Carnap’s naturalism evidently differs from Quine’s, but the precise nature of this difference has proven elusive. This chapter focuses on what Quine defends as his “provincial” naturalism against a Carnapian “cosmopolitan” alternative. The problem with this contrast, however, is that Quine does not represent a pure form of what he calls a “provincial” view. This is illustrated by his tergiversations about analyticity; after initially denying that there was even an explicandum worth bothering about, he later offered his own ordinary-language-based account of analyticity, without feeling any need to supply a more exact explication; there would appear to be no way to resolve the resulting stand-off with the cosmopolitan standpoint. This paper suggests a more robust explicandum for analyticity (and cosmopolitanism more generally). We come back, in the end, to the confrontation between Carnap and Quine in Chicago in 1950, where Carnap convinced Quine that their differences did not concern any question about which there could be right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is regretted that Quine soon lost this lesson from sight.

Recognition that people are divided by a common language is typically marked by a search for culprit ambiguities – but rarely so when name philosophers are involved, for whom continued talking past each other may seem the easier option.Whether the case of Carnap and Quine fits this profile is my quarry here. I begin with Quine’s conjecture that it was Neurath’s influence that made Carnap introduce the paragraphs into the Aufbau that promised, without elaboration, a conceptual genealogy on a physical basis. I argue that are good grounds to support Quine here. The analysis will be supplemented with remarks about later disagreements between Carnap and Neurath.

This chapter explores Ernst Mach’s philosophy of scientific knowledge as an original form of pragmatism. Mach recognised science as a deeply historical phenomenon and scientific knowledge as path-dependent, thoroughly fallible, and far from ever closed. Conceptual perplexities, he held, can only be resolved by historical-comparative investigations. What merits thinking of Mach as a pragmatist, I will argue, is his insistence, as a philosopher, on the ultimately practical orientation of all thought as a matter both of fact and norm, and, as a historian of science, on the need to investigate the specific problem situations out of and in response to which concepts and theories developed. Last but not least, the practical orientation of his philosophy found expression in his allegiance to the ideal of enlightenment.

INTRODUCTION

Rudolf Carnap is today the best known representative of the Vienna Circle, even though he was neither its nominal leader (Moritz Schlick), nor its effective founder (Hans Hahn), nor its most prolific writer and propagandist (Otto Neurath). The reason for Carnap's prominence lies in two books - The Logical Construction of the World (1928, better known as the Aufbau) and The Logical Syntax of Language (1934c, translated in 1937) - and a series of papers - including “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932d/1959) and “The Physical Language as the Universal Language of Science” (1932a, translated as The Unity of Science, 1934) - published between 1928 and 1936. In these works Carnap managed to articulate with until then unsurpassed clarity certain theses of extreme boldness and daring complexity that were closely associated with the Circle as a whole. Yet while he provided exemplary articulations of its members' characteristic convictions and also set themes for the Circle's continuing discussions, it must be stressed that the development of these theses was very much Carnap's own and that many of his positions encountered opposition even within the Circle itself. If one is then moved to add that there is more to the Vienna Circle's philosophy than Carnap's, one must also add that there is more to Rudolf Carnap than the Vienna Circle's influence.

If there is a movement or school that epitomized or typified analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it was, by all odds, logical empiricism. Logical empiricists such as Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Carl G. Hempel, and Herbert Feigl had, by 1950, influenced the major fields of analytic philosophy. They had been instrumental in creating a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, in establishing mathematical logic as a topic in and a tool for philosophy, and in creating the project of formal semantics. Logical empiricism provided an importantly new understanding of the nature of empiricism and a new rejection of metaphysics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century give logical empiricism a central place in the project, often repeating for analytic philosophy the revolutionary rhetoric of early logical empiricism. Because of this importance of logical empiricism in establishing the project of analytic philosophy, philosophical innovations both within and outside the analytic tradition in the 1960s and 1970s often were at pains to distance themselves from one aspect or another of logical empiricism.

Philosophy of social science is unlikely to figure in many people's judgment as a field in which logical empiricism effected great progress. If anything, impressions run to the contrary. Considered in the right light, however, the riches of logical empiricist philosophy of social science were considerable. The trick is to find the proper lighting. Here the aim is to illuminate a much misunderstood early doctrine, not only for its intrinsic interest but also - alongside Chapters 3 and 11 but from a different angle - to highlight what was lost when central members of the Vienna Circle were marginalized in the heyday of orthodox logical empiricism.

THE PLURALITY OF LOGICAL EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHIES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, BROADLY CONCEIVED

For current purposes virtually all post-World War II philosophy of social science must be neglected. The reason is by no means that there is no good work in the field during that time by logical empiricists. Nor is the reason that in this period it is even more difficult to decide membership of the movement than in the previous one. It is rather that no figures central in pre–WorldWar II logical empiricism in this field remained to continue their work after the war. Given this discontinuity of personnel, the concentration here will lie on prewar logical empiricist philosophy of social science. Even so delimited, the field holds forgotten riches.

Rudolf Carnap's first major book, The Logical Structure of the World [Der logische Aufbau der Welt] (2003a [1928]; hereafter referred to as “Aufbau”), is a key work for the understanding of the philosophical movement called “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism”. Like this movement it has suffered a protracted period of misinterpretation, but also profited from a recent renewal of interest. Once regarded as the explicitly phenomenalist completion of Wittgenstein's positivistic-ally misunderstood Tractatus, it is now recognized as an extremely complex work in its own right that continues to be the focus of intense efforts of re-evaluation and reinterpretation. Here the aim is to abstract as much as possible from the wealth of logical details that make up the Aufbau and to uncover the philosophical point of this work and the interpretative debates about it.

Carnap, language constructor: overview of the Aufbau

Carnap pursued the aim uncontroversially ascribed to the Vienna Circle -furnishing an account of the nature of scientific knowledge adequate to the then latest advances – and his own, more recently recognized aim – accounting for the possibility of objective knowledge – by developing constructed languages for scientific disciplines. Importantly, Carnap did not seek to defend the knowledge claim of science by analysing the languages that science actually used. Over the course of his long career, Carnap changed his mind about the nature of the languages appropriate to the representation of scientific theories, but not about the philosophical strategy of providing so-called rational reconstructions of the logico-linguistic frameworks of scientific theories (in place of analysing them in their historically given form). Their point lay in the clear exhibition of the meaning and empirical basis of scientific propositions.