Review of "Metametaphysics"

This Review of Metametaphysics by Guido Imaguire is of a book collecting 17 contributions on that topic, edited by Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman.

The authors apparently form two opposing camps representing various degrees of "deflationism" or "anti-deflationism" (among other terms), and this therefore represents one of the many contemporary debates whose novelty consists partly in their not rejecting out of hand Carnap's position on metaphysics.

WIthout having read the review fully, let alone the book, I am given the impression of a menagerie.

At the beginning of the twentieth century philosophers were aware of their vulnerability.  Russell's metaphysics was savaged by Wittgenstein, and he promptly abandoned metaphysics, imagining that Wittgenstein was the man for the job.  Wittgenstein however, possibly impressed by how easy it is for a young kid to wreak havock with the metaphysical pretensions of a great figure like Russell, decided instead to concoct a philosophy the principle feature of which is to say nothing sufficiently definite ever to be refuted.

Though not fond of metaphysics, Carnap's did not shy from the kind of ambitious philosophical program which carried risk of failure, and was subjected to devastating attack mid century by representatives of an emerging sense of self confidence in American academic philosophy.

From those days of vulnerability we seem to have moved in the second half to a pluralism of philosophical standpoint which admitted almost anything which could not be confused with the standard caricature of the only philosophical veiwpoint held to have been definitively refuted (i.e. that of Carnap).

Have philosophers become irrefutable?
Do they now engage only in works of fantasy which cannot be dismissed on the ground that they speak only of an abstract realm which bears no relation to reality (even when it discusses realism)?

Like Carnap, I am a pluralist, now not only a linguistic pluralist but a methodological one.   But Carnap and myself are not idle fantasists.
Though we would not deny anyone the language of their choice, we like to adopt languages and methods on a pragmatic basis, and an undue proliferation of languages, or of metaphyics, probably will not provide a basis for any great advance in our knowledge either scientific or philosophical.

What then might constitute and undue proliferation?

Fortunately I do not need to answer that question.
The onus is on those who propose to motivate their proposal, and on those who adopt to select carefully for their purposes in hand.

What we still lack, which Carnap tried to supply but was rebuffed, was any way of sorting out the philosophical chaff from the real money.
The tools of modern logic were thought to supply the means to make that distinction, and though they may fall short of the whole task, philosophers have never come near exploiting them to the extent envisaged by Carnap.

Until these questions of analytic method are reconsidered and philosophy begins to be undertaken rigorously wherever that is feasible, we will be able to look upon such a collection and wonder whether the debate it represents can ever yield fruit.

RBJ

Quine/Carnap on Ontology (CFP)

Here's another snippet of evidence of the resurrection of Carnap as a philosopher (rather than a whipping dog).

A call for papers:
The Carnap/Quine debate and its contemporary relevance to metaontology.

RBJ

The Aufbau and Neutral Monism

I have a Google alert on Carnap, which mostly comes up with junk, but occasionally finds something worthwhile.
I will add to this blog a highly filtered version, and here is the first, an online PDF version of a nice discussion of Carnap's Aufbau.


Carnap's Aufbau and the Legacy of Neutral Monism
by Andy Hamilton
[in David Bell and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl eds. Science and Subjectivity, Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1992, ISBN 3-05-002188-8, pp. 131-152]

Oddly enough, though he quotes Carnap (from Schilpp) talking about his neutrality with respect to the ontologies of phenomenalism and physicalism,
he then goes on to criticism of the Aufbau as being clearly phenomenalistic (hence not neutral).  Of course it is! Carnap's idea is that you progress both the phenomenalistic and the physicalistic perspectives and judge their merits and applicability pragmatically. In the same paragraph we find Quine's criticism that the Aufbau fails to effect a full reduction.   Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

The Aufbau was Carnap's first best attempt at a phenomenalistic reduction.
He finds that the most radical conception of what a reduction should be (i.e. everything definable in terms of the reductive base) is not going to work, so he comes up with some more subtle relationship.   Having had a shot at that he goes on to consider physicalism and the theoretical language, in both these he is considering languages which are closer to those of science than the phenomenalistic language.

This all seems consistent with his (admittedly evolving) overall conception in which he is metaphysically neutral, but allowing the use of any ontology on a pragmatic basis.

RBJ

More Reck on Carnap

 Here is another bit of Carnap scholarship from Reck:

From Frege and Russell to Carnap: Logic and Logicism in the 1920s

There is a gap in Carnap's autobiography in relation to a major transition which he made in his thinking about his core programme of applying logic to science,

In the early twenties Carnap has taken a lead from Russell in terms of the orientation of his philosophical program, and is studying Principia Mathematica.
His "Abriss der Logistick" is a logic text based on Russell's Theory of Types (with the ramifications and the axiom of reduction dropped).  This was not published until 1929,

But when Carnap comes to Logical Syntax, in the early 30s, he has adopted a position which is much more like that of Hilbert, which is quite a substantial movement.  The Frege/Russell approach is sometimes called universalism because it is not pluralistic with respect to the logical systems, they think in terms of one logical system.  More importantly, after the logical system is set up you are supposed to define concepts using explicit definitions.
Hilbert's was more pluralistic, and for Hilbert an axiom system was used to give an "implicit" definition of mathematical concepts.
In his autobiography Carnap gives us little information about how this transition in his thinking occurred.
Reck provides an interesting story on what was going on.
Another source of detail about what was happening to Carnap's ideas on logic may be found in a paper by Goldfarb:

On Godel's Way In: The Influence of Rudolf Carnap

The puzzle for me about how Hilbert's influence came to bear on Carnap is resolved by the mention of two men who Carnap does not speak of in his autobiography.  The first is Heinrich Behmann, who was an associate of Hilbert's and with whom Carnap "closely collaborated".  The other is Fraenkel, whom we have just come across in the Fraenkel-Carnap problem.

It sounds as though at this time Carnap was heading in the direction of adopting axiomatic "implicit" definitions, and was undertaking theoretical investigations to underpin the legitimacy of such methods.  The question of categoricity is of course relevant in this connection, one might take the view that axioms do provide a good (if implicit) definition of mathematical concepts only if they are categorical.

In this connection it appears that Carnap was working on a book to be called "Allgemeinen Axiomatik", which never appeared.  Goldfarb's paper suggests that this may be because when Godel entered the field with his PhD proving the completeness of first order logic, this exposed the weakness of the methods by which Carnap had been approaching similar problems.  Hence Godel's book was never published.

RBJ