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
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Good. We HAVE discussed this, I mean, Jones and I. HILBERT is the man. I.e. if Grice (and others) said, that AUSTIN said,
ReplyDelete"Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man" (cited by Nicola Lacey as "Some people like Witters, but Moore's my man" I propose Carnap saying:
"Some like Witters, but Hilbert's MY man"
"Some like Frege, but Hilbert's MY man".
In fact, we NEED to provide a caricature of Hilbert. I propose Grice's thirteen or so postulates in the first two pages of "Logic and Conversation" (WoW:ii), i.e. the caricature of what he terms the "Formalist". We should go one by one, and report. I HAVE to go to your hyperlink! But my system is so poor that if I doubleclick there NOW all is lost, so in another post, I hope!