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Questions tagged [carnap]

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was a German philosopher who moved to the United States. He was a member of the Vienna Circle. He advocated logical positivism.

The following provides general information about Rudolf Carnap or the Vienna Circle:

Other sources:

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Why does Carnap say 'Caesar is a prime number' is meaningless?

I don't get it. Assuming there exists an individual Caesar, we can look at the set of prime numbers and not-(prime numbers), and Caesar will be in one of them. I just don't see, even though it may be a bit silly to ask, why he rejects that this has…
Casey
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Rudolf Carnap's opinion about free will

I know that the logical positivists thought that many old philosophical questions are meaningless, but I never found a source on the internet about their position on free will. So what was their position? (especially Rudolf Carnap's position on it)
JonnyPython
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Where did Carnap express his disagreement with Wittgenstein's Tractatus?

I read the following in G. E. M. Anscombe's description of the consequences of Wittgenstein's picture theory of language: (page 82) Carnap strongly objected to Wittgenstein's doctrine with its corollary of the 'unsayables' that are 'shewn', which…
Frank Hubeny
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Do logically incoherent statements still have meaning?

My reading of Carnap's "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" suggests to me that it is possible to form sentences in a language that are grammatically correct but logically meaningless. The consequence of this is that…
syntonicC
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The Vienna Circle and metaphysics

The Vienna Circle opposed to metaphysics. This is exposed in depth in Carnape's paper "'Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache' in Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932 (English translation 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical…
Starckman
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Why the 'degree of confirmation'?

Carnap from 1950 sets out his exposition on defining a system purely on inductive logic that he attributes with epistemic qualities from probability. This journey begins with his 'degree of confirmation', which requires evidence and a hypothesis to…
Stackcans
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Carnap's method of induction

Carnap provides a general understanding of symbolic induction, given as c(h, e)=r. c = degree of confirmation h = hypothesis e = evidence r = outcome What exactly is meant by Carnap's 'degree of confirmation'? Is it an expectation given h and e,…
Meilton
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What does Carnap mean by the extensionality requirement in an observational language?

In his article Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts (Section II), he lists the requirements proposed for any language L to be meaningful. However, I don't understand what he means exactly when he talks about extensionality: Requirement…
Vanessa
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State description in PWS

A very short question: If, following Carnap, we can represent a possible world as a state description starting from a quantified language L, why does it make sense, following standard modal logic, to take worlds as primitive instead of just a set of…
PwNzDust
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Is this a more unequivocal way to make an analytic v synthetic distinction?

Is this an unequivocal way to make an analytic v synthetic distinction, that would address Quine's objections? “Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of…
polcott
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