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How not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Alan Richardson
Alan Richardson*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Rudolf Carnap is principally renowned for stating with remarkable precision and rigor a rich variety of philosophical doctrines — doctrines which, thanks mainly to Carnap’s meticulous formulations, the philosophical world now holds to be clearly and fundamentally mistaken. Thus, it is Carnap who, in Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1947), presents in detail the linguistic doctrine of logical truth and the semantic underpinnings of the analytic/synthetic distinction, providing thereby the grist for the mill of Quine’s highly influential and important attacks on precisely these doctrines. Again, it was Carnap who, more than any other, precisely delineated the program of inductive logic. This program is now, thanks largely to Goodman’s (1983) New Riddle of Induction, also considered hopeless. Carnap is now firmly associated with a bewildering variety of discredited views: reductionism and the unity of science; the verification criterion of meaning; logic as an uninterpreted calculus; Russellian logicism even in the face of Gödel’s devastating incompleteness results; etc.

Type
Part I. Logical Empiricism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 2 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

This paper has been improved by discussions with Anil Gupta, Thomas Ricketts, and especially Michael Friedman. My thinking on Russell has been influenced by Ricketts’ unpublished paper “Facts, Logic, and the Criticism of Metaphysics in the Tractatus”. A prior version of this paper was presented to the Fullerton Club at Bryn Mawr University and I would like to thank David Ward for the invitation and the audience for helpful comments.

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