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?
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Friday, 30 July 2010
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
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
Thursday, 29 July 2010
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
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
Friday, 18 June 2010
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
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
Monday, 14 June 2010
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
A call for papers:
The Carnap/Quine debate and its contemporary relevance to metaontology.
RBJ
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
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
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
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
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
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
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