[3.5.] Rudolf Carnap.^[1]

 

·         Born in Ronsdorf, Germany, 1891.

·         From 1910-1914, studied at the Universities of Jena and Freiberg.

·         At Jena, he took courses from Frege, who was a professor of mathematics there.

·         His education was interrupted by WWI, during which he served in the German army for three years.

·         After the war, he continued his education, first at the University of Freiburg (where Einstein was a professor) and then at the University of Berlin.

·         During this early period, his work focused on philosophical physics; his first attempt at a dissertation was rejected by the physics department as being too philosophical, but a philosophy professor there described it as being “pure physics.”

·         His eventual dissertation was a philosophical investigation of space, influenced by Kant.

·         In the 1920s, he met a number of philosophers working in Vienna, Austria, and eventually moved there himself, becoming a professor at the University of Vienna in 1926 and a part of the Vienna Circle.

·         Like many Jewish philosophers, Carnap fled Europe in 1935 due to the rise of Nazism; with the help of American philosophers Charles Morris and W. V. O. Quine, he came to America and became an American citizen in 1941.

·         He was a professor at the University of Chicago, then at Princeton, and then at UCLA.

·         He died in Santa Monica, CA, in September 1970.

 

 

[3.5.1.] Carnap and Wittgenstein.

 

Carnap, and the Vienna Circle in general, were influenced by Wittgenstein, who met with the group on a number of occasions.

 

Carnap and the rest of the Circle had initially understood the point of the Tractatus to be that statements that do not mean anything according to the picture theory of meaning are meaningless, i.e. nonsensical, although Wittgenstein himself seems not to have believed that.

 

Not everyone in the group was equally impressed with Wittgenstein:

 

A few in the Circle … came to regard Wittgenstein as a confidence trickster. Rudolf Carnap was particularly struck by the contrast between the Circle’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s text and the man himself. The Circle consisted of hard-nosed scientists, dismissive of metaphysics, moralizing, and spirituality—and they initially believed that such rejection was also the message of the Tractatus. And yet here, in the flesh, was this poetry reciting semimystic. As Carnap put it:

 

His point of view and his attitude towards people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist, one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer. … When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation.

 

                Perhaps inevitably, the misunderstandings and tensions between Wittgenstein and the Circle coterie soon erupted, bringing divisions in their wake. In particular, there was a basic clash of personality with the serene, composed Carnap. Carnap, who believed in the desirability of an ideal language, turned out to be an advocate of the artificial language Esperanto. This innocuous enthusiasm drove Wittgenstein into a rage. Language, he insisted, must be organic.

Although Carnap always deferred to Wittgenstein, his persistent, politely phrased and thoughtful questions about how Wittgenstein reached conclusion Z from assumptions X and Y would be dismissed as the preoccupations of a pedant. “If he doesn’t smell it, I can’t help him. He just has no nose.” The final breach occurred with the publication of Carnap’s masterpiece, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Construction of the World). Wittgenstein accused Carnap of plagiarism—a crime that he was always scenting and that he believed was actually compounded in this case by Carnap’s acknowledgement in the book of the debt he owed Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein responded, “I don’t mind a small boy’s stealing my apples, but I do mind his saying that I gave them to him.”^[2]

 

 

[3.5.2.] Carnap’s General Account of Meaning.

 

The account of meaning which we will examine, as well as the criticism of metaphysics to which it gives rise, come from Carnap’s 1932 article “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language.”

 

This account reflects the logical positivism (a.k.a. logical empiricism and verificationism) that Carnap shared with the other members of the Vienna Circle.

 

As we shall see, Carnap holds that

 

                In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless. (106, emphasis added)

 

But he doesn’t mean “meaningless” in the sense of pointless, or obviously false, or contradictory. He means it in a much stricter sense:

 

... a sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement. It may happen that such a sequence of words looks like a statement at first glance; in that case we call it a pseudo-statement. Our thesis, now, is that logical analysis reveals the alleged statements of metaphysics to be pseudo-statements. (106)

 

There are two ways in which a string of words that appears to constitute a meaningful statement can actually fail to do so, and thus be a pseudo-statement:

 

1.      It contains one or more meaningless words.

2.      All of its words are meaningful, but they “are put together in such a way that nevertheless no meaning results.” (109, emphasis added)

 

We will examine each of these in turn.

 

 

[3.5.2.1.] The Meaningfulness of Words.

 

On Carnap’s view of meaning, in order for a word to be meaningful, there must be definite answers to two questions about it:

 

1.      How does the word occur in the simplest sentence in which it can occur (i.e., how does it occur in its elementary sentence)?

 

For example, the word “stone”: its elementary sentence is “x is a stone,” where “x” stands for a material thing.

 

2.      Which sentences imply that elementary sentence, and which sentences are implied by it?

 

For example, with regard to the word “arthropod,” it must be possible to place its elementary sentence (“x is an arthropod”) in the following sort of scheme:

 

sentences that imply the elementary sentence, e.g.

“x is an animal”

“x has a segmented body”

“x has jointed legs”

taken together

 

¯

 

“x is an arthropod”

 

¯

 

sentences that are implied by the elementary sentence, e.g.

“x is an animal”

“x has a segmented body”

“x has jointed legs”

taken separately

 

Every meaningful word can be “reduced” to other words in this way, until the most basic words in the language are reached.

 

Those most basic words are the words that occur in observation sentences (a.k.a. protocol sentences, a.k.a. primary sentences).

 

What will the words in these most fundamental “observations sentences” refer to?

 

Carnap remarks that “[i]n the theory of knowledge it is customary to say that the primary sentences refer to “the given,” i.e., that which is “given” to us in our sensory experience of the world.

 

But he also notes that there is no consensus as to what the given is, i.e., no consensus about what it is that we are directly experiencing when we have a sensory experience:

·         extra-mental things, the physical objects that exist apart from our sensing them;

·         the “simplest qualities of sense and feeling”, e.g., warmth, blueness, joy, etc.

 

Since there is no consensus about what the given is, there is no consensus regarding what these most basic sentences are about, and thus no consensus as to what the most fundamental words refer to.

 

Nevertheless, he maintains that the meaning of a word depends on its elementary sentence being “reducible” to observation sentences.

 

Regardless of this diversity of opinion it is certain that a sequence of words has a meaning only if its relations of deducibility to the protocol sentences are fixed, whatever the characteristics of the protocol sentences may be; and similarly, that a word is significant only if the sentences in which it may occur are reducible to protocol sentences. (107)

 

[Notice the similarity between Carnap and the early Wittgenstein, who had maintained that any meaningful proposition can be analyzed into elementary propositions that picture facts.]

 

 

[3.5.2.2.] “Teavy.”

 

As an argument for his account of meaningfulness, Carnap asks us to imagine someone introducing a new word into our language: “teavy.”

 

Suppose this person says that some things are teavy, while other things are not. We ask her how to tell the difference between teavy things and non-teavy things, and she says that there are no empirical signs of teaviness; it is just a simple fact that some things are teavy and other things are not.

 

At this point we ought to object: well, then, the word “teavy” is meaningless.

 

But suppose she goes on to say something like this: “...all the same there are things which are teavy and there are things which are not teavy, only it remains for the weak, finite intellect of man an eternal secret which things are teavy and which are not...” (107)

 

Says Carnap: “we should regard this as empty verbiage.” (107)

 

Further, it does not matter whether the person associates some mental images or feelings with the word—that is not enough to make the word meaningful.

 

So the word “teavy” is meaningless, and any sentence in which that word occurs is a meaningless pseudo-statement.

 

 

In summary: let “a” stand for a word and “S(a)” stand for a sentence in which “a” occurs. The word “a” is meaningful if and only if “[t]he empirical criteria for a are known”; in other words, “a” is meaningful if and only if “[t]he method of verification of ‘S(a)’ is known.”

 

So like the other members of the Vienna Circle, and like the logical positivists in general, Carnap accepted

 

The Verification Principle (df.): A sentence S is empirically meaningful if and only if S is verifiable by experience, i.e., S can shown to be true or false by means of the senses.

 

 

[3.5.3.] Carnap’s Criticism of Metaphysics.

 

 

[3.5.3.1.] Metaphysics: Difficult, or Meaningless?

 

By the late 19th / early 20th century, metaphysics had reached a high-point in obscurity. For example, the British Idealist F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) developed an elaborate metaphysical system which he expressed in prose such as this:

 

... the Absolute is one system, and ... its contents are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of any kind, can fall outside its limits. (Appearance and Reality, 1893)^[3]

 

The work of the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is an even more extreme example:

 

What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; being alone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyond being—nothing. What about this Nothing? . . . Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e., the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? . . . We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation.  (“Was ist Metaphysik?” [“What is Metaphysics?”], a lecture given by Heidegger on July 24, 1929; quoted by Carnap at p.110 of your textbook)

 

Even fans of this sort of work have to admit that it is extremely difficult to understand.

 

But some critics wanted to criticize this work, not simply as being too difficult, or even as just being bad philosophy, but as being meaningless.

 

It was the work of this sort of metaphysician that the logical positivists, including Carnap, had in their sights.

 

Stopping point for Monday February 25. For next time, continue reading the article by Carnap in your textbook (pp.108-115 [secs. 3-6]). Be prepared to answer these questions:

1.      Explain the first way in which an alleged statement of metaphysics can be a meaningless pseudo-statement. What two examples does Carnap give to illustrate this point?

2.      Explain the second way in which an alleged statement of metaphysics can be a meaningless pseudo-statement.

3.      Illustrate your answer to the previous question by explaining Carnap’s criticism of the passage about “nothing” (by Martin Heidegger) quoted on p.110.