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Carnap's Sprachanschauung Circa 1932

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

J. Alberto Coffa
J. Alberto Coffa*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

Around 1932 Carnap's philosophical development reached a point of equilibrium from which he would no longer depart significantly. The basic items of the conception of knowledge which he came to endorse at that time were three: a variety of reductionistic empiricism which he had illustrated in the Aufbau; a rejection of standard correspondence theories of truth (together with what looked like an endorsement of coherentism); and a syntactical understanding of the nature of philosophical activities. To many philosophers, even those whom Carnap considered his teachers or his allies, this set of views seemed absurd and incoherent. Russell saw in them a neo-neo-Platonism, inspired by a superstitious awe of language ([27], pp. 21, 141;, Schlick saw in them the irony of extreme rationalism stemming from extreme empiricism ([28], p. 69); and some Polish philosophers said they were “too sober” to share Carnap's views ([22], p. 233).

Type
Part IV. Logical Positivism, Its Origins and Critics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 205 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I should like to express my gratitude to the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh for allowing me to consult some of the items in the Carnap Collection, to Prof. Richard Creath of Arizona State University for allowing me to use his invaluable preliminary bibliography of the Carnap Collection, and to Prof. Henk Mulder of the University of Amsterdam for allowing me to consult part of the Schlick-Wittgenstein correspondence in the Schlick Archives (Amsterdam). I am greatly indebted to Profs. Carl G. Hempel and H.Go Bohnert for their most helpful and illuminating comments. Thanks are also due to NSF for generous support.

A word about translations. When I give a reference to a German source, the translation is my own ; when the reference is to both the German source and an English translation, that means that I have followed the English translation except for minor adjustments.

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