Carnap Empiricism Semantics Ontology
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What is it?
Carnap attempting to undermine the realism debate by showing ontological questions to be either trivial or devoid of cognitive content.
Where can it be found?
Carnap,R.; Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology; Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. 4 (1950), pp. 20 - 40
How does it fit in for me?
As has already been demonstrated in some of the other papers I’ve read (see Yablo Ontology for example), Carnap’s basic idea can be used to undermine any attempt to draw ontological conclusions from linguistic analysis. Such an attempt is fundamental to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument.
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Summary
I’m not going to do a large summary of Carnap’s argument here as I’ve already developed one from several of the other papers defending his idea from Quine’s attack. I’ll just use this section to collect a few of the juicier ideas that may not have been emphasised in earlier summaries.
- Carnap is attempting to show that physicists and other scientists can use talk of abstract entities without any empiricist guilt. — This is because he believes the realist/nominalist debate is actually either trivial or nonsensical (depending on whether it occurs internal or external to a linguistic framework). — i.e. using language involving abstract entities does not commit one to a Platonist ontology.
- framework rules don’t need to be explicitly stated but should be rationally reconstructable
- while the choice to adopt a framework is not a cognitive one, it does involve an assessment as to efficiency, fruitfulness and simplicity resultant from the adoption of that framework — and so the adoption of a framework is not a yes/no question, it is a matter of degree
- introducing a new entity to a framework:
- introduce a higher level predicate
- introduce variables of this new type
- a true internal answer may be either analytically or empirically so — {[green This is what Quine disputes ]}
- realism debate with regard to numbers cannot be addressed unless the disputants are able to subsume it under some framework in which it would become an empirical question. — {[green presumably neither would be willing to accept a framework in which it became an analytic (or largely non-empirical) point that their position was incorrect. ]}
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What do I think? - isn’t the assessment process for the adoption of a particular framework really just the imposition of a more general framework for choosing between frameworks? — perhaps this hinges on what is to be understood by Carnap’s use of cognitive? — and of course, there has to be a cut-off of these broader frameworks somewhere, i.e. at some level there must be an “exterior” to our linguistic frameworks, no matter how many levels we determine them to have (otherwise we are involved in an infinite regress) and this is where Carnap’s points can be applied (thus there is no escape from Carnap’s criticism, one may just move it around a bit). (And we certainly can’t get “outside” in the sense that those engaged in the realism debate would wish.) — this should be able to be related to Rorty’s discussion of Galileo via Kuhn and what was to be considered appropriate evidence within the scientific discourse(s) - is Carnap’s idea that framework choice is a matter of degree of any use to Bayesians? - Carnap’s point that “the restriction to rational coordinates would not be in conflict with any experimental knowledge we have” could be useful. Are we restricted to only postulating the existence of the rationals under Quine-Putnam? If so, must our proofs (if they are even possible/necessary under this conception of mathematics) also be undertaken with respect to this topology? (I’m not sure if this would be highly problematic or not - I’d need to have a chat to some of the analysis guys if I really wanted to press this point.) - is Carnap adopting a pragmatic approach to framework choice? - if (externally) postulating the existence of abstract entities is meaningless, should all external existence statements be held as such (well, all external statements really)?
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