Philosopher
Rudolf Carnap
1891–1970
Leading figure of logical empiricism and a founder of the philosophy of science, who saw philosophy as the engineering of clearer languages and rejected metaphysics as empty.
In logic, there are no morals.
Carnap was born in 1891 in Ronsdorf, now part of Wuppertal in western Germany, and studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at Jena, where Gottlob Frege taught him logic. In the mid-1920s he went to Vienna and joined Moritz Schlick’s circle, which was then reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and would soon be known as the Vienna Circle, the source of what came to be called logical positivism, a name Carnap never liked.
He moved to Prague in 1931, where he wrote The Logical Syntax of Language, and as war approached he left Europe for the University of Chicago in 1936, later teaching at UCLA. As logical empiricism fell from favour in the 1950s and 1960s his standing declined, though much of the next generation’s work, Quine’s included, can be read as a response to him. He died in 1970, and since the 1980s his ideas have enjoyed a major revival.
Key ideas
- Philosophy as conceptual engineering
- Traditional philosophical problems arise largely from the inadequate languages we inherited for everyday, pre-scientific life. Philosophy should build better, more precise concepts and frameworks, replacing vague notions with explicit reconstructions.
- Tolerance
- There is no single correct language or logic. Everyone may build a linguistic framework as they wish, judged by how well it serves its purposes: “in logic, there are no morals”.
- The elimination of metaphysics
- Statements that convey nothing, but only purport to say something significant, are “metaphysics”. Carnap spent his life trying to state precisely the difference between such empty verbiage and statements with genuine content.
- Confirmation, not verification
- Scientific theories range over endless instances, so they can never strictly be verified, only confirmed to some degree. Carnap later developed an inductive logic to measure how far evidence confirms a hypothesis.
- The logical construction of the world
- In the Aufbau, influenced by his teacher Frege, Carnap tried to bring all the concepts of knowledge into a single system built up from logic and experience.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Germany, Austria and United States
- Schools
- Logical Empiricism
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- Knowledge and scepticism
Influences
Influenced by
Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
Influenced
Influenced by
Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
Influenced
Where these links come from
- Rudolf Carnap drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant. Source: Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus, Rudolf Carnap, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Rudolf Carnap studied with and drew on Gottlob Frege. Source: Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus, Rudolf Carnap, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Rudolf Carnap drew on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Source: Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus, Rudolf Carnap, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- W. V. O. Quine drew on and argued against Rudolf Carnap. Source: Peter Hylton and Gary Kemp, Willard Van Orman Quine, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- The Logical Structure of the World (Der logische Aufbau der Welt), 1928
- The Logical Syntax of Language (Logische Syntax der Sprache), 1934
- Logical Foundations of Probability, 1950
- Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, 1950
Sources
- Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus, Rudolf Carnap, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Richard Creath, Logical Empiricism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy