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Clear, comprehensive, intermediate introduction to logical languages, applications of symbolic logic to physics, mathematics, biology.
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Customer Reviews (3)

A real bargain by a true master
Rudolf Carnap was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and the only student of Frege's worth thinking about. But what a student!

This is his intro text, a doubtful first text, but full of insight for those who already know some logic. Carnap trained as a mathematician; surprisingly, his text is of value mainly for philosophers. For instance, this is the ONLY undergrad logic text I know that grapples with the intension-extension dichotomy, with the Carnap-Morris syntax-semantics-pragmatics trichotomy. Metatheory is nonexistent, and Carnap's notion of proof is emphatically too casual for my taste.
The book is also dated. In its treatment of first order logic, Carnap is a bit too loyal to Principia Mathematica. His axioms are a bit pedantic, a bit inelegant for my taste. (Quantified formulae are much easier to work with than Carnap and his contemporaries realized; all you need to do with quantified variables is to instantiate them! See the "main method" of Quine's Methods of Logic.) You won't learn any natural deduction, truth trees, or Gentzen sequents here. You most definitely won't learn anything about recursion. But the exposition incorporates thoughout Carnap's greatest discovery: his formal theory of semantics. You will also learn more about the logic of relations than you will in any other undergrad text. You will be given an idea of the mathematical power of logic (infinity, continuity, numbers). You will even be introduced to the lambda calculus, Alonzo Church's great discovery. Carnap was comfortable with the notion of a predicate letter like few logicians since.

Part II of the book is without parallel anywhere: an introduction to a very wide range of axiomatic theories, presented as interesting applications of modern formal logic. This is a wonderful reference for ZF set theory, Peano axioms, Tarski's axioms for the reals, the Hausdorff- Bohnenblust axioms for topology, axioms for geometry, space-time, and mirabile dictu, even mereology. Other texts present at most the first 2 items on this list.

good books
It ismy experience as a reader that good books are always books thathave lots of examples because they make our understanding easier.Therefore, if this math book has examples in it,then it must mean it isvery good.So I recommend that whenever you have a chance to see it that youbuy it.

Carnap and Vienna Circle
Rudolf Carnap is the one of the most famous analytic philosophers of 20th Century and he is one of the leaders of Vienna Circle. Learning Symbolic Logic from this classical book would be enthusiastic ... Read more

Product Description
Stimulating, thought-provoking text by one of the 20th century’s most creative philosophers clearly and discerningly makes accessible such topics as probability, measurement and quantitative language, structure of space, causality and determinism, theoretical laws and concepts and much more. "...the best book available for the intelligent reader who wants to gain some insight into the nature of contemporary philosophy of science."—Choice.
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Customer Reviews (6)

Review by LP
A cultural cornerstone. Must be read by those who are interested in science and its history.

Not only for specialists
The value of this book is that it contains a summary of the views of Carnap in his last years, but it is readable not only for specialists. The "introduction" really menas that it is not so technical. You may read this book if you are interested in special relativity and some philosophy, or if you are curious about the scientific method and like to think abot it.

Carnapian survivals and computerized successes
Positivism is dead.Most of the philosophy in this book is now obsolete, but it has relevance today following the passing of the brief but popular anti-analytical Kuhnian fad.

Carnap rejected the idea of a machine for creating theories, which reference unobservables.And in his Logical foundations of probability (1950) he concluded that there cannot be an "inductive machine", i.e. a computer system, into which the scientist can input all the relevant observation sentences, and then get an output consisting of a system of empirical laws that explain the observed phenomena. He only believed that given observation e and hypothesis h, there can be an inductive machine which will mechanically determine the logical probability or degree of confirmation of h on the basis of e.

It is regrettable that the computer age had not begun thirty years earlier, because Carnap's linguistic-analysis constructionalist approach and his idea of semantical systems could have found evident application in contemporary computational philosophy of science - of course with large and important modifications to accommodate both contemporary pragmatism and modern systems design.

There have been many computerized discovery systems, sometimes called "artificial intelligence systems", as found in Herbert Simon's book Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Processes.I created a discovery system for social science, and found similarities between Carnap's ideas and the pragmatic concepts in my system design.

Perhaps the reader of this review interested in computational philosophy of science will permit me to share some personal experience in the linguistic-analysis approach.A summary of my modifications and similarities to Carnap's approach, which are discussed in my books titled Introduction to Metascience and History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, is as follows:

1. Unlike Carnap scientists never use the Russellian symbolic logic for the expression of their theories.The object-language theories constructed by my discovery system are expressed as mathematical equations of the type actually used in the relevant science.

2. The computer language constituting the discovery system is the metalanguage expressing a mechanized generative grammar in the program.

3. The semantical rules that describe the semantical interpretation of the object-language statements are sentences that are both analytic and synthetic like Quine's analytical hypotheses or discursive postulates.They might also be viewed as similar to Carnap's reduction sentences, which he says determine only "part" of the meaning of theoretical terms.

4. The state descriptions are the computer system input and output expressed in the object language, and they reveal the semantical changes produced by the discovery system.

5. The theory of information is similar to Yu Shreider's semantical metatheory, and the state descriptions are identified with Shreider's concept of a thesaurus.Thus the amount of information communicated depends on the degree of transformation between his initial thesaurus and the outputted theory that must transform his thesaurus for the user to understand the new theory, and the psychological resistance to a new theory is large if the amount of information communicated is large.

Had history been kinder to Carnap, I believe that notwithstanding his positivist pessimism about a theory-making "inductive machine", he would have contributed to computational philosophy of science, perhaps anticipating Herbert Simon's Stahl and Dalton systems.

Even more significantly computational philosophy of science might have taken the linguistic-analysis turn, which I prefer, instead of its now popular psychologistic turn, which I think is misconceived.I believe that today's computational philosophy of science would be better served were discovery systems construed as language-processing constructionalist systems producing new semantical state descriptions, and that the legacy of Carnap can contribute some needed perspective for twenty-first century philosophy of science.

Readers are invited to Google my book at my com web site philsci, which offers free downloads.

Thomas J. Hickey

A unique product of a unique collaberation
Is this book still relevant, despite being a bit old?The answer is
an unqualified YES.Why is this book the best introduction to the
philosophy of science ever written?Because it is the result of a
collaberation between Rudolf Carnap (a philosophical giant) and Martin
Gardner--the celebrated columnest who gave us so many years of
"Mathematical games," during Scientific American's golden years.

Because it was co-written by a professional writer of popular
mathematics, it is probably the only philosophy of science book which
can be read and understood by the interested lay person.But because
it is based on a series of lecture notes from one of the worlds
all-time great philosophers of science, it doesn't "wimp out" on the
technical level.If you read it you will be brought to the forefront
of philosophy of science, at least as understood by the later logical
positivists.

In short, a remarkable collaberation by two men who were at the top of
their game.Thank God for Dover.For ten bucks you can buy a priceless
book.

a great introduction to the philosophy of science
This is perhaps the only book in which Carnap is almost invariably informal. It is a remarkably clear introduction to some important topics in the philosophy of science: the nature of scientific laws, probability, scientific measurement, the structure of space, causality and determinism, theoretical concepts and laws, and a last chapter called "beyond determinism". The point where Carnap gets a bit formal, sections 26-28, is boring and absolutely out of date; his approach to analyticity is certainly not the best available. As for the rest, Carnap's conceptions are generally reliable (although it should be observed that his "logical conception" programme for probability was a complete failure). The sections I enjoyed most are those which deal with the structure of space. Carnap is highly proficient there (Carnap's doctoral dissertation was called "Der Raum") and his philosophical observations are always lucid and precise. ... Read more

Product Description
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) 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. ... Read more

Product Description
Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle. In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap adopts the position of "methodological solipsism" and shows that it is possible to describe the world from the immediate data of experience. In his Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, he asserts that many philosophical problems are meaningless. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Logical Structure of the World
Even though Logical Positivism itself failed as a philosophical project, the effects of this empirical project still ripple through the philosophical world today.One cannot come to an understanding of modern analytic philosophy, such as the philosophies of W.V.O. Quine, without dealing with the theories of the Logical Positivists, such as Rudolf Carnap.This work is one of the cornerstones of Positivistic philosophy; it is 'manifesto' of what the Positivists wanted in a philosophical theory.By utilizing logic and radical reductionism, Carnap wished to show how one's knowledge of the world can be reduced to sense data and how our talk about the external world is built up from our immediate sense data.This work is concise and clearly formulated; its goals clearly stated and the workings of the logical mechinary vividly shown.I would recommend this book to one wanting to learn more about Logical Positivism. ... Read more

Product Description
MEANING AND NECESSITY- A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic By RUDOLF C RNAP.PREFACE: The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and ex tending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors. These other methods have one characteristic k corfflHbi Wrhey all regard an expression in a language as a name of a concrete or abstract entity. In contradistinc tion, the method here proposed takes an expression, not as naming any thing, but as possessing an intension and an extension. This book may be regarded as a third volume of the series which I have called Studies in Semantics, two volumes of which were published ear lier. However, the present book does not presuppose the knowledge of its predecessors but is independent. The semantical terms used in the present volume are fully explained in the text. The present method for defining the L-terms for example, L-true, meaning logically true, analytic differs from the methods discussed in the earlier Introduction to Semantics. I now think that the method used in this volume is more satisfactory for lan guages of a relatively simple structure. After meaning analysis, the second main topic discussed in this book is modal logic, that is, the theory of modalities, such as necessity, contin gency, possibility, impossibility, etc. Various systems of modal logic have been proposed by various authors. It seems to me, however, that it is not possible to construct a satisfactory system before the meanings of the modalities are sufficiently clarified. I further believe that this clarification can best be achieved by correlating each of the modal concepts with a cor responding semantical concept for example, necessity with L-truth. It will be seen that this method also leads to a clarification and elimination of certain puzzles which logicians have encountered in connection with modalities. In the Preface to the second volume of Studies in Semantics, I announced my intention to publish, as the next volume, a book on modal logic containing, among other things, syntactical and semantical systems which combine modalities with quantification. The present book, however, is not as yet the complete fulfilment of that promise it contains only analyses and discussions of modalities, preliminary to the construc tion of modal systems The systems themselves are not given here. In an article published elsewhere see Bibliography, I have stated a calculus and a semantical system combining modalities with quantification, and have summarized some of the results concerning these systems. A more comprehensive exhibition of results already found and those yet to be found must be left for another time. The investigations of modal logic which led to the methods developed in this book were made in 1942, and the first version of this book was writ ten in 1943, during a leave of absence granted by the University of Chi cago and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. To each of these insti tutions I wish to express my gratitude for their help. Professors Alonzo Church and W. V. Quine reaorhe first version and discussed it with me in an extensive correspondence... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A philosophy of language primer for late 20th century
It's somewhat incredible just how much of the philosophy of language to emerge in the last half of the 20th century was anticipated by Carnap here. Indeterminacy of translation, primary and secondary intensions; there are passages that foreshadow Kripke as well. There is very little to object to. Indeed, just about everything Carnap says seems pretty obvious. Still, this seems to be the really hard thing to pull off, judging by the missteps many other philosophers manage to talk themselves into. One is continually awed in Carnap by his tremendous judgement. Like Russell before him, he sees very clearly that when it comes to the choice of a semantic method, that is, a method of interpretation of utterances (assignation of "meaning"), "right" and "wrong" aren't useful categories. (Almost all philosophers these days speak of their opponents' theories being "wrong", "false", "obviously false" or "demonstrably false", a real disaster not only for the ill will it engenders.) Various theories may be more or less useful for one purpose or another.

Now, there are some well known objections to much of what is here. Carnap does make a point of separating the meaning ("intension") from the truth ("extension") of an utterance and hence views interpretation as being analyzable into two dissimilable components, one a sort of armchair process and the other empirical. Quine's objections to this are legendary but not particularly useful to science. Indeed, if one were to do a probabilistic analysis of Quine, one would find that what he's worried about are events of asymptotically vanishing probability. This sort of theme is common in mathematics; there are notions of stability and instability that are second-nature to most scientists that ordinary philosophers don't seem to really have. All of Quine's imagined "alternate conceptual schemes" are almost certainly wildly unstable; all of the aliens *we'll* ever meet are tremendously likely to see and discuss the same sorts of everyday objects we see and discuss; this is because natural probabilities are a much different lay of land than "metaphysical possibilities" or "logical possibilities". In truth, of course, you only need to know that other humans have similar conceptual schemes. Searle was onto this in answer to Quine, though he didn't really have the resources to say it very well. (He speaks of a "background" or some such nonsense when he really should be talking about brain architecture.) On the other hand Carnap (shockingly) was really ahead of this all along if you read him closely; he properly sidesteps the issue of ontology altogether.

Reading back over the paragraph I just wrote, this is probably the most disjointed review I have ever written. Partly this is because I haven't fully digested Carnap's achievement in this book--which is a vast one.

Highly technical
This bookis interesting for you only if you are really interested in complex, technical views about semantics or modal logic, or the pphilosophy of Carnap.

If you are jsut interested in Carnap's philosophy, but want to read some interesting stuff, then this is not your book. Try Introduction to Philosophy of Science, or try the autobiography of Carnap.

Meaning at Midcentury: Carnap's Rules of Ramifying Order
Though Willard van Orman Quine taught a generation of analytic philosophers to disparage Rudolf Carnap's *Meaning and Necessity*, in reality (as in Carnap's private helps to understanding this period of his work) there is very little to dislike about this book.Carnap's "assimilation" of Tarski and Goedel's limitative results with respect to the logical syntax of language did not cause him to completely abandon the habits of mind he had accustomed himself to, but led him to write a series of books on semantics. And in this third volume, his last major work on the philosophy of language, Carnap extends his analysis to include modal phenomena (possibility and necessity) which were formerly intellectually distasteful to the Vienna Circle.The volume is rounded out with a number of papers, including Carnap's famous "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" and a discussion of Charles W. Morris' tripartite division of semiotics.

Although Quine (whom Carnap engaged in a spirited correspondence with concerning these topics) spent a great deal of time during the '50s and '60s demonstrating the logical inconsistency of Carnap's analysis, this book is very much an "implementation" of Carnap's Principle of Tolerance concerning modalities and their role in semantic analysis: although Carnap is usually understood as a slightly lax Fregean, here he presents a formalization of Frege alongside multiple theories of his own.Furthermore, all subsequent work in intensional logic and the semantics of modal logic owes something to Carnap's treatment of "possible worlds" in terms of state-descriptions: contemporary modal logic has rather less to do with the metaphysics of modality than with the issues of descriptive adequacy raised by possible-worlds semantics and addressed at length in Barwise and Perry's *Situations and Attitudes* (a book which would not have existed but for this one, as perhaps could be honestly said of many linguistic works informed by "generative semantics").All in all, an important document of postwar intellectual life and a model for genuinely critical analysis -- an excellent buy. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

One of the best of the Library of Living Philosophers volumes
The intellectual autobiography of Carnap is interesting, the papers are by the most important philosophers working at the time (interesting that the list of philosophers who considered themselves influenced by Carnap enough to contribute and the list of philosophers who were themselves hugely influential at the time is so similar) and cover a variety of fascinating topics, and Carnap's replies are very clear and sharp.Of particular historical interest perhaps is Carnap's response to Quine on logical truth.It may be that Carnap was wrong, but I think he did a pretty decisive job of showing that if he was wrong, Quine hadn't shown it.There's lots of other good stuff, though, far too much to try to list.

Most important resource on Carnap
This book contains Carnap's philosophycal autobiography, a lot of articles about the philosophy of Canrap, and Carnap's answer on them.

It is highly valuable to read contemporary fresh philosophers' view on Carnap, and also read his reaction on some critique.

A lot of sharp questions raised, and sharp answers as well. ... Read more

Product Description
Philosophy is deeply divided between two hostile camps: analytic philosophy (dominant in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries) and continental philosophy (dominant in Germany and France). In this volume, Friedman explores the common origin of analytic and continental philosophy, showing how social and political events intertwined and influenced philosophy during the early twentieth-century.

Friedman gives a general overview of the philosophical issues of the period, paying special attention to the relationships among three key twentieth-century philosophers: Rudolf Carnap, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger. Already polarized by their philosophical disagreements, the approaches of Carnap and Heidegger-now practiced largely in isolation from one another-were further split apart by the rise of Naziism and the resulting emigration of all influential German-speaking philosophers except for Heidegger. While the radical directions taken by Carnap (analytic philosophy) and Heidegger (post-modernism) have been hugely influential, Friedman enters a plea on behalf of Cassirer's "middle way" as a bridge between the dead ends now reached in both analytic and continental philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Technical But Accessible
This is a rather technical but accessible case study of the split between "continental" and "analytic" philosophy.Friedman focuses on 3 disparate figures; the analytic philosopher Rudolph Carnap, the seminal continental philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the the influential neo-Kantian philosopher and historian Ernst Cassirer.As Friedman demonstrates, these men had a common intellectual heritage in the Neo-Kantian revival that occurred at the end of 19th century.This heritage provided something of a common vocabulary and also resulted in the identification of common philosophic problems, notably aspects of dualities in Kants' epistemology.The specific roles of logic, mathematics, and scientific thought as forms of knowledge were also points of contention.Friedman provides a concise but detailed discussion of the Neo-Kantian background, emphasizing its diversity, with Heidegger emerging from one strand of the Neo-Kantian background, and Cassirer as he final flower of another strand.These 3 philosophers are presented as responding to the common set of problems in Neo-Kantianism in markedly different ways.Carnap pursues a reconstruction of epistemology inspired by newer developments in mathematical logic.Heidegger undertakes perhaps the most radical transformation with an effort to strike out in a new direction which appears (to me, at any rate) as a wholesale rejection of the previously crucial role of logic and scientific knowledge.Both of these thinkers drew on important new developments in philosophy; Carnap on Frege and Heidegger on Husserl's phenomenology.Friedman has a very sympathetic discussion of Cassirer's thought, which he sees as something of an effort to respond to concerns that motivated both Carnap and Heidegger, resulting in a body of thought that occupies something of middle way between Carnap and Heidegger.

Friedman, then, stresses the common heritage of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy and suggests that the split is not as great as conventionally portrayed.He suggests also that the split is partly the contingent result of the success of Nazism.Carnap, Cassirer, and most other analytically oriented philosophers had to leave Germany, eiher because of ethnicity or because of their political views.Heidegger, who later embraced Nazism, was left as the only great philosopher in Germany, and possibly in continental Europe.Friedman points out that Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger had very collegial relations prior to the Nazi seizure of power.The implication is that preservation of routine academic life in Germany would have resulted in more interaction and cross-fertilization.I'm not sure that Friedman is entirely convincing on this point.Its clear from his account that Carnap and Heidegger produced radically different and quite irreconcilable responses to what appears to have been a set of common problems.Friedman argues well for Cassirer's distinctive contribution but Cassirer's continued emphasis on the importance of science, mathematics, and logic places him much closer to Carnap in some crucial respects.It really appears that despite a common heritage, there really was a great split.

It also has to be commented that the claim of contintental philosophy to be more oriented to human concerns, as opposed to the technical preoccupations of analytic philosophy, is belied by the fact that in fundamental matters of ethics, it was people like Carnap and Cassirer who got it right.

Informative yet inaccessible
Micheal Friedan's "A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger"(2000) is a helpful overview of the early twentieth-century Neo-Kantian disputes on logical validity and phenomenological universality which, in the philosophies of Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger, would famously diverge into the "analytic-continental" divide. Friedman's book aims to discuss the intellectual relationship between three broad representatives of twentieth-century Kantianism: the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, the strict neo-kantian Ernst Cassirer, and the existential-phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. The book occasionally digresses into what may seem to be needless biographical and historical discussions, which would be more appropriate to a book of intellectual history than history of philosophy. Although this book patiently summarizes and thoroughly examines their distinctive interpretation of Kant's philosophy with prolific references to other philosophers, it nonetheless seems to ultimately present merely the relevant fragments of each writer's epistemological conception. As such, this book cannot be expected to serve as a general introduction to either logical positivism or phenomenology, while it does a more admirable service of discussing Neo-Kantianism. Friedan's book is not easily accessible, and seems intended for intermediate and advanced student-scholars of Kantian and German philosophy. Apart from the numerous post-Kantian and Neo-Kantian philosophers which are occasionally referenced, the reader must possess a working knowledge of the "transcendental aesthetic" and "transcendental analytic" from Kant's first Critique of Pure Reason, as many of the disputes concerning logic, perception and validity arise from this section of the first Critique. If the reader is unfamiliar the inner workings of Kant's epistemology, I would suggest T.K. Seung's short book, "Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed". The most informative chapter in this book is the ninth and final chapter, which summarizes the disputes within their historical context. I would recommend reading this chapter first to familiarize oneself with the topics of dispute.

A much needed contribution
The history of early 20th century philosophy is woefully little known these days, even by philosophers.Friedman provides an extremely detailed and well-documented account of the early evolutions of the views of probably the two most influential German philosophers of the century, Carnap and Heidegger.He pays attention to the connections both philosophers saw between their philosophies and both politics and everyday life, connections of which most admirers of Carnap are unaware, and connections which most admirers of Heidegger would prefer to ignore.Cassirer is of course not as influential a figure as either Carnap or Heidegger, but reconciliation projects are generally viewed as less exciting, and Friedman makes a plausible case that Cassirer's position sought to navigate a middle ground between the then rising Positivist and Existentialist movements.

Cassirer is also important to the overall picture because he is the most avowedly Kantian of the three philosophers Friedman examines, though another valuable contribution of this work is to highlight the heavy influence of the early 20th century German neo-Kantian schools on both Carnap and Heidegger (the Kantian influence on Carnap is also discussed in Friedman's book on Logical Positivism).

Friedman himself seems to hope to encourage more modern dialogue between the analytic and the continental traditions which are the heirs of Carnap and Heidegger respectively.This is of course no easy task, but while as an analytic partisan myself my response to the discussion of Heidegger's views tended to be along the lines of "so that's why the continentals have gone so horribly wrong," (not because of Friedman's presentation, I think; he presents all three philosophers he discusses quite favorably), greater mutual understanding is surely a necessary beginning, even if prospects for any kind of agreement are far off.

Changing social dynamics and ways of thought
A Parting Of The Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, And Heidegger by Michael Friedman (Ruth N. Halls Professor of Arts and Humanities, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, and Professor of Philosophy, Indiana University) is a informative, scholarly study in the division of philosophy into the analytic tradition (held widely in the Anglophone world), and the continental philosophic tradition of Europe. Examining how this split took place just before and during the 1930's, A Parting Of The Ways focuses upon a pivotal 1929 debate between two respected German philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Rudolf Carnap, who represented the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. A Parting Of The Ways is an intrinsically fascinating study of changing social dynamics and ways of thought, and the negative impact that the rise of Hitler had on philosophy schools as a whole and German philosophers in particular. A Parting Of The Ways is an invaluable contribution to Philosophy Studies academic reference collections and supplemental reading lists. ... Read more

Product Description
Available for the first time in 20 years, here is the Rudolf Carnap's famous "principle of tolerance" by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of language and logic. In The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap explains how his entire theory of language structure came to him like a vision when he was ill. He postulates that concepts of the theory of logic are purely syntactical and therefore can be formulated in logical syntax. ... Read more

Product Description
MEANING AND NECESSITY- A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic By RUDOLF C RNAP.PREFACE: The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and ex tending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors. These other methods have one characteristic k corfflHbi Wrhey all regard an expression in a language as a name of a concrete or abstract entity. In contradistinc tion, the method here proposed takes an expression, not as naming any thing, but as possessing an intension and an extension. This book may be regarded as a third volume of the series which I have called Studies in Semantics, two volumes of which were published ear lier. However, the present book does not presuppose the knowledge of its predecessors but is independent. The semantical terms used in the present volume are fully explained in the text. The present method for defining the L-terms for example, L-true, meaning logically true, analytic differs from the methods discussed in the earlier Introduction to Semantics. I now think that the method used in this volume is more satisfactory for lan guages of a relatively simple structure. After meaning analysis, the second main topic discussed in this book is modal logic, that is, the theory of modalities, such as necessity, contin gency, possibility, impossibility, etc. Various systems of modal logic have been proposed by various authors. It seems to me, however, that it is not possible to construct a satisfactory system before the meanings of the modalities are sufficiently clarified. I further believe that this clarification can best be achieved by correlating each of the modal concepts with a cor responding semantical concept for example, necessity with L-truth. It will be seen that this method also leads to a clarification and elimination of certain puzzles which logicians have encountered in connection with modalities. In the Preface to the second volume of Studies in Semantics, I announced my intention to publish, as the next volume, a book on modal logic containing, among other things, syntactical and semantical systems which combine modalities with quantification. The present book, however, is not as yet the complete fulfilment of that promise it contains only analyses and discussions of modalities, preliminary to the construc tion of modal systems The systems themselves are not given here. In an article published elsewhere see Bibliography, I have stated a calculus and a semantical system combining modalities with quantification, and have summarized some of the results concerning these systems. A more comprehensive exhibition of results already found and those yet to be found must be left for another time. The investigations of modal logic which led to the methods developed in this book were made in 1942, and the first version of this book was writ ten in 1943, during a leave of absence granted by the University of Chi cago and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. To each of these insti tutions I wish to express my gratitude for their help. Professors Alonzo Church and W. V. Quine reaorhe first version and discussed it with me in an extensive correspondence... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A philosophy of language primer for late 20th century
It's somewhat incredible just how much of the philosophy of language to emerge in the last half of the 20th century was anticipated by Carnap here. Indeterminacy of translation, primary and secondary intensions; there are passages that foreshadow Kripke as well. There is very little to object to. Indeed, just about everything Carnap says seems pretty obvious. Still, this seems to be the really hard thing to pull off, judging by the missteps many other philosophers manage to talk themselves into. One is continually awed in Carnap by his tremendous judgement. Like Russell before him, he sees very clearly that when it comes to the choice of a semantic method, that is, a method of interpretation of utterances (assignation of "meaning"), "right" and "wrong" aren't useful categories. (Almost all philosophers these days speak of their opponents' theories being "wrong", "false", "obviously false" or "demonstrably false", a real disaster not only for the ill will it engenders.) Various theories may be more or less useful for one purpose or another.

Now, there are some well known objections to much of what is here. Carnap does make a point of separating the meaning ("intension") from the truth ("extension") of an utterance and hence views interpretation as being analyzable into two dissimilable components, one a sort of armchair process and the other empirical. Quine's objections to this are legendary but not particularly useful to science. Indeed, if one were to do a probabilistic analysis of Quine, one would find that what he's worried about are events of asymptotically vanishing probability. This sort of theme is common in mathematics; there are notions of stability and instability that are second-nature to most scientists that ordinary philosophers don't seem to really have. All of Quine's imagined "alternate conceptual schemes" are almost certainly wildly unstable; all of the aliens *we'll* ever meet are tremendously likely to see and discuss the same sorts of everyday objects we see and discuss; this is because natural probabilities are a much different lay of land than "metaphysical possibilities" or "logical possibilities". In truth, of course, you only need to know that other humans have similar conceptual schemes. Searle was onto this in answer to Quine, though he didn't really have the resources to say it very well. (He speaks of a "background" or some such nonsense when he really should be talking about brain architecture.) On the other hand Carnap (shockingly) was really ahead of this all along if you read him closely; he properly sidesteps the issue of ontology altogether.

Reading back over the paragraph I just wrote, this is probably the most disjointed review I have ever written. Partly this is because I haven't fully digested Carnap's achievement in this book--which is a vast one.

Highly technical
This bookis interesting for you only if you are really interested in complex, technical views about semantics or modal logic, or the pphilosophy of Carnap.

If you are jsut interested in Carnap's philosophy, but want to read some interesting stuff, then this is not your book. Try Introduction to Philosophy of Science, or try the autobiography of Carnap.

Meaning at Midcentury: Carnap's Rules of Ramifying Order
Though Willard van Orman Quine taught a generation of analytic philosophers to disparage Rudolf Carnap's *Meaning and Necessity*, in reality (as in Carnap's private helps to understanding this period of his work) there is very little to dislike about this book.Carnap's "assimilation" of Tarski and Goedel's limitative results with respect to the logical syntax of language did not cause him to completely abandon the habits of mind he had accustomed himself to, but led him to write a series of books on semantics. And in this third volume, his last major work on the philosophy of language, Carnap extends his analysis to include modal phenomena (possibility and necessity) which were formerly intellectually distasteful to the Vienna Circle.The volume is rounded out with a number of papers, including Carnap's famous "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" and a discussion of Charles W. Morris' tripartite division of semiotics.

Although Quine (whom Carnap engaged in a spirited correspondence with concerning these topics) spent a great deal of time during the '50s and '60s demonstrating the logical inconsistency of Carnap's analysis, this book is very much an "implementation" of Carnap's Principle of Tolerance concerning modalities and their role in semantic analysis: although Carnap is usually understood as a slightly lax Fregean, here he presents a formalization of Frege alongside multiple theories of his own.Furthermore, all subsequent work in intensional logic and the semantics of modal logic owes something to Carnap's treatment of "possible worlds" in terms of state-descriptions: contemporary modal logic has rather less to do with the metaphysics of modality than with the issues of descriptive adequacy raised by possible-worlds semantics and addressed at length in Barwise and Perry's *Situations and Attitudes* (a book which would not have existed but for this one, as perhaps could be honestly said of many linguistic works informed by "generative semantics").All in all, an important document of postwar intellectual life and a model for genuinely critical analysis -- an excellent buy. ... Read more

Product Description
Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, corresponded at lengthand over a long period of timeon matters personal, professional, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed issues and disagreements that go to the heart of contemporary philosophic discussions. Carnap (1891-1970) was a founder and leader of the logical positivist school. The younger Quine (1908-) 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.Dear Carnap, I enclose a copy of a paper which I am ready to send off for publication. . . . I am anxious to have you look this over as soon as possible, to see whether you have reason to suppose the system contradictory: for it looks dangerous.Dear Quine: I read your paper very carefully and with the highest interest. . . . So far, I do not see any contradiction in the system itself . . . but I share your feeling that the whole looks rather dangerous. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Interesting collection
This book is very interesting if you are interested in Carnap. You get a lot of the personality of Carnap, and some of his views. It is a real experience to read this after a long research in the philosophy of Carnap.

Other may find the correspondence also interesting just because it contains some views and personal experiences of a philosopher. If you are on such thing, you may buy it as well.

An excellent book
This book, edited by Richard Creath, is valuable both as a biographical work on the lives of Carnap and Quine, and as an resource for scholars interested in the Carnap-Quine debates (and the history of 20th century analytic philosophy more generally). The correspondence, which constitutes most of the book, provides a nice glimpse into the personal and academic friendship between Carnap and Quine: a friendship that developed from their first meeting in the 1930's till Carnap's untimely death in 1970. The book also includes a useful 43 page introduction by Creath focusing on the Carnap-Quine debates on analyticity. Previously unpublished manuscripts, i.e., Quine's "Three Lectures on Carnap" and Carnap's "Quine on Analyticity," are valuable resources for philosophers interested in the Carnap-Quine debates. The book concludes appropriately with Quine's "Homeage to Carnap," a personal tribute to his mentor. Overall, Creath does a superb editorial job and the resulting book is a pleasure to read. ... Read more

Product Description
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) is considered the pioneer of logical positivism, but his work was thought to have been repudiated. Recently he has been undergoing a reappraisal, and this book of essays by leading philosophers, logicians, and art historians attempts to return Carnap to his rightful place. The philosopher’s early days as a utopianist, the root of his thought in neo-Kantianism, his social and political activism – all are explored in these important essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Articles on Carnap
This book is a collection of articles on Carnap. Interesting for specialists. You should consider the year of publication, the authors and the table of content, if you are interested in it. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is dedicated to Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, two of the greatest philosophers of this century, on the occasion of their 100th birthdays. It is presented by Erkenntnis, the journal they founded, and contains 22 contributions from the most renowned analytic philosophers and philosophers of science. The essays address many subjects, all of which are related to the work of Reichenbach and Carnap. They cover epistemology and philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. They thus display the rich and lively influence of Reichenbach and Carnap on present-day philosophizing. Some further essays give valuable historical information on their philosophical setting and on some neglected aspects of their work; in particular, two unknown pieces by Reichenbach, one of which was never published, have been included in the volume. ... Read more