Abstract
In the previous two chapters we saw what Neurath’s naturalistic pragmatics of science can do: provide a theory of empirical evidence that ultimately combines the relevant insights of the psychology of perception with the sociology and history of institutionalised collective endeavours with normative directives arrived at in the light of agreed objectives. Let us now turn to Carnap. What contributions might a logician of science be able to make beyond simply analysing the logic of pre-existing scientific theories? Important as that task may be, one must also ask whether Carnap’s logic of science can, in a comparable and complementary way to Neurath’s pragmatics, make a positive contribution towards sha** the future development of scientific practice. The answer, as will be demonstrated, is yes. Carnap’s method of explication allows the logician of science to contribute to the scientific endeavor both and increased awareness of, and consequent deepening, of scientific practice but also the provision of linguistic and logical innovations.
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Notes
- 1.
Brun raises the seemingly banal but easy to overlook point that not only is explication only one form of conceptual engineering, but that sometimes explication simply may not be possible (Brun 2016, 1234).
- 2.
This is a key difference between explication and definition. According to Brun, definitions are either reportive (capture current usage) or stipulative (introduce a new usage). The process of explication may involve stipulative definition, but is not equivalent to it Brun (2016, 1229–32).
- 3.
- 4.
The primacy of fruitfulness is also recognised by Dutilh Novaes and Reck (2017, 202).
- 5.
There are obvious similarities with Carnap’s prioritization of inter-connection to Neurath’s rejection of isolated statements as meaningless.
- 6.
This paradox is missing in Dutilh-Novaes’s more recent paper, she may have reconsidered (Dutilh Novaes 2020).
- 7.
Strawson stops short of expecting complete synonymy from conceptual analysis, but any deviations are clearly expected to be minimal.
- 8.
This quote comes from the work Strawson is specifically responding to. Strawson presents as criticisms what Carnap has readily accepted already.
- 9.
Another example comes from Carnap’s collaboration with Bar-Hillel. They conclude that ‘there is not one explicandum [of] ‘amount of information’ but at least two’ (Bar-Hillel and Carnap 1953, 150).
- 10.
See for example Eagle (2004, 372).
- 11.
As Quine notes, the assumption of ordinary language philosophers like Strawson seems to be that philosophical analysis involves ‘the uncovering of hidden meanings’ (Quine 1960/2013, 238).
- 12.
A perfect example of this kind of disambiguating explication as a solution to a philosophical dispute is Carnap’s own explication of “probability”. Surveying existing accounts of probability, Carnap concludes that the ‘assumption of a unique explicandum common to all authors is untenable’ (Carnap 1945, 517). There are rather, broadly speaking, two concepts being referred to by “probability”. Carnap therefore provides two explicanda: probability1, the degree of a hypothesis’s confirmation, and probability2, the relative frequency of a type of event (Carnap 1945, §3–§4). Whilst both are numerical, in their metric versions the former is semantic (attributing a value determined by logical relations between hypotheses and the evidence for them) and the latter is empirical (the value being determined by relevant observations). In so doing, Carnap has shown how to move beyond the ‘futile polemics’ of those advocates of either conception who believe they have arrived at the singular, correct analysis of “probability” (Carnap 1945, 532).
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Bentley, J. (2023). Carnapian Explication. In: Logical Empiricism and Naturalism. Vienna Circle Institute Library. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29328-3_4
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