It is widely believed that empiricism, though once dominant, is now extinct. This turns out to be mistaken because of incorrect assumption about the initial dominance of logical empiricism and about the content and variety of logical empiricist views. In fact, prominent contemporary philosophers (Quine and Kuhn) who are thought to have demolished logical empiricism are shown to exhibit central views of the logical empiricists rather than having overthrown them.

Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful.” The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. Even the most cutting (...) edge significance criteria identify empirical significance with predictive power, and thereby rule out vocabulary with legitimate scientific functions. In a nutshell, the problem is that there are terms that reduce the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory, and that may therefore be scientifically useful, but that do not add to the theory’s observational consequences, and so are ruled scientifically inadmissibility by existing significance criteria. I spell out this objection by specifying shortcut terms that are ruled inadmissible by Creath’s and Schurz’s criteria. Having objected in this way to extant criteria, and to the equation of empirical significance with predictive power in general, I discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning. I gloss Goldfarb and Ricketts’s idea of “case-by-case” delineations of empirically significant terms as the provision of special rather than general explications of the informal concept of empirical significance. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap is increasingly regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. He was one of the leading figures of the logical empiricist movement associated with the Vienna Circle and a central figure in the analytic tradition more generally. He made major contributions to philosophy of science and philosophy of logic, and, perhaps most importantly, to our understanding of the nature of philosophy as a discipline. In this volume a team of contributors explores the major themes (...) of his philosophy and discusses his relationship with the Vienna Circle and with philosophers such as Frege, Husserl, Russell, and Quine. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Carnap currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Carnap. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at length—and over a long period of time—on matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine began as his staunch admirer but diverged from him increasingly over questions in the analysis of meaning and the justification of belief. That they (...) remained close, relishing their differences through years of correspondence, shows their stature both as thinkers and as friends. The letters are presented here, in full, for the first time. The substantial introduction by Richard Creath offers a lively overview of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, allowing the nonspecialist to see their writings in historical and intellectual perspective. Creath also provides a judicious analysis of the philosophical divide between them, showing how deep the issues cut into the discipline, and how to a large extent they remain unresolved. (shrink)

This paper is a reexamination of Two Dogmas in the light of Quine's ongoing debate with Carnap over analyticity. It shows, first, that analytic is a technical term within Carnap's epistemology. As such it is intelligible, and Carnap's position can meet Quine's objections. Second, it shows that the core of Quine's objection is that he has an alternative epistemology to advance, one which appears to make no room for analyticity. Finally, the paper shows that Quine's alternative epistemology is itself open (...) to very serious objections. Quine is not thereby refuted, but neither can Carnap's analyticity be dismissed as dogma. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

Philosophers often divide Carnap's work into syntactic, semantic, and later periods, but this disguises the importance of his early syntactical writing. In Logical Syntax Carnap is a thoroughgoing conventionalist and pragmatist. Once we see that, it is easier to see as well that these views were retained throughout the rest of his life, that the breaks between periods are not as important as the continuities, and that our understanding of such Carnapian notions as analyticity and probability needs reevaluation.

In 'the methodological character of theoretical concepts' carnap offered a sophisticated criterion of empirical significance. Unfortunately, Shortly thereafter david kaplan devised a pair of devastating counter-Examples which appeared to show that carnap's criterion was simultaneously too wide and too narrow. In this note I show that kaplan's first counter-Example misses its mark and that his second counter-Example can be avoided by a natural generalization of carnap's method.

This set of original essays by some of the best names in philosophy of science explores a range of diverse issues in the intersection of biology and epistemology. It asks whether the study of life requires a special biological approach to knowledge and concludes that it does not. The studies, taken together, help to develop and deepen our understanding of how biology works and what counts as warranted knowledge and as legitimate approaches to the study of life. The first section (...) deals with the nature of evidence and evolutionary theory as it came to dominate nineteenth-century philosophy of science; the second and third parts deal with the impact of laboratory and experimental research. This is an impressive team of authors, bringing together some of the most distinguished philosophers of science today. The volume will interest professionals and graduate students in biology and the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In 1932 Ludwig Wittgenstein accused Rudolf Carnap of plagiarism and seems to have gone so far as to scrawl the word ‘Plagiarism’ on one of Carnap’s offprints and initial that note as well. Priority disputes are inherently distasteful and usually sterile. And they are often impossible to adjudicate fully. I make no such attempt here. But these disputes can also be revealing about what the participants thought they were doing and what they thought they had achieved. It is in this (...) latter vein that I revisit the 1932 dispute. My primary focus will be on Carnap, and I begin by examining the accounts of the dispute by three distinguished philosopher/historians, Jaakko Hintikka, Thomas Uebel, and David Stern. The aim is not a verdict on Wittgenstein’s charge of plagiarism, but to see what the dispute and surrounding documents show about how Carnap’s views were developing in the early thirties, what antecedents those ideas may have had (including in Wittgenstein), and how Carnap saw the changes in his views. (shrink)

This book discusses Rudolf Carnap, a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.

The Moral Nexus develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing. The book offers an interpretative argument (...) for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms. The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. The book argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people. (shrink)

It is argued that Carnap was not a complete verificationist in the Aufbau despite the widespread view that he was. That doctrine would be intrinsic to constructionalism only if either of two additional assumptions are made, and there is no reason to believe that Carnap made these assumptions. Further, in the Aufbau Carnap did not demand verifiability independently of constructionalism, and his clear rejection of verifiability in Pseudoproblems counts heavily against his ever having accepted it in the Aufbau.

In 1931 Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman published a delightfully silly history of England entitled 1066 and All That 2, as they said, “comprising, all the parts you can remember including one hundred and three good things, five bad kings, and two genuine dates”.3 History, they tell us, is not what you think; it is what you can remember. So their history is simplified and garbled, and the moral point is put front and center: every development is described as a (...) good thing or a bad thing, a good king or a bad king. What makes 1066... comic is the cleverness of its insight into what confusions people actually have and the antic candor in giving us the moral point without wasting any time on dates, motivations, or any other such confusing historical details. (shrink)

This paper considers various objections to Carnap’s logical syntax definition of ’logical expression’, including those by Saunders Mac Lane and W. V. O. Quine. While the specific objections of these two authors can be answered, if necessary by a slight modification of Carnap’s definition, there are other objections that I do not see how to meet. I also consider the proposal by Denis Bonnay for avoiding the objections to Carnap’s definition. In light of the unresolved problems with Carnap’s definition, I (...) go on to consider what Carnap’s assumptions must have been in framing his definition and to assess how much damage is caused by this failure of Carnap’s definition. This damage is not as much as might be assumed. (shrink)

Our deepest commitments about history are reflected in how we break it down into periods. (Cf. Galison 1988) By drawing a break at a certain point we emphasize the novelty and importance of a new development. It is also how we contain and dismiss certain work as no longer relevant. Thus, in the history of physics we break the story with Newton, both to emphasize his roles in bringing previous developments to a close and in initiating new lines of work, (...) and also to suggest that the ongoing practice of physics thereafter can appropriately in large measure ignore what preceeds Newton. Periodizing history is essential to understanding it, including when we periodize the work of a given writer. In philosophy, anyone who did not see a gulf between Kant’s early work and his critical philosophy or between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations would be missing something enormously important. (shrink)

This paper defends scientific realism, the doctrine that we should interpret theories as being just as ontologically committing as beliefs at the observational level. I examine the character of observation to show that the difference in interpretation suggested by anti-realists is unwarranted. Second, I discuss Wilfrid Sellars'' approach to the issue. Finally, I provide a detailed study of recent work by Bas van Fraassen. While van Fraassen''s work is the focus of the paper, the conclusions are far broader: That a (...) wide family of anti-realist views (of which van Fraassen''s is only one) is problematic and unmotivated and hence to be rejected. (shrink)

We live in a metaphysical age. And I do not mean just that too many people still believe The Prophecies of Nostradamus and/or the horoscopes found in most local newspapers. It is a metaphysical age among philosophers – even among those who shun horoscopes and are frankly embarrassed to fi nd Nostradamus so prominently displayed in the metaphysics section of their campus bookstore. Nowadays, distinguished philosophers in prestigious departments proudly call themselves metaphysicians. They all know, of course, that Carnap and (...) his Viennese friends campaigned in the late twenties and early thirties against metaphysics. (shrink)

Quine rejects Peirce's theory of truth because, among other things, its notion of a limit of a sequence of theories is defective in that the notion of a limit depends on that of nearer than which is defined for numbers but not for theories. This paper shows that the missing definition of nearer than applied to theories can be supplied from within Quine's own epistemology. The upshot is that either Quine's epistemology must be rejected or Peirce's pragmatic theory of truth (...) is partially vindicated. (shrink)

Recent essays by Michael Friedman1 and William Demopoulos2 on Carnap’s late approach to analyticity in the theoretical language make a convincing case for the continuing philosophic interest of this part of Carnap’s work. The present essay is intended not to disagree with any of these essays but to raise a logically prior worry as to whether Carnap’s account of analyticity here is well motivated and consistent with other attractive aspects of his view. To do this I outline, in §1, Frank (...) Ramsey’s approach to theories and the so-called Ramsey sentence. This will allow us to trace the steps by which Carnap came to use the Ramsey sentence in developing an account of analyticity for the theoretical language. Then, in §2, I articulate my own uneasiness with what I see as Carnap’s motivation. Finally, in §3, I express my practical reservations about how well Carnap’s approach fits with other aspects of his view. This is not intended as a refutation but rather as a reflection on how we can learn from Carnap and as a reminder of how much more we have to do. (shrink)

Recent essays by Michael Friedman1 and William Demopoulos2 on Carnap’s late approach to analyticity in the theoretical language make a convincing case for the continuing philosophic interest of this part of Carnap’s work. The present essay is intended not to disagree with any of these essays but to raise a logically prior worry as to whether Carnap’s account of analyticity here is well motivated and consistent with other attractive aspects of his view. To do this I outline, in §1, Frank (...) Ramsey’s approach to theories and the so-called Ramsey sentence. This will allow us to trace the steps by which Carnap came to use the Ramsey sentence in developing an account of analyticity for the theoretical language. Then, in §2, I articulate my own uneasiness with what I see as Carnap’s motivation. Finally, in §3, I express my practical reservations about how well Carnap’s approach fits with other aspects of his view. This is not intended as a refutation but rather as a reflection on how we can learn from Carnap and as a reminder of how much more we have to do. (shrink)

In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast and numerous publications in its wake Nelson Goodman has tried to define projectibility on the basis of a notion of entrenchment. While he and his associates have been able to defend the theory ingeniously against repeated and varied attacks, there seems to be one obstacle to the applicability of that theory which has not been widely discussed and to which we can only hope that Goodman will turn his attention.

Quine does not like counterfactuals. He thinks them unclear, and so he eschews them. It is enough, he thinks, for science to say of what it is that it is and that it is all that is. There is no need to say of what is not that it is not, or even worse, to say of what is not what it would be if ...

Shortly before he died Alberto Coffa said he was writing “a very grumpy book.” It has turned out to be grumpy indeed, but also funny and deep and wonderful. When he began his work nearly 20 years ago he chose what must have seemed the most unpromising topic imaginable: the history of the a priori, both in the nineteenth century and especially among the logical positivists in the decade following 1925. In the early 1970s it was risky for a promising (...) young philosopher of science to concentrate on historical topics. The nineteenth century was, with a few notable exceptions, terra incognita to analytically inclined philosophers. The positivists were pariahs. And many philosophers were convinced that there was no such thing as the a priori to be studied. Times have changed a bit, but this book still covers new territory. And though I cannot accept all of his conclusions, Coffa has much to teach, perhaps especially to those who would have found the whole investigation unpromising. (shrink)