Carnap and the compulsions of interpretation: Reining in the liberalization of empiricism

Abstract

Carnap’s work was instrumental to the liberalization of empiricism in the 1930s that transformed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to what came to be known as logical empiricism. A central feature of this liberalization was the deployment of the Principle of Tolerance, originally introduced in logic, but now invoked in an epistemological context in “Testability and Meaning” (Carnap 1936a, 1937b). Immediately afterwards, starting with Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Carnap (1939) embraced semantics and turned to interpretation to guide the choice of a theoretical language for science. The first thesis of this paper is that recourse to an intended interpretation led to a partial retrenchment of the conventionalism implied by the Principle of Tolerance. It required that the choice of a language be based on abstraction from a (typically empirical) context; this procedure later became a component of the process of explication that was distinctive to Carnap’s mature views. The (typically empirical) interpretive origin of formal systems also ensured their likely syntactic consistency, an issue on which Carnap was strongly criticized by figures such as Beth and Godel. The second thesis of this paper is that this reliance on an intended interpretation enabled constructed formal systems to be relevant to the development of empirical science.