Language, Truth and Knowledge: Contributions to the Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap

195 Pages·2003·3.868 MB·

by  Ilkka Niiniluoto (auth.), Thomas Bonk (eds.)

LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE
VIENNA CIRCLE INSTITUTE LIBRARY [2003]
2
Institut Wiener Kreis
So cie ty Jor the Advancement oJ the Scientific World Conception
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Friedrich Stadler
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The tit/es pubfished in this series are fisted at the end af the va/urne.
LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND
KNOWLEDGE
Contributions to the
Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap
Edited by
THOMASBONK
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-90-481-6258-1 ISBN 978-94-017-0151-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-0151-8
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ................................................................................................... Vll
ILKKA NIINILUOTO, Carnap on Truth ............................................ ..
JAN WOLENSKI, Carnap's Metaphilosophy .. ................ ....................... 27
THOMAS MORMANN, Synthetic Geometry and Aufbau ..................... 45
ULRICH MAJER, Carnap's Übernahme der Gestalttheorie in
den Aufbau im Lichte heutiger, vor allem computationaler
Theorien des Sehens ........................................................................ 65
C. WADE SAVAGE, Carnap's Aufbau Rehabilitated ............................. 79
CHRIS PINCOCK, Carnap and the Unity ofScience: 1921-1928......... 87
GRAHAM H. BIRD, Carnap's Internal and External Questions
Part 1: Quine's Criticisms ........ ........................................................ 97
Part 2: Carnap's Arguments .... ........................ ................................ 116
THOMAS BONK, Scepticism under New Colours? Stroud's
Criticism ofCarnap ......................................................................... 133
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Squaring the Vienna Circle with
Up-to-date Logic and Epistemology ................................................. 149
WOLFGANG SPOHN, Carnap versus Quine, or Aprioristic
versus Naturalized Epistemology, or a Lesson from
Dispositions ..................................................................................... 167
SAHOTRA SARKAR, Husserl's Role in Carnap's Der Raum ............... 179
Index ..................................................................................................... 191
PREFACE
This collection originated at a conference organized by the Institute Vienna
Circle and the University of Vienna on the Vienna Circle and Logical
Empiricism and was held in Vienna in July 2001. (cf. The Vienna Orcle and
Logical Empiricism. Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. Edited by Frie
drich Stadler. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer, 2003, Vienna Circle
Institute Yearbook 10). All the essays in this volume with one exception are
based on talks presented on that occasion and appear here for the first time.
The contributions address a broad range of issues in the philosophy of
Rudolf Carnap, but two themes stand out. Many authors respond directly
or indirectly to objections against various aspects of Carnap's work: the
pro gram of Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, his views on ontology and realism,
and his explication of disposition predicates. w.v. Quine's shadow looms
large. Rising to the challenge, these authors constructively modify Carnapian
ideas or explore alternatives without abandoning key tenets of his empiri
cism. As our understanding of Carnap's work in its historical context has
become more nuanced and detailed over the past decade, the room for
dis agreement over its interpretation has grown. Several of the papers aim to
put the record straight with respect to such works as Logische Syntax der
Sprache, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, and Der Raum. This collection then
attests to the continuing and growing attraction of Carnap's philosophy.
The first two essays in this collection track Carnap's ideas about the nature
of philosophy and the notion of truth over the course of his life. Ilkka
Niiniluoto corrects the widespread view that it is only through Tarski's
definition of truth in 1935 that Carnap came to semanties. In fact, Carnap's
pioneering contributions to semantics were independently conceived. Niini
luoto argues that by 1942 Carnap had moved closer to scientific realism by
adopting a non-epistemic notion of truth for theoretical statements in the
sciences. The move was subsequently obscured by the "partial interpretation"
approach to the significance oftheoretical terms. fan Wolenski examines how
Carnap's views on the scope and proper method of philosophy evolved in
opposition to Wittgenstein: from identification of philosophical method with
the "logic of science" to the study of syntax of languages and then on to the
semantics of languages.
The Logische Aufbau der Welt, in its monumental ambition to provide a
single conceptual system based on a few primitive predicates that would
allow to express all of objective knowledge, continues to fascinate. Thomas
Mormann stresses the significance of the geometrie origin of the Aufbau's
method. By reconsidering Carnap's quasi-analysis as an instance of "syn
thetic" geometry he takes issue with Nelson Goodman's sweeping objections
against the methods employed in the Aufbau. C. Wade Savage rejects an
vii
viii PREFACE
influential contemporary interpretation of the Aufbau and argues that it
should be read straight-forwardly as a foundationalist project that was
abandoned by Carnap mainly for technical reasons. The difficulties can be
overcome, he suggests, by applying lessons from Artificial Intelligence
regarding the translatability of "knowledge representations." Carnap's deci
sion to employ the Gestalt theoretic approach to perception in the Aufbau has
been variously interpreted. Ulrich Majer contends that Gestalt theory is after
all crucial for the aims and methods of Carnap's project. However, since the
pioneering works of Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler new theories of
vision have emerged. Majer examines shortcomings and strengths of the
Aufbau in the light of one of the most influential of those theories. Chris
Pincock compares Carnap's conception ofthe unity ofthe sciences with Hans
Reichenbach's and Moritz Schlick's, who championed a "local" axiomatic
approach anchored in coordinative definitions for theoretical concepts. In
the period of the Aufbau Carnap, on the other hand, thought to ground the
unity of science in a universallanguage and basic "structural" relations.
Carnap's analysis of the ontological import of formal and empirical
theories, advanced in the seminal "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,"
has raised much controversy. Quine, famously, argued that Carnap's answer
is flawed both in its reliance on the analytic-synthetic distinction and with
respect to the significance of the internal-external distinction. In part 1 of
"Carnap and Quine: Internal and External Questions," Graham H Bird takes
on these objections. He points out that Carnap's distinction of extern al and
internal questions with respect to a linguistic framework is actually
embedded in a subtIe fourfold distinction and shows how Quine misrepre
sented Carnap's position. The focus ofpart 2 ofthe essay is on Susan Haack's
interpretation and criticism of "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology."
Several commentators have found prima faäe powerful arguments against
Cartesian scepticism in the latter essay and in Carnap's book Scheinprobleme
in der Philosophie. Barry Stroud, Michael Williams, and others think these
arguments are mistaken. Thomas Bonk examines and rejects Stroud's
influential analysis of Carnap's views on verification and the significance of
linguistic frameworks.
The first of the final three essays investigates technical and conceptual
difficulties which stand in the way of realizing Carnap's idea of a universal
language that is sufficiently expressive for science and mathematics and
includes its meta-Ianguage. Jaakko Hintikka argues that much of Carnap's
logicism can be salvaged and certain objections by Quine can be removed if
"Frege-Russell" logic is replaced by the first-order logic that Hintikka and
co-workers have developed. The next essay deals with difficulties which beset
the explication of physical disposition predicates by way of reduction
sentences proposed by Carnap. Based on the notion of a "defeasible" apriori
Wolfgang Spohn shows how the original account of reduction sentences can
be revised in a way that appears to be consistent with the main tenets of
Carnap's empiricism. Last but not least, Sahotra Sarkar questions the
PREFACE ix
conventional wisdom that neo-Kantian thought was the dominant inftuence
on Carnap's dissertation Der Raum. He traces and emphasizes the inftuence
of Edmund Husserl as a major source for the epistemological basis of Der
Raum.
I would like to thank Friedrich Stadler for his encouragement and
patience. This book would not exist without his initiative and enthusiasm.
Also, my thanks to the staff of the Institute Vienna Circ1e for expert help in
preparing the manuscript. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the permission
of the author and Kluwer Academic Publishers to reprint what he re appears
as the first part of G.H. Bird's essay.
Thomas Bonk
August 2002
ILKKA NIINILUOTO
CARNAP ON TRUTH
During his long career, Rudolf Carnap held various different views ab out the
concept of truth and its philosophical significance. As a good logical
empiricist, he insisted on the distinction between logical and factual state
ments, and employed his technical powers to give rigorous characterizations
of the notions of logical, analytic, and factual truth. The development of
Carnap's views reflected his ability to quickly absorb new influences and his
broad interests ranging from logic to epistemology, philosophy of language,
and philosophy of science (Sections 1 and 2). Carnap was the co-founder of
logical semantics with Alfred Tarski (Section 3), and therefore it is especially
interesting to see how Carnap's work was related to Tarski's early definition
of truth and to the later Tarskian model theory (Section 4). In Section 5, we
discuss some difficulties in Carnap's liberally empiricist treatment of scien
tific theories. The final section 6 makes some remarks on Carnap's con
temporary relevance.
I. CARNAP'S EARLY WORK
For the purposes of our survey, the first period of Carnap's work can be
taken to cover his early development until the end of the 1920s. During this
time, unlike some of his associates in Vienna (Moritz Schlick) and Berlin
(Hans Reichenbach), Carnap did not show any particular interest in the
classical philosophical debates on the notion of truth.
1
Carnap's education had three important components. One was his study of
contemporary developments in mathematics and physics, including philoso
phical commentaries written by positivists (Ernst Mach) and conventional
ists (Henri Poincare, Hugo Dingler). The second was mathematical logic,
introduced to him in 1910-14 by Gottlob Frege in Jena. The third was the
influence of his Neo-Kantian teachers of philosophy.
The Neo-Kantian programme ofthe Marburg school attempted to modify
Kantian approaches in order to make them compatible with the latest
achievements ofmathematics and physics, such as non-Euclidean geometries
and the theory of relativity. This outlook still dominated Carnap's 1922
doctoral dissertation Der Raum, which claimed that the topological structure
of geometry is based upon pure intuition and, therefore, synthetic apriori.
T Bank (ed.), Language, Truth and Knawledge, 1-25.
© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 ILKKA NIINILUOTO
However, the works of Frege and Bertrand Russell soon convinced Carnap
of the logistic view that mathematics is reducible to logic and, hence, analytic
and apriori. But, with Reichenbach, Carnap accepted the idea that the a
priori element of science has to be relativized to theoretical frameworks.
The reading of Russell's Our Knowledge 01 the External World in the winter
of 1921 assured Carnap of the importance of logic as the method of
philosophy. By 1924 he finished a manuscript "Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit"
which applied Russell's type theory from Principia Mathematica to the
Kantian problem about the constitution of the world. After moving to
Vienna in 1926, Carnap eventually published this grandiose work in 1928
with the title Der Logische Aufbau der Welt.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the neo-Kantian motives in Carnap's
Aufbau.2 His choice of the "autopsychological" Elementarerlebnisse as the
basis of the constitution, and thereby his way of treating physical objects and
other minds as "logical constructs" in Russell's sense, links his views also to
Mach's phenomenalism. Discussions about Aufbau in Schlick's circle in
Vienna promoted a phenomenalist reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tracta
tus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) which had left open the nature of its
"elements."
Carnap's constitution system can be read as a rational reconstruction of
the path of human concept formation and knowledge from "the given" to
more complex domains of science.3 This epistemological reading is compa
tible with Carnap's very strict exclusion of questions of ontology as bad
metaphysics: the choice of the basis is a matter of choosing a language, and
the construction process proceeds from terms to other terms via explicit
definitions. Appealing to Wittgenstein, Carnap argued that the task of
philosophy is to analyse language. In his Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie
in 1928, he warned against the dangerous "pseudo-problems" that arise in
philosophy from the careless use of statements without factual or experiential
content. Here the strict criterion of meaningfulness of the Aufbau (i.e.
constructibility in the phenomenalist constitution system) was replaced by a
more liberal condition requiring that there is conceivable empirical evidence
which deductively or inductively supports a statement or its negation.4
Among the meaningless pseudo-problems Carnap included the issue of
realism, i.e. the question of the existence of "an extern al world" independent
from the cognizing consciousness. Likewise, questions ab out the relations of
language to extra-linguistic reality were counted as metaphysical. Indeed, in
his "Intellectual Autobiography" (1963), Carnap told that the Vienna Circle
read Wittgenstein's Tractatus as claiming that "the logical structure of
sentences and the relation between language and the world" are things that
"show themselves but cannot be said."s In other words, this amounts to the
ineffability of syntax and semantics, confirming Jaakko Hintikka's thesis that
Frege, RusselI, and Wittgenstein - and the young Carnap in their footsteps -
advocated the universal medium view of logic and language.6