Review Essays: The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station

Abstract

The impressive volume before us started out as an attempt to write history of epistemology since Kant, the way Carnap would have written it had he been Hegel.(1)1 Coffa began his project 1981 while a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science Pittsburgh and had finished a good penultimate draft when he suddenly died, after a brief illness, on 30 Dec., 1984. The title alludes to Edmund Wilson's classic study of revolutionary ideology, To the Finland Station. This is no accident and would be presumptuous a lesser work. The two studies cover roughly the same period, from the late eighteenth century to the first part of the present one, and they are both sparkling narratives that boldly project a large picture and then fill it with canny detail. Coffa begins with Kant, the villain of the piece, and ends with a group of thinkers in the neighborhood of Vienna (generously construed to include Berlin, Prague, Warsaw) who came to terms with the restrictive framework they had inherited from Kant, finally overcoming it favor of a new philosophy which meaning, rather than mind, played the central role. The main subject is the elusive a priori, the competitors for explaining it (or explaining it away) Kantianism, positivism, and what Coffa calls the semantic tradition. Kant is given credit for pointing to something of worth his remarks on the constitutive functions of mind, but his sins are many, prominent among them a variety of semantic confusions: of the contents of representations with their objects, of knowledge obtained by (narrowly Kantian) analysis of concepts and purely conceptual knowledge, of purely conceptual knowledge with knowledge which tells us nothing new, and so on. These errors had large and lasting consequences: Only through a complex and labo-