Carnap and Quine

The Carnap Corner blog was initiated to complement the Grice Club and The City of Eternal Truth as a place for material on Carnap related to a join project of mine with J.L.Speranza, attempting to find common ground (and note irreconcilable differences) between Carnap and Grice (as they might have become) through "A conversation between Carnap and Grice".

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Carnap also figures large in another of my projects, which is at present holding things up on my collaboration with Speranza (since I felt the need to get it going before pressing on with JLS, and it is stubbornly declining to move rapidly enough for me to say that is done).

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In that project there is an important segment on the Carnap/Quine relationship (as it really was. not in this case a contemporary rehash).

On this I have been gradually gathering a better coverage of the relevant literature in my small personal library (having no convenient access to Universities), and as I do so my perception of how things were is slowly but surely transforming, almost beyond recognition.

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I don't believe when I first read "Two Dogmas" that I knew enough about Carnap to realise that the paper was a repudiation of Carnap's programme. It was then for me an outrageous bag of transparently fallacious arguments against a fundamental and fundamentally important philosophical distinction.

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When I later became better acquainted with Carnap and aware of the relationship between him and Quine I came to think of "Two Dogmas" as an act of betrayal more cutting than any cogent critique could have been.

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It remains the case that I cannot comprehend how Quine could have believed the arguments he put forward in "Two Dogmas", but my recent readings have finally forced me to recognise how far from the truth my first impressions were.

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It now seems to me that over the first twenty years of Quine's professional life, the development of his philosophy was closely linked with that of Carnap, that the influence was in both directions, and that Carnap's influence on Quine, though not what he would have wished, was possibly much greater than that of Quine on Carnap.

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For the moment however, just a comment on the latter.

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There are many shifts in Carnap's preoccupations, even within that core thread of analytic technique, method and philosophical underpinnings, which I regard as his most important work. When Quine and Carnap first met "The logical syntax of language" was nearing completion, and Carnap was still in Europe benefiting from the philosophically congenial atmosphere of the Vienna Circle (even though not then in VIenna).

There followed soon the disruptions engendered by impending war and emigration to the USA, and it was in Chicago that the next, semantic, phase in Carnap's philosophy began with the production of the first two volumes of a projected series on Semantics (by Harvard). These have the character of works written by a philosopher progressing a programme of work in a benign context in which the general aims would be largely acceptable but the details subject to intense scrutiny and discussion.

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Ten years earlier such a volume would have been discussed in the Vienna Circle, and the critique would have been in the context of a general acceptance this was a worthwhile line of development.

While the first Volume was in manuscript an opportunity to reproduce that kind of benign and productive philosophical environment arose. Both Carnap and Tarski spent 1940-41 at Harvard with Quine, Russell also was present for the first term. These four were the core participants of occasional meetings discussing "logical problems".

According to Quine, Carnap offered the manuscript of his "Introduction to Semantics" for criticism, but:

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"midway through the first page, Tarski and I took issue

with Carnap on analyticity. The controversy continued through subsequent sessions, without resolution and.without progress in the reading of Carnap's manuscript."

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One sees in the volume intended as the third in the series on semantics a radical change. "Meaning and Necessity" is much less a straightforward technical presentation written in apparent assurance of constructive reception. Unlike the previous volumes it is substantially devoted to comparison between Carnap's proposed methods and those of other philosopher's who had done related work, such as Frege, Russell, the logician Alonzo Church, C.I.Lewis, and of course, Quine and Tarski. The two topics, semantics and necessity, directly addressed the central controversy between Quine and Carnap.

Carnap evidently was not confident that he could accurately present Quine's point of view, and solicited a letter from Quine for inclusion in the volume.

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Quine's opposition to Carnap's conception had been evident as early as his 1936 paper "Truth by Convention". In 1940 it had been shown to represent so severe a reservation as to warrant refusal (de facto if not de dicto) to discuss Carnap's most recent work. Carnap's 1947 publication of "Meaning and Necessity" can be read, in its principle themes and detailed discussions as a response to Quine's antipathy on logical truth (which Carnap identified with analyticty and necessity and defined through semantics).

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What then was new to Carnap in "Two Dogmas",. could he have felt betrayal at that point? Surely this was just more of the same?

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"Two dogmas" puts into print what Carnap might possibly have suspected back in 1940, that Quine was determined to reject his philosophy, come what may. It offers a "critique" so uncompromising as to border (like much scepticism) on incoherence and leave no possibility of reconciliation.

It ushered in a period in which Carnap and logical positivism were not even considered worthy of careful critique, but could be dismissed with conventional caricatures.

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In this lengthy controversy Carnap's philosophical writings came to be substantially directed towards amendments addressing cogent critiques (such as are found in the supplementary papers in the second edition of "Meaning and Necessity" and in new approaches presented in Carnap's volume in the library of living philosophers), and in detailed comparisons with related works explaining why Carnap preferred the methods he was offering.

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The effect on Carnap we might therefore speculate, was to increase the time he expended on exposition and on corrections to his ideas on these core issues at the expense of moving on to other problems.

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The effect on Quine might possibly have been more profound and lasting. The central features of Quine's philosophy were reactions against Carnap, and were primarily reactions against the most fundamental core features of Carnap's philosophy, the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, the nature of logical truth and necessity, ontology, the value and use of formal languages. Can Quine's subsequent philosophical writing be understood as a continuous servicing of the obligation to sustain a tenuous position provoked through opposition to Carnap?

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It is said of my favourite ancient sceptic that he was exceptional in his ability, then fashionable, to argue the case successfully both for and against any question.

Is Quine's philosophy an enterprise of similar character extended over an entire and lengthy career, made less obvious but no less impressive by Quine arguing only and tacitly as devil's advocate?

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As I read around this central episode in the philosophies of Carnap and Quine, I find my perception continuously moderating, and my perception of the reality softening little by little. At present however I seem to be heading in the direction of crediting Quine with providing a foil which will ultimately yield a sharper appreciation of those aspects of Carnap's philosophical outlook which deserve a place in the future.

RBJ