| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
The aim that Carnap states in §1 makes §4 the heart of this paper. However, for our purposes, the more general discussion in §§2-3 is the most important part. It represents a recasting of Carnap’s version of logical positivism in the semantic form he began to give it during WWII, and it will the target of the criticisms by Quine that we will discuss next week.
The key ideas for the whole paper—the concept of linguistic frameworks and the distinction between internal and external questions—come out very quickly in §2, and you can expect our discussion to center on Carnap’s examples of them.
Section 3 focuses on the difference between internal and external questions. The central place Carnap gives to semantics in this paper was occupied in his thinking in the 1930s by syntax. He had made a range of points in syntactic terms that are roughly analogous to the ones he makes here semantically, and I’ll sketch them so they are available for comparison:
In the 1930s, Carnp described the proper concern of philosophy as the “logical syntax of language” (which was also the title of his major work of the period). He spoke of rules of “syntax” as the basis for the a priori knowledge philosophers might seek, and his critique of metaphysics used a distinction between speech in the “formal” and “material mode.” According to him, when we speak in the formal mode (one of his examples was “The word ‘rose’ is a thing-word”), we use a clearly syntactic vocabulary to make claims that he thought were fundamentally about the structure of our language. On the other hand, speaking in the material mode (e.g., “The rose is a thing”) presents such statements as if they were comparable to ordinary synthetic statements (e.g., “The rose is red”). He referred to the latter as “object sentences,” labeling material-mode claims as “pseudo-object-sentences” or “quasi-syntactical sentences.” He didn’t reject material-mode statements but held that a key source of philosophical problems was a failure to recognize the true syntactic content that was hidden by their form.
In this paper Carnap traces a similar range of problems to a misunderstanding of the character of internal and external questions.
Sections 4–5 will serve us mainly as an application of the ideas in §3, but they do address a question about meaning that we won’t encounter otherwise: what are we commiting ourselves to if we speak of meanings as things?