Whereas Frege had the strongest influence on me in the fields of logic and semantics, in my philosophical thinking in general I learned most from Bertrand Russell. In the winter of 1921 I read his book, Our Knowledge of the External World, as a Field For Scientific Method in Philosophy. Some passages made an especially vivid impression on me because they formulated clearly and explicitly a view of the aim and method of philosophy which I had implicitly held for some time. In the Preface he speaks about "the logical-analytic method of philosophy" and refers to Frege's work as the first complete example of this method. And on the very last pages of the book he gives a summarizing characterization of this philosophical method in the following words:
The study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy: it gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics gives the method in physics.
All this supposed knowledge in the traditional systems must be swept away, and a new beginning must be made.
To the large and still growing body of men engaged in the pursuit of science, ... the new method, successful already in such time-honored problems as number, infinity, continuity, space and time, should make an appeal which the older methods have wholly failed to make. The one and only condition, I believe, which is necessary in order to secure for philosophy in the near future an achievement surpassing all that has hitherto been accomplished by philosophers, is the creation of a school of men with scientific training and philosophical interests, unhampered by the traditions of the past, and not misled by the literary methods of those who copy the ancients in all except their merits.
I felt as if this appeal had been directed to me personally. To work in this spirit would be my task from now on! And indeed henceforth the application of the new logical instrument for the purposes of analyzing scientific concepts and of clarifying philosophical problems has been the essential aim of my philosophical activity.from his "Intellectual autobiography" in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p13.
What I want to draw attention to is the stark difference between this scarcely ever mentioned central aim of Carnap's philosophy, "the application of the new logical instrument for the purposes of analyzing scientific concepts and of clarifying philosophical problems has been the essential aim of my philosophical activity", and the aspects of his philosophy more frequently discussed. Those two most prominent parts of Carnap's philosophy were his early work on the structure of appearances, and his attempt to identify the meaning to empirical propositions with their verification conditions, the "verification principle".
Not only have these two aspects been given undue prominence, but also their significance has been grossly distorted. By many Carnap is thought of to this day as a phenomenalist, whose empiricism was so rooted in the verification principle that the whole edifice was discredited by critique of the verification principle. W.V. Quine did not share in any mass delusion about the significance of these aspects of Carnap's philosophy. He incisively zeroed in on a fundamental principle which really was central, the analytic/synthetic distinction. His attack on this principle, in essence a radical scepticism about semantics, was enough to turn his contemporaries against Carnap and thrust himself forward into global pre-eminence.
In my next I will look closer at Carnap's core programme.
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