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.     

On the universality of language comprehension strategies: evidence from Turkish

A fundamental question in psycholinguistic research concerns the universality of comprehension strategies. We investigated this issue by examining the so-called "subject preference" in Turkish, a language which allows for a natural (unmarked) object reading of an initial ambiguous argument. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we observed increased processing difficulty in the form of a broadly distributed positivity when an initial ambiguous argument was disambiguated towards an object reading. This effect was independent of the animacy (i.e. semantic subject prototypicality) of the ambiguous argument. Our results therefore speak in favour of a universal tendency to interpret the first argument encountered as the "subject" of the clause, even in languages providing no obvious structural motivation for such a strategy. However, we argue that the underlying explanation for this preference must be modified in accordance with cross-linguistic considerations.     

Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians

James Conant, a proponent of the 'New American Wittgenstein', has argued that the standard interpretation of Wittgenstein is wholly mistaken in respect of Wittgenstein's critique of metaphysics and the attendant conception of nonsense. The standard interpretation, Conant holds, misascribes to Wittgenstein Carnapian views on the illegitimacy of metaphysical utterances, on logical syntax and grammar, and on the nature of nonsense. Against this account, I demonstrate that (i) Carnap is misrepresented; (ii) the so–called standard interpretation (in so far as I have contributed to it) is misrepresented; (iii) Wittgenstein's views, early and late, are misrepresented. I clarify Wittgenstein's conception of logical syntax and of the nonsense that results from transgressing it.     

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).     

On the universality of language dissolution: The case of a Turkish aphasic

The case of a Turkish aphasic suffering from motor aphasia is described. The transitional phonemic systems which could be observed in this patient in the course of speech rehabilitation are compared to the so-called “phonemic disintegration,” whereas the errors of his graphic performance are compared to the so-called “agrammatism” of Indo-European languages. It is found that there exists a strong parallelism between this agglutinative language and the inflecting Indo-European languages insofar as aphasic language dissolution is concerned.     

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).)     

Probability spaces,hilbert spaces,and the axioms of test theory

A branch of probability theory that has been studied extensively in recent years, the theory of conditional expectation, provides just the concepts needed for mathematical derivation of the main results of the classical test theory with minimal assumptions and greatest economy in the proofs. The collection of all random variables with finite variance defined on a given probability space is a Hilbert space; the function that assigns to each random variable its conditional expectation is a linear operator; and the properties of the conditional expectation needed to derive the usual test-theory formulas are general properties of linear operators in Hilbert space. Accordingly, each of the test-theory formulas has a simple geometric interpretation that holds in all Hilbert spaces.     

Carnap and weyl on the foundations of geometry and relativity theory

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on Semantical Aspects of Space-Time Theories at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung at the Universität Bielefeld in May 1994. I am indebted to the participants for helpful comments. I am also, and especially, indebted to comments from and discussions with Thomas Ryckman. All translations from the German are my own.