The Philosophy Book

257

See also: Gottlob Frege 336 ■ Ludwig Wittgenstein 246–51 ■ Karl Popper 262–65 ■

Willard Van Orman Quine 278–79 ■ Thomas Kuhn 293

O

ne of the problems for

20th-century philosophy

is determining a role for

philosophy given the success of the

natural sciences. This is one of the

main concerns of German-born

Rudolf Carnap in The Physical

Language as the Universal Language

of Science (1934), which suggests

that philosophy’s proper function—

and its primary contribution to

science—is the analysis and

clarification of scientific concepts.

Carnap claims that many

apparently deep philosophical

problems—such as metaphysical

ones—are meaningless, because

they cannot be proved or disproved

through experience. He adds that

they are also in fact pseudo-problems

caused by logical confusions in the

way we use language.

Logical language

Logical positivism accepts as true

only strictly logical statements that

can be empirically verified. For

Carnap, philosophy’s real task is

therefore the logical analysis of

language (in order to discover and

rule out those questions that are,

strictly speaking, meaningless), and

to find ways of talking clearly and

unambiguously about the sciences.

Some philosophers, such as

Willard Quine and Karl Popper, have

argued that Carnap’s standards for

what can be said meaningfully are

too exacting and present an idealized

view of how science operates,

which is not reflected in practice.

Nevertheless, Carnap’s reminder

that language can fool us into

seeing problems that are not really

there is an important one. ■

THE MODERN WORLD

LOGIC IS THE LAST

SCIENTIFIC

INGREDIENT

OF PHILOSOPHY

RUDOLF CARNAP (1891–1970)

IN CONTEXT

BRANCH
Philosophy of science

APPROACH
Logical positivism

BEFORE
1890 Gottlob Frege starts to
explore the logical structures
of language.

1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein
writes that philosophy is the
study of the limits of language.

AFTER
1930s Karl Popper proposes
that science works by means
of falsifiability: no amount of
positive proofs can prove
something to be true, whereas
one negative result confirms
that a theory is incorrect.

1960s Thomas Kuhn explores
the social dimensions of
scientific progress,
undermining some of the
tenets of logical positivism.

In logic,

there are no morals.

Rudolf Carnap