THE FATE OF ANALYSIS, #27–Carnap Before and After the Tractatus.
By Robert Hanna
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Classical Analytic Philosophy
II.1 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Is: Two Basic Theses
II.2 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Officially Isn’t: Its Conflicted Anti-Kantianism
II.3 Classical Analytic Philosophy Characterized in Simple, Subtler, and Subtlest Ways
II.4 Three Kinds of Analysis: Decompositional, Transformative, and Conceptual
II.5 Frege, The First Founding Father of Classical Analytic Philosophy
II.6 Frege’s Project of (Transformative or Reductive) Analysis
II.8 Frege’s Semantics of Sense and Reference, aka Meaning
II.9 Some Biggish Problems For Frege’s Semantics
II.10 Husserl, Logic, and Logical Psychologism, aka LP
II.11 What LP is, and its Three Cardinal Sins
II.12 Husserl’s Three Basic Arguments Against LP
II. Moore, Brentano, Husserl, Judgment, Anti-Idealism, and Meinong’s World
III.1 G.E. Moore, the Second Founding Father of Classical Analytic Philosophy
III.2 Brentano on Phenomenology, Mental Phenomena, and Intentionality
III.3 Husserl on Phenomenology and Intentionality
III.4 Moore and the Nature of Judgment
III.5 Moore and the Refutation of Idealism
IV. Russell, Unlimited Logicism, Acquaintance, and Description
IV.1 Russell Beyond Brentano, Husserl, Moore, and Meinong
IV.2 Russell and Mathematical Logic versus Kant
IV.3 Russell’s Unlimited Logicist Project
IV.4 Pursued by Logical Furies: Russell’s Paradox Again
IV.5 Russell’s ‘Fido’-Fido Theory of Meaning
IV.6 Knowledge-by-Acquaintance and Knowledge-by-Description
IV.7 Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
IV.8 Russell’s Multiple-Relation Theory of Judgment
IV.9 Russellian Analysis, Early Wittgenstein, and Impredicativity Again
IV.10 Russell and The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
V. Wittgenstein and the Tractatus 1: The Title, and Propositions 1–2.063
V.1 A Brief Synopsis of the Tractatus
V.3 The Basic Structure of the Tractatus: A Simple Picture
V.5 Reconstructing Wittgenstein’s Reasoning
V.6 What Are the Objects or Things?
V.7 The Role of Logic in Tractarian Ontology
V.9 Tractarian Ontology, Necessity, and Contingency
V.10 Some Initial Worries, and Some Possible Wittgensteinian Counter-Moves
VI. Wittgenstein and the Tractatus 2: Propositions 2.013–5.55
VI.1 What is Logical Space? What is Real Space?
VI.3 Logical Space is Essentially More Comprehensive than Manifest or Phenomenal Space
VI.4 Why There Can’t/Kant Be a Non-Logical World
VI.5 A Worry About Wittgenstein’s Conception of Logic: Non-Classical Logics
VI.6 What is a Tractarian Proposition?
VI.7 Naming Objects or Things, and Picturing Atomic Facts
VI.8 Signs, Symbols, Sense, Truth, and Judgment
VII. Wittgenstein and the Tractatus 3: Propositions 4–5.61
VII.1 The Logocentric Predicament, Version 3.0: Justifying Deduction
VII.2 The Logical Form of Deduction
VII.3 Logic Must Take Care of Itself
VII.4 Tautologies and Contradictions
VII.6 Logic is the A Priori Essence of Language
VII.7 Logic is the A Priori Essence of Thought
VII.8 Logic is the A Priori Essence of the World
VIII. Wittgenstein and the Tractatus 4: Propositions 5.62–7
VIII.1 Tractarian Solipsism and Tractarian Realism
VIII.4 Is the Tractatus’s Point an Ethical One?
VIII.6 Three Basic Worries About the Tractatus
VIII.7 Natural Science and the Worry About the Simplicity of the Objects or Things
VIII.8 Natural Science and the Worry About the Logical Independence of Atomic Facts
VIII.9 Tractarian Mysticism and the Worry About Metaphilosophy
IX. Carnap, The Vienna Circle, Logical Empiricism, and The Great Divide
IX.1 Carnap Before and After the Tractatus
IX.2 Carnap, The Vienna Circle, and The Elimination of Metaphysics
IX.3 The Verifiability Principle and Its Fate
IX.4 The Davos Conference and The Great Divide
X. Wittgenstein and the Investigations 1: Preface, and §§1–27
X.1 From the Tractatus to the Investigations
X.2 The Thesis That Meaning Is Use
X.3 A Map of the Investigations
X.4 The Critique of Pure Reference: What the Builders Did
XI. Wittgenstein and the Investigations 2: §§28–242
XI.1 The Picture Theory and the Vices of Simplicity
XI.2 Wittgenstein’s Argument Against The Picture Theory: A Rational Reconstruction
XI.3 Understanding and Rule-Following
XI.4 Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox: The Basic Rationale
XI.5 Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox: A Rational Reconstruction
XI.6 Kripkenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox: Why Read Kripke Too?
XI.7 Kripkenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox: A Rational Reconstruction
XI.8 How to Solve The Paradox: Wittgenstein’s Way and Kripkenstein’s Way
XI.8.1 Wittgenstein and The Rule-Following Paradox: A Rational Reconstruction
XI.8.2 Kripkenstein and The Rule-Following Paradox: A Rational Reconstruction
XII. Wittgenstein and the Investigations 3: §§242–315
XII.1 What is a Private Language?
XII.2 The Private Language Argument: A Rational Reconstruction
XII.3 Is Wittgenstein a Behaviorist? No.
XII.4 Wittgenstein on Meanings, Sensations, and Human Mindedness: A Rational Reconstruction
XIII. Wittgenstein and the Investigations 4: §§316–693 & 174e-232e
XIII.1 Linguistic Phenomenology
XIII.2 Two Kinds of Seeing
XIII.3 Experiencing the Meaning of a Word
XIII.4 The Critique of Logical Analysis, and Logic-As-Grammar
XIV. Coda: Wittgenstein and Kantianism
XIV.1 World-Conformity 1: Kant, Transcendental Idealism, and Empirical Realism
XIV.2 World-Conformity 2: Wittgenstein, Transcendental Solipsism, and Pure Realism
XIV.3 World-Conformity 3: To Forms of Life
XIV.4 The Critique of Self-Alienated Philosophy 1: Kant’s Critical Metaphilosophy
XIV.5 The Critique of Self-Alienated Philosophy 2: Wittgensteinian Analysis as Critique
XV. From Quine to Kripke and Analytic Metaphysics: The Adventures of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
XV.1 Two Urban Legends of Post-Empiricism
XV.2 A Very Brief History of The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
XV.3 Why the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction Really Matters
XV.4 Quine’s Critique of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction, and a Meta-Critique
XV.5 Three Dogmas of Post-Quineanism
XVI. Analytic Philosophy and The Ash-Heap of History
XVI.1 Husserl’s Crisis and Our Crisis
XVI.2 Why Hasn’t Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy Produced Any Important Ideas in the Last Thirty-Five Years?
XVI.3 On Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being, Or, It’s The End Of Analytic Philosophy As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
XVI.4 Thinking Inside and Outside the Fly-Bottle: The New Poverty of Philosophy and Its Second Copernican Revolution
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This installment contains section IX.1.
But you can also read or download a .pdf version of the complete book HERE.
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IX. Carnap, The Vienna Circle, Logical Empiricism, and The Great Divide
IX.1 Carnap Before and After the Tractatus
Wittgenstein gave up philosophy for roughly ten years after the publication of the Tractatus.
At the same time, during Wittgenstein‘s “silent decade” — interestingly comparable to and contrastible with Kant’s own “silent decade” between the early 1770s and the early 1780s — Carnap was discovering his own philosophical voice.
Falling into what will by now no doubt seem like a familiar pattern, and indeed very like Russell, Carnap started his philosophical career as a neo-Kantian philosopher of the foundations of geometry:
I studied Kant‘s philosophy with Bruno Bauch in Jena. In his seminar, the Critique of Pure Reason was discussed in detail for an entire year. I was strongly impressed by Kant‘s conception that the geometrical structure of space is determined by our forms of intuition. The after-effects of this influence were still noticeable in the chapter on the space of intuition in my dissertation, Der Raum [published in 1922]…. Knowledge of intuitive space I regarded at the time, under the influence of Kant and the neo-Kantians, especially Natorp and Cassirer, as based on “pure intuition,” and independent of contingent experience.[i]
It’s not altogether irrelevant that Bauch was virulently anti-semitic and eventually a Nazi;[ii] whereas Carnap was an anti-fascist, a universalist, an egalitarian, and at least while he still lived in Europe, also a radical socialist.
So seems to me quite possible that Carnap’s sharp moral and political disagreements with his former teacher also primed his officially anti-Kantian and anti-neo-Kantian turn by the late 1920s and early 30s.[iii]
In any case, Carnap’s progress away from Kant‘s metaphysics and neo-Kantianism more generally, followed the familiar dual pattern for Analytic philosophers of treating post-Kantian developments in the exact sciences as refutations of basic Kantian theses, and replacing transcendental idealism with philosophical logic.
By the early 1930s, Carnap had been heavily influenced by the Theory of Relativity and by the close study of Frege‘s writings, along with the Russell‘s and Whitehead‘s Principia, Russell‘s Our Knowledge of the External World, and above all the Tractatus.
Carnap‘s intellectual ferment was expressed in two important books, The Logical Structure of the World (Logische Aufbau der Welt) (1928), and The Logical Syntax of Language (1934).
The Aufbau played a crucial variation on Russell‘s platonistic conception of philosophical analysis by turning it into constructive empiricism, which can be glossed as follows:
The natural world as a whole is the object of analysis. But the simples out of which the world is logically constructed are not Really Real mind-independent substances, but instead nothing but subjective streams of experience and a single fundamental relation, the recollection of similarity.
Correspondingly, Logical Syntax converts Wittgenstein‘s transcendental and activist conception of analysis into logico-linguistic conventionalism, which can be glossed this way:
There is no One True Logic, just as there is no One True Natural Language, but instead there as many distinct logical languages as there are formal symbolic calculi constructed on the models of the Begriffsschrift and Principia, plus distinct axiom-systems, or distinct sets of logical constants, or distinct notions of logical consequence; and the choice of precisely which logical language is to be adopted as the basis of the exact sciences is purely a pragmatic matter (whether voluntaristic or social) having nothing to do with logic itself.
The overall result is that Kant‘s transcendental turn from the apparent or manifestly world to a set of a priori world-structures that are (according, at least, to the strong versions of Kant’s transcendental idealism) imposed on phenomenal appearances by our innate spontaneous cognitive capacities, is replaced by Carnap with the linguistic turn[iv] from the apparent world to a set of a priori world-structures that are imposed on those phenomenal appearances by the syntax and semantics of our logical and natural languages.
Needless to say however, even after the linguistic turn, the gambit of imposing a priori logico-linguistic structures on phenomenal appearances remains basically a neo-Kantian and thereby (arguably, again depending on your interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics) also a Kantian move.[v]
Indeed, the very same Carnapian fusion of pure logic and epistemological neo-Kantianism is vividly evident in C. I. Lewis‘s Mind and the World Order (1929) and Nelson Goodman‘s The Structure of Appearance (1951/1966).
NOTES
[i] R. Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in P. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle: Open Court, 1963), pp. 3–84, at pp. 4 and 12.
[ii] See, e.g., H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), esp. ch. 4.
[iii] See, e.g., M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (La Salle: Open Court, 2000), esp. ch. 5.
[iv] See R. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), esp. the Editor‘s Introduction, pp. 1–39.
[v] See, e.g., A. Richardson, Carnap and the Construction of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
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