I provide a brief history of pragmatics as it relates to explanation, highlighting the great neglect of pragmatics and pragmatic considerations in regard to explanation during the mid-twentieth century. In order to understand pragmatic considerations regarding explanation, I utilize the work of Bas C. van Fraassen, Peter Achinstein, and Jan Faye. These thinkers provide crucial tools for understanding pragmatics, especially with regard to concepts such as context and exigence. The work of these thinkers provides the platform from which I compose (...) a definition of pragmatic considerations. (shrink)

In Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik and Abriss der Logistik, Carnap attempted to formulate the metatheory of axiomatic theories within a single, fully interpreted type-theoretic framework and to investigate a number of meta-logical notions in it, such as those of model, consequence, consistency, completeness, and decidability. These attempts were largely unsuccessful, also in his own considered judgment. A detailed assessment of Carnap’s attempt shows, nevertheless, that his approach is much less confused and hopeless than it has often been made out to (...) be. By providing such a reassessment, the paper contributes to a reevaluation of Carnap’s contributions to the development of modern logic. (shrink)

All contributions included in the present issue were originally prepared for an “Author Meets Critics” session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.

I explore a strand of reception history that follows Rudolf Carnap’s shift from a purely syntactical analysis of constructed languages to his conception of pure semantics. My exploration focuses on Gustav Bergmann’s and Everett Hall’s interpretation of pure semantics, their understanding of what constitutes a ’formal’ investigation of language, and their arguments concerning the relationship between expressions and their extra-linguistic referents. I argue that Bergmann and Hall strongly misread Carnap’s semantic project and, subsequently, their misunderstanding is passed down through colleagues (...) and students. (shrink)

I use van Heijenoort’s published writings and manuscript materials to provide a comprehensive overview of his conception of modern logic as a first-order functional calculus and of the historical developments which led to this conception of mathematical logic, its defining characteristics, and in particular to provide an integral account, from his most important publications as well as his unpublished notes and scattered shorter historico-philosophical articles, of how and why the mathematical logic, whose he traced to Frege and the culmination of (...) its formative period in the incompleteness results of Gödel, became modern logic, as distinct from the traditional logic of Aristotle, and why and how the logistic tradition that led from Frege through Russell, rather than the algebraic tradition that led from De Morgan and Boole through Peirce and Schröder, came, in his view, to define modern logic. (shrink)