Rudolf Carnap

Introduction
Rudolf Carnap (b. 1891–d. 1970) was acknowledged as the principal philosophical spokesman for the
movement known as “logical empiricism” or “logical positivism,” and the leading philosopher of the
“Vienna Circle” of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He first became widely known for his 1928 book Der
logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Construction of the World), which was generally seen as attempting
to carry out a positivistic or phenomenalist reduction of all knowledge to sense data—an impression that
has only recently been corrected. Carnap’s attention then shifted to the philosophy of logic and
mathematics. His next major book, the 1934 Logical Syntax of Language, sought to resolve the debate
among the foundational schools of logicism, intuitionism, and formalism (then at its height) by proposing
a “principle of tolerance,” according to which there is no ultimately “correct” logic, but only more and less
useful ones for various human purposes. This became the guiding principle for his entire later philosophy,
including his program of “explication” or piecemeal replacement of vague ideas and concepts by better
ones. After Carnap’s emigration to the United States in 1936, the larger ethical and political context of his
work—obvious in Central Europe to followers of the Vienna Circle and surrounding debates—went
unrecognized, and his experimentation with new language forms came to seem somewhat recondite and
technical, even after his shift in focus during the 1940s to inductive logic and probability. Although his
major 1950 book Logical Foundations of Probability reshaped the field and led eventually to current
Bayesian epistemology and decision theory, it was viewed as a narrowly technical preoccupation.
Moreover, by this time, Carnap’s philosophy had come under widespread attack from younger
philosophers, especially Quine, who shaped his generation’s understanding of Carnap, which remained in
place until quite recently. By the time of Carnap’s major restatement of his views in The Philosophy of
Rudolf Carnap (1963), therefore, philosophers had mostly lost interest, and the wider intellectual world
saw Quine and Kuhn as having decisively superseded logical empiricism. This only began to be seriously
questioned some two decades after Carnap’s death, when the historical turn in analytical philosophy led to
closer investigation of many classical texts. Since about 1990, re-interpretations of Carnap’s works have
proliferated, and the literature on various aspects of his philosophy has grown at an increasing rate.
Surveys and Orientation

There is a curious ambivalence to the general character of Carnap’s philosophy. From a certain viewpoint,
his work appears to be very much in the mainstream of western philosophy—he can be recognized as
working within certain traditions of thought, and his philosophical development can be accounted for, to
some degree, as responses to those traditions. But from another angle of view, he stands very much outside
the philosophical tradition, with which he never had much patience and to which he made only grudging
concessions; most of his published work is stiffly expository and technical, hence less than suitable for
orientation. Such overall surveys as exist do quite a good job from the first viewpoint but not the second—
reasonably enough, as they mostly come from philosophers. Probably the best place to start is Friedman
and Creath 2007. There is no suitable single-authored survey in English, though Friedman 2000 puts the
early Carnap in a wide overall context, as do the early chapters of Carus 2007. For those who read
German, Mormann 2000 is genuinely introductory in a way none of the other items in this section are, but
(perhaps for that reason) it is somewhat limited in scope. An orientation to the revolutionary ramifications
of the “principle of tolerance” central to Carnap’s thought can be obtained from Ricketts 1994 or Creath
2009. For those interested in the second, more anti- or aphilosophical aspect of Carnap’s thought, there is
no overall orientation, but Uebel 2004 sketches a general context, Bouveresse 2012 gives an interestingly
different one, and Carus 2007 (chapters 1–3) provides extensive material. Carnap’s own published
autobiography, though significantly cut from the original manuscript (preserved in the Carnap papers at
the University of California, Los Angeles), is nonetheless an important introductory document, included in
Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works).
Bouveresse, Jacques. “Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Aufklärung.” In Carnap’s Ideal of
Explication and Naturalism. Edited by Pierre Wagner, 47–62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230379749Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Abridged translation of “Rudolf Carnap et l’héritage de l’Aufklärung.” In Jacques Bouveresse’s

Essais VI: Les lumières des positivistes, 55–133; Marseille: Agone, 2011. Broad discussion of the
predicament of the Enlightenment in 20th-century Europe and Carnap’s place in that interplay of
ideas.
Find this resource:
Carus, A. W. Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511487132Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Looks for the architectonic unity of Carnap’s thought in his ideal of explication, mostly by way of
how Carnap arrived at it—via early influences, his first writings, the Aufbau, up to the Syntax and a
bit beyond, against a wide array of archival documents that provide narrative continuity.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “The Gentle Strength of Tolerance: The Logical Syntax of Language and Carnap’s
Philosophical Programme.” In Carnap’s “Logical Syntax of Language.” Edited by Pierre Wagner,
203–216. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
The principle of tolerance considered more broadly as an argumentative (not merely rhetorical)
strategy, illustrating just how radical a move it is, and how unprecedented in the history of thought.
Stresses that the program behind tolerance is a positive, creative engineering program more than a
negative, anti-metaphysical one.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger. LaSalle, IL: Open Court,
2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reconstructs the epoch-making philosophical encounter in Davos between the establishment Neo-
Kantian Ernst Cassirer and the upcoming “secret king” of German philosophy, Martin Heidegger.
Carnap also attended. The different responses of Carnap and Heidegger to the Neo-Kantian
problematic epitomize the ensuing split between analytical and continental traditions in philosophy.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael, and Richard Creath. The Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521840156Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collection of introductory papers by leading Carnap scholars covering most aspects of Carnap’s
work, with a valuable overview introduction by Friedman that also reflects critically on the Carnap
literature as a whole, including his own previous work. Several of these papers are cited separately
in other sections of this article.
Find this resource:
Mormann, Thomas. Carnap. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000.
The only brief introduction to Carnap for the nonspecialist. Very readable and literate; places its
subject in a broad context. Concludes by presenting Carnap’s philosophy as one of “possibilities” in
the spirit of Robert Musil’s “Möglichkeitsmenschen” (people who imagine possibilities envisaging
the world as being different from the way it is).
Find this resource:
Ricketts, Thomas. “Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism.” In Reading

Putnam. Edited by Peter Clark and Bob Hale, 176–200. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
One of the best and clearest expositions of the import and the larger philosophical significance of
Carnap’s principle of tolerance.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. “Carnap, the Left Vienna Circle, and Neopositivist Antimetaphysics.” In Carnap
Brought Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 247–278.
LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2004.
Paints a vivid picture of the Vienna Circle in its “political” context, broadly speaking (especially the
“left” Vienna Circle, the subgroup to which Carnap belonged), with “bewusste Lebensgestaltung”
(conscious shaping of life) at the center of its agenda, and the anti-metaphysical impulse a desire to
shake off the conservative burden of the past.
Find this resource:
Carnap’s Works
There is no scholarly edition of Carnap’s works (though some of the leading Carnap scholars are at work
on one), and many have been out of print for extended periods. The original Aufbau, published in 1928,
has recently been reprinted by its original publisher, Felix Meiner, along with a collection of the classical
anti-metaphysics papers in Carnap 2004. The original Syntax, in German, is available in its unchanged
1934 edition (not updated with the changes to the English translation) by print-on-demand. Carnap 1967 is
a competent if somewhat stilted English translation of the Aufbau; Carnap 1937 a rather garbled one of the
Syntax. Many of the important papers of Carnap’s German period have been translated. Of the books in
English, Carnap 1956 is still in print and contains Carnap’s best-known paper, “Empiricism, Semantics,
and Ontology” (see sections Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology and “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”
for further discussion), in an appendix. Logical Foundations of Probability is out of print, but Carnap
1963a, Carnap’s major book in English—the Schilpp volume—is available. Carnap’s seminar at the
University of California, Los Angeles on the philosophy of physics was transcribed and heavily edited by
Martin Gardner and published as Philosophical Foundations of Physics, which remains in print (under a
different title), as does Carnap 1958, a translation of Carnap’s logic textbook. All Carnap’s works, with a
few recondite exceptions, are easily accessible through an academic library. Carnap 1963b includes a
comprehensive bibliography through about 1960. Many of Carnap’s writings were unpublished in his
lifetime; it is noted in the annotations where these have been recently published. The two major collections
of Carnap papers are at the Archive of Scientific Philosophy (Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh)
and at the Young Research Library (University of California at Los Angeles). Both of these collections
have been used extensively in many of the publications cited.
Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937.
Translation of Logische Syntax der Sprache, Vienna: Springer, 1934. Now generally considered
Carnap’s most important book. Its most prominent thesis, dominating Part V on philosophical
implications of the syntax view, is that only the “formal mode of speech” is genuinely legitimate. It
also contains the first more systematic formulation, in section 17, of the “principle of tolerance,”
which came to shape Carnap’s entire further development.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. 2d ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1956.
The third of Carnap’s series of Studies in Semantics, this slim volume (which Carnap himself
pointed out was concerned mainly with preparatory clarification rather than actual explication) has
attracted a wider readership than most of Carnap’s other books. Originally published in 1947; very
influential during the 1950s.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications. New York: Dover, 1958.
Still a lucid guide to Carnap’s conception of logic, especially its second half, where elementary
logic is applied across a number of fields. Covers only elementary logic, not even advancing as far
as Gödel’s completeness theorem (which is mentioned, near the end, but not proved).
Find this resource:

Carnap, Rudolf. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp. LaSalle, IL: Open
Court, 1963a.
This enormous book (over a thousand pages) consists partly of critical essays written by others, but
it is also Carnap’s most connected and considered statement of his own viewpoint across a wide
range of issues. Both the Autobiography and the Replies to Critics are philosophically very
substantive, and many of the essays by others (e.g., Quine, Putnam, Davidson, Hempel, Popper)
have become classics.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Logical Foundations of Probability. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1963b.
Originally published in 1950, Carnap’s major publication on inductive logic, though like Meaning
and Necessity, is engaged primarily in preparatory clarification rather than actual explication, which
makes it quite readable as well. However, Carnap moved on from the specific doctrines advanced
here; he continued working on probability for another twenty years (see section on Probability and
Induction).
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Philosophical Foundations of Physics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Science. Edited by Martin Gardner. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Based on transcribed tape recordings from Carnap’s seminar at the University of California, Los
Angeles in 1958. Carnap edited these carefully, but then Martin Gardner simplified and reorganized
them, giving the book a more textbook-like feel than the original Carnap-edited version, which is
preserved among the Carnap papers in Pittsburgh. Reprinted as Introduction to the Philosophy of
Science, New York: Dover (1995).
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Structure of the World. Berkely: University of California Press, 1967.
Translation of Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Hamburg: Felix Meiner (1928). This was Carnap’s
first major book, and the first to be discussed again in recent years. Long misunderstood as pursuing
reductionist phenomenalism, it played a major role in Vienna Circle propaganda (e.g., the
“Manifesto,” Hahn, et al. 1929, cited under Vienna Circle), so Carnap is still often identified with its
doctrines.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften.

Hamburg: Meiner, 2004.
Carnap’s 1928 pamphlet Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie was long reprinted with the Aufbau.
But when the Aufbau was finally considered enough of a classic to be moved into Meiner’s famous
green series (Philosophische Bibliothek), the Scheinprobleme and a number of other anti-
metaphysical writings of this period, including the hitherto unpublished “Von Gott und Seele” (see
Aufbau section), were put into this companion volume.
Find this resource:
Carnap’s Beginnings
The formative years of Carnap’s intellectual life, including his time on both the eastern and western fronts
in the First World War, have received very little attention, partly because the relevant parts of his Nachlass
at the University of Pittsburgh library were closed to the public until very recently. So there is much work
to be done here. However, it has been known for a while (though the relevant parts of Carnap’s
autobiography remain unpublished) that Carnap was deeply involved in a local variant of the pre-war
German Youth Movement, and that this experience significantly shaped his attitudes toward many aspects
of life. Werner 2003 is a fascinating account of the Jena scene that Carnap participated in so intensely.
Chapter 1 of Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and Orientation) provides extensive material. Carnap’s
earliest philosophical interests and preoccupations were shaped by Neo-Kantianism as well as by Gottlob
Frege, by positivism, by phenomenology, and perhaps by Lebensphilosophie. The first two of these have
been written about extensively, the last three less so. Frege’s influence on Carnap has been much
discussed since his own description of it in Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works); see especially
Gabriel 2004 and Ricketts 2004, as well as Carnap’s student notes on Frege’s lectures, translated in Reck
and Awodey 2004. On the Neo-Kantian influence, the best-known texts are the papers collected in
Friedman 1999 (which also touch on phenomenology). Friedman and others had little in English to draw
on about the leading Neo-Kantians themselves, and the German literature on Neo-Kantianism shows little
interest in its logical or mathematical dimensions or its influence on logical empiricism. This has now been
rectified by Jeremy Heis, e.g., in Heis 2011, especially for the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism, which
particularly influenced Carnap. Ryckman 2007 surveys the literature on Carnap and phenomenology,
while chapter 2of Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and Orientation) looks at the interplay of Neo-Kantian
and positivistic motifs in Carnap’s early development, especially emphasizing the importance of
Helmholtz. Gabriel 2004 makes a case for the influence of Lebensphilosophie, while Uebel 2010 (cited
under Values) is more skeptical.
Friedman, Michael. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1999.
Collection of the author’s papers on the early history of logical empiricism; nearly every chapter
focuses to some degree on the Neo-Kantian background to the issue under discussion, and most are
directly concerned with aspects of Carnap’s philosophy.
Find this resource:
Gabriel, Gottfried. “Introduction: Carnap Brought Home.” In Carnap Brought Home: The View
from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 3–23. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2004.
Though also an introduction to the volume, this paper focuses largely on Carnap’s opposition to
поменять
прокси
metaphysics, which it seeks to trace to his pietist background and the influence during his
undergraduate years of Lebensphilosophie via Herman Nohl, one of his favorite professors.
Find this resource:
Heis, Jeremy. “Ernst Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Geometry.” British Journal for the
History of Philosophy 19 (2011): 759–794.
DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2011.583421Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A vivid and detailed account of the specific situation in late 19th-century mathematics (especially
projective geometry and the arithmetization of geometry) to which Cassirer and other Neo-Kantians
—including the early Carnap—were responding. Heis has also published a number of other relevant
papers on closely related themes.
Find this resource:
Reck, Erich, and Steve Awodey, eds. Frege’s Lectures on Logic: Carnap’s Student Notes, 1910–
1914. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2004.
A very important document for the study of both Frege and Carnap. The long and informative
introduction sheds new light on the complex ramifications of Frege’s influence on Carnap.
Find this resource:
Ricketts, Thomas. “Frege, Carnap, and Quine: Continuities and Discontinuities.” In Carnap Brought
Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 181–202. LaSalle, IL:
Open Court, 2004.
Amplifies the discussion in Ricketts 1994 (cited under Surveys and Orientation) about the
continuities between Frege and Carnap, then also argues for a significant degree of continuity
between Carnap and Quine, especially regarding their ultimate default to ordinary language (the
“mother tongue”).
Find this resource:

Ryckman, Thomas. “Carnap and Husserl.” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Edited by
Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 81–105. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Discusses the parallels between early Carnap and phenomenology, and the possible influence of
Husserl on Carnap; more balanced than other accounts now available regarding the extent of this
influence.
Find this resource:
Werner, Meike. Moderne in der Provinz: Kulturelle Experimente im Fin de Siècle Jena. Göttingen,
Germany: Wallstein, 2003.
Broad panorama of the Jena scene and the Sera group that Carnap participated in there in the early
20th century, against the backdrop of the German Youth Movement and various other cultural
cross-currents.
Find this resource:
The Aufbau
Curiously, Carnap’s first major book is generally referred to in English by (an abbreviated form of) its
original German title. The English translation Carnap 1967 (cited under Carnap’s Works) that eventually
appeared forty years later, called The Logical Structure of the World, has a misleading title; a more
accurate translation would have been “The Logical Construction of the World” (the German word
“Aufbau” means something like “build-up” or “character”), which would also have signaled the
shortcomings of the traditional conception of the book (see Critiques of the Aufbau, and Its Later
Influence) as carrying out a reductive empiricist program of all concepts to sense data. The Aufbau was the
first of Carnap’s works to receive renewed attention in the 1980s, especially with Friedman 1987 and
Richardson 1998. The method of “quasi-analysis” that underpins Carnap’s construction is discussed from
different viewpoints in Leitgeb 2007 and Mormann 2009. Pincock 2005 seeks to reconcile Friedman’s
Neo-Kantian interpretation with the more traditional, Russellian one. Pincock 2009 is a more general
overview of recent literature on the Aufbau. In his popular lecture Carnap 2004—dating from 1929—
Carnap himself provided a contemporaneous orientation to the project of the Aufbau.
Carnap, Rudolf. “Über Gott und Seele: Scheinfragen in Metaphysik und Theologie.” In
Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften. By Rudolf Carnap,
edited by Thomas Mormann, 49–62. Hamburg: Meiner, 2004.
Carnap’s own brief statement of the motivation of the Aufbau and its place in the history of thought,
written (and given as a talk) in 1929 but unpublished until this edition. It has not been translated into
English, but Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and Orientation) gives a summary with extensive
quotations (pp. 181–183).
Find this resource:

Friedman, Michael. “Carnap’s Aufbau Reconsidered.” Noûs 21 (1987): 521–545.
The first paper to bring the Aufbau back to the attention of philosophers after long neglect.
Reprinted in Friedman’s Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Friedman 1999, cited under Carnap’s
Beginnings), along with the equally important paper “Epistemology in the Aufbau,” and later
reflections on these papers.
Find this resource:
Leitgeb, Hannes. “A New Analysis of Quasianalysis.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 (2007):

181–226.
DOI: 10.1007/s10992-006-9033-zSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gives a modern, precise reconstruction of Carnapian quasianalysis as a method of abstraction and

shows that there is a trade-off between the two desiderata of what it calls “faithfulness” and
“fullness.” Gives examples to show when these desiderata can be met and when the method fails.
Partially endorses the critique of Goodman 1951, but Leitgeb 2011 (both cited under
Reconstructions and Technical Critiques of the Aufbau) suggests a way of circumventing it.
Find this resource:
Mormann, Thomas. “New Work for Carnap’s Quasi-Analysis.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 38
(2009): 249–282.
DOI: 10.1007/s10992-008-9095-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Response to Leitgeb 2007 that seeks to rescue quasianalysis from the critique of Goodman 1951
(cited under Reconstructions and Technical Critiques of the Aufbau) by taking it in a broader sense
as a family of methods for representational mapping of concepts.
Find this resource:
Pincock, Christopher. “A Reserved Reading of Carnap’s Aufbau.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

86 (2005): 518–543.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2005.00240.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that Carnap conceived of constitution theory as an empirical scientific discipline. Goes
along with much of the Neo-Kantian view, but sees the structural conception of objectivity, much
stressed by Richardson 1998, as something that must be reconstructed within the system, rather than
imposed from outside as a criterion of adequacy.
Find this resource:

Pincock, Christopher. “Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World.” Philosophy Compass 4 (2009):
951–961.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2009.00247.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gives a concise summary of the Aufbau and a brief overview of several recent interpretations as
well as the reconstruction of Leitgeb 2011 (cited under Reconstructions and Technical Critiques of
the Aufbau).
Find this resource:
Richardson, Alan. Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical
Empiricism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
First monograph devoted largely to the Aufbau, giving more detail to the Neo-Kantian conception of
the early Carnap; considers Carnap’s pre-Aufbau writings in some detail. Also presents some of the
first arguments against Goodman’s critiques (cited under Reconstructions and Technical Critiques
of the Aufbau).
Find this resource:
Critiques of the Aufbau, and Its Later Influence

Kaila 1930 is the first extensive published critique of the Aufbau; it anticipates, from a generally
Reichenbachian viewpoint, many of the other criticisms of the book over the years, but it has hardly been
referred to. Carnap himself paid very close attention; Carnap 1931, critical review of the book and the
author went to work on a larger-scale response (described in chapters 6–7 of Carus 2007, cited under
Surveys and Orientation). Reichenbach himself, in Reichenbach 1938, criticizes the Aufbau implicitly
(though almost without mentioning it) in some detail. Ayer 1936 was strongly influenced by the Aufbau,
and many readers of this bestselling book accepted on Ayer’s authority that the “elementary experiences”
of the Aufbau could be taken as explicating the “objects” composing the “atomic sentences” of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. (It remained for a whole subsequent generation of Wittgenstein scholars to point
out that this identification was quite misleading as an interpretation of the Tractatus.) The more recent
literature by Friedman and others, referred to in the previous section, showed that the interpretations of the
Aufbau in all these earlier critiques and appreciations, and even in later ones by Goodman and Quine, were
at best one-sided and somewhat misleading. Friedman 2007 restates this position and places it in a larger
context.
Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1936.
Still by far the most famous statement of “logical positivist” views on most subjects. Heavily
influenced by the Aufbau and by Ayer’s four-month stay in Vienna (though Carnap was mostly in
Prague by then), but hazy on the details of Carnap’s system and subsequent developments.
Find this resource:

Carnap, Rudolf. “Review of Der logische Neupositivismus: Eine kritische Studie.” Erkenntnis 2
(1931): 75–77.
DOI: 10.1007/BF02028134Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although Kaila’s critique comes from something like a traditional realist point of view, resembling
Reichenbach but independent-minded, Carnap responds generously. Having started out (in 1922)
with something much closer to the book Kaila would have preferred, Carnap is able to articulate
(though perhaps not clearly enough) why he has moved away from that starting point.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “The Aufbau and the Rejection of Metaphysics.” In The Cambridge Companion
to Carnap. Edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 129–152. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Builds on Friedman’s earlier papers (see the sections Carnap’s Beginnings and The Aufbau) to place
the Aufbau in both historical context and that of Carnap’s development. Shows that the Aufbau
anticipates the pluralism of the Syntax in certain hitherto not widely noticed ways; integrates the
anti-metaphysical thrust of Carnap’s Vienna years with the constructive theses of the Aufbau.
Find this resource:
Kaila, Eino. Der logische Neupositivismus: Eine kritische Studie. Turku, Finland: Turun Yliopiston
Kustantama, 1930.
Far better informed on the details of the Aufbau and Carnap’s post-1928 development of its ideas in
Vienna than Ayer (this book and Carnap’s response are discussed in Carus 2007, pp. 198–201, 209–
218, cited under Surveys and Orientation).
Find this resource:
Reichenbach, Hans. Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations of the Structure of
Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.
DOI: 10.1037/11656-000Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Extended attempt to revive realism in response to Carnap’s strictures in the final sections of the
Aufbau and in Scheinprobleme, though reference is mostly to unnamed “positivists” rather than to
Carnap himself.
Find this resource:
Reconstructions and Technical Critiques of the Aufbau

Serious engagement with the details of Carnap’s technical apparatus in the Aufbau began with Goodman
1951, which advanced most of the more specific arguments against Carnap’s constitution system that are
still taken to be decisive, in the context of a constructive attempt to resuscitate the Aufbau project. Quine
1951 adds a critique of Carnap’s construction of three-dimensional space from the two-dimensional visual
field. Only recently have these apparently decisive refutations of the Aufbau’s central arguments been
contested, first in Mormann 2004, then in Leitgeb 2011. (Carnap’s method of “quasi-analysis” is discussed
from (different) modern viewpoints by the same authors in Leitgeb 2007 and Mormann 2009, cited under
the Aufbau.) Even such reformulations, however, still work within the reductive framework assumed by
Ayer, Goodman, Quine, and subsequent commentators, whereas if Friedman’s perspective (e.g., Friedman
2007, cited under Critiques of the Aufbau, and Its Later Influence) is taken seriously, this is not the point
of the Aufbau, which should be seen rather in the attempt to characterize scientific objectivity more
generally, not to provide a reduction of all knowledge to sense experience. Carnap’s own
contemporaneous statement of his aims, in Carnap 2004 (cited under The Aufbau), would appear to
support Leitgeb more than Friedman, but there has been little discussion of this question. A more recent
attempt to emulate the Aufbau in a completely different, and much less precise and restrictive way, is
suggested in Chalmers 2012.
Chalmers, David J. Constructing the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Here neither the traditional conception of the Aufbau as pursuing phenomenalist reduction to sense
data nor Friedman’s conception of it as an account of scientific objectivity are at issue. In fact it
may be doubted whether this explicitly metaphysical book, despite its frequent invocation of
Carnap, bears any relation at all to Carnap’s philosophical agenda.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Nelson. The Structure of Appearance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951.
Wide-ranging critique of the Aufbau; it attempts to succeed where the Aufbau failed. Now read and
remembered more for the critique than the attempted positive contribution, which had little echo.
Find this resource:
Leitgeb, Hannes. “New Life for Carnap’s Aufbau?” Synthese 180 (2011): 265–299.
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9605-xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reformulates a somewhat more modest goal than Carnap’s for any future possible Aufbau-like
construction, and shows in detail that this modification makes it possible to answer the Goodman
and Quine objections, among others.
Find this resource:
Mormann, Thomas. “A Quasi-Analytical Constitution of Physical Space.” In Carnap Brought

Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 79–99. LaSalle, IL: Open
Court, 2004.
Attempts to refute the criticism of the Aufbau in Quine 1951 by undertaking an explicit construction
within synthetic geometry.
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–
43.
This paper, reprinted in Quine, Willard Van Orman, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-
Philosophical Essays, pp. 20–46 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), is much more
famous for its notorious critique of analyticity (and is cited again under that heading). But in one
passage (p. 40 of reprint) it also casts doubt on the claim of the Aufbau (section 125) to have
constructed the relation “is at” (i.e., three-dimensional space or four-dimensional spacetime) from
(purely observational, i.e., presumably two-dimensional) elementary experiences. Not until recently
has anyone questioned this point.
Find this resource:
The Vienna Circle

Carnap was in Vienna from 1926 to 1931; he moved to nearby Prague and continued to participate in the
Circle’s discussions, by correspondence and visits to Vienna, until Schlick’s death and his own emigration
to the United States in 1936. From the time he arrived in 1926, Carnap quickly became the Circle’s
leading philosophical spokesman. But the philosophical views within the Circle were far from uniform,
despite Otto Neurath’s efforts to formulate and maintain a party line. These only led, in the course of the
“protocol-sentence debate” (see The “Protocol-Sentence Debate” and Physicalism) to the fracture of the
Circle into a “right” wing, led by Moritz Schlick himself, and greatly influenced by Wittgenstein, and a
“left” wing led by Carnap and Neurath. The most comprehensive study and documentation of the Vienna
Circle is Stadler 2001. Uebel 2007, though concerned more specifically with the “protocol-sentence
debate,” contains a wealth of information about the Vienna Circle more generally. Earlier introductions
such as Coffa 1991 and Haller 1993 are now largely superseded by the subsequent literature they inspired.
The classic attempt to formulate a common platform is the pamphlet Hahn, et al. 1929, sometimes
referred to as the “Vienna Circle Manifesto.” Its authorship has long been the subject of speculation, but
Uebel 2008, deploying a range of evidence, establishes that Carnap was its principal author. Despite the
party line, the Circle was willing to engage in debate and outreach to those who disagreed, e.g., the
Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila; see Manninen 2012. Carnap credits the Vienna Circle with having
inspired his own blanket rejection of metaphysics, but Friedman 2007 (cited under Critiques of the
Aufbau, and Its Later Influence), shows that the Aufbau, largely complete before Carnap arrived in Vienna,
is essentially consistent with his anti-metaphysical writings of the Vienna years (conveniently collected in
Carnap 2004, cited under Carnap’s Works).
Coffa, Alberto. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
The first major comprehensive survey of the development of logical empiricism, and Carnap’s
philosophy in particular, which brought many new documents and new aspects to light, many of
which have since been developed further or are seen differently. One of Coffa’s main themes is that
Carnap endorsed a “semantic factualism”; this attribution has been largely discredited, especially by
Goldfarb 1997.
Find this resource:
Goldfarb, Warren. “Semantics in Carnap: A Rejoinder to Alberto Coffa.” Philosophical Topics 25

(1997): 51–66.
DOI: 10.5840/philtopics19972529Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows in detail that the “semantic factualism” that Coffa 1991 attributes to Carnap is inconsistent
with Carnap’s overall view. Goes on to question, from a Quinean viewpoint, Coffa’s blanket
preference for the semantic Carnap over the syntactic.
Find this resource:
Hahn, Hans, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener
Kreis. Vienna: Artur Wolf Verlag, 1929.
The “Vienna Circle Manifesto” seeks to summarize and popularize the doctrines of the Vienna
Circle and to position it with respect to the cultural modernism of Weimar Central Europe more
generally.
Find this resource:
Haller, Rudolf. Neopositivismus: Eine historische Einführung in die Philosophie des Wiener
Kreises. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993.
Broad cultural history of the Vienna Circle in its Austrian setting, mostly philosophical in
orientation. Has worn quite well, though many of its details have been revised or questioned in the
past two decades.
Find this resource:
Manninen, Juha. “Eino Kaila in ‘Carnap’s Circle.’” Acta Philosophica Fennica 89 (2012): 9–52.
Detailed reconstruction, based on archival documents and correspondence, of Eino Kaila’s relations
with Carnap and the Vienna Circle, tracing the philosophical interactions among Kaila,
Reichenbach, Carnap, and others.
Find this resource:

Stadler, Friedrich. The Vienna Circle: Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical
Empiricism. Vienna: Springer, 2001.
Translation of Studien zum Wiener Kreis: Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen
Empirismus im Kontext. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp (1997). Encyclopedic compendium of facts,
dates, people, courses taught, and publications, with interesting excursuses. Also reproduces the
minutes of Vienna Circle meetings in 1930–1931 taken by Rose Rand.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate.
While the other books shed light on doctrines, background, influence, publications, and other facts,
this is the best reconstruction of the story of the Vienna Circle, seen through the prism of one of
their major debates (which was in one way or another related to most of the others).
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. “Writing a Revolution. On the Production and Early Reception of the Vienna
Circle’s Manifesto.” Perspectives on Science 16 (2008): 70–102.
DOI: 10.1162/posc.2008.16.1.70Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Detailed reconstruction of the composition of the manifesto through all its stages, from Neurath’s
first draft through the final checking of the proofs, against the background of the main players’
motivations and priorities.
Find this resource:
From the Aufbau to the Syntax

Carnap’s two best-known books were published six years apart, and yet they seem to be by different
authors; they not only address different subjects, they also approach them from what seem completely
different viewpoints, with the Syntax apparently undermining much of the Aufbau. Until quite recently,
there was assumed to be little connection between the books, and Carnap’s philosophical development was
regarded as somewhat haphazard. Considerable light has now been shed on this story, which has a number
of different threads, including the debates on logic, the epistemological “protocol-sentence debate,” and
the discussions of and with Wittgenstein as well as other philosophers. (This section will focus on the first
of these; the next two sections with the other two, respectively.) A detailed narrative weaving these
threads together is found in chapters 7–10 of Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and Orientation). It is now
evident that Carnap was just as concerned from the beginning with the logical underpinnings of the
Aufbau project as he was with its epistemological application; the project he called General Axiomatics, in
which he addressed the completeness of axiom systems, is summarized in Carnap 1927. The Axiomatics
was never published, though a small fragment of Part 1 came out as Carnap 1930, and parts of the
extensive Part 2 were used in later publications. Part 1, of which Carnap had circulated a full typescript in
1928 and abandoned in 1930, was published posthumously as Carnap 2000. Coffa 1991 (cited under The
Vienna Circle) discusses the General Axiomatics without having established the full context; this is
recovered, with the help of further archival material, in Awodey and Carus 2001; Reck 2004 (cited under
Logicism and Philosophy of Mathematics) provides further discussion, and Goldfarb 2005 is an account
from Gödel’s viewpoint. Schiemer 2013 probes more deeply by looking at the wider mathematical context
in the mid-1920s and taking Part 2 of the Axiomatics into account. In early 1930, Carnap was convinced
by Tarski in personal conversation that the single-language approach of the Axiomatics failed to do justice
to the problem, as it lacked important distinctions, and he gave up the project. Carnap said that the origin
of the Logical Syntax was a flash of insight during a sleepless night in January 1931. Discussions with
Gödel played a major role in leading up to this, as illustrated in Buldt 2004. Examination of the surviving
manuscript from the day after this sleepless night, however, affords little insight into its connection with
the book published a few years later. The path leading from this manuscript to the book (against the
background of the Axiomatics project and discussions within the Circle, especially with Gödel) is
reconstructed in Awodey and Carus 2009.
Awodey, Steve, and A. W. Carus. “Carnap, Completeness, and Categoricity: The Gabelbarkeitssatz
of 1928.” Erkenntnis 54 (2001): 145–172.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1005622201768Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Looks closely at Carnap’s theorem (in Book I of the Allgemeine Axiomatik) that an axiom system is
complete iff it is categorical and concludes that, although it sounds wrong, Carnap was not using our
modern, post-Gödel and post-Tarski concepts; in his terms the theorem was sound, indeed the
authors report a proof of a special case of it by Dana Scott. Gödel was inspired partly by Carnap’s
typescript to prove the theorem false in the first-order case.
Find this resource:
Awodey, Steve, and A. W. Carus. “From Wittgenstein’s Prison to the Boundless Ocean: Carnap’s
Dream of Logical Syntax.” In Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. Edited by Pierre Wagner, 79–
106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Interprets Carnap’s manuscript “Versuch einer Metalogik” (from immediately after the sleepless
night on 21 January 1931, when he had his syntax idea) against the background of the Allgemeine
Axiomatik the previous year and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems soon after. Disentangles the two
(or three) quite separate and distinct ideas fused into the Syntax, which soon fell apart again.
Find this resource:
Buldt, Bernd. “On RC 102-43-14.” In Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve
Awodey and Carsten Klein, 225–246. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2004.
Examines a cryptic remark of Carnap’s in a note made on a conversation with Gödel, about
Hilbert’s “omega-rule,” and puts it in the context of Carnap’s preoccupations at this time and other
conversations with Gödel (and with other interlocutors).
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Eigentliche und uneigentliche Begriffe.” Symposion 1 (1927): 355–374.
Carnap’s own motivation and summary of his central preoccupation in 1926–1929, the project of a
general axiomatics, investigating the relations of various conceptions of completeness. States the
“Gabelbarkeitssatz,” a theorem claiming categoricity and completeness to be equivalent.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Bericht über Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik.” Erkenntnis 1 (1930):
303–307.
Very brief summary of Part I of the Untersuchungen (Carnap 2000), including the
“Gabelbarkeitssatz,” but giving no context or motivation.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik. Edited by Thomas Bonk and Jesus
Mosterin. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000.
The text of Part I of the Untersuchungen, culminating in the “Gabelbarkeitssatz,” a theorem that
supposedly shows the equivalence of (versions of) completeness, decidability, and categoricity.
Summarized and placed in context by Carnap 1927.
Find this resource:
Goldfarb, Warren. “On Gödel’s Way In: The Influence of Rudolf Carnap.” Bulletin of Symbolic
Logic 11 (2005): 185–193.
DOI: 10.2178/bsl/1120231629Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tells the story of Carnap’s Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik and Gödel’s response to it
from Gödel’s point of view.
Find this resource:
Schiemer, Georg. “Carnap’s Early Semantics.” Erkenntnis 78 (2013): 487–522.

The first serious historical work that takes Part 2 of the Untersuchungen into account. Careful
reconstruction of Carnap’s pre-Syntax conception; argues that earlier negative assessments of
Carnap’s early model-theoretic work, especially by Hintikka, misunderstood Carnap’s pre-Gödel,
pre-Tarski apparatus.
Find this resource:
The “Protocol-Sentence Debate” and Physicalism

The expression “protocol sentence,” a bad translation from German, refers to the subject of a debate in the
early 1930s, mostly among members and close associates of the Vienna Circle, about how to articulate
empirical evidence. The participants (which included, among others, Neurath, Popper, Schlick, Hempel,
and Carnap) agreed in rejecting what Sellars would later call “the myth of the given”—they all agreed,
that is, in holding the formulation of sensory evidence to be a matter of linguistic convention rather than
something inherently fixed or foundational. But some (esp. Schlick and Popper) had more realistic
leanings than those (Carnap, Neurath, and Frank) who regarded themselves, partly in response to this
controversy, as the newly emergent “left wing” of the Vienna Circle. The most comprehensive and
authoritative source on this debate and its context is Uebel 2007. Carnap’s own direct contributions to the
debate—in Carnap 1932a and Carnap 1932b—are also of independent interest as each represents a
significant step on the way to the radically new Syntax view (on which more in the corresponding
section). Carnap 1932a launched the debate, or at least brought it out into the open, and introduced the
famous distinction between “formal” and “material” modes of speech, while Carnap 1932b was the first
public articulation of Carnap’s new “principle of tolerance,” which grew out of the increasingly
acrimonious and apparently irreconcileable philosophical differences about the nature and status of
evidence for scientific knowledge. Carnap 1935, a review of Popper’s Logik der Forschung, is another
application of the principle of tolerance to this debate. Carnap recounts in section 7 of his autobiography
(Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s Works) that Neurath persuaded him after long discussions of the
merits of a new attitude toward philosophy, in which the search for truth is replaced by an attitude of
conceptual engineering. The slogan often attached to this attitude is “physicalism,” and it is generally
associated with the arguments in the protocol-sentence debate, although the context is broader, as Uebel
2007, chapters 6–8 and 12, as well as Manninen 2003, discuss from different angles. However,
“physicalism” has often been understood by others as a thesis rather than an attitude, and it seems that a
particular understanding of this thesis underlay Wittgenstein’s notorious accusation of plagiarism against
Carnap in 1932. Uebel 1995 shows convincingly that Wittgenstein, Carnap, Neurath, Schlick, and others
maintained quite different versions of “physicalism,” and that the priority disputes concerning it were
moot.
Carnap, Rudolf. “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft.” Erkenntnis 2
(1932a): 432–465.
First proposal of Carnap’s version of physicalism, after long discussions with Neurath; brought the
protocol-sentence debate into public circulation. The one-language (pre-tolerance) syntax view is in
the background, but the discussion arising from this paper resulted within a few months in the
principle of tolerance, first stated in Carnap 1932b. Translated as “The Physical Language as a
Universal Language of Science.” In Readings in Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Edited by W. P.
Alston and George Nakhnikian, pp. 393–424. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963).
Find this resource:

Carnap, Rudolf. “Über Protokollsätze.” Erkenntnis 2 (1932b): 215–228.
First statement of the principle of tolerance, which would henceforth inform and motivate Carnap’s
entire philosophy in all its aspects. Discusses critically his own paper Carnap 1932a, written only a
few months earlier, as well as Neurath and Wittgenstein; mentions Popper (still a complete
unknown) favorably. Translated as “On Protocol Sentences.” Noûs 21 (1987), pp. 457–470.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Review of Karl Popper Logik der Forschung. Erkenntnis 5 (1935): 290–294.
Appeared in the same issue of Erkenntnis as Neurath’s and Reichenbach’s attacks on Popper, from
opposite viewpoints (Neurath saw Popper as regimenting induction, Reichenbach as abandoning it).
Carnap largely defends Popper, portraying Reichenbach’s and Popper’s accounts of induction as two
proposals equally worth considering—i.e., Carnap advocates tolerance.
Find this resource:
Manninen, Juha. “Toward a Physicalistic Attitude.” In The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism:
Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. Edited by Friedrich Stadler, 133–150. Dordrecht: Kluwer,
2003.
DOI: 10.1007/0-306-48214-2Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reconstructs the personal and philosophical interactions of Carnap, Neurath, and various others in
their progress toward articulating their different variants of a physicalistic standpoint.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. “Physicalism in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.” In Physics, Philosophy, and
the Scientific Community: Essays in the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences and
Mathematics in Honor of Robert S. Cohen. Edited by Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, and Marx W.
Wartofsky, 327–356. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995.
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2658-0Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Carefully examines the different versions of physicalism in circulation around 1932 and concludes
that both Wittgenstein’s and Neurath’s claims to priority (among others) are empty, as their versions
of “physicalism” differed (in different ways) from that of Carnap.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle’s Protocol-Sentence Debate.
The basic book on the subject, completely re-worked from an earlier version in the light of fifteen
years of further research by Uebel himself and many others. In comparison to the earlier version, the
emphasis has shifted from Neurath, who had occupied center stage, to an incipient (though never
fully realized) consensus on the “left wing” of the Vienna Circle.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Wittgenstein, Heidegger

In the larger philosophical landscape of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Vienna Circle was identified
with Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein (to his dismay) was read through the eyes of the Vienna Circle. There
were, of course, some direct conversations between Wittgenstein and some members of the Circle
(including Carnap), published as Wittgenstein 1979. Beyond the issues directly discussed there, however,
the Circle was deeply preoccupied with the Tractatus; see the minutes of their meetings reproduced in
Stadler 2001 (cited under the Vienna Circle). Three issues were especially important for Carnap’s
thinking: the apparent finitism of the Tractatus; its vagueness about the notion of “object”; and the
problematic status of “elucidations” or meta-linguistic sentences, sentences about language. Each of these
three was discussed in the Circle and played an important role in Carnap’s development from the General
Axiomatics to the Syntax. In early 1929, while Carnap was still working on the Axiomatics, he wrote a
“new foundation for logic” in which he tried to meet these Wittgensteinian constraints as a basis for the
fixed, contentful meta-language he was developing in the Axiomatics, thus attempting to fuse Hilbert and
Wittgenstein, as Awodey and Carus 2009 describes. The dominant current in German philosophy outside
the Vienna orbit during the late 1920s and early 1930s was undoubtedly phenomenology. Prior to 1927,
when Being and Time was published, Husserlian phenomenology had striven to align itself with
mathematics and natural science, and Carnap himself had been interested and perhaps somewhat
influenced by it (see the section on Carnap’s Beginnings). Heidegger was a different matter, and while
Carnap was interested enough to have attended the 1929 confrontation in Davos between Heidegger and
Cassirer (described in Friedman 2000, cited under Surveys and Orientation), he also thought that
Heidegger’s writings were largely nonsense. The problem was how to make this precise. Carnap 1932 was
a first attempt, a direct outgrowth of the Vienna Circle’s understanding of the Tractatus. But by this time,
Carnap had already dropped Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning, and by the time it was published, the
1932 criterion of logical “correctness” (that Heidegger fell afoul of) had also gone overboard. The result
was an entirely new criterion, introduced in Carnap 1932a (cited under The “Protocol-Sentence Debate”
and Physicalism), no longer involving “meaning.” Indeed, the new criterion was precisely the avoidance
of meaning—the meta-language (unlike the scientific object language) was now restricted to the “formal
mode of speech,” in which only strings of signs could be referred to, in isolation from anything they might
or might not refer to or signify.
Awodey, Steve, and A. W. Carus. “From Wittgenstein’s Prison to the Boundless Ocean: Carnap’s
Dream of Logical Syntax.” In Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. Edited by Pierre Wagner, 79–
106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Shows how the three problems from Wittgenstein (finitism, atomic “objects,” elucidations) spurred
Carnap’s radical change, in several stages, first to pure syntax and then from a single standard (or
“correct”) language to complete linguistic pluralism, during the period 1930–1932.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” Erkenntnis 2
(1932): 219–241.
Carnap’s celebrated critique of metaphysics, using a passage from Heidegger as his main example,
showing that it does not accord with a “logically correct language.” Often taken as indicative of
Carnap’s overall conception of nonsense, this paper actually depends heavily on ideas specific to a
brief transitional period between January 1931 and the adoption of tolerance in the autumn of 1932.
Find this resource:
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations. Edited by Brian
McGuinness. Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.
Translation of Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis: Gespräche, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,

originally published in 1967. Waismann’s notes on the conversations of a few Vienna Circle
members (at first including Carnap) with Wittgenstein. Essential context for the period when
Carnap was moving toward the Syntax view.
Find this resource:
Logical Syntax of Language

Generally regarded as Carnap’s most important book, the Syntax is hard for the ordinary philosophical
reader, even if trained in logic, to read or understand without help. Much of the book is taken up with the
technical construction of two languages imaginatively called “Language I” (based on primitive recursive
arithmetic) and “Language II” (based on classical mathematics), and discussing some of their properties,
e.g., showing that a syntactic metalanguage for Language I can be expressed within the language itself.
The philosophical section of the book, its concluding Part V, rests on the development in these earlier
parts, which are framed in terms that date from a time when both the foundational ideas of logic and its
technical apparatus were in flux. Much of the book is therefore easily misunderstood, but fortunately there
is now a reliable guide to these difficulties, Pierre Wagner’s long but eminently user-friendly introduction
to Wagner 2009. The philosophical achievement of the Syntax is also surveyed and put in a broad context
in Ricketts 1994, which among other things explains how even a serious philosopher such as Hilary
Putnam, who knew Carnap personally, could have misunderstood the Syntax and the principle of tolerance
so fundamentally. Misunderstandings of this principle still abound, as illustrated in very different ways in
Restall 2002 and Ben-Menahem 2006 (drawing on Gödel 1953–1959, cited under Carnap and Gödel—
Again). Friedman 2006 corrects one such misreading and puts it in broad historical perspective. More
skeptical accounts of the Syntax, in the spirit of Quine, are Goldfarb 2009 (cited under Logicism and
Philosophy of Mathematics) and Ebbs 2001.
Ben-Menahem, Yemima. Conventionalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Assimilates the principle of tolerance to a “conventionalist” tradition of thought, whose weaknesses,
when overextended, are revealed by Gödel’s critique of Carnap (see section on Carnap and Gödel—
Again), which Ben-Menahem seeks to vindicate against its critics.
Find this resource:
Ebbs, Gary. “Carnap’s Logical Syntax.” In Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy.

Edited by Richard A. Gaskin, 218–237. London: Routledge, 2001.
Sees Carnap’s attitude in the Syntax as involving an idealization of logic that leads him to reject
what Ebbs calls “transtheoretical terms” and thus into an internal tension between different possible
desiderata for philosophical clarification.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “Carnap and Quine: Twentieth-Century Echoes of Kant and Hume.”
Philosophical Topics 34 (2006): 35–58.
DOI: 10.5840/philtopics2006341/23Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Finds the roots (or one root) of Quine’s misreading of Carnap in his Humean empiricism. Draws an
instructive parallel between Kant vs. Hume in the 18th century, and Carnap vs. Quine in the 20th.
Find this resource:
Restall, Greg. “Carnap’s Tolerance, Meaning, and Logical Pluralism.” Journal of Philosophy 99
(2002): 426–443.
Champions a “logical pluralism” that accepts different possible explications (in Carnap’s sense) of
the explicandum “logical consequence,” but interprets Carnap’s pluralism in Syntax (the principle of
tolerance) as requiring an explicatory holism about languages; particular explications require
replacements of the entire language. This is clearly not Carnap’s position; see e.g., Maher 2006 or
Kitcher 2008 (both cited under Explication).
Find this resource:
Ricketts, Thomas. “Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism.” In Reading

Putnam. Edited by Peter Clark and Bob Hale, 176–200. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Perhaps the best overall introduction to the point of the Syntax and the coherence of its doctrines.
Ricketts also clarifies exactly how Frege continued to influence Carnap in his Syntax period, and
how Carnap is also still responding to the Tractatus. Despite some historical inaccuracies, clarified
in subsequent literature, this remains the most illuminating single paper on the Syntax.
Find this resource:
Wagner, Pierre, ed. Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
Collection of papers on the Syntax, several of which are cited individually in other sections.
Wagner’s long introduction is the best available guide to the pitfalls of interpreting the early-1930s
logical apparatus of the Syntax, and to a number of other specific technical issues not readily
apparent to the reader unfamiliar with the context.
Find this resource:
Misunderstandings and Critiques of Logical Syntax

The published Logical Syntax combines two strands that would almost immediately come apart again:
first, the conception of logic (and philosophy) as syntax (requiring “formal mode of speech”), stemming
from the “sleepless night” of January 1931 (see section From the Aufbau to the Syntax); and second, the
principle of tolerance (October 1932). The Logical Syntax was briefly influential in the English-speaking
world, especially after an English translation appeared in 1937, but was seriously misunderstood. The
leading commentators, even those with strong words of praise, such as Quine, Ayer, or Popper, largely
failed to notice the principle of tolerance. They can easily be forgiven, though, since Carnap himself
devoted the entire final section of the book—its most obviously “philosophical” part—to the syntax idea,
not the tolerance idea. The syntax idea was portrayed there as a program promoting the “formal mode of
speech” (presenting philosophical problems as problems about a choice of language forms) over the
misleading “material mode of speech” (taking philosophical problems at face value, as matters of fact).
Since it became known shortly after the publication of the Syntax (and even before the appearance of its
English translation) that Carnap had signed on to Tarski’s program of semantics, and given up the
insistence on syntax only, it was widely assumed that the Logical Syntax, with all its philosophical
implications (i.e., the final part of the book), was no longer relevant. Only many years later, after the
posthumous publication of Gödel’s critique in 1995 (Goldfarb 1995, cited under Carnap and Gödel—
Again) did the significance of the Syntax and especially the principle of tolerance finally become clear to a
wider philosophical public. One of the most influential critiques of the technical apparatus of the Syntax,
apart from Quine (on which see relevant sections) was Mac Lane 1938. Creath 1996 and Bonnay 2009
comment on the difficulties pointed out by Mac Lane; Carnap’s ensuing struggles to define analyticity in
semantics are discussed in Awodey 2007 (cited under Semantics).
Bonnay, Denis. “Carnap’s Criterion of Logicality.” In Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. Edited
by Pierre Wagner, 147–164. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Reviews the challenges to Carnap’s attempted definition of “logical” expressions in general syntax
(by Mac Lane 1938, Creath 1996, and Quine 1951 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine), and proposes a
revised definition that escapes these strictures.
Find this resource:

Creath, Richard. “Languages without Logic.” In Origins of Logical Empiricism. Edited by Ronald
L. Giere and Alan Richardson, 251–265. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Places the difficulty of defining “logical” (as opposed to “descriptive”) expressions into a wider
context and argues that even if this difficulty cannot be overcome, analyticity may still be defined
without such a definition.
Find this resource:
Mac Lane, Saunders. “Carnap on Logical Syntax.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
44 (1938): 171–176.
Largely sympathetic review of the English translation of Syntax, which however points out an
inconsistency in Carnap’s definition (in general syntax) of “logical” expressions, even if modified in
various ways. Mac Lane proposes instead a “postulational” approach, which Carnap however seems
to have avoided for various possible reasons discussed by Awodey 2007 (cited under Semantics).
Find this resource:
Logicism and Philosophy of Mathematics

Carnap was not only a student of Frege but deeply influenced by Russell, as he himself repeatedly
emphasized. So it is not surprising that he initially subscribed to a logicism not so dissimilar to theirs; this
view was also widely shared in the Vienna Circle, which attempted to graft it onto the Tractatus
conception of tautologies (resulting in a view Steve Awodey has called “tautologicism”). Indeed at the
famous Königsberg meeting of 1930, where Gödel first announced his incompleteness result, Carnap was
the official representative of logicism, with Heyting and von Neumann representing the other two then-
recognized foundational schools, intuitionism and formalism. Carnap’s paper there was published as
Carnap 1931; it has been so widely anthologized and quoted that Carnap has become strongly identified
with this earlier form of logicism. That is a very misleading identification, however, as in most of his
writings on the subject, including even the reported “Discussion” after the three Königsberg talks in Gödel
1931, Carnap was more concerned with bridging the differences among the three schools than with
pleading for a specific form of logicism. And right after Königsberg, moreover, he changed his view quite
radically. In the Syntax section 84, though he still indicates a preference for logicism, it is now defined
quite differently from before. It would thus appear that logicism had meant something quite different to
him all along than it had to Frege, Russell, or even Dedekind. While Carnap continued to describe himself
in later years as a logicist, it is unclear what he meant by this. It was closely connected with his conception
of analyticity, for which he never found an explication that satisfied him or others. His view seems to have
been that we should regard “analytic” as only a makeshift and evolving concept, an explicandum for
which we can use a provisional explicatum in a particular context that we replace when it becomes
problematic, though he never quite spelled this out. It emerges most explicitly in a conversation of the late
1960s, reported in Bohnert 1975 (pp. 205–211), though it is also implicit in Carnap’s reply to Beth 1963,
in Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works). Views of Carnap’s stance regarding logicism differ
widely. Those who see Carnap’s logicism as having meant something quite different from Frege or
Russell from the beginning include Awodey and Carus 2001 and Awodey and Carus 2009 (cited under
From the Aufbau to the Syntax and Carnap, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, respectively), and Reck 2004, while
Goldfarb 2009 detects a significant tension between logicism and tolerance. Friedman 2001 diagnoses a
similar tension, but the author has since distanced himself from this view. There are differences of
perspective among these authors, also, about whether the principle of tolerance should be viewed as
primarily a way of reconciling, or of allowing co-existence among the foundational schools, or should be
interpreted more broadly.
Beth, Evert. “Carnap’s Views on the Advantages of Constructed Systems over Natural Languages in
the Philosophy of Science.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Paul Schilpp, 469–502.
Foreshadows many of the arguments currently raised about Carnap’s logicism, analyticity, and
tolerance. In particular, Beth was the first to raise a now-well-known issue about the non-neutrality
of the principle of tolerance between intuitionism and classical mathematics.
Find this resource:
Bohnert, Herbert. “Carnap’s Logicism.” In Rudolf Carnap, Logical Empiricist: Materials and
Perspectives. Edited by Jaako Hintikka, 183–216. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975.
Discusses Carnap’s logicism through all its phases, without the benefit of the massive scholarship
since then. The most interesting part of this paper, therefore, is Bohnert’s report and discussion of
various conversations with Carnap himself, including one specifically about logicism in 1968.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Die logizistische Grundlegung der Mathematik.” Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 91–105.
Carnap here sticks more closely than later to the original Frege-Russell conception of logicism as
the reduction of mathematics to logic, and considers the question (which he would soon abandon) of
whether certain axioms of set theory should be considered “logical.” Focuses more on reconciling
the three foundational schools than on presenting arguments in favor of logicism. Translated as
“The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics.” In Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings.
Edited by Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, pp. 41–51 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1964). See also Gödel 1931.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “Tolerance and Analyticity in Carnap’s Philosophy of Mathematics.” In Future

Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Edited by Juliet Floyd and Sanford
Shieh, 223–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1093/019513916X.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Responds to Goldfarb and Ricketts 1992 (cited under Carnap and Gödel—Again). Sees a
fundamental tension between Carnap’s logicism and his principle of tolerance, based on an
argument similar to Gödel’s and that of Beth 1963, but later retracted this argument, e.g., in
Friedman 2006 (cited under Logical Syntax of Language).
Find this resource:
Gödel, Kurt. “Diskussion zur Grundlegung der Mathematik.” Erkenntnis 2.1 (1931): 135–151.
Sheds an interesting light on Carnap 1931; Carnap himself wanted this discussion to be included in
the Benacerraf and Putnam collection together with that paper. In the discussion, Carnap sees
logicism as the “standpoint of the physicist” (p. 141) (as opposed to the mathematician or the
philosopher), and seeks a reconcilation with intuitionism and formalism.
Find this resource:
Goldfarb, Warren. “Carnap’s Syntax Programme and the Philosophy of Mathematics.” In Carnap’s
Logical Syntax of Language. Edited by Pierre Wagner, 109–120. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Gives an account of Carnap’s motivation in arriving at the Syntax program and the principle of
tolerance that agrees with Awodey and Carus 2001 (cited under From the Aufbau to the Syntax)
regarding the actual succession of events, which it recounts from a somewhat different angle, but
disagrees regarding Carnap’s motivation and the status of logicism.
Find this resource:
Reck, Erich. “From Frege and Russell to Carnap: Logic and Logicism in the 1920s.” In Carnap
Brought Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 151–180.
Brings many points of view to bear on the question how to diagnose Carnap’s logicism, especially
after the transformation wrought by the “sleepless night” of 1931 and the principle of tolerance the
following year. Arrives at a balanced view that does not attribute any particular doctrinal continuity.
Find this resource:
Semantics
The year after the Syntax was published, in 1935, Carnap had another fateful conversation with Tarski.
This time, Tarski explained his recently published (in German) definition of truth, and Carnap accepted
that it applies not only to logical or mathematical truth but also to empirical sentences such as “snow is
white,” though of course the Tarskian “truth” of this sentence says nothing about our decision procedure
for determining whether snow is in fact white. This is a question of confirmation, not of truth, and is
subject to a whole separate set of procedural and linguistic conventions. Carnap first highlighted this
distinction in Carnap 1936, signaling his acceptance of Tarskian semantics. This caused great
consternation among his erstwhile fellow travelers of the Vienna Circle’s “left wing.” Neurath was
outraged that Carnap would now accept a metaphysical idea such as “truth,” which he had kept at arm’s
length during the Syntax period; Mormann 1999 considers this response sympathetically. In fact, as
Carnap himself repeatedly tried to make clear (e.g., in section 39 of Introduction to Semantics), the
acceptance of semantics had been only a modest adjustment in his views; the true turning point had come
in 1932, with the principle of tolerance. This has been clarified more recently by Creath 1990 and Ricketts
1996, among others. Semantics was first introduced, in a simplified form, in Carnap 1939. Carnap’s first
two major semantic works, Introduction to Semantics and the Formalization of Logic, are something of an
enigma. Very little historical work has been done on them other than Belnap and Massey 1990. The third
of the “Studies in Semantics,” Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1956, cited under Carnap’s Works) is
different and more wide-ranging, more recognizeably “philosophical” in character. Stegmüller 1958 is a
comprehensive discussion of Carnap’s semantic works; Awodey 2007 provides a very helpful overview,
putting the entire semantic enterprise in a broad historical and logical context.
Awodey, Steve. “Carnap’s Quest for Analyticity: The Studies in Semantics.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Carnap. Edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 226–247. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Considers Carnap’s move to semantics and the semantical works of the late 1930s and 1940s,
against the background of the development leading up to the Syntax, and the criticisms of that book
by logicians. Points out how Carnap anticipated certain later developments without getting credit for
it, and explains some peculiar directions Carnapian semantics took.
Find this resource:
Belnap, Nuel, and Gerald Massey. “Semantic Holism.” Studia Logica 49 (1990): 67–82.
Finds implicit in Carnap’s development in Carnap’s Formalization of Logic a thesis the authors call
“semantic holism,” which they prove false in its most general form, although they speculate it
may be true or almost true in many relevant cases. Though the issue has not been completely
ignored, their hypotheses have not been pursued.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Wahrheit und Bewährung.” In Actes du Congrès international de philosophie

scientifique, Sorbonne, Paris 1935, fasc. 4. Unité de la science. 18–23. Paris: Hermann, 1936.
Carnap’s first public endorsement of semantics and semantic truth, which he distinguishes sharply
from empirical confirmation. Translated as “Truth and Confirmation.” In Readings in Philosophical
Analysis. Edited by Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars, pp. 119–127 (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1949).
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. Foundations of Logic and Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1939.
Introduces the notion of a semantic system and shows how it can be coordinated with a purely
syntactic calculus. In later parts, discusses the geometric interpretation of a calculus, and then a
physical interpretation. Distinguishes subjective “understanding” from such an empirical
interpretation; indicates briefly how Carnap now conceives of the relation between theoretical and
observational parts of science as much looser than portrayed in Carnap 1936–1937 (cited under
“Testability and Meaning” and Criteria of Empirical Significance).
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “The Unimportance of Semantics.” Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the
Philosophy of Science Association 1990 2 (1990): 405–416.
Corrects a number of traditional misconceptions about Carnap, stressing the continuity between the
supposed “syntax period” and the Studies in Semantics, and criticizing the periodization that inserts
a major break between the two that has made it too easy to ignore the Syntax.
Find this resource:
Mormann, Thomas. “Neurath’s Opposition to Tarskian Semantics.” In Alfred Tarski and the Vienna
Circle: Austro-Polish Connections in Logical Empiricism. Edited by Jan Woleński and Eckehart
Köhler, 165–178. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 1999.
Looks at Neurath’s side of the debate over semantics in the late 1930s and early 40s, and shows that,
although Neurath was unable to articulate it in a way Carnap could understand, Neurath’s radical
empiricism—not so distant from Quine’s later grounds for rejecting semantics (though not Tarski’s
truth definition)—was a perfectly respectable rationale for Neurath’s stance.
Find this resource:
Ricketts, Thomas. “Carnap: From Logical Syntax to Semantics.” In Origins of Logical Empiricism.
Edited by Ronald L. Giere and Alan Richardson, 231–250. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996.
Considers Carnap’s approach to truth in the Syntax and shows how little it changes in the following
years. Nonetheless, in a Quinean spirit, notes the costs to Carnap of the move to semantics, in terms
of clarity and precision.
Find this resource:
Stegmüller, Wolfgang. Das Wahrheitsproblem und die Idee der Semantik. Vienna: Springer, 1958.
Comprehensive discussion of the background to Tarskian/Carnapian semantics and its motivation,

together with a long commentary on their technical development. Also includes an encyclopedic
chapter refuting or discussing all the various criticisms that had been leveled at semantics, including
those of Neurath, Quine, Strawson, Ryle, and many others.
Find this resource:
Critiques and Misunderstandings of Carnap’s Semantics

Carnap’s project of semantics was largely misunderstood at the time. Russell, for instance, could not see,
in his An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, why Carnap did not focus more on “certain prior questions”
without which “the relation of empirical knowledge to non-linguistic occurrences cannot be properly
understood”; see Pincock 2007. The most notorious attack on Carnap ever, Ryle 1949, takes this miscue to
an extreme and sees the semantic works as proposing a “Fido-‘Fido’ principle,” according to which all of
linguistic meaning is assimilated to the correspondence between a proper name and the thing it names. It
was in response to this as well as Quine (see the Carnap vs. Quine) that Carnap 1950 (cited under Carnap
vs. Quine on Ontology) sought to set the record straight. Less well-known are the wide-ranging critique by
Wilfried Sellars, culminating in Sellars 1963 and discussed in Carus 2004, and the even more wide-
ranging critique of Pap 1957. More specific critiques and discussions concerned the technical apparatus of
Carnap’s semantics, especially his modal logic (see Modal Logic section) and his concept of “intensional
isomorphism,” were discussed among a number of prominent philosophers and logicians including Hilary
Putnam, Benson Mates, Wilfrid Sellars, Leonard Linsky, and Alonzo Church; Church 1954 is an example,
with references to others. One theme in a great deal of this more technical literature is the question of the
relation between Tarski’s and Carnap’s semantics; this has been explored more recently from different
angles in Schurz 1999 and Niiniluoto 2003.
Carus, A. W. “Sellars, Carnap, and the Logical Space of Reasons.” In Carnap Brought Home: The
View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 317–355. LaSalle, IL: Open Court,
2004.
Reviews the long history of Sellars’s borrowings from, and misunderstandings of, Carnap, then
focuses more specifically on Sellars 1963 and Carnap’s reply. On this basis, compares Carnap’s and
Sellars’s overall perspectives.
Find this resource:
Church, Alonzo. “Intensional Isomorphism and Identity of Belief.” Philosophical Studies 5 (1954):
65–73.
Criticizes a conception of intensional isomorphism or intensional synonymy that Benson Mates had
proposed as a modification of that proposed in Carnap 1956 (cited under Carnap’s Works), and that
Carnap and Hilary Putnam had appeared to endorse. Carnap responds to these discussions in
sections 9–14 of his “Replies” in Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works).
Find this resource:
Niiniluoto, Ilkka. “Carnap on Truth.” In Language, Truth, and Knowledge: Contributions to the
Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Thomas Bonk, 1–25. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003.
Surveys the development of Carnap’s views on truth throughout his career; includes a detailed
comparison with Tarski and ends with a discussion of more recent philosophical debates in which
the Carnapian problems discussed remain unresolved.
Find this resource:
Pap, Arthur. Semantics and Necessary Truth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.
Semantics, though thoroughly treated from the viewpoint of the Quine-Carnap debate, is only the
pretext for a wide-ranging discussion and critique of many of Carnap’s major ideas, including
reducibility and empiricist criteria of meaning, the relations between natural and artificial languages,
and finally explication itself. Largely ignored.
Find this resource:
Pincock, Christopher. “Carnap, Russell, and the External World.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Carnap. Edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 106–128. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Shows how, despite their mutual respect, Carnap and Russell always differed on certain fundamental
issues, especially realism; focuses specifically on Quine’s Russellian misunderstanding of the
Aufbau and Russell’s misunderstanding of Carnap’s semantics in his later Inquiry into Meaning and
Truth.
Find this resource:
Ryle, Gilbert. “Discussion: Meaning and Necessity.” Philosophy 24 (1949): 69–76.
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100006781Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Accuses Carnap in Meaning and Necessity of modeling all meaning on the correspondence between
proper names and their objects, which he calls the “Fido-Fido” principle, or the “muddled and
obsolete doctrine of terms.” Highly vituperative. Carnap 1950 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on
Ontology) responded (calmly).
Find this resource:
Schurz, Gerhard. “Tarski and Carnap on Logical Truth—Or: What is Genuine Logic?” In Alfred
Tarski and the Vienna Circle: Austro-Polish Connections in Logical Empiricism. Edited by Jan
Wolenski and Eckehart Köhler, 77–94. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999.
Reviews the relations between Tarski and Carnap’s semantics via their respective series of attempts
to define logical truth (or logical consequence), against the background of recent discussions by
John Etchemendy and Gila Sher. Carnap and Tarski play a game in four rounds, with the outcome a
draw in which each side wins two.
Find this resource:
Sellars, Wilfrid. “Empiricism and Abstract Entities.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited
by Paul Schilpp, 431–468. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963.
Written together with Sellars’s well-known “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which it
complements in many respects. Exemplifies certain classical misunderstandings of Carnap’s
semantics and pragmatics, which Carnap seeks to clarify in his reply. Placed by Carus 2004 in the
context of Sellars’s long-running love-hate critique of Carnap.
Find this resource:
“Testability and Meaning” and Criteria of Empirical Significance

Carnap 1936–1937, Carnap’s major paper on criteria of empirical significance, reflects not only the
principle of tolerance and the recent acceptance of semantics, but also the liberalization of empiricism
arising out of the “protocol-sentence debate.” Carnap criticizes the previous Vienna Circle notion of
“verification” and considers various possible rational reconstructions of the weaker concept of empirical
confirmation (or disconfirmation); he mainly considers a weaker concept he calls “confirmability” and a
somewhat stronger one he calls “testability,” which he says corresponds approximately to Percy
Bridgman’s principle of operationalism. Various forms of testability are discussed, including that of Karl
Popper, which he discusses in some depth. Popper, ironically, thought highly of “Testability and Meaning”
as he thought it endorsed (though somewhat misunderstood) a form of his own criterion of falsifiability, as
he reaffirmed much later in Popper 1974 (section 3, esp. pp. 971–972). Neither in this passage nor
anywhere else does Popper mention that Carnap 1936–1937 (sections 25–26) decisively rejects Popper’s
falsifiability criterion by showing that verification and falsification are logically distinguishable only in
certain fortuitous special cases. Popper never responded to this critique, nor did any of his circle. Carnap
1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works), p. 879, in a reply to Popper, briefly reminds Popper of this passage,
yet in the voluminous literature on Popper and falsification, it is passed over in silence. Carnap 1938 gives
a brief summary of the conception of “reduction,” “reduction sentences,” and “reduction bases” advanced
in Carnap 1936–1937, and places these ideas in a larger context. They were highly influential at the time,
though few of the contributions influenced by Carnap 1936–1937 are still read much, with the notable
exception of the critical reflections of Hempel 1950 and Hempel 1951. Hempel 1963 restates and expands
the critique, which Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works) replies to Carnap’s later proposals for
criteria of empirical significance, and the recent literature on them, is discussed in the section on
Theoretical Concepts.
Carnap, Rudolf. “Testability and Meaning.” Philosophy of Science 3–4 (1936–1937): 420–471; 2–
40.
Carnap is careful to stress here, in contradistinction to all his earlier epistemology-related writings,
that he is making proposals rather than asserting claims. Lays out the entire problem of empirical
content and empirical significance very thoroughly and systematically; also interesting for its
reflections on earlier phases of Vienna Circle thought, his own included.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science.” In International Encyclopedia of

Unified Science. Vol. 1. Edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, 42–62.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.
Compact overview of Carnap’s overall position in the initial semantic period, before probability,
integrating the reduction-sentence apparatus of “Testability and Meaning,” some years before
Hempel’s paradoxes of confirmation had complicated the picture and Carnap had moved on to
probability. Reducibility and reduction sentences are compactly explained in section 3.
Find this resource:
Hempel, Carl G. “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.” Revue
Internationale de Philosophie 11 (1950): 41–63.
This paper was later combined with Hempel 1951 into Hempel 1965.
Find this resource:
Hempel, Carl G. “The Concept of Cognitive Significance: A Reconsideration.” Proceedings of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80 (1951): 61–77.
This paper was later combined with Hempel 1950 into Hempel 1965.
Find this resource:

Hempel, Carl G. “Implications of Carnap’s Work for the Philosophy of Science.” In The Philosophy
of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 685–709. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963.
This paper, written and sent to Carnap in 1954 (it partly shaped Carnap’s agenda in the following
years) challenges Carnap to provide a criterion of cognitive significance, of empirical content, and of
analyticity for theoretical terms, now that earlier criteria (those of Carnap 1936–1937) had become
questionable against the background of the many critiques including Hempel’s own “raven
paradox” and Hempel 1950 and Hempel 1951.
Find this resource:
Hempel, Carl G. “Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes.” Aspects of
Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. By Carl G. Hempel, 101–119.
New York: Free Press, 1965.
Wide-ranging discussion of Carnap 1936–1937 in the context of other criteria of testability and
confirmability proposed before and after Carnap’s paper. Best source for understanding the state of
the debate before Carnap embarked on his exploration of intentions and his later series of papers on
theoretical concepts, beginning with Carnap 1956 (cited under Theoretical Concepts). Originally
published in 1950–1951.
Find this resource:
Popper, Karl. “Replies to My Critics.” In The Philosophy of Karl Popper. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp,
961–1197. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974.
In section 3, part of a long prologue in which Popper addresses what he calls the “Popper myth”
(that Popper supposedly addressed the same problem of “meaning” as that addressed by logical
empiricists), there is an extended and somewhat misleading discussion of “Testability and
Meaning.”
Find this resource:
Modal Logic
Even during the Syntax period, Carnap had been interested in modal languages, but in the Syntax itself he
had claimed that, though falling within the scope of the principle of tolerance, modal statements, indeed
all apparently intensional statements, are actually extensional statements in disguise; this idea evidently
had a substantial influence on Quine and others, as Shieh 2013 shows. In the early 1940s, however, after
accepting semantics and taking the principle of tolerance more seriously, Carnap decided that since “the
informal thinking of the great majority of philosophers and scientists proceeds in terms of intensions”
(Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s Works, p. 895), and more precise explications of intensional notions
turned out to be possible (including translations of modal into extensional languages), he devoted attention
to these matters, especially in Carnap 1946 and Carnap 1956 (the latter cited under Carnap’s Works). The
modal system highlighted in Carnap 1946 was assumed by many to be equivalent to C. I. Lewis’s S5, but
as Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works), section 9 of the Replies, makes clear, the system in the
background was “far more comprehensive than those I have described in my publications” (p. 899). This
has recently been clarified in Schurz 2001, with many references to publications by others.
Carnap, Rudolf. “Modalities and Quantification.” Journal of Symbolic Logic 11 (1946): 33–64.
Presents some rudimentary modal propositional and functional languages, taking necessity as
logical necessity (truth in all state descriptions). As Schurz 2001 points out, however, the logic
resulting from Carnap’s semantical rules is actually much stronger than Lewis’s S5, which Carnap
himself obtains by an arbitrary restriction.
Find this resource:
Schurz, Gerhard. “Rudolf Carnap’s Modal Logic.” In Zwischen traditioneller und moderner Logik:
Nichtklassische Ansätze. Edited by Werner Stelzner and Manfred Stöckler, 365–380. Paderborn,
Germany: Mentis, 2001.
Shows, with reference to a substantial body of technical literature, that Carnap’s modal logic (called
“C” here to distinguish it from Lewis’s weaker S5), is much richer and more interesting than is
generally known, particularly that it is nonmonotonic.
Find this resource:
Shieh, Sanford. “Modality.” In Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Edited by
Michael Beaney, 1043–1081. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0016Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation

»
Compact historical overview of the interest in and use of modal logic in analytic philosophy since
Frege, Russell, and C. I. Lewis, focusing especially on the inhibitory effect of Quine’s skepticism
about modality, which appears to have had its origins in Carnap’s Syntax.
Find this resource:
Probability and Induction

In the early 1940s, Carnap embarked on the project—which would occupy him for most of the rest of his
life—of attempting to develop a quantitative measure of the degree of confirmation. In “Testability and
Meaning,” he had left open the question whether this was possible; it is unclear what motivated his change
of mind, though the work on modal logic seems to have set the stage. The best-known work is Carnap
1963b (cited under Carnap’s Works), first published in 1950, though as evident in Carnap 1971, there was
considerable movement in the direction of a more “personalist” conception (in L. J. Savage’s sense) of
inductive probability over the twenty-five years of Carnap’s focus on these issues. There were many
philosophical critiques of this work at the time, notably Putnam 1963, and especially by Popper, discussed
in Michalos 1971, but there was also supportive commentary, such as Kemeny 1963. Richard Braithwaite
regarded Carnap’s work as the realization of Keynes’s vision of inductive probability. Since Carnap’s
death, the study of inductive probability has evolved into a more explicitly Bayesian form, and the focus
has shifted away from Carnap’s own works. Still, Carnap’s work is often taken to stand in for
Bayesianism, as in the textbook Gower 1997. Earman 1993 takes Carnap as representative of—indeed, as
having substantially shaped—the approach of modern Bayesianism, as do the only serious historical
studies of Carnap’s inductive-probability work, those of Sandy Zabell; Zabell 2007 is an introductory
overview to this work, and Zabell 2009 is a more comprehensive account, placing Carnap in a larger
context. Zabell has also proposed a generalization of Carnap 1952, on a different basis.
Carnap, Rudolf. The Continuum of Inductive Methods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
Within two years of singling out one confirmation function as most pragmatically useful (in Carnap
1963b, cited under Carnap’s Works), Carnap here offers a whole range of confirmation functions,
each determined by a parameter λ (roughly the weight to be given new evidence in learning from
experience), and the choice among them depends on the chooser’s utility function.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Inductive Logic and Rational Decisions.” In Studies in Inductive Logic and
Probability. Vol. I. Edited by Rudolf Carnap and Richard C. Jeffrey, 5–32. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971.
Posthumously published overview of Carnap’s general view of probability and decision theory two
decades after the original (1950) publication of Carnap 1963b (cited under Carnap’s Works),
reflecting Carnap’s shift toward a more “personalist” standpoint.
Find this resource:
Earman, John. “Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology.” In World Changes:
Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Edited by Paul Horwich, 9–36. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1993.
Compares Carnap and Kuhn, with Carnap essentially a representative of the Bayesian conception of
science. Finds that Kuhn’s view of science does not really fit into a Bayesian perspective, but
recognizes that (as elsewhere in this volume argued by Michael Friedman), Kuhn and the later
Carnap agreed in certain important respects.
Find this resource:

Gower, Barry. Scientific Method: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Chapter 11 is devoted largely to Carnap’s inductive logic and concludes with a comparison of
Carnap with modern Bayesian approaches, stressing the continuities. Elementary treatment,
requiring no technical knowledge, but well-motivated by previous chapters about Bernoulli and
Bayes, Herschel and Mill, Venn and Peirce, Keynes and Ramsey, as well as Reichenbach and
Popper, all with a strong focus on their respective conceptions of probability.
Find this resource:
Kemeny, John G. “Carnap’s Theory of Probability and Induction.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf
Carnap. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 711–738. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963.
Gives a brief and readable overview of Carnap’s entire theory of inductive logic (to which Kemeny
was himself a significant contributor) in much more straightforward terms than Carnap ever did, or
than he does in sections 25–26 of his own Replies (in this same volume), which largely complement
Kemeny’s simple account.
Find this resource:
Michalos, Alex. The Popper-Carnap Controversy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.
Amazingly even-handed account of the controversy over the possibility of an inductive logic
between Popper and Carnap (and their respective followers), developing an independent (though on
the whole more Carnapian than Popperian) perspective in conclusion.
Find this resource:
Putnam, Hilary. “‘Degree of Confirmation’ and Inductive Logic.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf
Carnap. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 761–784. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963.
Proposes that Carnap’s project of a quantitative degree of confirmation is impossible (by Putnam’s
proposed standard of adequacy), and that it be replaced by a system of acceptance rules with respect
to explicitly identified alternatives. Of significant importance in the (later) development of formal
learning theory.
Find this resource:
Zabell, Sandy L. “Carnap on Probability and Induction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap.
Edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 273–294. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Introduction to Carnap’s theory of induction and its development from 1945 to 1970, against a
historical background of previous attempts (Bernoulli, Bayes, Laplace) to understand induction in
terms of probability.
Find this resource:
Zabell, Sandy L. “Carnap and the Logic of Inductive Inference.” In Handbook of the History of
Logic. Vol. 10, Inductive Logic. Edited by Stephan Hartmann, 1–45. Dordrecht: Elsevier, 2009.
Greatly expanded and more mathematically demanding version of Zabell 2007. Appraises Carnap’s
overall project in its historical context from a modern Bayesian personalist point of view. Rare
combination of both historical and mathematical conscientiousness.
Find this resource:
Carnap vs. Quine

After beginning in the 1930s as a self-described “disciple” of Carnap (though this hardly emerges
unequivocally from his 1934 lectures on the Syntax reproduced in Creath 1990), Quine soon became
critical; his first published paper concerned largely (though not explicitly) with Carnap’s views was Quine
1936, which contained, as Quine himself later said, “the seeds of my dissent” from Carnap. The detailed
analyses of Creath 1987 and Ebbs 2011 cast doubt on this. More openly critical, in any case, were the
well-known Quine 1951 (to which Carnap responded in the fragment “Quine on Analyticity” published in
Creath 1990) and Quine 1963 (to which section 15 of Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s Works replies).
The immediate object of Quine’s attack was Carnap’s distinction between analytic and synthetic
statements, and while Quine’s view on analyticity did not go unchallenged by other philosophers at the
time, it largely carried the day until quite recently. Bound up with the attack on analyticity, though, were a
number of other issues, including Quine’s rejection of all irreducibly intensional language, indeed with all
“theory of meaning” (as opposed to “theory of reference”) as he understood it, and Quine’s willingness to
take the question about “what there is” at face value, in opposition to Carnap’s refusal to allow that
“existence” could be attributed to anything outside the context of a defined language. The following three
sections will list a few of the more important things written about the analytic-synthetic debate and about
ontology, respectively, but it should be kept in mind that the distinction is largely artificial, and there are
many connections between the two; most of the items in each of the two sections could also be listed in
the other. O’Grady 1999 is an introductory overview, and Creath 2007 is a good introduction to the whole
range of issues in the Carnap-Quine dialogue. Friedman 2006 (cited under Logical Syntax of Language)
places it in a broad historical perspective.
Creath, Richard. “The Initial Reception of Carnap’s Doctrine of Analyticity.” Nous 21 (1987): 477–
799.
The title is misleading; it should read “Quine’s Initial Reception . . . .” Argues that Quine’s Harvard
lectures of 1934 on syntax are entirely consistent with Quine 1936, and that it is anachronistic to
read Quine’s later critique into either text. Also looks at Carnap’s response and finds that although
Carnap and Quine are not yet at odds, they are already talking past each other in fundamental ways.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard, ed. Dear Carnap—Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related
Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Contains not only the correspondence between Carnap and Quine, but also a few unpublished items
from archives, and a long and very informative introduction by the editor evenhandedly showing
that Carnap and Quine each failed to grasp what the other said, and bringing out the merits on both
sides of the argument.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “Quine’s Challenge to Carnap” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, edited
by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 316–335. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
One of the few texts that sets out the basic issues between Carnap and Quine in clear and readable
terms, avoiding entanglement in the many associated issues and disputes along the way, but
providing judicious guidance about the respective merits and drawbacks of each side.
Find this resource:
Ebbs, Gary. “Carnap and Quine on Truth by Convention.” Mind 120 (2011): 193–237.
DOI: 10.1093/mind/fzr020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows that the “truth by convention” Quine 1936 discusses is not actually attributed (or even
attributable) to Carnap, who rejected any explanatory sense of convention; it is Quine himself,
rather, who had initially been attracted to the idea of using convention in an explanatory sense, and
this is what Quine 1936 argues against.
Find this resource:
O’Grady, Paul. “Carnap and Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 59 (1999): 1015–1027.
Shows that Quine 1951 did not attack any position Carnap actually held, and especially emphasizes
the radicalism of Carnap’s stance, which Quine (and most readers since then) appears to have
missed.
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Truth by Convention.” In Philosophical Essays for A.N. Whitehead,
edited by O.H. Lee, 90–124. New York: Longmans, 1936.
Often read as a first round of Quine’s later criticism of Carnap and analyticity, even by Quine
himself, retrospectively, but Creath 1987 argues on the basis of a closer reading that this view of it
is anachronistic, and Ebbs 2011 argues that in any case the target of the criticism cannot be Carnap.
Reprinted in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. By W. V. O. Quine, pp. 70–99 (New York:
Random House, 1966).
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View: Nine
Logico-Philosophical Essays. Edited by Willard Van Orman Quine, 20–46. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1951.
Perhaps the best-known paper in analytic philosophy since Russell’s “On Denoting,” and the locus
classicus of the Quine-Carnap debate. Given as a colloquium talk in Carnap’s presence at the
University of Chicago before publication; the discussion afterwards between Carnap and Quine is
recounted by Stein 1992 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology).
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Carnap on Logical Truth.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap.
Edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 385–406. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963.
Written in 1954, only a short time after Quine 1951, it extends the argument of that paper, focusing
more specifically on Carnap’s definitions of logical truth and analyticity, and again criticizing the
idea of stipulating artificial languages on which Carnap’s whole approach is based. Its main
argument is scrutinized in great detail by Creath 2003 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity).
Find this resource:
Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity

Creath 1990 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine), Creath 1991, Isaacson 1992, and Stein 1992 (cited under
Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology), were among the first to challenge effectively the consensus (which has
dissipated since then), that Quine had “won” the analytic-synthetic debate. Previous contributions raising
some of the same points were Hellman 1986 and Bohnert 1986; unfortunately, they were largely ignored,
perhaps because both were brushed off rather high-handedly by Quine himself. Even Ebbs 1997 and
George 2000 still approach the question from the presumption that the readership will assume Quine had
carried the day. Creath 2003 performs the kind of detailed line-by-line examination of Quine 1963 (cited
under Carnap vs. Quine) that Creath 1991 does of Quine 1951 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine). Proust 1989
puts Carnap’s analytic-synthetic distinction in a longer historical perspective, comparing it with other
versions of this distinction, especially those of Kant, Bolzano, and Frege.
Bohnert, Herbert G. “Quine on Analyticity.” In The Philosophy of W.V. Quine. Edited by Lewis
Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, 77–92. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986.
Of some historical importance as it continues and extends the arguments against Quine that Bohnert
first put forward in Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works) and discussed with Carnap, who
commented on them in his reply (also in Carnap 1963a).
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “Every Dogma Has Its Day.” Erkenntnis 35 (1991): 347–389.
Perhaps the most detailed point-by-point examination of Quine 1951 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine),
followed by an equally detailed account of Carnap’s response in the unpublished fragment “Quine
on Analyticity” (mentioned in the section Carnap vs. Quine) and further archival documents in the
context of other philosophers who participated in the early stages of the debate.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “The Linguistic Doctrine and Conventionality: The Main Argument in ‘Carnap and
Logical Truth.’” In Logical Empiricism in North America. Edited by Alan W. Richardson and Gary
L. Hardcastle, 234–256. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Shows in detail that Quine’s apparently powerful main argument in Quine 1963 (cited under Carnap
vs. Quine) relies heavily on the idea that elementary logic is “obvious.” Explores what Quine could
have meant by this, and concludes that so understood, the argument actually does not weigh against
Carnap at all, but actually supports the “linguistic doctrine.”
Find this resource:
Ebbs, Gary. Rule-Following and Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Thorough and refreshingly coherent discussion of Carnap vs. Quine on analyticity (especially in
chapters 4–5) in the context of a wide-ranging argument against both “scientific naturalism” and
“metaphysical realism” (as these terms are understood by Ebbs). While the discussion of Carnap is
subordinated to this overall agenda, with which one might quarrel here and there (as the author
himself sometimes does), and historical scholarship is largely neglected, many insights are to be
gained.
Find this resource:
George, Alexander. “On Washing the Fur without Wetting It: Quine, Carnap, and Analyticity.”
Mind 109 (2000): 1–24.
DOI: 10.1093/mind/109.433.1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Clear and transparent presentation of the basic positions, beginning with the point that the usual
reading of Carnap and Quine in this controversy must be wrong since Quine’s supposed position is
self-undermining. Comes to a conclusion close to that of Isaacson 1992, from a somewhat different
perspective.
Find this resource:
Hellman, Geoffrey. “Logical Truth by Linguistic Convention.” In The Philosophy of W. V. Quine.

Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, 189–205. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986.
Addresses the Quine 1936 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine) regress argument; also indirectly
addresses Quine’s view of the “obviousness” of logic and provokes Quine (in his reply) into an
admission that he meant it just as Creath 2003 would later conjecture. Explores issues concerning
the relation between Quinean ontological relativity and the metalinguistic resources needed for
stipulation that have been neglected in subsequent discussions.
Find this resource:
Isaacson, Daniel. “Carnap, Quine, and Logical Truth.” In Wissenschaft und Subjektivität: Der
Wiener Kreis und die Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Edited by David Bell and Wilhelm
Vossenkuhl, 100–130. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992.
Makes a detailed case that Quine’s arguments against Carnap never quite succeed in differentiating
Quine’s own position from what is already to be found in Carnap, if we read closely enough.
Quine’s well-known holism (from which he argues against a sharp distinction between analytic and
synthetic), for instance, is already fully spelled out in the Syntax.
Find this resource:
Proust, Joëlle. Questions of Form: Logic and the Analytic Proposition from Kant to Carnap.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Adds a historical dimension to the study of Carnapian analyticity; compares Carnap’s conception of
analyticity in Logical Syntax in detail to those of Kant, Bolzano, and Frege. Emphasizes the
continuities between this rationalist, Kantian tradition and Carnap; in the light of these the
divergence of logical empiricism from the positivist and empiricist traditions—which Quine
reasserted—is highlighted. Translated from a French original.
Find this resource:
Later Debates on Analyticity

In the past decades, analyticity has become something of an industry, not all of which refers back to the
ideas of Carnap and Quine, but Juhl and Loomis 2010 and Russell 2008 illustrate the extent to which they
still do, and the extent to which the issues between Carnap and Quine still animate philosophers now.
Davidson 1986 could still say that Quine “saved the philosophy of language as a serious subject” by
“erasing the line between analytic and synthetic” (p. 313), but it is fair to say that such sentiments no
longer represent a uniform consensus. Creath 1994 reinterprets the analyticity debate from a new angle by
seeing Carnap’s theory of meaning as a “functionalist” one. Gregory 2003a and Gregory 2003b address
the arguments in Creath 1991 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity), O’Grady 1999 (cited under
Carnap vs. Quine), and George 2000 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity) and sugggest they have
missed the real thrust of Quine’s arguments against Carnapian analyticity. Demopoulos 2013 shows that
Quine’s conception of Carnapian analyticity (involving the “centrality” of mathematics to a “conceptual
scheme”) is not Carnap’s, and that Carnap’s actual conception can be straightforwardly defended by a
completely different route.
Creath, Richard. “Functionalist Theories of Meaning and the Defense of Analyticity.” In Logic,
Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach
Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21–24 May 1991. Edited by Wesley Salmon and Gereon
Wolters, 287–304. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
Suggests that we see Carnap’s theory of meaning as “functionalist,” i.e., as one in which the
meaning of an expression is to be understood in terms of its role in relating sentences to each other
and (some) sentences to the “world” (the nonverbal environment they refer to). Shows with
particular reference to Quine’s indeterminacy-of-meaning arguments that such a functionalist view
of meaning is empirically intelligible.
Find this resource:
Davidson, Donald. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Truth and Interpretation:
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Edited by Ernest LePore, 307–319. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986.
Exemplifies a mainstream form of post-Quinean philosophy that considers only verbal behavior to
the exclusion of rule systems, or, in Chomskian terms, only linguistic performance to the exclusion
of linguistic competence. While the re-examination of the Carnap-Quine debate evident in many
citations here has made it permissible to talk of analytic sentences again, the exclusive focus on
verbal behavior exhibited in Davidson remains more widespread.
Find this resource:
Demopoulos, William. “Carnap’s Thesis.” In Logicism and Its Philosophical Legacy. By William
Demopoulos, 28–45. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Shows that Carnap’s thesis that (some) mathematics is non-empirical or non-factual can be defended
on grounds entirely independent of those that Quine attributes to Carnap, i.e., those involving the
“centrality” of a sentence, or its being held true “come what may”—which Quine and his readers
have seen as a development of the strategy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
Find this resource:
Gregory, Paul A. “‘Two Dogmas’—All Bark and No Bite? Carnap and Quine on Analyticity.”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003a): 633–648.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003.tb00311.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that O’Grady 1999 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine), while appropriately describing Carnap’s
aims, fails to consider whether they are realizeable. In particular, claims that O’Grady does not
consider the consequences of extending Carnap’s deflationism to the analytic-synthetic distinction
itself.
Find this resource:
Gregory, Paul A. “Putting the Bite back into ‘Two Dogmas.’” Principia 7 (2003b): 115–129.
Extends the argument of Gregory 2003a to address also Creath 1991 and George 2000 (both cited
under Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity). Argues that Carnap’s metaphysical deflationism is
incompatible with an analytic-synthetic distinction, and that in this way Quine’s arguments do make
direct critical contact with Carnap’s theses rather than missing the point as these authors maintain.
Find this resource:
Juhl, Cory, and Eric Loomis. Analyticity. London: Routledge, 2010.
Encyclopedic treatment of the Carnap-Quine controversy about analyticity, bringing in historical

background and recent debates. Much interesting philosophical argument (with both Carnap and
Quine) on detailed points, which however—perhaps because of the textbook format—does not
appear to add up to a unified or coherent viewpoint in the end.
Find this resource:

Russell, Gillian. Truth in Virtue of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232192.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation

»
Philosophically substantive response to the historical debate on analyticity as conceived over the
past few generations of analytic philosophers (and metaphysicians), i.e., as conceived essentially in
Quine’s terms. Carnap is omnipresent, of course, but he is Quine’s Carnap—which sometimes leads
the author to re-invent Carnapian positions without realizing it.
Find this resource:
Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology

Carnap famously classified supposedly ontological questions (questions about what there really is) into
two categories: internal and external (see the following section for the locus classicus). For Quine,
however, there are no external questions; all questions about existence are internal to our conceptual
scheme, which we cannot step outside of; this view is in the background of all Quine’s writings, but made
most explicit in Quine 1948. So the disagreement really boils down to one over the nature of language and
languages: Carnap thought we couldn’t really make proper assertions outside a constructed, fully specified
language, while Quine saw such languages as simply regimented extensions of the “mother tongue,” our
pre-theoretical natural languages. So Quine wanted to take existence questions literally, while Carnap
thought this was both unnecessary and impossible, i.e., beyond the scope of human capability—though we
are capable of deliberating on, and choosing, which language framework to employ (see section on
Carnap’s Voluntarist Conception of Philosophy). Carnap saw this as a difference of program, as Stein
1992 reports, not as a difference about any factual question in dispute. Quine, however, thought he could
actually show Carnap’s viewpoint to be wrong. Stein 1992, Bird 1995, and Alspector-Kelly 2001 show
from different angles how weak his arguments are for this and how Quine misunderstood various aspects
of Carnap. Yablo 1998 suggests that Quine requires a distinction that is even harder to find than an
analytic-synthetic one. Isaacson 1992 and George 2000 (both cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Analyticity)
show how close Quine’s conception of ontology actually is to Carnap’s despite rhetorical differences;
Price 2009 extends this view and brings it to bear on present-day analytic metaphysics.
Alspector-Kelly, Marc. “On Quine on Carnap on Ontology.” Philosophical Studies 102 (2001): 93–
122.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010353825006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Like Friedman 2006 (cited under Logical Syntax of Language), rejects, with Carnap, Quine’s
assumption that empiricism requires nominalism, but focuses more specifically on Quine’s
nominalist misinterpretation of “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” Given Quine’s later
renunciation of his appeal to nominalist intuitions, concludes that the dispute thus becomes merely
verbal.
Find this resource:
Bird, Graham. “Carnap and Quine: Internal and External Questions.” Erkenntnis 42 (1995): 41–64.
Argues that Quine’s arguments against Carnap miss their mark, and shows—against Quine and most
interpreters—that the internal-external distinction is independent of the analytic-synthetic
distinction.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4

(1950): 20–40.
Carnap’s most widely read paper (see separate section on it). It responded not only to Quine’s
conception of ontology, but also to the attacks on Carnapian semantics by Gilbert Ryle and other
ordinary-language philosophers. Contains the most systematic formulation of Carnap’s well-known
distinction between “internal” and “external” questions of existence. Reprinted in Rudolf Carnap:
Meaning and Necessity, 2d ed., pp. 205–221 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
Find this resource:
Price, Huw. “Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?” In Metametaphysics: New Essays
on the Foundations of Ontology. Edited by David J. Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan
Wasserman, 320–346. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Although the recent outpouring of analytic metaphysics regards Quine as its liberator from Carnap,
Price argues that with respect to ontology, at least, there are mostly rhetorical and strategic
differences between them, not doctrinal ones.
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “On What There Is.” Review of Metaphysics 2 (1948): 21–38.
Though mostly not directed against Carnap, even in disguise, this paper (largely directed against
more luxuriant ontologies of possible worlds) is where Quine revives ontology and advances, with
qualifications, his maxim that “to be is to be the value of a variable.” Reprinted in From a Logical
Point of View. By Willard Van Orman Quine, pp. 1–19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1953.
Find this resource:
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “On Carnap’s Views on Ontology.” The Ways of Paradox and other
Essays. By Willard Van Orman Quine, 126–134. New York: Random House, 1966.
Originally part of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” when first presented, this ontological portion of
Quine’s critique has been far less in the limelight. Re-interprets Carnap’s “internal” and “external”
questions as “subclass” and “category” questions, which many critics (including Carnap himself)
have rejected as a misunderstanding.
Find this resource:
Stein, Howard. “Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?” Synthese 93 (1992): 275–295.
Subtle but deceptively readable critique of some of Quine’s best-known arguments against Carnap,
important also for its broad portrayal of Carnap’s philosophical approach. A milestone in the shift
toward seeing Carnap as “a far subtler and a far more interesting philosopher than he is usually
taken to be” (p. 275).
Find this resource:
Yablo, Stephen. “Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Supplementary Volumes 72 (1998): 229–261.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8349.00044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Assumes that Carnap lost the debate over internal and external questions, but argues that Quine is in
the same (or in a worse) position, as his conception of ontology licenses metaphor as ontologically
non-committing, so he requires a sharp distinction between literal and metaphorical, which Yablo
argues is far harder to find than that between analytic and synthetic.
Find this resource:
“Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”

Carnap’s most widely read paper has a deceptive simplicity: talk about “what is” is possible only within
an explicitly specified language framework; outside that framework, ontological questions have no
meaning (though they may be recast as practical questions about what language to use). Many
philosophers have read this text against a general background of the knowledge they think they have of
“logical positivism,” and construct a picture of a “Carnap” that bears little resemblance to the actual
philosopher. Some recent “metaontology” (or “metametaphysics”) appears to come under this heading,
such as Chalmers, et al. 2009. An earlier and highly influential example of this genre is Stroud 1987,
which enlists Carnap in its own preoccupation of refuting skepticism, and finds him wanting. Bird 2003
pinpoints the anachronisms underlying Stroud’s interpretation, while Alspector-Kelly 2002 is a more
comprehensive critique. Not at all of this genre is Penelope Maddy’s wide-ranging Maddy 2007, which
classifies Carnap as an archetypal “two-level” philosopher (in contrast to her preferred “second
philosopher”) on the model of Kant. In the course of her argument, she goes out on a limb to claim that
Carnap would have had no resources to admit the existence (in an internal sense) of atoms in response to
the discoveries of Perrin and Einstein. Demopoulos 2011 elegantly saws off this limb, also providing an
illuminating analysis of Carnap’s paper in multiple contexts. Burgess 2004 illustrates the degree to which
Carnap 1950 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology) still represents a baseline to which recourse is
possible even now.
Alspector-Kelly, Marc. “Stroud’s Carnap.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002):
276–302.
Focuses particularly on Stroud’s attribution of “verificationism” to Carnap as the background to

“Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” Contrasts Quine’s misinterpretations of that paper
(discussed in Alspector-Kelly 2001, cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology) with Stroud’s.
Concludes that far from seeking to address it, Carnap rejected the skeptical problematic altogether.
Find this resource:
Bird, Graham. “Carnap’s Internal and External Questions: Carnap’s Arguments.” In Language,
Truth, and Knowledge: Contributions to the Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Thomas Bonk,
116–131. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003.
Sequel to Bird 1995 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology, and also reprinted in this volume).
Addresses a number of critiques of Carnap’s argument in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.”
Especially focuses on Susan Haack and on Stroud 1987, which he shows projects the pre-tolerance
Carnap onto the 1950 paper.
Find this resource:
Burgess, John P. “Mathematics and Bleak House.” Philosophia Mathematica 12 (2004): 18–36.
DOI: 10.1093/philmat/12.1.18Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A critique of mathematical fictionalism more widely, but in that context focuses on, and largely
endorses, Carnap’s position in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” placing it in the context of
current debates about mathematical fictionalism.
Find this resource:
Chalmers, David J., David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, eds. Metametaphysics: Essays on the
Foundations of Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Collection of papers reflecting a range of metaphysical attitudes. Many use the distinction of Carnap
1950 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology) between internal and external questions (and
Quine’s dissent) as a framework of discussion. With a few exceptions, however, such as Price 2009
(cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology), not well informed about the actual Carnap.
Find this resource:
Demopoulos, William. “Extending ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’ to the Realism-

Instrumentalism Controversy.” Journal of Philosophy 108 (2011): 647–669.
Deepest and subtlest analysis of “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” published to date, probing
questions Carnap left open. Explores the interplay between the internal-external distinction and the
Ramsey-sentence conception of empirical content (as discussed in Friedman 2011, cited under
Theoretical Concepts), and shows that the internal and external questions can be distinguished
independently of that or any related conception.
Find this resource:
Maddy, Penelope. Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273669.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation

»
Wide-ranging presentation of a post-Quinean form of naturalism. In Section I, chapter 5, argues less

that Carnap’s “two-level” view (modeled on Kant) is wrong, as that it is of no interest to the “second
philosopher.” Claims, in support of this, that Carnap would have had to classify the existence of
atoms as a linguistic choice rather than an empirical finding. Demopoulos 2011 rejects this claim
and finds the internal-external distinction consistent with “second philosophy.”
Find this resource:
Stroud, Barry. The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987.
Argues that Carnap’s ultimate motive in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” was to refute
skepticism using the verification criterion. Was long taken quite seriously. Discussed critically from
different angles by Bird 2003 and Alspector-Kelly 2002.
Find this resource:
Theoretical Concepts
After the abandonment in the 1930s of positivistic strictures on the use of abstract concepts, and the
acceptance of semantics, Carnap returned to his early, pre-Wittgenstein preoccupation with theoretical
concepts and the relations between theoretical and empirical concepts, now against the background of the
entire debate on criteria of empirical significance culminating in Carnap 1936–1937 (cited under
“Testability and Meaning” and Criteria of Empirical Significance section). In Carnap 1939 (cited under
Semantics), he portrayed the relation between theoretical concepts and empirical facts as much looser than
he had before. Carnap 1956 introduced a new proposal for a criterion of empirical significance against this
more free-floating conception of a theoretical language, and while David Kaplan found a counterexample,
Creath 1976 proposed an apparently easy fix. In any case, Carnap 1959 developed a new approach based
on F. P. Ramsey’s method of extracting the purely empirical content from a theoretical sentence; this
approach is explained in somewhat more detail in a lecture given by Carnap in 1959 at a meeting of the
American Philosophical Association, published with an introduction by Psillos 2000. Picked up by David
Lewis and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s, this Ramsey-sentence construction became the basis of a widely
discussed and still influential form of metaphysical realism quite foreign to Carnap’s original motivation.
Carnap’s entire series of attempts to find a precise criterion of empirical significance is generally regarded
a failure, but Lutz 2012 advances a robust defence of the project along the very lines proposed by Carnap,
though with some new technical apparatus. Friedman 2011 and Demopoulos 2007 discuss Carnap’s
Ramsey-sentence construction in historical perspective. Creath 2012 looks at this history from a somewhat
different angle and wonders whether Carnap’s stark dichotomy—derived from Hempel—between
analyticity in the theoretical and empirical languages is consistent with other late-Carnapian motivations.
Carnap, Rudolf. “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts.” In The Foundations of

Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Edited by Herbert Feigl and Michael
Scriven, 38–76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Carnap’s first attempt to spell out the brief indications he had given in Carnap 1939 (cited under
Semantics) characterizing the system of theoretical physics as “floating in air, so to speak” (p. 65).
Classical statement of the partial-interpretation view of theories further worked out in the Ramsey-
sentence construction of Carnap 1959, Psillos 2000, and elsewhere.
Find this resource:
Carnap, Rudolf. “Beobachtungssprache und theoretische Sprache.” Dialectica 12 (1959): 236–248.
First published statement of the Ramsey-sentence device for distinguishing analytic from synthetic
in theoretical statements. Since it was published in a special issue that was also a Festschrift for Paul
Bernays, it was natural for Carnap also to respond, directly and indirectly, to a critique of the Syntax
view (quite different from Quine’s) that Bernays had recently published.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “On Kaplan on Carnap on Significance.” Philosophical Studies 30 (1976): 393–
400.
Argues that Kaplan’s counterexamples to the criterion of empirical significance in Carnap 1956 can
be dealt with quite easily by a natural weakening of Carnap’s requirements. References to the
Kaplan paper and other literature referring to it can be found here.
Find this resource:
Creath, Richard. “Analyticity in the Theoretical Language: Is a Different Account Really

Necessary?” In Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism. Edited by Richard Creath,
57–66. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012.
Reflects on Carnap’s response to Hempel’s critique in the Schilpp volume (and elsewhere) and
wonders whether Carnap should have taken it quite so seriously.
Find this resource:
Demopoulos, William. “Carnap on the Rational Reconstruction of Scientific Theories.” In The

Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Edited by Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 248–272.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Clarifies common misunderstandings of Carnap’s late writings on theoretical concepts, including the
Ramsey-sentence construction, but also finds a limitation in the latter in its incompatibility with
certain intuitions we have about the tasks we expect of theories.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “Carnap on Theoretical Terms: Structuralism without Metaphysics.” Synthese

180 (2011): 249–263.
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9604-ySave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Defends Carnap’s view in Carnap 1956 and Carnap 1959 against complaints by both realists and
anti-realists (or instrumentalists) that Carnap’s view in these papers is not genuinely neutral. Argues
that the “Newman Problem” described in Demopoulos 2007 is not a fatal objection to Carnap’s
account of theoretical terms.
Find this resource:
Lutz, Sebastian. Criteria of Empirical Significance: Foundations, Relations, Applications. Utrecht:

Zeno Institute of Philosophy, Utrecht University, 2012.
Comprehensively defends the Carnap-Hempel “received view,” including such long-unfashionable

aspects as the connection of theoretical and observational terms by correspondence rules. Revives a
little-known formalism developed by Marian Przełeçki in the 1960s to develop a criterion not
subject to the well-known pitfalls of Carnap’s own, and stronger than can be achieved by fixes such
as Creath 1976.
Find this resource:
Psillos, Stathis. “Rudolf Carnap’s ‘Theoretical Concepts in Science.’” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 151–172.
DOI: 10.1016/S0039-3681(99)00031-XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Publishes a typescript of Carnap’s given as a lecture at the 1959 American Psychological
Association meeting in Santa Barbara, where the Ramsey-sentence construction is set out in more
detail than in Carnap 1959. Very helpful and well-informed introduction by the editor, quoting
extensively from correspondence surrounding the lecture and its content.
Find this resource:
Carnap and Gödel—Again

In 1995, a volume of hitherto unpublished papers from Gödel’s Nachlass appeared; it included Gödel
1953–1959, two versions of a paper Gödel had committed to contribute to the Schilpp volume on Carnap
(cited under Carnap’s Works), but withdrew at the last moment after having written seven drafts.
Inevitably, it caught the attention of philosophers. Logical empiricism had been well and truly dead for
many years by 1995, but Gödel had a new argument against it that no one had thought of before.
Characteristically, it was a mathematical argument involving his own second incompleteness theorem. In
an introduction to Gödel 1953–1959, Goldfarb 1995 (though Goldfarb himself is more sympathetic to
Quine than Carnap) defends Carnap against Gödel’s critique and shows that it rested on unwarranted
assumptions that Gödel (like many critics of logical empiricism) had made about Carnap. Goldfarb and
Ricketts 1992 had previously elaborated on this theme, as had Ricketts 1994 (cited under Logical Syntax of
Language). Gödel’s argument attracted a great deal of commentary, and the response to it was one of the
main vehicles by which the deep and radical significance of Carnap’s principle of tolerance became more
widely known among philosophers. Parsons 1995 compared Gödel and Quine’s critiques of Carnap, while
Potter 2000 saw contradictions arising from Carnap’s rejection of the Tractatus. Awodey and Carus 2003
and Awodey and Carus 2004 respond to these and other papers in a more robust defence of Carnap’s
position, showing also that Gödel’s argument involves a logical error.
Awodey, Steve, and A. W. Carus. “Carnap vs. Gödel on Syntax and Tolerance.” In Logical
Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Paolo Parrini, Wesley C.
Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon, 57–64. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
Gödel’s argument was nominally directed specifically at the question whether mathematics is
syntax, i.e., at the original Syntax version of Carnap’s principle of tolerance. This paper responds
from that earlier point of view. It points out a mistake in Gödel’s reasoning, but shows how this also
casts an interesting light on the status of the principle of tolerance.
Find this resource:
Awodey, Steve, and A. W. Carus. “How Carnap Could Have Replied to Gödel.” In Carnap Brought
Home: The View from Jena. Edited by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, 203–223. LaSalle, IL:
Open Court, 2004.
This paper responds to Gödel’s argument from the viewpoint of the later, post-Syntax Carnap, i.e.,
the Carnap of the 1950s, when Gödel was writing his critique, since Gödel himself acknowledges
that Carnap’s view has changed since the Syntax. Also addresses other Gödel texts and variants of
Gödel’s argument by others.
Find this resource:

Gödel, Kurt. “Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?” In Collected Works. Vol. 3. By Kurt Gödel,
126–155. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953–1959.
Six versions of this critique of Carnap were found in Gödel’s Nachlass, prepared for the Schilpp
volume (Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s Works) but then withdrawn. Two are included here.
Uses Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem to show that syntactic stipulations introduced as a
basis for mathematics cannot be proven to be free of factual contamination. Informative critical
introduction by Warren Goldfarb; see Goldfarb 1995.
Find this resource:
Goldfarb, Warren. “Introductory Note to *1953/9.” In Collected Works. Vol. 3. Edited by Kurt
Gödel, 324–333. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gives a brief and clear summary of Gödel’s argument and explains clearly and transparently why
the argument misses its intended target, as Gödel’s characterization of the “syntactic” view fails to
capture Carnap’s actual Syntax (and post-Syntax) view.
Find this resource:
Goldfarb, Warren, and Thomas Ricketts. “Carnap and the Philosophy of Mathematics.” In Science
and Subjectivity: The Vienna Circle and Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Edited by David Bell and
Wilhelm Vossenkuhl. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1992.
Explores some of the consequences of Carnap’s principle of tolerance. Rejects Gödel’s argument,
but finds on essentially Quinean grounds that the principle of tolerance does not have much bite, and
can be upheld only in a rather weak form. Still probably the best-known paper on the Gödel critique
of Carnap.
Find this resource:
Parsons, Charles. “Quine and Gödel on Analyticity.” In On Quine: New Essays. Edited by Paolo
Leonardi and Marco Santambrogio, 297–313. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Draws attention to the fact that, despite the very different conclusions they draw, Gödel and Quine
actually use quite similar argumentative strategies, and some of the same resources, in their
respective arguments that analyticity will not do the work Carnap thinks it will.
Find this resource:

Potter, Michael. Reason’s Nearest Kin: Philosophies of Arithmetic from Kant to Carnap. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Suggests a new twist on Gödel’s argument criticizing Carnap, and concludes that Carnap’s view has
implications that come “as close to a straightforward contradiction as one is likely to encounter in
philosophy” (p. 277). Discussed in Awodey and Carus 2004. Sees the origin of the contradiction
attributed to Carnap in his rejection of the role of the “self” in the Tractatus.
Find this resource:
Unity of Science, the Encyclopedia, and Kuhn

The physicalism of the Vienna Circle period became the basis for Neurath’s unity of science program, of
which the most visible ongoing manifestation was the project of an International Encyclopedia of Unified
Science, edited by Neurath, Carnap, and Charles Morris at the University of Chicago. A number of
volumes were actually published by the University of Chicago Press, and the project continued after
Neurath’s death in 1945 with Carnap and Morris. One of the last volumes to be published was Thomas
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. This book, which was often taken to be directed
against logical empiricism and to have played a major role in its downfall, was in fact not only
commissioned for the encyclopedia by Carnap, but welcomed enthusiastically once he saw the typescript.
Carnap’s attitude, however, remained unknown until Reisch 1991 published Carnap’s notes on and letters
to Kuhn, and pointed out that Carnap’s positive response was actually consistent with Carnap’s later
philosophy. This revealed an aspect of Carnap of which the general philosophical public had been unaware
until then, and it gave rise to a considerable literature, including Earman 1993 (cited under Probability and
Induction), and Friedman’s paper in the same volume, along with Kuhn’s response to Earman and
Friedman. Subsequent commentary on the relations between Carnap and Kuhn includes Friedman 2003,
Psillos 2008, and Carus 2013. The encyclopedia project has been closely studied and placed in historical
context by Reisch 2005. The growing philosophical conflicts between Neurath and Carnap, despite their
continued co-editorship of the encyclopedia, are appraised in Uebel 2001. Friedman 2000 looks at Carl G.
Hempel’s late conversion from Carnap to Kuhn (broadly speaking) against the background of this same
conflict.
Carus, A. W. “History and the Future of Logical Empiricism.” In The Historical Turn in Analytic
Philosophy. Edited by Erich H. Reck, 261–293. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Suggests there are actually two ways of adding a historical dimension to logical empiricism. A live
alternative to Kuhn, more consistent with a Carnapian framework, is the philosophical history of
science that goes back to the writings of Howard Stein. Gives examples of fruitful interaction
between history and philosophy of science along these lines.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “Hempel and the Vienna Circle.” In Science, Explanation, and Rationality: The
Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel. Edited by James H. Fetzer, 39–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000.
Detailed history of Hempel’s interactions with Carnap, Schlick, and Neurath, showing that though
he came around to Carnap’s view after his emigration to the US in the mid-1930s, Hempel was
strongly attracted to Neurath’s more naturalistic and radical empiricism. This in turn attracted him to
Kuhn after Carnap’s death, and led him eventually closer to a Kuhnian position.
Find this resource:
Friedman, Michael. “Kuhn and Logical Empiricism.” In Thomas Kuhn. Edited by Thomas Nickles,
19–44. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Sees Carnap and Kuhn as sharing certain assumptions due to their shared background in Neo-
Kantianism, but traces their differences back to the fact that Carnap arose from the more
mathematically-oriented Marburg Neo-Kantianism, while Kuhn was more influenced by the French
historical Neo-Kantians such as Meyerson and Koyré.
Find this resource:
Psillos, Stathis. “Carnap and Incommensurability.” Philosophical Inquiry 30 (2008): 135–156.
DOI: 10.5840/philinquiry2008301/226Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues in scrupulous detail against the attribution to Carnap, by various authors, of “meaning
holism” or an acceptance of “theory-ladenness of observation,” by showing how Kuhn’s problem of
incommensurability between conceptual systems does not arise in Carnap’s view of the language(s)
of science. Most thorough and convincing paper to date on the question of the compatibility
between Carnap and Kuhn.
Find this resource:
Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991): 264–277.
Published Carnap’s letters to Kuhn praising his manuscript of The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (of which he was the series editor), along with a commentary making a compelling case
that this praise was well motivated from within Carnap’s own view of scientific progress.
Find this resource:
Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Traces the history of the Unity of Science movement from its initiation in the mid-1930s by Neurath
to its decline in the United States after Neurath’s death under conditions of strong social pressure
against movements and organizations promoting international cooperation. Many details about
Carnap’s involvement, his investigation by the FBI, his conflicts with Neurath, and much else.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. “Carnap and Neurath in Exile: Can Their Disputes Be Resolved?” International
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 15 (2001): 211–220.
Reviews the disputes about semantics, naturalism, and the unity of science and concludes that the
difference between Carnap and Neurath were all to some degree bridgeable; stresses that Neurath’s
naturalism differed in significant ways from Quine’s later version, which—in theory, at least, if not
in historical fact—made reconciliation with Carnap less problematic.
Find this resource:
Values
In Carnap’s anti-metaphysical writings of the Vienna Circle period, normative and moral language are
excluded entirely from the realm of the cognitive, essentially following the Tractatus. Later, Carnap said
he had always been dissatisfied with his early remarks about ethics and normativity, even at the time. In
any case, the opportunity of writing more systematically about the logic of normative statements did not
arise until Carnap’s reply to Abraham Kaplan, a former colleague at the University of Chicago, in the
Schilpp volume (Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s Works). This reply, which concludes his “Replies
and Systematic Expositions,” is substantially longer than any other, and responds to Kaplan only
incidentally, being largely an exposition of Carnap’s own view. This turns out to be remarkably similar to
the account of normative inferential relations published, just a couple of years previously in Hare 1954
(Carnap wrote the bulk of this reply in 1956–1957). There is no evidence to suggest that Carnap was aware
of this, or had read Hare, though it is footnoted by Kaplan in the paper to which Carnap was replying.
However, this section of Carnap 1963a (cited under Carnap’s Works)—unlike Hare has gone largely
unnoticed by moral philosophers, and even those few who have recently turned their attention to Carnap’s
conceptions of values focus largely on the earlier Carnap, where there is much less textual evidence to go
on. Thus Richardson 2007 (cited under Carnap’s Voluntarist Conception of Philosophy) argues
convincingly that Carnap accepted a Kantian distinction between practical and theoretical, focusing on
Carnap 1934, a hitherto almost unnoticed short paper, while Mormann 2010 claims that Carnap’s
discussion of values in section 152 of the Aufbau exhibits a Rickert-influenced normative cognitivism later
discarded. Uebel 2010 provisionally accepts this finding, but, consistently with Dreben 1995 though from a
different angle, rejects Mormann’s further diagnosis of Carnap’s turn to non-cognitivism as a regression to
his youthful Lebensphilosophie. The volume in which both the Mormann and Uebel papers appeared,
Siegesleitner 2010, is one of the first to take the ethical component of logical empiricism seriously.
Carnap, Rudolf. “Theoretische Fragen und praktische Entscheidungen.” Natur und Geist 2 (1934):
257–260.
Distinguishes sharply between cognitive questions and practical ones, arguing that even if we know
all the (cognitive) facts about a situation we could possibly know, that still does not tell us what
decision to take, which depends on our values. These cannot be arrived at by cognitive methods, but
this does not absolve us from the need—“indeed the duty”—of practical judgement and practical
decision.
Find this resource:
Dreben, Burton. “Cohen’s Carnap, or Subjectivity is in the Eye of the Beholder.” In Science,
Politics, and Social Practice. Edited by Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, and Marx W. Wartofsky,
27–42. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995.
Sympathetic and surprisingly well-informed reflections on Robert Cohen’s attempt, in Carnap 1963a
(cited under Carnap’s Works), to combine Carnapian logical empiricism with a form of dialectical
materialism. Portrays an ethically sophisticated Carnap, and draws an interesting connection
between Carnap and Rawls in his surprising conclusion.
Find this resource:
Hare, Richard M. The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.
A systematic exposition of a logic of normative sentences, motivated not as a Carnapian language

framework but from ordinary usage (Hare had been a student of J. L. Austin). Unlike Carnap, Hare
was shaped by the discussion stemming from Moore’s Principia Ethica. Like Carnap, however,
Hare was also strongly influenced by Stevenson’s Ethics and Language.
Find this resource:
Mormann, Thomas. “Wertphilosophische Abschweifungen eines logischen Empiristen: Der Fall

Carnap.” In Logischer Empirismus, Werte, und Moral: Eine Neubewertung. Edited by Anne
Siegesleitner, 81–102. Vienna: Springer, 2010.
Based on a case made in earlier writings by the author that Carnap was heavily influenced by
Rickert in the Aufbau, argues that its section 152 is to be understood as an attempt to recreate
Rickert’s “objective values,” and that Carnap’s later abandonment of this position was due to a
relapse into the Lebensphilosophie Carnap had embraced in his youth. Discussed critically in Uebel
2010.
Find this resource:
Siegesleitner, Anne, ed. Logischer Empirismus, Werte, und Moral: Eine Neubewertung. Vienna:
Springer, 2010.

First collection of papers to focus specifically on the ethical agenda of logical empiricism and to
begin the process of rescuing it from the almost total oblivion it has fallen into, even at the time
logical empiricism was an influential philosophical program.
Find this resource:
Uebel, Thomas. “‘BLUBO-Metaphysik’: Die Verwerfung der Werttheorie des Südwestdeutschen

Neukantianismus durch Carnap und Neurath.” In Logischer Empirismus, Werte, und Moral: Eine
Neubewertung. Edited by Anne Siegesleitner, 103–129. Vienna: Springer, 2010.
Takes Mormann’s hypothesis of Rickert’s influence on the Aufbau seriously, but shows that Carnap
and Neurath soon afterwards distanced themselves quite radically from the vague hypostatization of
“values” in German idealism as well as much of phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism.
Find this resource:
Carnap’s Voluntarist Conception of Philosophy

The positive side of the anti-metaphysical animus in Carnap and logical empiricism was the conviction
that, freed of the ghosts of the past, our species is free to set up its cognitive systems and its modes of
cohabitation (moral and political) however it chooses (e.g., Uebel 2004, cited under Surveys and
Orientation). By accepting traditional or conventional lore about how things “really are” we constrain
these choices unnecessarily (Jeffrey 1992). We need genuine empirical knowledge because it does
constrain (and inform) our choices, but pseudo-knowledge does not, and should not be allowed to get in
the way. These views are very consistent with the tradition of the European Enlightenment on the one
hand, as Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and Orientation) affirms, but also constitute a kind of
pragmatism—a quite different kind, though, as Richardson 2007 shows, from the better-known American
pragmatism of James and Dewey. Kitcher 2008 (cited under Explication) suggests that Richard Rorty’s
apparently incendiary conception of philosophy was not so alien to, and in some ways continuous with,
Carnap’s. O’Grady 1999 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine) and Price 1997 also suggest (somewhat different)
continuities between Carnap and Rorty. Rorty himself would, of course, have been utterly bewildered and
appalled to find that only a few years after his death, people were seriously arguing that Carnap, of all
people, was not only more decidedly voluntaristic than Rorty, but also more utopian.
Jeffrey, Richard. “Carnap’s Voluntarism.” In Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science IX.
Edited by D. Prawitz, B. Skyrms, and D. Westerståhl, 847–866. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1992.
By “voluntarism” Jeffrey means the view that we (rather than God, as in seventeenth-century
voluntarism) are fully in control of, and responsible for, our conceptual systems. Tradition
constrains us, but we can break free of it. Carnap himself hardly mentioned this because he took it
so entirely for granted (though see e.g., his reply to Strawson in Carnap 1963a, cited under Carnap’s
Works).
Find this resource:

Price, Huw. “Naturalism and the Fate of the M-Worlds.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 71
(1997): 247–267.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8349.00029Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Proposes a naturalistic but non-eliminative way of retaining parts of human discourse that have
often seemed under threat from scientific naturalism; the “M-worlds” of (among others) morality,
modality, meaning, and the mental. Price’s strategy rests heavily on what he calls “the Carnap
thesis” regarding the inadmissability of “external” questions. The connection with Rorty is not
explicit in this paper but in subsequent writings. Reprinted in Naturalism without Mirrors. By Huw
Price, pp. 132–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Find this resource:
Richardson, Alan. “Carnapian Pragmatism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Carnap. Edited by

Michael Friedman and Richard Creath, 295–315. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Pinpoints the difference between Carnap’s pragmatism and the traditional American pragmatism of
James, Dewey, and Lewis in the latter’s refusal to recognize Carnap’s fundamental (Kantian)
distinction between between the theoretical and the practical; from Carnap’s viewpoint, this “robs
them of of being able to view a logical system as an instrument that can be chosen or left aside” (p.
313).
Find this resource:
Explication
Carnap’s voluntarism was most memorably epitomized, in his later philosophy, by his ideal of explication.
This is nowhere fully articulated, though Carnap 1963b (cited under Carnap’s Works), §§1–6 give the
most extended account of explication itself. Previously, a version of explication had been called “rational
reconstruction,” but after the principle of tolerance there could be no such thing as a “correct” or “more
correct” (or “less correct”) rational reconstruction. Any judgement about the appropriateness or adequacy
of an explication had therefore to be an external—which is to say a pragmatic—question. While this is
implicit in Carnap’s own most extensive discussion in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” it was
first explicitly pointed out by Stein 1992 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine on Ontology), who also noted that
this externality of explication generates a dialectic—a sort of dynamic mutual feedback and adjustment—
between the cognitive and the pragmatic (descriptive and normative), whereby the cognitive provides the
constraint structure for the choice among pragmatic values, while the values so chosen are brought to bear
on the choice of conceptual framework(s) for the cognitive realm. Carus 2007 (cited under Surveys and
Orientation) and many of the papers in Wagner 2012 elaborate on this conception, while Loomis and Juhl
2006 reject it, following Strawson 1963. Although Quine 1951 (cited under Carnap vs. Quine) also
deprecated explication, Quine later came to embrace something under that name. However, as Gustafsson
2014 shows, what Quine meant by explication was something quite different from what Carnap had in
mind; for Quine, explication is elimination (i.e., essentially what Russell meant by “analysis”), while for
Carnap this is not a requirement. Maher 2006 exemplifies the attitude of many philosophers who, while
accepting that Carnapian explication is preferable to Quinean eliminative analysis, leave aside the
dialectical dimension identified by Stein and the voluntarism identified by Jeffrey, and prefer to see
explication as a narrower task more continuous with traditional philosophical analysis. Philosophers of
biology, however, seem specially able to appreciate Carnap’s program of explication in all its original
splendor; Kitcher 2008 wields Carnapian explication against the perpetual attempts to arrive at “the” (or
“the correct” or “the definitive”) concept of “species” or “unit of selection,” while Justus 2012 applies
Carnapian explication to criticize the ecological fixation on finding “the” correct concept of “balance of
nature.”
Gustafsson, Martin. “Quine’s Conception of Explication—And Why It Isn’t Carnap’s.” In A

Companion to W. V. O. Quine. Edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernie LePore, 508–525. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2014.
Shows that Quine’s conception of explication, even after apparently embracing Carnap’s version,
remained very different, i.e., remained eliminative in a Russellian ontological sense.
Find this resource:
Justus, James. “Carnap on Concept Determination: Methodology for Philosophy of Science.”

European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (2012): 161–179.
Makes a strong case that while a great deal of current work, including especially in experimental
philosophy, has tended to undermine the credibility of traditional conceptual analysis, Carnapian
explication is free of these weaknesses, and can supply precisely the normative framework that
experimental philosophy by itself has so far lacked. Stresses the common ground between Strawson
and Carnap. Illustrates the potential of explication with an example from ecology.
Find this resource:
Kitcher, Philip. “Carnap and the Caterpillar.” Philosophical Topics 36 (2008): 111–127.
DOI: 10.5840/philtopics20083617Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Perhaps the simplest and most compelling introduction to the Carnapian program of explication,
comparing Carnap’s program to Rorty’s on the one hand, and applying it to current controversies in
the philosophy of biology (about the attempts to find definitive concepts of “species” and identify
the “correct” units of selection) on the other.
Find this resource:
Loomis, Eric, and Cory Juhl. “Explication.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of
Science. Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer, 287–294. London: Routledge, 2006.
Brief exposition of Carnap’s conception of explication, followed by an extended critique based

mostly on Strawson 1963.
Find this resource:
Maher, Patrick. “Explication Defended.” Studia Logica 86 (2006): 331–341.
Regards Carnap’s response to Strawson 1963 as inadequate and proposes a better (by which he
means a more narrowly focused) one. Also responds to some recent critics of explication and easily
shows that they completely misunderstand it.
Find this resource:
Strawson, Peter F. “Carnap’s Views on Constructed Systems vs. Natural Languages in Analytic
Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by Paul Schilpp, 503–518. LaSalle, IL:
Open Court, 1963.
Argues from the viewpoint of Oxford ordinary language philosophy that the vital connection with
actual usage is the philosopher’s “sole and essential point of contact with reality” (p. 518), and that
Carnap’s approach of explication, which substitutes new concepts for vague or inadequate old ones,
is not so much solving philosophical problems as simply “changing the subject” (p. 506).
Find this resource:
Wagner, Pierre. Carnap’s Ideal of Explication and Naturalism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Collection of papers on Carnap’s ideal of explication and the naturalist challenges to it, from Quine
and philosophers in the Quinean tradition such as Mark Wilson. (Other self-described “naturalist”
philosophers, such as Philip Kitcher—see Kitcher 2008—are nonetheless also sympathetic to
Carnap’s ideal of explication.)
Find this resource:
back to top
Introduction
Surveys
and
Orientation
Carnap’s
Works
Carnap’s
Beginnings
The

Rudolf Carnap

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rudolf Carnap

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Introduction

Surveys and Orientation

Abridged translation of “Rudolf Carnap et l’héritage de l’Aufklärung.” In Jacques Bouveresse’s

Find this resource:

Carus, A. W. Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment. Cambridge,

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511487132Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

DOI: 10.1057/9780230235397Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Find this resource:

Mormann, Thomas. Carnap. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000.

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Ricketts, Thomas. “Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism.” In Reading

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Carnap, Rudolf. Philosophical Foundations of Physics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Carnap, Rudolf. Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften.

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Friedman, Michael. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139173193Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2011.583421Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521840156Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

DOI: 10.2307/2215671Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Leitgeb, Hannes. “A New Analysis of Quasianalysis.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 (2007):

DOI: 10.1007/s10992-006-9033-zSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Gives a modern, precise reconstruction of Carnapian quasianalysis as a method of abstraction and

Find this resource:

DOI: 10.1007/s10992-008-9095-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource:

Pincock, Christopher. “A Reserved Reading of Carnap’s Aufbau.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2005.00240.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Find this resource: