Carnap Research Articles

Conceptual engineering in the Lvov-Warsaw School

ABSTRACT The paper explores the relationship between conceptual engineering and the methodology of the Lvov-Warsaw School. While conceptual engineering is commonly seen as rooted in Rudolf Carnap's works and his method of explication, this paper argues that LWS predates and informs contemporary understanding of this methodology. The paper establishes that LWS not only engaged in but also systematically developed a method of conceptual revision aimed at enhancing clarity, precision, and coherence with specific theoretical frameworks. The analysis shows that LWS's approach to concepts combined both descriptive and normative methodologies to improve and adapt philosophical concepts to better address actual phenomena and certain theoretical or practical needs. This method, described by LWS members as ‘analysis and construction’, parallels contemporary conceptual engineering practices, particularly its so-called ‘narrow’ understanding focused on revising existing concepts rather than on merely introducing new ones. By tracing the historical trajectory of conceptual engineering back to LWS, this paper provides a deeper understanding of its foundational strategies and suggesting that LWS's methodology could serve as a guide for current and future philosophical projects.

Carnap and Wittgenstein: Tolerance, Arbitrariness, and Truth

This article discusses the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophies of logic during the time of Wittgenstein’s interactions with the Vienna Circle and up to 1934 when the German edition of Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language was published. Whilst Section 1 focuses on the relationship between Carnap and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, including Wittgenstein’s accusation of plagiarism against Carnap in 1932, Section 2 discusses the relationship between Carnap’s principle of tolerance and Wittgenstein’s similar principle of the arbitrariness of grammar. I argue that, although Carnap’s claim in Logical Syntax to ‘go beyond’ Wittgenstein has certain justification in relation to the Tractatus, so does Wittgenstein’s priority claim. The relationship between Carnap’s philosophy of logic and the Tractatus is thus more complicated than is often recognized. If the reference point is Wittgenstein in the early 1930s, however, Carnap cannot be described as going beyond him, and by 1934, Wittgenstein had advanced further than Carnap would ever venture. Despite evidence that Carnap knew about Wittgenstein’s principle of the arbitrariness of syntax well before his first articulations of his principle of tolerance, the extent of the influence of Wittgenstein’s principle on Carnap remains unclear. What can be established with certainty is that Wittgenstein’s principle predates Carnap’s and that Carnap resisted acknowledging him despite being urged to do so. Arguably, Wittgenstein’s account of syntax as both arbitrary and non-arbitrary is also superior in clarity to Carnap’s misleading claim about a ‘complete freedom’ implied by the principle of tolerance, because such a freedom only exists for idle syntactical systems that are not put to work. In Section 3, I discuss the relationship between Carnap’s notion of expediency and Wittgenstein’s account of the correctness or truth of logical accounts. As my discussion of Wittgenstein’s account brings out, Carnap’s rejection of truth in logic for expediency as the goal of logical clarifications does not follow from the principle of tolerance and is not justified by it. It remains unclear what justifies Carnap’s rejection of truth as the goal of logical clarification. Again, Wittgenstein’s account seems preferable, given the vacuity of the claim that expediency constitutes the basis of choice between different logical languages and clarifications.

Regrounding the Unworldly: Carnap’s Politically Engaged Logical Pluralism

Recent discussions of logical pluralism trace its origins to Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance; indeed, the principle is seen as one of Carnap’s lasting philosophical contributions. In this paper, I will argue that Carnap’s reasons for adopting this principle are not purely logical, but are rather founded in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto—a programmatic document that brings the Circle’s philosophical work together with a program of social change. Building on work by Uebel, Romizi, and others, I argue that we must understand the principle in light of Carnap’s role in writing the manifesto, and thus as integrated into the larger philosophical and political goals of the Circle. This history illuminates the often-ignored relationship between Carnap’s logical pluralism and his political views. Finally, I turn to the political situation of the post-World War 2 period in the United States. During this time, the Circle’s emigres in the USA transitioned their work from active efforts to reform society to the technical work that we recognize as the foundation of American analytic philosophy today. In this final section, I argue that the reasons that Carnap distanced himself from the political foundations of his view were due in large part to McCarthy-era persecution of left-wing academics.

Religion and Its Position in the Society: A Critical Study on Rudolf Carnap’s Thoughts

The battle between rationalism and empiricism is a reaction arising from an attempt to have an understanding of reality. Wilhelm Dilthey’s critique of positivism gave birth to the Vienna Circle with his ideas on logical positivism or neo-positivism. This paper explains Rudolf Carnap’s, the most prominent figure, thoughts of the understanding of religious theology’s position in logical positivism. The research results state that: first, the Vienna Circle significantly contributed to the development of contemporary philosophy; second, they were based on verification-confirmation, metaphysical elimination, and combination of knowledge aspects; and third, the transcendental philosophy offered by Immanuel Kant was on which our further studies were based. Transcendental philosophy was born out of “conflict” between empiricism and rationalism.

Truth in philosophy: a conceptual engineering approach

The focus of this paper will be to examine the implications that a “practical” approach to conceptual engineering might have for the “traditional” conception of philosophy as uncovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. In doing so, I will be building on the ideas of a figure that many take to be the first major philosopher to write on conceptual engineering: Rudolf Carnap. Though the current wave of interest in conceptual engineering goes back less than a decade, many conceptual engineers have found precedent for their views in Carnap’s characterization of what he called “explication.” Interestingly, however, not nearly as much attention has been paid to another Carnapian thesis which seems to me to have deep relevance to methodological questions about conceptual engineering. I have in mind here the distinction between internal and external questions proposed in “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950b) and the accompanying claim that external questions lack cognitive content and can be cogently approached only as a matter of pragmatic decision-making. This is the aspect of Carnap’s views upon which I propose to build. I'll first make the case that there is a suggestive similarity between Carnap’s claim that external questions are matters of pragmatic choice and the practical conceptual engineer’s claim that engineering success should be characterized in terms of suitability to a function or purpose. After that, I'll look at potential worries about the Carnapian distinction—including, e.g., the concern that it relies on the analytic/synthetic distinction. Finally, I will propose a somewhat modified and expanded version of the distinction and examine its consequences for the thesis that philosophy aims at discovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest.

Carnaps fråga och teologins gåta

In this text, I develop my earlier argument on the possibility of a non-confessional theological inquiry, and hence an intellectual practice devoted to the classical theological problems that begin with reason rather than faith, at secular universities in Sweden, a country with no state church and many different religions and denominations. I answer the criticism against this tentative proposal by returning to Rudolf Carnap's discussion of Friedrich Gogarten's theological tractate Die religiöse Entscheidung (1921). The logical positivist was amazed that Gogarten was so boldly staking out a new area of reality, and he wanted to know how he could see what Gogarten saw. "Gogarten can rightly say that I am blind", Carnap wrote, and "my non-seeing would not be an objection for him, but would only show that I am not (yet) one of the elect". But Carnap continued by stating that this would lead to a relativistic outcome that he could not assent to due to his "belief in reason" (Vernunftglaube). Accepting Carnap's criticism of relativism but deconstructing the difference between what he called the question (die Frage) and the puzzle or mystery (das Rätsel), I show how theological questions still emerge in the sciences and that there is a link between questions and mysteries. Insisting that Carnap's own belief in reason is a good indication of the relation between die Frage and das Rätsel, and hence between science and what the logical positivist would describe as metaphysics, I argue that systematic theology not only has a prominent and vital role at a secular university, as the science that investigates shapes and discusses theological discourses wherever they appear. It also asks (and might even give tentative answers to) the problematic question of the truth of these discourses, since I show that Carnap's, ultimately Diltheyan, attempt to differentiate understanding (verstehen) from explanation (erklären), cannot hold. Theology is, in this sense, not only an attempt to describe and explain how different religions think. It is also a critical and philosophical discussion of these thought systems' meaning and truth content. Theology thereby reminds the university of the interconnection between science and mystery, truth and meaning.

The reduction sentences are easy even within a Popperian view

Rudolf Carnap proposed three reduction rules to improve scientific language. Those rules indicate when it is correct to add a property in situations in which other properties are already had. Assuming the theory of mental models, it has been shown that the rules are not hard to use from the cognitive point of view. The key to argue that is to accept that the human mind works as dual-process theories claim. According to these theories, people can use two different systems. One of them implies effort but the other one does not. Thus, the idea is that Carnap’s reduction rules can be applied resorting just to the system not implying cognitive effort. This paper goes one step further and poses that even from a Popperian perspective the reduction rules keep not being difficult. One might think that falsifiability requires cognitive effort because it needs to address situations in which the sentences are false. However, this paper tries to explain that, following the theory of mental models, that is not hard if the sentences are conditionals, and the sentences in the reduction rules have conditional structures.

Rudolf Carnap’s Ideas in Philosophy of Language in the Context of Conceptual Engineering

The past decade has seen notable development of conceptual engineering – a field of analytical philosophy that focuses on the critical evaluation of concepts. Most authors engaged with this area identify Rudolf Carnap’s ideas as its methodological framework and theoretical origin, placing particular emphasis on the philosopher’s method of explication. This article highlights the unquestionable influence Carnap’s thought had on conceptual engineering whilst by no means reducing it to the utilisation and advancement of explication within this field of analytical philosophy: indeed, conceptual engineering has incorporated – and brought to the forefront – much broader tenets of Carnap’s concept. This study draws on a series of the philosopher’s works, as well as his ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, to trace the evolution of his ideas about language and describe the fundamental elements revealing the ‘engineering perspective’ in his reflection. Most clearly, this perspective is evident in his interpretation of logic as a conceptual tool for acquiring and processing knowledge, ‘assembling’ it into a structure and refining the procedures of logic itself. It is shown that the origins of the engineering perspective trace back, on the one hand, to Carnap’s interest in the methodological framework of physics, particularly the measurement problem and its epistemological analysis, and, on the other, his fascination with interpretations of the nature of mathematical theory and the idea of unifying logicism and formalism by introducing the principle of tolerance, which adds a pragmatic dimension to methodology. The article examines in detail the idea of explication and its theoretical origins, which lie, in particular, in Carnap’s intention to exactify the notions expressing the degree of validity and probability. His idea of a link between the results of explication and its goal became the central principle of conceptual engineering, distinguishing it from mere conceptual analysis. It is concluded that, when considered together, Carnap’s two major ideas – explication and the principle of tolerance – can be placed in a broader context of a project seeking a rational reconstruction of the life of society and providing it with knowledge-based underpinnings.

Philosophie und die Wahrheit der Kunst. Untersuchungen zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Dissertation über Martin Heidegger

This article deals with Ingeborg Bachmann’s doctoral dissertation on the critical reception of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the exceptional position of Bachman’s dissertation in academia after the Second World War, which celebrated Heidegger as a master-thinker even though he was deeply engaged in the Third Reich. On the basis of Rudolf Carnap’s thinking Bachmann draws a sharp line between philosophy and Heidegger’s “Seinsmystik”. This leads her to a short, but profound, reflection on the essence of fine art.

Analisis Intertekstual Kristeva; antara Metode Ilmiah Rudolf Carnap dan Pemahaman Hadis Muhammad Syuhudi Ismail

This study explores the differences in approach between the scientific method and critical discussion of hadith in the thought of Rudolf Carnap and Muhammad Shuhudi Ismail. Carnap emphasized empirical verification, while Shuhudi Ismail highlighted the historical and cultural context in the understanding of hadith. The research aims to analyze the implications and integration of these two approaches in hadith analysis, as well as identify their potential integration in the perspective of Julia Kristeva. This study uses text analysis to compare Carnap and Syuhudi Ismail's perspectives on the scientific method and critical discussion of hadith. The integration of this approach is analyzed through Kristeva's intertextual approach. The results showed a difference between Carnap's approach that focused on empirical verification and rigorous logic and Syuhudi Ismail's contextual approach that emphasized understanding hadith in historical and cultural contexts. The integration of these two perspectives through Kristeva's intertextual analysis allows for a deeper and scientifically strong understanding of understanding in hadith studies.

Prior’s early reflections on sense and sentences

We present here an introduction and a discussion of A.N. Prior’s ‘Sense and Sentences’ in light of the context of publication in the journal National Education, written upon his return from Europe and while he was undergoing a crisis of faith. We argue that ‘Sense and Sentences’ is the article referred to by Kenny in his Obituary on Prior as an article written “on the relations between logic and grammar (with reference to Popper, Wisdom and Carnap)”. Furthermore, we argue that Prior was working his way into philosophy, by demonstrating his familiarity with the work of key persons within analytic philosophy such as Rudolf Carnap, John Wisdom and Karl Popper. We also argue that Findlay’s – and, thus, indirectly: Wittgenstein’s – influence is also visible in this period where Prior was transitioning from being a religious journalist to the future philosopher he would turn out to become. In particular, we argue that, while Findlay’s influence on the relationship between grammar and metaphysics would win the day with A.N. Prior, when he discovered tense-logic, it was not an evident feature of Prior’s work on the relationship between logic and grammar in sense and sentences. We argue that Sense and Sentences is interesting because it seems to have expressed a stage in Prior’s thinking on logic that he later came to modify, thereby distancing himself more from the anti-metaphysical tenets of analytic philosophy.

Lewis and Quine in context

Robert Sinclair’s Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction persuasively argues that Quine’s epistemology was deeply influenced by C. I. Lewis’s pragmatism. Sinclair’s account raises the question why Quine himself frequently downplayed Lewis’s influence. Looking back, Quine has always said that Rudolf Carnap was his “greatest teacher” and that his 1933 meeting with the German philosopher was his “first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation” (1970, 41; 1985, 97-8, my emphasis). Quine’s autobiographies contain only a handful of biographical references to Lewis and he regularly soft-pedaled the latter’s influence in private correspondence. In this note, I discuss some archival evidence that helps us better understand Quine’s reluctance to acknowledge Lewis’s influence. I contextualize the relation between Lewis and Quine and argue that the latter viewed his teacher as a retrograde force in modern epistemology, impeding the more rigorous approach that Carnap had been developing in Europe. Next, I briefly discuss Lewis’s contribution to the development of scientific philosophy in the United States and argue that Quine underestimated his teacher’s role in this process. In doing so, I argue that Quine’s zealous commitment to Carnap’s approach negatively affected his assessment of Lewis’s influence, thereby supplementing Sinclair’s praiseworthy reconstruction with an explanation of why Quine himself underestimated Lewis’s role.

Much Ado about nothing.R.G. Collingwood versus Martin Heidegger on the status of metaphysics

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the completely neglected relation between Collingwood and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics by highlighting their respective reactions to Alfred J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap. In his article “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” from 1931, Carnap exposed the metaphysical statements, used by Heidegger in his inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics?, as pseudo-statements. Three years later, Ayer published the article “Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics”. In the late 1930s, Ayer's position was attacked by Collingwood in An Essay on Metaphysics. In the British debate, the tables of the German debate were thus turned. Whereas the analytic philosopher Carnap reacted against the metaphysician Heidegger, the metaphysician Collingwood reacted against the analytic philosopher Ayer. Accordingly, a correct understanding and evaluation of the relation between Collingwood's and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics are dependent on knowledge of their respective reactions to Ayer and Carnap. Three steps are taken. First, the discussion between Carnap and Heidegger is presented. Second, the friction between Ayer and Collingwood is outlined. In the final section, the similarities and differences between Collingwood and Heidegger's concepts of metaphysics are explored and situated within their divergent views on the Western history of philosophy.

Wittgenstein & het logisch empiricisme. Een gespannen verhouding

Wittgenstein & logical empiricism Rudolf Carnap and Ludwig Wittgenstein share many philosophical interests: an admiration of Frege’s formal logic, an anti-metaphysical stance and a modernist aesthetic aimed at removing superficial elements from discourse or thought. Despite their shared interests, Carnap and Wittgenstein ended their interaction in a plagiarism dispute. In this essay, I discuss which metaphilosophical reasons lie behind their dispute. I argue that Wittgenstein’s overarching philosophical project stood in direct conflict with Carnap’s. First, Wittgenstein never accepted that there are meaningful sentences about the language of science. Thus, there could be no meaningful reflection on science, and this nullified Carnap’s Logic of Science project. Second, Wittgenstein had an overall disdain for Carnap’s desire, as displayed in the Manifesto and the Aufbau, to reform philosophical activity as a part of science itself in tandem with a general reform of the place science in society.

In the Mood: Why Vibes Matter in Reading and Writing Philosophy

AbstractPhilosophers often write in a particular mood; their work is playful, strident, strenuous, or nostalgic. On the face of it, these moods contribute little to a philosophical argument and are merely incidental. However, I will argue that the cognitive science of moods and emotions offers us reasons to suspect that mood is relevant for philosophical texts. I use examples from Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolph Carnap to illustrate the role moods play in their arguments. As readers and writers of philosophical texts, we do well to attend to mood.

Carnap as a Beall-style logical monist

There was a time when both Rudolf Carnap and Jc Beall were thought to be arch logical pluralists. Beall has since renounced his pluralistic views, but Carnap is still largely regarded as a pluralist. In this paper, I will show that there is good reason to think that Carnap is not a logical pluralist, at least in the way he is presented in the literature. Instead, I argue, he can be seen as a Beall-style logical monist at the meta-level, in line with the views expressed in Beall (APHI 14:1–29, 2017 and NOUS 28:30–54, 2018).

Kantian Views of Empirical Truth

"Let a Kantian view of empirical truth be any view according to which the truth of empirical claim depends on the truth of non-empirical claims, because subjects (consciously or not) constitute the empirical when applying the non-empirical to experience. Historically the most important such view is Immanuel Kant’s. It is not the only. Rudolf Carnap, Thomas Kuhn, and Donald Davidson held such views. Conversely, Willard van Orman Quine’s view was contrastingly instructive. My aim is to briefly sort all this out in search of lessons about the nature of empirical truth generally. Keywords: anthropocentric; ethnocentric; idiocentric; Kant; Immanuel; logocentric; truth. "

For my friend Richard J. Bernstein

For my friend Richard J. Bernstein

Rudolf Carnap’s diaries: from the German Youth Movement to the Vienna Circle

Rudolf Carnap’s diaries: from the German Youth Movement to the Vienna Circle

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle

It is not unusual to speculate on the contrary-to-fact implications of political assassinations. Lincoln's is the classic case in point, but we need only think of Julius Caesar, Gandhi, or John Kennedy, if we require further examples. One totally neglected case in this context is that of Moritz Schlick. One of the remote consequences of his murder, on June 22, 1936, which was most definitely a political assassination, is that today's academic world may well have been an entirely different one if he had gone on to lead the Vienna Circle into exile. That group of young philosophers of science had formed as he assumed the University of Vienna's chair of natural philosophy in 1922. A quarter of a century later, the entire English-speaking world (and Scandinavia) was in thrall to “logical positivism,” a caricature of scientific philosophy as the circle conceived it but an incredibly powerful intellectual standpoint, for all that. The view that all genuine knowledge can be quantified not only dominated philosophy but transformed the nature of universities to the point of threatening the very existence of the humanities, which could scarcely meet this demand. The polemical and oversimplified view of Rudolf Carnap's strong program for scientific philosophy simply found no place for disciplines based on mere description (ethnology) or on understanding complex interlinked constellations of events as they develop over time (history and its myriad allied disciplines).The die was cast, and the humanities became saddled with an inferiority complex that, even today, they have only partially shaken off. Only disciplines that employed mathematical methods in aid of rigorous explanation, working collectively in networks like those of physics or chemistry, were worthy of being institutionalized at universities. Since the humanities were, for the most part, embodied in individual researchers burning the Midnight Oil as they pondered the Eternal Verities, they were disqualified as sciences. They would have to reform themselves radically or disappear. The battle commenced, and sensitive observers can attest that, administrative rhetoric to the contrary, it still goes on. Had Schlick lived on, the pluralism and tolerance that was part of his view of the world might well have carried more influence than the more radical elements in the group ultimately did, and so the humanities might well have fared better in a more secure environment than they have done.Edmonds's The Murder of Professor Schlick does not venture into such speculations. Instead, it offers us a vibrant, suspense-filled narrative replete with as much information as the reader can digest (and more). Briefly, Edmonds presents a fully detailed, complex version of the high drama of the rise and decline of logical positivism in both its philosophical and its political dimensions, complete with vivid portraits of the characters whose thought and personalities supplied that movement with its dazzling dynamism. They include such characters as Schlick himself; the irrepressible Otto Neurath, who had been a minister in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic; Rudolf Carnap, the circle's standard-bearer; Ludwig Wittgenstein, its unwilling ideal; Bertrand Russell, its Promethean inspiration; the eccentric Kurt Gödel; the rabbi Josef Schächter; the clever Englishman A. J. Ayer; America's rising star, W. V. Quine; the perennial contrarian, Karl Popper; the unfortunate Friedrich Waismann, doomed to failure in all his efforts; the tragic Edgar Zilsel, who committed suicide in American exile; and several frequently neglected women, such as Rose Rand, Olga Hahn, Marie Reidemeister, and Olga Taussky. In addition, the strong Jewish presence in the circle and the surrounding anti-Semitism that was a continuing stumbling block to it are clearly and powerfully described.These are but highlights of Edmond's narrative, but they are proof positive that his study is where to begin an encounter with the Vienna Circle and thus with the philosophical view that, more than any other, has conferred its character on modern thought and deeply molded people who have never heard of it.