. Press. (2003).

Demopoulos, W. Carnap on the Reconstruction of Scientific Theories, The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, eds. R. Creath and M. Friedman.

Moser, P.K. and vander Nat, A. (2003) Human Knowledge Oxford Univ. Press.

Schlick, Moritz (1918) General Theory of Knowledge (Allegemeine Erkenntnislehre). Trans. Albert Blumberg. Open Court Publishing, Chicago/La Salle, IL. (2002).

Carnap, Grice, and the Theory of Everything

---- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
----------- For the Carnap Corner.


--- Roger Bishop Jones has used "theory of everything" in both his website and in open discussion in hist-analytic (posts filed). I, too!

So here this historical piece: and you can imagine that that great grandfather's name was "Carnapus Griceus".

From wiki, 'theory of everything':

"A great-grandfather of

Ijon Tichy — a character from

a cycle of Stanisław Lem's

science-fiction stories of 1960s --

was known to work on

the "General Theory of Everything"".


JLS

Ramsey: Shared Love of Carnap and Grice

--- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
----------- for the Carnap Corner


--- THIS LINK BELOW provides a good full page of Carnap on well-known topic of the 'correspondence rule'

O <----> T

observation theory


-- This has at least two offsprings of importance in the Carnap/Grice debate:

-------(a) Phenomenalism, (which both Carnap and Grice reject) as wanting to see 'material' object as a 'theoretical' concept.

------- (b) Functionalism (a bete noire for Grice), as applied to psychology. In this second context, input and output (perceptual input and sensory output) are O-terms (in a Turing machine set) and the psychological predicate is the T-term.

Grice relies on Ramsification. In the link below we see Carnap at his best: exposing views and 'explicating' as was his wont and favourite term, which are so abtract they hurt! What a genius. Surely the same type of temperament that Grice was seen to display, in his more relaxed modes!

JLS

The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology - Google Books
Michael Ruse - 2008 - Science
... pluralism is theoretically monistic, but operationally pluralistic. ... Rudolf Carnap explains: Our theoretical laws deal exclusively with the behavior ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0195182057...

The Carnap We Love

---- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Circle
---------- for the Carnap Corner

--- Roger Bishop Jones may not be welcoming the 'we' in header, or the verb ('love') but that's because he loves ALL CARNAPS. The Carnap I particularly love is the one I identify with quotes like this below, from an online source:

"Carnap and Ayer ridiculed the whole debate as mystical nonsense."

--- any old debate: realism vs. idealism, monism vs. pluralism (I think the case is in the above quote), objectivism vs. subjectivism, libertarianism vs. determinism -- and the REST of them!


----- Grice Studies. Get your PhD NOW

-------- Carnap Studies -- Get your PhD -- YESTERDAY!

(Just joking: on the idea that Carnap makes the study of philosophy (as we knew it) quite a lovely study to undertake: Imagine his suggested readings for "Metaphysics II". What a genius!)

We need to consider Philosophy (or at least _I_ should) as it applies to items _Grice_ found of interest, which makes the thing funNER!

Monism: What Variety? (Give Me A Sweet Break)

--- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club.
----------- for the Carnap Corner.

---- ROGER, you have to be careful, and keep up the good work. There's a growing literature on your hero, and they are abusing him! So, now we have full articles on Carnap and "anomalous monism" and this below on Carnap and "neutral monism". The problem is they are not blogging: they come from out-of-the-mainstream unis and it's all difficult to access. But the biblio (of historical importance) should be easy enough to retrieve, if we were interested. Just sampling the combos for alternatives for epithets. Etc.

JL

---

Neutral Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)by L Stubenberg - 2005
1992, “Carnap's Aufbau and the Legacy of Neutral Monism”, in Bell, ... 1971, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, New York: Dutton.

Demons, No Ghosts

--- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
----------- For the Carnap Corner

From an onice source:

[PDF]

"Metaphysics After Carnap: the Ghost Who Walks?"

by H Price

"an argument for Monism, where

Carnap requires Pluralism, as it were."


"I want to show that this is a mistake,

and rests on a confusion

between two theoretical [things]."

www.usyd.edu.au/time/price/preprints/metameta.pdf


--- Metaphysics SHOULD NOT be a ghost who talks, but if H. Price is so fastidious about it, let's use "metaphilosophy". :)

Monism Comes In One Variety

--- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
----------- For the Carnap Corner

---- WE ALL KNOW IT'S PRETTY HATEFUL TO provide and provide and provide literature reference, especially coming from the philosophy machinery -- but here is the abstract (online) from a specific "Carnap" secondary bibliography essay (below). Again, to consider when discussing

Pluralism vs. Monism

--- None is a bete noire for Grice, but the may attach to other things so let's be sort of warned:

Matti Eklund (2009).

"Carnap and Ontological Pluralism."

In David J. Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.),

Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations
of Ontology. Oxford University Press.

"ABSTRACT. "My focus here will be Carnap’s views on ontology,

as these are presented in the seminal

“Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950).

I will first describe how I think Carnap’s

distinction between external and internal questions

is best understood.

Then I will turn to broader issues regarding

Carnap’s views on ontology. With certain reservations,

I will ascribe to Carnap an ontological

pluralist position roughly similar to

the positions of Eli Hirsch and

the later Hilary Putnam."

"Then I turn to some interrelated

arguments against the pluralist view."

"The arguments are not demonstrative."

"Some possible escape routes for

the pluralist are outlined."

----- Such kindness. Gladiatorial at best! :). It's only the later Putnam, though. :(, not the latest and top.

"But I think the arguments constitute a

formidable challenge."

for anyone who will get the book!

"There should be serious doubt

as to whether the pluralist view,

as it emerges after discussion

of these arguments, will be worth

defending."

Sure it will -- the only good things
worth defending are those YOU will
doubt about!


"Moreover, there is an alternative

ontological view which equally well

subserves the motivations

underlying ontological pluralism."


---- Don't say it's Monism, because it comes in just one variety and there's two of us here: Roger Bishop Jones and I. :).

Ontology: Monism vs. Pluralism

---- By J. L. Speranza, the Grice Club,
------------ for the Carnap Corner.


---- TO CONSIDER SOMEWHAT seriously, from an online source: "Beall and Restall [2000], [2001] and [2006] advocate a comprehensive pluralist approach to logic, which they call Logical Pluralism, according to which there is not one true logic but many equally acceptable logical systems. They maintain that Logical Pluralism is

compatible

with

monism about metaphysical modality."

-- Restall, whom I know, is explicitly neo-Carnapian. Not oddly, Grice has defended monism about metaphysical modality too (i.e. that necessarily 'must' and analytically 'must' must be the same must) in what he calls the Aequi-Vocality Thesis.

I think it should be pretty serious to consider here the epithets:

logical

vs.

ontological


cfr.

physical

vs.

metaphysical

--- &c.

And also the

monism-pluralism distinction.

Monism since strictly the possibly only good alternative to 'pluralism' of the sort that Carnap defends explicitly elsewhere. To consider as demons, perilous and malevolent (betes noires) or other.