Meaning Postulates for "Refudiate"

Chortles refudiate frumiously.

Recall Carnap's example taken up by Grice, "Pirots karulise elatically". Now, Palin was onto something. An online source provides a 'meaning postulate' alla Old Carnap for her neologism:

"a conjunction of repudiate (i.e., renounce the planned building) and refute (i.e., dispute the notion that it is necessary and appropriate at that exact location)."

So what's the buzz?

Under Carnap's Lamp

One of the nice things about the Goguen/Carnap connection mentioned in my last post is that the aspect of Carnap it relates to is his central logical doctrines, rather than the more marginal phenomenalistic reductionism which has more often (in my acquaintance) been involved in recent attempts to build on or resurrect aspects of Carnap's philosophy.

I am still chasing the connections and finding more recent research which invokes Carnap's pluralism.  Admittedly the reference to Carnap is probably just that superficial; nothing more than Carnap's principle of tolerance is invoked.
However, that does not  mean that there is no more of interest in the research.
Certainly in the case of Institutions and their applications there is material which might prove useful to a contemporary philosopher engaged in a programme of research which had more in common with Carnap's work (which is what I suppose myself to be).

Anyway, Belnap is the next connection for the sake of his Under Carnap's Lamp: Flat pre-semantics.
As well as the connection (however tenuous) with Carnap, there is some connection here with my recent work on Grice's Vacuous names.
The connection is that the method I there adopt, the use of shallow embeddings, is intended to facilitate addressing semantic issues while side stepping the complexity of reasoning about syntax.

What Belnap calls "pre-semantics" is precisely that, the discussion of semantics with syntax excised.  Belnap talks as if this were more novel than it is, for this is one of the ideas which came from Scott and Strachey's work on the denotational semantics of programming languages.
They advocated considering semantic issues before syntactic ones (and did not see any difficulty in the use of the term "semantics" in this way).
The most conspicuously syntax detached semantic issues concerned what computer science then called "domain theory".

However, Belnap's speciality here is "flat", and I have not read far enough to get a decent handle on what he means by this or to understand the importance he attaches to it.  It seems to be connected with what he calls the relativity of the concept of truth, which seems to me an unfortunate way of talking about the handling of context in semantics.

RBJ

Carnap and Goguen

I was reflecting upon the poor quality of the Google alerts I get on Rudolf Carnap and wondering whether to scrap the alert when along came this gem which I am very very glad know about, and makes me happy to continue receiving a high proportion of garbage in my Google Carnap alerts.

While philosophers continue to have doubts about Carnap's pluralism, we have now had half a century of pluralism in Computer Science and Information Systems Engineering, in which domain there is a natural presumption that languages can be invented at will and on a pragmatic basis.
Up until now, I have not been aware of any recognition either in Computer Science or Philosophy of the connection between Carnap's philosophy and the culture of computing.  At last I have a paper making the connection, between the work of Carnap and that of one of the great theoreticians of pluralism (without the word) in computer science, Joseph Goguen, whose work has already contributed a great deal to my way of thinking about mathematics and computing.

Carnap Goguen and the Hyperontologies (by Kutze, Mossakowski and Lütze) is the paper which explicitly connects the work of Carnap and Goguen.  It seems to be principally from an AI/Semantic Web perspective, and so I will be very interested to discover whether this will help with my "X-Logic" ideas (for which semantic web is one motivator).
In this connection, Goguen's previous work on (logical) "Institutions" is relevant and it is of interest to me to discover where this has now lead, and to be able to consider more carefully how this relates to my present perspective.

More anon on "Carnapian Goguenism".

RBJ

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

R. B. Jones's System C-R

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

WHEN Grice was invited (we trust) to honor Quine (SOME honoring: it came out in a book entitled, "Words and objections" -- SOME pun on Quine's alleged masterpiece), he talked of "System Q".

When Myro died, among his drafts was a few pages (which I MUST have somewhere) entitled, something like, "A sketch of System G, in gratitude to Paul Grice for the original idea". He had indeed previously referred to such a System in a piece Jones is familiar with. Or rather with a piece by Myro in a COLLECTION Jones is familiar with, since it includes Code's "Izzing and Hazzing" essay. This one is Myro's "Identity and Time", where, as I say, he also mentions this System G (as he later will in his unpublished drafts).

The point then? Well, I have gone on record for having extended Myro's System G, into what I call "System G-HP" where "HP" are meant as subscripts and where thus the hyphen is unnecessary. I don't know if Rudolf had another name than Rudolf, but then there's R. B. Jones's System C-R, which is, thus, System Carnap.

I propose that Speranza's System G-HP and JOnes's System C-R are IDENTICAL, which is a good way to the City!

More on this later, I hope. I have to go the City of Eternal Truth right now to drop the news!

Carnap and Grice in the history of logic (KEYWORD: "History of Logic")

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

I SHOULD DROP A NOTE IN "THE CITY of eternal truth", someday -- but the point is there. I am fascinated that Jones found that chapter on "Carnap and modern logic" (by Reck), in the Friede et al, Cambridge companion to Carnap -- of interest.

We should discuss a bit of a timeline here. As we move towards the overlapping of things.

From what _I_ see, "Whitehead/Russell" are central. This was 1910, but the whole thing was finished by 1913, only. Then there's the 1914 notebooks by Wittgenstein, which ARE important from a historical perspective.

Then of course we have anything EARLIER. Grice was OBSESSED by Russell, "On denoting" (Mind, 1905 -- which thus predates his collaboration with Whitehead) and I would think Carnap thought of Russell's theory of description of some value.

Then we can go EARLIER, to my pet: nineteenth-century logic. Frege, of course. But which WERE the general tracts by Frege: the conceptual notation, of course, which as Jones notes elsewhere (his website) is just Leibniz (and I'd add Wilkins) deja vue all over again!

---- Frege's PHILOSOPHICAL points were perhaps more 'minor'. Then there's PEANO, which Ruseell adopted, at least at the point of terminology --.

At an earlier time, the divergences between, say, British and Continental sources diverge. And I wouldn't know which German authors which are relevant to the History of GERMAN logic are of GENERAL importance. Stigwart perhaps. Then we should go back to KANT. Because after all, he wrote on Logic, too. People are too obsessed with his general theory of knowledge, but most of his points were purely logic, and it's very good to see that neo-Kantian is used, with a straight face, when talking Carnap.

Before that, we go to the scholastics which were pretty confused on a number of things, but not on ALL things. Kneale, "The Development of Logic" has been useful to me on this. And then, yes, we get to Aristotle! -- And categoricity without tears!

Carnap and Grice on constructivism

--- Thanks to Jones for referring to the essay, "Carnap and modern logic" in the volume co-edited by Friedman (Friedman was a close collaborator with Grice -- and a few pieces by Friedman and Grice and by Grice and Friedman need to be edited from the Grice collection -- tomorrow, perhaps). This to acknwoledge this footnote, 8, on one of that pages of that essay, where the author acknowledges 'constructionism' or 'constructivism', which we have discussed with Jones elsewhere (notably in the Grice Club). So the point is that THIS usage of 'constructivism' by the author of "Carnap and Modern Logic" is yet a different one.

He just means Brouwer, and what will later will transpire as 'intuitionism'. But it IS interesting to focus on why the earlier labels for this approach were indeed 'constructionism' or 'constructivism'. The author of that essay perhaps too hastily goes on to dimiss the point. Surely one can't have everything in an essay and the man had been INVITED to write it! But in any case, the author points that at SOME time, then, Carnap was viewing 'constructivism' as a 'third approach'.

In the Gricean rewrite, the problem with constructionism, when applied to intuitionism, lies in things like the acceptance or not of something like DNE (double negation elimination). What construction you ACCEPT is a matter of YOUR intuitions. Brouwer was perhaps not sophisticated enough (I write that provocatively) to see the points that would later concern English-speaking philosophers (as I'm not!) but -- hey!

Or not hey!

---

Awody and Reck on Categoricity

Further to my last post about categoricity in relation to the Fraenkel-Carnap problem, I found a couple of interesting papers on the history which provide technical background.

My very concise "explication" of categoricity (and related concepts) can be seen spelt out more fully and very clearly by Awody and Reck in:
Completeness and Categoricity, Part I: 19th Century Axiomatics to 20th Century Metalogic with the history continued in Completeness and Categoricity, Part II: 20th Century Metalogic to 21st Century Semantics.

I have not read much yet, and I'm sure that it soon gets tough going, but it starts off gently, and comes in early with two points which I like.
The first is to point out the importance of Fraenkel and Carnap to the development of these topics.  The second is to say that higher order logics are good and that the tendency in parts of mathematical logic to focus exclusively on first order logic is not so good, either from the point of view of historical or contemporary understanding.

RBJ

Carnap and Modern Logic

There has been a very considerable development of Carnap scholarship over the last couple of decades with which I am myself mostly unacquainted, but which hopefully has now corrected the caricatures which were prevalent when Logical Positivism was first supposedly given a definitive refutation.

It remains the case that most of the material I read on Carnap regards Carnap's philosophy as centering around phenomenal reductionism (the Aufbau) or the verification principle, despite the small place which these occupy in the very readable (and short) but apparently not widely read Carnap autobiography.

It is therefore nice to see something contributing to a better understanding of Carnap's work relating to the real core of his philosophy.

Carnap and Modern Logic is a chapter from the recent "Cambridge Companion to Carnap" which is of great interest (at least) in filling in detail of the history of Carnap's logical work which would not otherwise be accessible to a wide audience.

It is of particular interest to me in providing details about the influence of Hilbert on Carnap, on which Carnap says little in his autobiography, but which, on the face of it, accounts for the most substantial differences between the approach to logic of Frege and Russell and that seen in Carnap, and which in some respects weaken (make more vulnerable to the Quinean attack) the resulting conception of logical truth/ analyticity.  I was assuming that the influence of Hilbert came via Schlick (I possibly hint on this in the draft Carnap/Grice conversation), but this work may tell me otherwise (when I have digested it).

RBJ

Categoricity and "The Fraenkel-Carnap Question"

The Fraenkel-Carnap question has today come to my notice, and I suspect this may be the source of the matters to which Speranza referred in an earlier post to Carnap Corner on categoricity.

The Fraenkel-Carnap question is (according to Weaver and George):

whether every finitely axiomatizable semantically complete second-order theory is categorical

I offer an "explication" of this as follows.

A theory is a set of sentences in some logical system.
A second order theory is a theory in a second order logic.
A theory is finitely axiomatisable if all the sentences in the theory are formally derivable from some finite subset if the sentences.
A theory is semantically complete if it "determines" the truth value of every sentence in the language, however this means semantically, not syntactically.
It means that every sentence in the language has the same truth value in every model of the theory, so semantically it is either true or false in the context of the theory, which does not mean that it is provable or disprovable, since second order logic is not complete.

Categorical has two meanings, a syntactic and a semantic meaning.
We know that the semantic meaning is the relevant one here since the answer to the question is otherwise too easy.

A theory is syntactically categorical if every sentence or its negation is in the theory.
A theory is semantically categorical if it has only one model up to isomorphism, this is sometimes qualified by cardinality, since a first order theory with an infinite model will have models of every infinite cardinality and no two models of different cardinality will be isomorphic.  So, often, categorical should be read: all models of the same cardinality are isomorphic.

One might naively suppose that a semantically complete theory will be semantically categorical, but the theory of "true arithmetic" provides a counter-example.  "true arithmetic" is the set of true sentences of first order arithmetic.
It is semantically complete, because every sentence or its negation is true, but it is not semantically categorical, it has non-standard countable models.

The fact that first order logic is complete tells us that any semantically complete axiomatic theory will be syntactically categorical, but the above counterexample shows that this does not entail semantic categoricity.

In the case of second order logic, we forgo completeness of the deductive system for the sake of greater expressiveness in the semantics (leaving the syntax behind).
The consequence of the more expressive semantics is that second order arithmetic becomes semantically categorical, but the semantic expressiveness is not matched by any greater syntactic strength, so we don't have syntactic categoricity.  Consequently we now have a categorical "true second order arithmetic", and its no longer obvious where to look for a counter-example to the general thesis considered in the Fraenkel-Carnap question.

This seems to me to be a somewhat recondite problem in mathematical logic.

I cannot myself see that it has any philosophical significance.
Carnap apparently offered a proof of the conjecture which was flawed.
Some partial results have been proven, the unqualified conjecture remains unsolved.

RBJ

Chalmers' John Locke Lectures

What  great sign of revival in the respectability of Carnap is the devotion of the Oxford John Locke lectures, this year by Chalmers, to some kind of Aufbau-like project.

The last thing I saw of his was something on the distinction between verbal and substantive question, which I do think worth getting clear.

I doubt that he is the man to get to the core of Carnap's programme, which is not phenomenal reductionism, but its nice that he is contributing to the rehabilitation of Carnap.

I haven't actually looked at any of the material online (apart from the first abstract) but I may be back when I have.

RBJ

Categoricity in Carnap and Grice

Not sure what the concept stands for in Carnap, but I'm SURE 'category' is a BASIC category in Grice!


Title:Carnap, Completeness, and Categoricity: The 'Gabelbarkeitssatz' of 1928
Authors:Awodey, S
Carus, A W
Source:Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 54(2), 145-172. 28 p. 2001.
Document Type:Journal Article
Subjects:AXIOMATICS
CATEGORICITY
COMPLETENESS
LOGIC
LOGICISM
Persons as Subjects:CARNAP
GÖDEL, KURT
Abstract:In 1929 Carnap gave a paper in Prague on "Investigations in General Axiomatics"; a brief summary was published soon after. Its subject looks something like early model theory, and the main result, called the 'Gabelbarkeitssatz', appears to claim that a consistent set of axioms is complete just if it is categorical. This, of course, casts doubt on the entire project. Though there is no further mention of this theorem in Carnap's published writings, his 'Nachlass' includes a large typescript on the subject, 'Investigations in General Axiomatics'. We examine this work here, showing that it provides important insights into Carnap's development during this critical period.

Jan Dejonzka does Carnap (He did Grice)

This below, because I have on record gone to great lengths of lovely conversation with this lovely author, so I'm sure what he says is fun -- and true!


Observational Ecumenicism, Holist Sectarianism: The Quine-Carnap Conflict on Metaphysical Realism
Authors:Dejnozka, Jan
Source:Philo: A Journal of Philosophy, 9(2), 165-191. 27 p. FALL-Winter 2006.
Document Type:Journal Article
Subjects:ECUMENICALISM
EMPIRICISM
EQUIVALENCE
HOLISM
METAPHYSICS
NATURALISM
PRAGMATISM
REALISM
SECTARIANISM
Persons as Subjects:CARNAP, RUDOLF
QUINE, WILLARD VAN ORMAN
Abstract:Do any significant philosophical differences between Quine and Carnap follow from Quine's rejection of Carnap's analytic-synthetic distinction? Not if they both understand empirical evidence in merely observational terms. But it follows from Quine's rejection of the distinction that empirical evidence has degrees of holophrastic depth penetrating even into logic and ontology (gradualism). Thus, his reasons to prefer realism to idealism are holophrastically empirical. I discuss Quine's holist sectarian realism on private languages, externalism versus internalism, unobserved objects, unobservable abstract entities, bivalence, ecumenicism versus sectarianism, and on gradualism itself.

From Vienna to Santa Fé, from Oxford to the Eternal City

--- No clear idea why Santa Fé is mentioned here...



Carnap and Language: From Vienna to Santa Fé (in Slovak)
Authors:Hanzel, Igor
Source:Organon F: filozofický casopis, 14(4), 470-497. 28 p. 2007.
Document Type:Journal Article
Subjects:LOGIC
METALANGUAGE
METALOGIC
SEMANTICS
SYNTAX
Persons as Subjects:CARNAP, RUDOLF
CHURCH, ALONZO
Abstract:The paper reconstructs three main stages in the development of Carnap's approach to language in the years 1931-1947. It starts with Carnap's approach to metalogic in his Viennese 'Zirkelprotokolle' (1931) and his 'Logische Syntax der Sprache' (1934) from the point of view of one-level approach to the relation between metalanguage and its object language. It then analyzes Tarski's turn to semantics in his paper presented at the Paris conference in September 1935, as well as the implications of his view for Carnap's approach to semantics from 1935 until 1943. Finally, it analyzes Church's rediscovery of Frege and its impact on Carnap's shift to the extension/intension distinction in his semantics in the years 1943-1947.

Martin Firiedman on Carnap and Grice

A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
Reviewers:Bird, Graham
Source:Kantian Review, 12(2), 161-163. 3 p. 2007.
Reviewed Item:Friedman, Michael; (2000). A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court.
Document Type:Book Review


--- Martin Friedman was collaborator with Grice on topics of 'universalia', now deposited at Bancroft. He wrote on Carnap, too.

Gustav Bergmann on Carnap and Grice

This bit below informs me that G. Bergmann belonged in the Vienna Circle. He referred to Grice as an "English futilitarian". I suppose he has nicer things to say about Carnap!

---

Wiener Kreis: Texte zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung von Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, Edgar Zilsel und Gustav Bergmann
By: Stölzner, Michael, Uebel, Thomas. Reviewed by: Neuber, Matthias. Zeitschrift fuer philosophische Forschung, 62(4), 618-619, 2 p. Hamburg: Verlag Felix Meiner. October-December 2008. (AN PHL9065400)
Database: Philosopher's Index
Add to folder Remove from folder

Essays by Carnap and Grice in J. Baillie, ed. "Contemporary Analytic Philosophy"

Title:Contemporary Analytic Philosophy
Authors:Baillie, James
Publication Information:Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall; 1997.
Subjects:ANALYTIC
ATOMISM
EPISTEMOLOGY
LANGUAGE
Abstract:

"This anthology includes some of the most influential readings in 20th century analytic philosophy. Authors are Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Schlick, Carnap, Moore, Ryle, Grice, Austin, Sellars, Quine, Tarski, Davidson, Krupke, Putnam. Each selection is given a detailed introduction, including biographical details, summary of the argument, criticism and recommendations for further reading."

One wonders that pieces.

Blurb for Ostertag's book that combines Carnap and Grice

When I found that Ostertag had managed to reproduce only PART of Grice's 'Vacuous Names' in this expensive MIT book, I was SO disappointed... Anyway, he includes Carnap, too, and one wonders what section.

"The debate over the proper analysis of definite descriptions, which began with Bertrand Russell's classic essay, continues to this day. While it is now widely acknowledged that, like the indexical expressions "I," "here," and "now," definite descriptions in natural language are context sensitive, there is significant disagreement as to the ultimate challenge this context-sensitivity poses to Russell's theory. This reader is intended both to introduce students to the philosophy of language via the theory of descriptions, and to provide scholars in analytic philosophy with ready access to some of the central contributions in this area. It includes classic works by Russell, Carnap, Strawson, Lambert, Donnellan, Grice, Peacocke, Kripke, Wettstein, Soames, Neale, and Schiffer."

The book is "Definite descriptions: a reader", MIT, 1998.

Russell, Carnap, Grice: the 'self' -- making sense of it via 'logical construction'

--- by JLS, of the Grice Club.

FURTHER TO SOME POSTS at the Grice Club, and City of Eternal Truth, this blogger. This from:

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/carnap.html

"Carnap says that construction theory

may also clarify the problem of what

defines the nature of the self, in that

the self may be defined as a unified

expression of elementary experiences (p. 260 of Logical Structure of the World)."

--- exactly Grice's view in 1941, which he maintained till the day of his death, in 1988.

Carnap and Grice on 'pragmatic' -- and what the inventor of it all thought about things: Morris -- via Sharpless

Seth Sharpless knows many (interesting things). Elsewhere, he pointed out how "Morris held that the debate between Quine and Carnap on the analytic-synthetic distinction could have been resolved had it been cast within the field of pragmatics."

Sharpless quotes from from Morris, "Signification and significance," pp. 46ff -- and publicly so. Morris writes:

"Another central issue in contemporary philosophy is whether a sharp
distinction can be made between analytic and synthetic sentences (or
"propositions"). In the present context this is the question of whether a
sharp distinction can be made between formative and lexical discourse. I
have suggested elsewhere that the distinction can be made only in terms of
pragmatic considerations--and not in terms o£ semantics or syntactics alone.
This seems to be implicitly involved in Carnap's introduction o£ "meaning
postulates" in his defense o£ the distinction o£ the analytic and the
synthetic. To decide whether the sentence "All crows are black" is analytic
or synthetic involves reference to the sign structure (and hence to the
dispositions to respond) of a specific interpreter (or a group of
interpreters). If the interpreter is disposed at a certain time to respond
to all denotata of the term 'crow' by the term 'black' (i.e., if he would
not call anything a crow unless it were black), then the sentence is
analytic at that time; otherwise it is not. Thp criterion is thus pragmatic
and involves the use of signs (i.e., the acceptance of a sign framework) by
a specific producer of the signs. 'Acceptance' is a basic term, in
pragmatics."

Sharpless comments: "Personally, I would not put it quite in this way, but I do believe that most of the force behind Quine's criticism of analyticity would vanish if the "language" under consideration were relativized to synchronic aspects of
idiolects, and if one allowed for reference to "meanings" (intensions,
senses) in the metalanguage, instead of, like Quine, nominalistically
banishing "meanings" to the "myth of the museum." It is hard to make the
case that any given sentence in English is analytic, but that may be because
English allows for a variety of proper interpretations, in some of which the
sentence would be analytic and in others not. Still, on an occasion when a
person interprets such a sentence (in conformity with the English lexical
rules), he may employ some specific criterion of identification (sense) of
the many allowed by English to identify denotata, and which criterion he
employs determines whether the sentence is analytic or not."

This is pretty much in keeping with Grice's pragmatist bent, too. I would think

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".

.

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).

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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

.

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.

.

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:

.

"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."

.

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.

.

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.

.

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?

.

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

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.

neo-Carnapian

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

I WOULD THINK that if you ask a German to say "neo-Carnapianism" in German he may say "neo-Carnapism". Google so far gives just one hit for that:

[PDF] Radical Interpretation, Normativity,

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat

This amounts to a certain Neo-Carnapism which leads to the (re-)introduction of analyticity into L1. 11) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p.25. ...

www.mbph.de/Language/normanaly.pdf

The Carnap-Grice Conversation (cf. The Carnap-Strawson Conversation)

--- By J. L. S.


----------- I WOULD THINK CARNAP was pretty fortunate, if that's a word, in having Strawson contribute to his Living Philosopher volume. It gave the occasion not so much to read the rather verbose thing by Strawson, but, to reply to it!

It may do to approach that 'conversation' bit by bit. While it's one stretch followed by 1/4 of same stretch by Carnap, it may be best to 'analyse' or dissect it in terms of particular conversational moves. I will provide a few clues:


---- STRAWSON starts the conversation. He proposes some neologisms or terms to 'frame' the question: constructionists versus _us_.

CARNAP replies that he rather speaks of 'naturalists', short for 'linguistic naturalists' for Strawson's ilk.

STRAWSON proposes to criticise Carnap on 'explanation.

CARNAP replies that Strawson fails to honour Carnap's own preferrence for the word 'explication' and that he totally forgets (not disingenously) to mention that role of 'clarification'. For Carnap it's first clarification, and then explication.

STRAWSON never provides one clear example. Except Carnap's own, "The room is warm" vs. "The temperature of the room is 20C". Quality versus Quantity. Strawson offers this example as a counter-example to Carnap on metaphysics. Strawson wants to say that 'has temperature 20C' fails to encapsulate the issue of 'is warm'.

CARNAP questions this.

STRAWSON brings in another example. The interpretation of '.' (the symbol he uses, after Principia Mathematica) and '-', the tilde or squiddly, also used in Principia. He does not, fortunately, care to state what they stand for (He made a point about this in "'.' and 'and'" and "'-' and 'not'" in the book most criticised by Grice in his lifetime, Introduction to Logical Theory (1952).

CARNAP takes up the issue.

STRAWSON wants to say that there may be a difference or divergence of meaning (between '.' and 'and' and '-' and 'not'. He is suggesting there may be valid inferences in the vernaculars of NL that are not reproduced in the analogues of FL.

CARNAP considers this but is not worried. He himself proposes a more interesting, perhaps, case of 'or', not as 'v' but as 'w'. His point is that, if a divergence IS noted, it can still be marked, or remarked by the use of a new symbol (the exclusive 'disjunction') (All this has Gricean relevance -- since Grice's metier is to elucidate how we go on multiplying senses, or avoiding common mistakes in both constructionalists and naturalists).

STRAWSON brings in 'science', and 'common sense', and 'philosophy'.

CARNAP is unimpressed and makes some sharp criticism to OLP (ordianary langauge philosopher), drawing from Sellars, etc, and being especially punny and playful that he IS NOT MEANING Strawson!

STRAWSON continues to bring in the philosophical relevance of ordinary language.

CARNAP goes on, in his perhaps most effective, or at least most amusing move, to declare the 'barbarity' of the new world. He is identifying Strawson with the Good Old World of England and Oxford and Grice and Germany and Ruhr, and Vienna and Jena. Instead, Carnap opposes the New World (! With old-worlders like that!). His geographical metaphor is just that: he wants to say that, to use Grice's term, there is no SANCTITY in ordinary language, and that barbarous expressions WILL be tolerated.

STRAWSON continues to dwell on how ordinary our philosophical practice is.

CARNAP criticises the 'naturalists' with sticking with what is 'talent' for them -- things they are used to -- as a fixation, and an ability to expand the horizons, and just be more blooming tolerant. "This does not apply to Strawson, of course", Carnap concludes!

A good tour-de-force!