We’re discussing the work of Carnap;
What is distinctive of his work is that, in contrast with earlier empiricists - even Mach, as the predecessor of the Vienna circle - (who never did this) he tries to show the general “family tree” of sciences as all boiling down to the same basis - ‘experience’, as the given.
He also tries to go bottom-up, whereby from experiences we are able to construct physical concepts (like space). Space can be reduced to experience, which Carnap does by first constructing space out of experience.
Kind of a Quinean thing where “other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: “Lo, food”; “Let’s go hunting”; “There will be a storm tonight” (these natives may be superstitious); “Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage”; “Lo, an undetached rabbit-part.” Some of these might become less likely – that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses – in the light of subsequent observation. Other translations can be ruled out only by querying the natives: An affirmative answer to “Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?” rules out some possible translations. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered much of the natives’ grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, admit of multiple interpretations.[1]” [This is my own understanding don’t take this as gospel]
Except Carnap doesn’t take indeterminacy into it and sees things as ultimately converging to one thing; repeatedly hearing a knock on a table lets one differentiate and figure out what it is.
[Does ‘color kinship’ run into Quinean issues?]
1:1 2:2 → you can create a list of matched pairs
[Is carnap’s whole thing just graph theory lowkey?]
The problem of the constant companion
[Structure descriptions] form the highest level of formalization and dematerialization. If we are given an arrow diagram, which contains nothing but double arrows, then we know that it represents the structure of a symmetrical relation, but it is no longer evident whether it represents persons under the relation of acquaintance, or towns under the relation of direct telephone connection, etc. Thus, our thesis, namely that scientific statements relate only to structural properties, amounts to the assertion that scientific statements speak only of forms without stating what the elements and the relations of these forms are. Superficially, this seems to be a paradoxical assertion […]: in an empirical science, one ought to know whether one speaks of persons or villages. This is the decisive point: empirical science must be in a position to distinguish these various entities; initially, it does this mostly through definite descriptions utilizing other entities. But ultimately the definite descriptions are carried out with the aid of structure descriptions only (Carnap 2003a, sec. 12).
(A) ↔ (B)
Physics gives us equations, but doesn’t tell us what these symbols mean. Effectively, Fg = G * (m1 * m2 / d ^ 2) just describes a relation, and the reason it applies to ‘gravity’ in particular is because gravity is the only thing that satisfies that relation in the way described by the formula.
1. Analytic philosophy as modernism (again) as renewing philosophy
Language itself is not a transparent medium; you cannot touch something ‘out there’ with language. Not like Wittgenstein’s ‘picture of the world out there’ → closer to Russell, “you do not know the table, you can only describe it as ‘the x which produces certain sense-data’”
→ language is an instrument to trace similarities between experiences.
Language is defined in terms of our experiences, and our experiences are immediate. → It’s not a transparent relationship to the world, but to our experiences (which is our ‘inner world’)
- Language is constructed/created according to a hierarchy, by the subject itself.
Culture is defined in terms of psychology, psychology in terms of the physical, the physical in terms of experience. ← inverse hierarchy, the closer to experience, the closer to the foundations you are. Ergo, while culture is “at the top”, that’s not really the top of the importance.
What, then, is the role of science? What conception of normativity? The conception of the subject/object relation?
Stevenson on the normativity of ethics
Dynamic vs. descriptive language use
Descriptive records, communicates, or clarifies beliefs.
Emotive meaning
Stevenson’s overarching point is that to ask whether it is good is to ask for influence;
Stealing is wrong == I disapprove of stealing, do so as well.
“Is this good” → not “am I approving,” but “should I approve”.
Stevenson does, in some sense, accept an emotive view of ethics: an ethical statement is not true or false, as it is an emotive, compulsive statement. → Hence, it misses the normativity of ethics.
Vienna Circle
Man is the measure of all things; we should free ourselves from the slag of historical languages, and instead find a neutral system of formulae.
The real questions are empirical questions.
Philosophy should take to unmasking the ‘pseudo-problems’ of philosophy. (see Wittgenstein)
Hence they’re all anti-metaphysics.
Richard Rorty in 1979 → Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Therein he argues that analytical philosophy ends up relying on traditional ideas that it has inherited (the slag of history) → see Platonic baggage of the whole enterprise.
These are:
- Kantian idea of what philosophy ought to do;
The notion that philosophy is the judge of other discourses; that philosophy must judge what is really important, or what discourses can claim to be knowledge. - Lockean idea that to know is to accurately represent the (external/outside) world (see also Wittgenstein’s picture theory).
The mind mirrors the world. - Cartesian idea: “where do philosophers get the jurisdiction to judge?” → Philosophers are the judge because they have special knowledge of the ‘instrument’ that we use to produce knowledge. Philosophers have special knowledge of minds, hence, philosophers are in a good position to judge when the mind mirrors nature, and when it doesn’t.
Carnap when he has to explain how it all works.
[P]hilosophy as a foundational discipline which ‘grounds’ knowledge-claims […] became, for the intellectuals, a substitute for religion. It was the area of culture where one touched bottom, where one found the vocabulary and the convictions which permitted one to explain and justify one’s activity (Rorty)
→ BUT WE HAVE TO BREAK OUTSIDE OF DISCOURSE TO REACH AN ARCHE BEYOND DISCOURSE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO WE HAVE TO REPEAL THE THREE IDEAS ABOVE.
A conception of the subject as the mind is fundamentally a conception of an ‘inner’ space, or an inner state. The outer world is science, so a philosopher who is using their mind is outside that realm of the scientific-physical-outer.
There is a certain atomism: individual states mirror states of affairs. “The table is white” is an atom that mirrors and atomistic state of affairs.
Our body is part of nature, however; inner means that one is independent (or even prior!) to everything else.
[I need to make an edit of the stockholm flag with clavicular on it.]
In logical empiricism
Hempel: the verifiability criterion of cognitive significance
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Modern empiricism (Hume and Locke) they expressed a principle of empiricism that all non-analytic knowledge is based on experience. (Non-analytic as discluding “all bachelors are unmarried”)
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Contemporary logical empiricism = the maxim that a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, only if
1. It is either analytic/self-contradictory
2. or capable, at least in principle, of experiential test.So, a statement is meaningful if it's either (p ∨ ¬p), or it's something we can show through experience (it will rain) → experience showed it rained.
Thus, the attempt is to characterize how a scientific statement should be related to observation sentences.
Storks are red-legged. Observation: this is a stork, and it is red-legged.
Ayer:
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requirement of complete actual verifiability.
A sentence is significant if you know what observations you would need to accept or reject it. -
Requirement of something being verifiable in principle. → I.e. you can make up a situation where you could verify it.
‘Most philosophy professors are boring people’ → if this follows logically from some finite and logically consistent class of observation sentences, it is empirically relevant.
This rules out universal statements. Think storks. -
Requirement of complete falsifiability in principle:
A sentence has empirical meaning if and only if its denial follows logically from some finite and logically consistent class of observation sentences.
”All philosophy professors are boring people”
>< rules out purely existential sentences: there is at least one philosophy professor who is not boring.
>< does not rule out the statements ‘S and the Absolute is perfect’ -
Requirement of confirmability: (1) a sentence S has empirical import if from S in conjunction with suitable subsidiary hypotheses it is possible to derive observation sentences which are not derivable from the subsidiary hypotheses alone.
subsidiary hypotheses = ‘My thermometer works accurately’
S = The temperature will rise with 5 centigrade every second
From ‘S and subsidiary hypothesis’ you can derive “at second 0 the thermometer will read 0” & “at second 1 the thermometer will read 5.”
But what if subs. hypothesis = “this apple is red → absolute is perfect”
S: “the absolute is perfect”
The observable sentence is “this apple is red”
[This is technically not logically correct] -
- subsidiary hypotheses can only be analytical or confirmable according to the criterion
With this,
N = the absolute is perfect
From ‘S and subsidiary hypotheses and N’:
- subsidiary hypotheses can only be analytical or confirmable according to the criterion
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translatability criterion: A sentence has cognitive meaning iff it is translatable into an empiricist language
A language L is empiricist if it contains
(1) the usual logical vocabulary
(2) Certain observation predicates
(3) any expression definable by means of (1) and (2)
‘Object X has a temperature of c degrees’ = df
if the thermometer is in contact with x, then the thermometer reads c degrees.
if p then q = (not p) or q
P → Q ≈ (¬P) ∨ Q