The concept of truth in Carnap'sLogical Syntax of Language

Abstract

Recently, several authors have argued that Rudolf Carnap's repudiation of the concept of truth in The Logical Syntax of Language was founded on considerations of an epistemological nature.1 According to this inter pretation, Carnap believed that, since scientific statements are hypo thetical and cannot be definitively verified, the truth-predicate can never be applied and is therefore useless. So if there is any legitimate role for the concept of truth at all, it is to mark those sentences that are currently accepted by contemporary scientists. Certainly, this line of reasoning was used by Carnap, as well as his friends Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel, in the midst of the Vienna Circle's celebrated controversy over protocol sentences (Carnap 1932c, p. 180; Neurath 1983, p. 53; Hempel 1935a, p. 57). But it would be mistaken to think that this epistemological argument provided Carnap's only, or even his strongest, motivation for repudiating the concept of truth. It would be especially misleading to locate this argument in The Logical Syntax of Language, as Alberto Coffa and others have recently done (Coffa 1976, p. 222 24; 1991, esp. pp. 303-05; Creath 1989; 1991b, pp. 410-11). For then it would appear that Carnap's Syntax-era, repudiation of the concept of truth was founded on epistemological grounds that are extraneous to his philosophy of language, and it would follow that Carnap's subsequent endorsement of the concept of truth, and his ensuing researches in semantics, were conditioned on the liberalization of his empiricism, rather than on fundamental changes in his conception of language.2 In short, Carnap's thirties philosophy of language would appear to have survived the shift from syntax to semantics virtually unscathed, for only a minor epistemological point separated the two in the first place, and even this matter was soon rendered obsolete by other developments in his thought.3 In what follows below it will be argued that this construal of the arguments against truth in the Syntax distorts Carnap's philosophical orientation in the early thirties. For Carnap's repudiation of truth is founded on a central theme in the Syntax-era philosophy, the doctrine of syntacticism the idea that syntactic methods of analysis are wholly