Peter Hylton has a paper in the Monist, now a few years old, that I’ve been meaning to comment on because it exemplifies a bad habit much of the Carnap-Quine literature suffers from: comparing the early Carnap with the later Quine. This is tempting, of course, because Quine himself did it (as e.g. Gregory Lavers has pointed out), and even Burton Dreben (Peter’s doctoral supervisor), though far more scrupulous than Quine, tended to fall into it; I guess it became a sort of Harvard thing, and Peter can’t be blamed too much for slipping into the ruts of his elders. However, he happens to have chosen a subject where this mismatch gets him into serious trouble, since if he’d actually compared the mature Quine with the mature Carnap, his main points wouldn’t be just questionable, they’d have collapsed entirely.
Continue readingInductive logic
New work on Carnap’s inductive logic
There’s a very interesting paper by Marta Sznajder in the latest Studies in History and Philosophy of Science about Carnap’s late (posthumously published) writings on inductive logic, especially his “Basic System” published by Dick Jeffrey in 1980. She focuses on Carnap’s introduction of “attribute spaces” to give structure to the semantics of the “world” to which properties are attributed; particular observations can be thought of then as points in such an attribute space, whose geometry is determined by the chosen linguistic framework (p. 70). There is an obvious continuity here with the structural characterization of the “world” in the Aufbau, a continuity Sznajder mentions (p. 65) but doesn’t develop. (I do hope someone follows this up soon – another obvious indication of the lifelong continuity, and overall unity, in Carnap’s thought that I am always banging on about!) What she does discuss very interestingly Continue reading