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
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Good -- and thanks for clarifying. Grice has a piece, "The syntax of illusion" which I love to see (it's unpublished though) as his answer to Goodman's The structure of appearance, which is the American answer to Carnap's phenomenalism!
ReplyDelete---- I like to discuss 'monism' and 'neutral monism'. It seems that 'neutral' can have a few implications or implicatures. As used with metaphysical, as Jones does, indeed Carnap was 'neutral' -- the choice of a physicalist or phenomenalist language depends 'on your point of view, really'. I think Floridi calls this 'perspectivism'.
But I think 'monism' (Can you believe that there is an American journal called "The Monist"; apparently it has a wide set of subscribers), as qualified by 'neutral' is a different animal?
I would think a monist is someone like Spinoza and his monads, no? The good thing about a monad is that it is 'neutral' as between the physical AND the mental. There IS a connection with 'physicalism' (the physical) and phenomenalism (the phenomenon as being sense-datum, i.e. 'mental') --.
But in any case, 'neutral', as applied to 'monism' seems to signal that it is NOT physical monism (physicalism) or 'psychological monism' (phenomenalism). Rather, that what exists is neutral as regards the physical AND the mental. But I can be totally mistaken!
I think you are right JL.
ReplyDeleteI would not call Carnap's position "neutral monism".
I am only familiar (even at the most superficial level) with neutral monism as it appears in Russell, apparently derived from a suggestion of Whitehead.
In Russell neutral monism is a definite monistic metaphysic in which the things which exist are neither mental nor physical but "neutral" entities from which mental and physical entities can be constructed. Mental and physical events are projections along different axes of the same space of fundamental entities (I forget what he called them).
So far as Russell is concerned, neutral monism really is a monism, but is neither materialistic nor idealistic, but something neutral between the two.
Carnap's conception is pluralistic but not quite in the sense of there being both material and mental entities, (though I think he would have admitted such a possibility) but in the sense that ontology as a whole is not absolute and one can work pragmatically with multiple monistic languages.
RBJ
I should revise the Hamilton, but seeing that he 'and'-conjoins both things, "Aufbau" AND "Neutral Monism", I am hoping he does not credit Carnap with neutral monism!?
ReplyDelete---- Mind, there IS a connection. If as you say, Russell deviced his 'neutral monism' to be composed of these, er, or this, since it was most likely a singular thing, neutral monad, one wonders about structure of language. It SEEMS Carnap -- in his, shall I say, System C-R -- or Grice in his system G-HP -- is thinking of the basic structure of language as 'neutral' -- consider 'x' has property 'phi'.
It would be at a LATER stage that we 'interpret' the lingo as either physicalistically monistic or phenomenalistically monistic. If we take 'x' to range over 'material-objects', 'objects', or 'things' we are being physicalist monists -- but Carnap is more serious than that since he was an expert in the lingo physicists use --; if we take 'x' as sense datum we are being phenomenalistic monists. Perhaps is this what Hamilton is having in mind?
Having looked a bit closer, it looks like Hamilton does have the same conception of neutral monism as we see in Russell. He also mentions Mach as a source of neutral monism. I know him only as a positivist, so we may wonder what it is in Mach that Hamilton so describes.
ReplyDeleteI find that in a rather more subtle way than the usual caricature of Carnap, Hamilton seems to be taking licence to disregard what Carnap says in his autobiography about his views on metaphysics. This seems to me bad enough in those how have read even less Carnap than I and base their opinions on Carnap's rejection of metaphysics with out actually asking whether there is any connection between the conception of metaphysics which Caranp rejected and the one of which they accuse him.
But in someone who clearly is better read than I on Carnap (which is not hard), and whose reading does include the autobiography, it is dismaying to me to see him reading as metaphysical doctrines which Carnap explicitly avows as pragmatic.
This is an implicit condemnation of the autobiography as fraud without any supporting evidence or argument.
Hamilton also at points, reads significance into what Carnap does not say, as if Carnap were obliged to repeat his basic principles at every point at which he might otherwise be misconstrued as having abandoned them.
RBJ
Sad. Yes, "neutral monism" seems a pretty easy thing to understand, and it´s sad Hamilton disregards the charm of the "pragmatist" approach by Carnap to such issues.
ReplyDeleteI think the difference between adopting a metaphysic and talking in such a way as might be misconstrued as adopting one is vanishingly small.
ReplyDeleteThis is deliberate in a pluralist like Carnap who claims the right to speak in a language according to "internal rules" which endorse the manner of speaking without endorsing the (real!) metaphysics.
The difficulty then is that some people who talk of Carnap don't seem to be aware that he makes this distinction, and that even those who are fully aware of it talk sometimes as if he didn't have that position, or as if they didn't know it.
Of course, they might themselves somewhere have said that when they speak about Carnap's metaphysical commitments they are not to be taken literally. That this is just a manner of speaking which they use to discuss the pragmatics of Carnap's ontology!
RBJ
Yes. A bit of 'als ob'. You know who (Grice) gave a seminar on 'als ob' -- as if. It may seem that perhaps some of the games Carnap played were 'as if'.
ReplyDeleteWhat IF phenomenalism were true. What sort of language would it commit us to?
What if physicalism IS true. Ditto.
---
Recall that the magnitude of Carnap's pluralism and his boundless sense of tolerance goes over a lot of people's heads! He had the inner curiosity (and wonder) that leads to philosophy since Socrates onwards. But you see some philosophy types and they can't smell past the end of their nose!
Unfortunately, alongside Carnap's tolerance, especially in his youth but also occasionally later, he has moments in which his repudiation of metaphysics remains fierce, and these are the bits that take the headlines (with all detail as to what counts as metaphysics omitted, even by Carnap).
ReplyDeleteI would say that there is something else between undertaking a metaphyscially motivated reduction and doing a reduction as a "what if", and that Carnap occupies this middle ground.
The middle ground is a pragmatic reductionism.
You do this exercise because you expect the result to be useful, particularly in Carnap's case, in science and its application (though this applies less plausibly to the phenomenal than to the physicalistic or theoretical languages, and then possibly only on the presumption that an advancement in epistemology must surely have some relevance to science).
The physicalistic language is for Carnap no better a basis for an absolute metaphysics, and the idea is not so much to speculate about what it would be like "if" one of these languages were "correct" but to discover which one better serves to advance science, or rather, to discover in which ways each one advances science.
Carnap, if he is consistent, cannot regard himself as doing a "what if" on the external (metaphysical in his sense) questions, because he does not accept that they have any meaning, and therefore can draw no conclusions from their supposition. Or if we want to emphasise his modesty (in the style of Russell against Strawson), he cannot himself understand the external questions, and will therefore be unable to draw any conclusions in a "what if".
RBJ
Very good. I suppose your candid, "He cannot himself understand the external questions" remind me of this clever red-coloured hardcover I once found by chance in a bookshop: "Wittgnstein" I think it's called, but it's by Rush Rhees. It's on Wittgenstein, and it contains an essay entitled, "Unanswerable questions". I think Rhees presented for the Aristotelian Society, because it is SO roundabout! But it may connect, I hope, with Carnap.
ReplyDeleteSurely he can say that he cannot undestand the question because he wouldn't understand any ANSWER that the question is crying for! Or something.
Sounds a bit cart before the horse to me.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't understand the question then answers, intelligible or otherwise cannot be judged.
Are there numbers? The cat is on the mat.
Well I understand the answer, and as it happens whether true or false it can't be an answer to the question. The answer, if the question were meaningful, would have to be "yes" or "no".
Carnap's failure to understand the question is reflected first in his knowing no way of telling which of these possible answers is correct, but also of not knowing (at least in "cognitive" aka empirical terms), what would be the significance of either answer.
"Yes there are numbers" but so what, how does that make the world different to me?
In Carnap's scheme these numbers are a bit like Russell's logical fictions, so you can chose a language in which talk of numbers is possible, even scientifically useful, but the answer to the "external question" (whether numbers _really_ exist) tells us nothing about the world. We should be concerned only with the pragmatic question of whether the language is useful.
RBJ
Good point. At least, 'one' is an odd number.
ReplyDelete"Are there are number?"
"Four cats are on four mats" -- seems to carry an implicit answer to the external question.
---
I guess it may be worth considering: intelligible qua. You may understand "the cat is on the mat" but I think we are talking of 'intelligible qua answer'. Still, I think the point by Rhees still holds: "Unintelligible question?"
Surely an unintelligible question cannot have an intelligible answer.
"Can't understand" seems thus stronger than "Can't answer"
"Unanswerable question", for Rhees, and indeed for the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, seems to comprise the 'intelligible' YET unanswerable question. And I think it was Rhees's conclusion that there are no such.
"Are there numbers?" Carnap understands and answers qua internal question.
---- A further tidbit (or titbit as some uninhibited Brits prefer) concerns the 'word that wears the trousers': 'real' as in the emphatic:
"Are there really numbers?"
(I think Jones has elaborated on this in his notes on Austin Sense and Sensibilia -- elsewhere).
My favourite use of 'real' must come from a quiz I used in a class on aesthetics: Keith Arnatt promoting himself:
"I am a real artist."
I couldn't find the bit you mention in my notes on Austin.
ReplyDeleteRbj
Sorry about that. I once did some detailed research -- and must have my notes somewhere -- onto this 'trouser word', or rather Austin's idea of the trouser word, and I thought you had covered the topic somewhere. In any case, I thought it related to something I have heard from you re the polemic between Austin and Ayer and the whole project of the philosophy of sense data.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I recall (I MUST have his "Sense and sensibilia" somewhere), Austin considers 'a real duck' versus 'a decoy' or something -- and he is very strict as to how NOT to use 'real'. Grice will reminisce this as Austin's "artless sexism" of the 'trouser word'. I forget which word is the one that wore the trousers for Austin. I suppose 'real', rather than 'duck'. The point, which he repeated elsewhere (in "Other Minds" and "A plea for excuses", I think) is that 'real' really doesn't really add, really, anything of real importance, to reality, or stuff. Will see if I can retrieve the quote. In any case, it may do to amuse ourselves with how this literally and directly apply to Carnap's point about the 'external' questions. We were recently discussing elsewhere with Jones on Meinongian jungles -- and it is worth mentioning that 'irreal' numbers are not so much outside the real realm provided they are interrogated properly internally. Or something. But I am speaking vaguely and I hope not wholly unintelligibly. Should provide better references, I know!