Rudolf Carnap

Carnap, Rudolf 

Born May 18, 1891, in Wuppertal; died Sept. 16, 1970, in Santa Maria, Calif. German-American philosopher and logician; a leading logical positivist and philosopher of science.

Carnap taught at the University of Vienna from 1926 to 1931 and was a professor of philosophy at the German University in Prague from 1931 to 1935. In 1935 he emigrated to the USA, where he was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1952 and at the University of California from 1954 until his death. He was a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

Influenced by L. Wittgenstein and B. Russell, Carnap considered the task of the philosophy of science to be the analysis of the structure of knowledge in the natural sciences so that, with the help of mathematical logic, the fundamental concepts of science would be made more precise. Three stages may be discerned in the evolution of Carnap’s work. In the first period, which lasted until the early 1930’s, Carnap was a member of the Vienna Circle and elaborated the ideas of logical empiricism. He advanced several radical neopositivist views, such as physical-ism, and denied the character of philosophy as a world view. In the second period Carnap advanced the thesis that the logic of science is the analysis of purely syntactical connections between propositions, concepts, and theories; he denied the possibility of scientific discussion of questions concerning the nature of real objects and their relation to the propositions of the language of science. Carnap developed the theory of logical syntax, constructing a language for the extended predicate calculus with equality and with a rule of infinite induction as an instrument for the logical analysis of scientific language.

In the third period, after 1936, Carnap was occupied with the construction of a “unified language of science.” He came to the conclusion that a purely syntactical approach was inadequate and that it was necessary to consider semantics as well, that is, the relation between language and the field of objects described by it. On the basis of his semantic theory, Carnap constructed inductive logic as a logic of probability. He also developed a formalized theory of inductive conclusions (in particular, conclusions by analogy) and elaborated a theory of semantic information. He also wrote about semantic interpretation and the quantification of modal logic. Several of his results were used in research on cybernetics by MacCulloch, Peets, and Warren. In his final years Carnap rejected many of the views he had held in the first stage of his career and stated more resolutely his belief in the existence of “unobserved material objects” as the basis for constructing logical systems. However, failure to understand the dialectics of knowledge prevented Carnap from developing this natural-scientific, materialist tendency.

In the area of social issues in the USA, Carnap was a resolute opponent of racial discrimination and American aggression in Vietnam.

WORKS

Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin-Schlachtensee, 1928.
Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie. Berlin-Schlachtensee, 1928.
Abriss der Logistik. Vienna, 1929.
Der logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna, 1934.
Studies in Semantics, vols. 1–2. Cambridge, Mass., 1942–43.
Testability and Meaning, 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn., 1954.
The Continuum of Inductive Methods. Chicago, 1952.
Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd ed. Chicago, 1962.
In Russian translation:
Znachenie i neobkhodimosV. Moscow, 1959.
Filosofskie osnovaniia fiziki: Vvedenie v filosofiiu nauki. Moscow, 1971. (Contains bibliography.)

REFERENCES

Narskii, I. S. Sovremennyi pozitivizm. Moscow, 1961.
Smirnov, V. A. “O dostoinstvakh i oshibkakh odnoi logiko-filosofskoi kontseptsii.” In Filosofiia marksizma i neopozitivizm. Moscow, 1963.
Hill, T. Sovremennye teorii poznaniia. Moscow, 1965. (Translated from English.)
P. A. Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Rudolph Carnap. La Salle (111.)-London, 1963. (Contains a bibliography.)

I. S. DOBRONRAVOV, D. LAKHUTI, and V. K. FINN