What Carnap's Philosophy was not - rbjones/HoLoTruth GitHub Wiki

• phenomenalism, i.e. the idea that only phenomena are real, that there are only sense data

  Carnap never was a phenomenalist, not even while he was writing his Aufbau (an attempt to establish a phenomenalistic account of the world).

• nominalism, the desire to keep to an absolute minimum the kinds of things which are supposed to exist

  Nor was Carnap a nominalist, ontologically he was a free-wheeling pragmatist, quite happy to countenance the greatest extravagances of Cantorian set theory if these proved convenient for science.

• the verification principle, i.e. the idea that the meaning of a sentence is its method of empirical verification, and that a sentence which lacks this kind of content is meaningless.

  This certainly was one of Carnap's views, early in his career. However, he recognised soon enough that it was not tenable, and gradually watered it down to almost nothing. He did continue to have an interest in the ways in which empirical science could be connected with the evidence supporting (or refuting) it, and this came later as work on confirmation theory and on the testing of empirical theories.

When conventional refutations are given of "logical positivism", by which is principally meant the philosopy of Rudolf Carnap, the authors rarely pay much attention to what Carnap clearly documents as his principal aims. They do not judge him against what he was trying to achieve. What Carnap wanted to do was to facilitate the use in science of the kinds of formal notation to which he was first introduced by Gottlob Frege as a student, and which he was inspired to apply to make philosophy "scientific" and science formally rigorous.

Admittedly, Carnap might not be considered as very successful in that. The widespread adoption of formal notations in science, as in mathematics, depends upon a level of technological support (in dealing with the extra complexity of detailed formal proofs) which has, 50 years after his death, still not been realised.

It is the purpose of this project to contribute to the realisation of the required technical infrastructure, and it depends on getting a minimal philosophical framework in place to render that enterprise intelligible.