Rudolf Carnap Quotes on Truth
Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language (1934), Meaning and Necessity (1947), and the late “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950) gave Vienna Circle logical empiricism its most rigorous treatment of truth, meaning, and the analysis of philosophical questions. The central project is the systematic separation of the internal questions about truth and existence that arise within a chosen linguistic framework — answerable by the framework’s own constitutive rules — from the external questions about the framework itself, which Carnap treats as practical questions about the choice of the most useful framework rather than substantive metaphysical questions admitting of right or wrong answers. The framework, drawing on Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the early Tarski, shaped the entire mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language and supplied the principal philosophical target of Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and the subsequent post-positivist analytic tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Rudolf Carnap:
“In logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build his own logic, that is, his own form of language, as he wishes.”
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“Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science, that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences.”
Foreword -
Attributed to Rudolf Carnap:
“What is presented as metaphysical assertion is in reality the expression of a feeling for life.”
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Attributed to Rudolf Carnap:
“Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.”
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Attributed to Rudolf Carnap:
“Science is the systematized knowledge of universal laws connecting observations.”
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“In order to determine whether or not one sentence is a consequence of another, no reference need be made to the meaning of the sentences. The mere statement of the truth-values is certainly too little; but the statement of the meaning is, on the other hand, too much. It is sufficient that the syntactical design of the sentences be given.”
p. 258 -
“After the new forms are introduced into the language, it is possible to formulate with their help internal questions and possible answers to them. A question of this kind may be either empirical or logical; accordingly a true answer is either factually true or analytic.”
"Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950) | Ch. 3. What does acceptance of a kind of entities mean?