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!

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