Carnap and translational indeterminacy

InWord and Object W. V. Quine argues that there is no uniquely correct way to assign referents to the terms of a language; any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly relative to a manual of translation. To Rudolf Carnap this must have seemed familiar. BeforeWord and Object was written Carnap had been saying the same thing inMeaning and Necessity: under the assumption of the method of the name-relation, any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly relative to what Carnap calls a conception of the name-relation. Yet Carnap is often taken to be a victim of Quine's relativistic notion of reference. Drawing on Carnap's discussion of the name-relation inMeaning and Necessity, it is argued that Carnap's and Quine's views on reference are not so far apart as is usually perceived.I would like to thank the referees who reviewed this paper for their helpful and insightful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Richard Creath both for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper as well as for conversations (beyond number) on these and many other issues related to the Quine-Carnap debate. Creath's own discussion of this topic entitled Functionalist Theories of Meaning and the Defense of Analyticity, appears in the volumeLanguage, Logic, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: The Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, edited by W. Salmon and G. Wolters (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, and Konstanz, Germany: University of Konstanz Press, 1994).     

Carnap und der Physikalismus

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Carnap and Achinstein on evidence

Two notions of evidence are focused on in this essay, Carnap's positive-relevance notion of evidence (1962, pp. 462 ff.), and Achinstein's notion of potential evidence (1978; and 1983, pp. 322–350). Achinstein creates several interesting examples in his attempt to find faults in Carnap's notion of evidence; his motive, ultimately, is to impel us towards potential evidence. The purpose of this essay is to show that positive relevance is significantly more promising than potential evidence with respect to capturing the scientific sense of the term evidence. This is accomplished by finding faults in the notion of potential evidence, and by defending positive relevance against Achinstein's examples.I am especially indebted to Peter Achinstein, Edwin Allaire and Bob Kane for many valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank my colleagues Donald Becker and Jean Kazez for their constructive criticisms and other useful suggestions. (The defense of the positive-relevance notion of evidence provided here fulfills an obligation made in an earlier essay (Kronz, 1988).)     

On Quine on Carnap on Ontology

Philosophical Studies -     

Carnap, the Ramsey-Sentence and Realistic Empiricism

Based on archival material from the Carnap and FeiglArchives, this paper re-examines Carnap's approach tothe issue of scientific realism in the 1950s and theearly 1960s. It focuses on Carnap's re-invention ofthe Ramsey-sentence approach to scientific theoriesand argues that Carnap wanted to entertain a genuineneutral stance in the realism-instrumentalism debate.Following Grover Maxwell, it claims that Carnap'sposition may be best understood as a version of`structural realism'. However, thus understood,Carnap's position faces the challenge that Newmanraised against Russell's structuralism: the claim thatthe knowledge of the unobservable is limited to itspurely structural characteristics is eitheruninformative or unsustainable.     

Carnap on theoretical terms: structuralism without metaphysics

Both realists and instrumentalists have found it difficult to understand (much less accept) Carnap’s developed view on theoretical terms, which attempts to stake out a neutral position between realism and instrumentalism. I argue that Carnap’s mature conception of a scientific theory as the conjunction of its Ramsey sentence and Carnap sentence can indeed achieve this neutral position. To see this, however, we need to see why the Newman problem raised in the context of recent work on structural realism is no problem for Carnap’s conception; and we also need to locate Carnap’s work on theoretical terms within his wider program of Wissenschaftslogik or the logic of science.     

Die Konstruktion der erfahrungswelt: Carnap und Husserl

Ohne ZusammenfassungDiese Untersuchung entstand im Rahmen eines Forschungsprojektes über die Geschichte der Analytischen Philosophie im Wiener Kreis, für deren Unterstützung ich der Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung danke.