Carnap on Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Rudolf Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," The Analytic Tradition, Spring 2017

[pjeffries]

The sheer breadth of your knowledge is crazy time Dr. Bonevac, can't count how many of your lectures I have watched. I don't always agree, but am always impressed. THX.

[elsmaija]

Haha I live in Perth! And just before the student said "Perth" I was thinking that Perth would be an alright example.

[abdulkader]

Carnap on Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology :

Suppose we are interested in a certain concept and trying to analyze what is all about philosophically. Imagine we did not have in our language the ability to express such concepts, what should we add to the language to give us the ability to express those concepts.

Think about a language in which we can't express mental entities, abstract entities, or numbers. And think what resources we would have to add for that language to be able to express them.
The dumb answer is just to add numbers. But here the question asked is what kind of move is made when we make that transition?

We need to start to talk about frameworks. One in which we can discuss propositions, mental states, or numbers.

So think about a language in which we can't discuss X. And then what we would have to add to have that passage and obtain such ability.
1) We would have to add terms like 'proposition', ' property, or 'number'. This term covers the general framework by naming it.
2) Add variables for propositions, numbers, relations
3) Definition

And that is all we need to do.
Take for example in Harry Potter. The word Dementor
We might be puzzled about how we puzzle the word and do an analysis of it and reduce it to something else.
All we need to do is introduce the word 'Dementor' and variables that would include them.

For another example, what would it take to introduce the framework 'propositions'?
What is a proposition? let us do an analysis
1) It is a sentence that expresses or signifies a set.
2) They have truth values.
3) They are objects of attitudes (you can fear them, for example, it might rain and I did not bring my umbrella).

For Carnap it is different :
1) Introduce the general term 'proposition'
2) Certain style of variables, like 'p' is a proposition
3) P is a proposition that is defined by 'p or not p'
What we got here is an analytic phrase. But I have to add the right thing for the meaning of p
Fred is fat (p), Fred is not fat (not p), makes sense
Molecules (p), not molecules (not p), do not make sense
So the last condition is just a way to make sense of the proposition, to characterize the proposition in hand (the example).

So if I introduce Dementor, I introduce the term, give it a variable, 'd', and then I should define it and characterize it.

In this case, it is not the first kind of definition but the Carnapian one that has some sort of surprising feature (rule 3).
I take something that was not functioning as a singular term and turn it into one that is. This means that I take something that works as a sentence (Chicago is large)then I turn it into something that functions as a singular term (Chicago).

One thing to notice is that he is not constructing an object, and saying that now we have something that plays a role of the proposition

Now let us think about properties: What does it take to introduce one?
1) Introduce the term 'property'
2) Introduce a new style of variable 'P'
3) Define P as a property to be the same as Px or not Px
So justice is a property if and only if x is just or x is not just. So we turned the term into an abstract by adding '-ice' to it and playing the role of a singular term.

There are two ways to see Carnap by this :
1) He is a nominalist, so you can talk about justice without committing yourself to abstract objects. You can take everything as a particular thing that is just or not just, true or not true. And then add this abstract language without having to commit to any ontological commitments.
2) the whole traditional debate about realism, conceptualism, and nominalism, is based on the idea that there is a real metaphysical question here. But there is not. Why?
When we introduce the framework we have
1- Internal questions about the framework: Are there propositions?
Within the framework of propositions, what is the answer? Yes, propositions are real.
Same thing for properties.
But both answers are analytic (it is evidential).
2- External question (which is deeper) :
Should we adopt that framework? You can answer yes because it is useful. So we are defending it pragmatically, not metaphysically. So there are positives and negatives to introducing them.
If I said Chicago is large. What do you mean by that? The vagueness is in what it expresses. There are levels of ambiguity that are introduced. Large compared to what? Large has two meanings, we know that a city is large enough for a population but also is the city large compared to other cities.

Another advantage to introducing a framework is to allow us to abstract from indexicals (any expression whose content varies from one context of use to another) and other stuff that introduces context-dependent, it allows us to know about what has been said or thought without being tied up to the specific context.
Another thing is taking things out of context. Suppose I say "this is red" and a german says it in german, we are expressing the same proposition and yet using two different sentences to express the same proposition

A disadvantage is not having 'identity conditions' (adequate if and only if it is, true and it specifies some property that is unique to events and which is a non-trivial essential property of events). So it simplifies a lot of phrases. For example asking, 'is the morning star the morning star' and then asking 'is the morning star the night star'. Some people do not know that the second phrase is the same as the first, but when you want to answer the ignorant person about it you can't just say true or false rather you have to elaborate. (The planet Venus, sometimes called the "evening star" or "morning star, "). So here you are equating the answer of two propositions that seemingly are the same for one person and to another are the same but with more conditions when answering (for example in a show he will just say true, but if someone does not know asked him a different answer will be).

Another disadvantage is that the message we try to convey depends on the rest of the linguistic framework. So you might wonder if we are losing some kind of content when we convey a message using a sentence without putting in mind the rest of the linguistic framework. Imagine you go to some natives who only have 3 colors to encompass all ranges, and the question is how do we translate the words they use? So what we would call brown for them is black. So how do capture the content of this proposition?
This idea goes to scientific changes also. When we move from Newtonian mechanics to a relativistic one. Do we have the same concept of mechanical energy? Does it have the same property in both theories?

So as far as we can take things out of context we get the disadvantage that we are losing information. Because how will I substitute the term (to take it out of context) and still not lose information? This leads Quine to his thesis of radical indeterminacy.

Conclusions :
1) To be is not to be a value of a variable. Because there are variables that have no value. Meaning that we can talk about there being properties without actually having any property as values of variables. So in a better way, existential and universe quantifications are not good guides to ontology, meaning that if something is real or not.
2) Metaphysical questions are either trivial or practical questions. It does not prove anything ontologically, there are no deep metaphysical questions (are their numbers, properties, propositions, relations, mental states)
So should we accept if there are really properties? It is trivial or pragmatic nothing more.

Carnap now proceeds to his basic conclusion; the following is his best statement of the difference between internal and external questions, and how each type is to be answered:

From the internal questions we must clearly distinguish external questions, i.e., philosophical questions concerning the existence or reality of the total system of the new entities. Many philosophers regard a question of this kind as an ontological question which must be raised and answered before the introduction of the new language forms. The latter introduction, they believe, is legitimate only if it can be justified by an ontological insight supplying an affirmative answer to the question of reality. In contrast to this view, we take the position that the new ways of speaking does not need any theoretical justification because it does not imply any assertion of reality. We may still speak (and have done so) of the "the acceptance of the new entities" since this form of speech is customary: but one must keep in mind that this phrase does not mean for us anything more than acceptance of the new framework, i.e. of the new linguistic forms. Above all, it must not be interpreted as referring to an assumption, belief, or assertion of "the reality of the entities." There is no such assertion. An alleged statement of the reality of the system of entities is a pseudo-statement without cognitive content. To be sure, we have to face at this point an important question; but it is a practical, not a theoretical question; it is the question of whether or not to accept the new linguistic forms. The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended. Judgments of this kind supply the motivation for the decision of accepting or rejecting the kind of entities.

So a framework is true only within the framework used in it that gives it a pragmatic value and we can't compare it to another one, like comparing realism to anti-realism because each one will understand its own words, and propositions by the linguistic framework embodied in it and its background assumption. So asking external questions is meaningless since we can't have an objective way to compare which one is the true one.

[ThomasKristensen]

Great lecture. Thanks for taking the time to record and upload, Daniel.

[opinionate-by-thesyllogist]

I love your lectures, professor Bonevac!

Would anyone like to explain the difference betwenn "That Chicago is large" and "Chicago is large"?

[lukestables]

1. In the UK city is used in a unique technical term for historical reasons that can mean some places can by tiny and actually cities while others can just be 'urban centres' although they contain hundreds of thousands of people. People still use it in everyday language the 'normal' way so it's kinda a pedantic point.
2. I find Carnap's way of dealing with the problem fascinating not least because it seems so elegant and allows us to simply drop a lot of metaphysical questions/baggage. I do worry though that perhaps its simply dodging the question. Suppose God tells us that "yes, numbers exist in reality, although the way you use them is just a kind of shadow of their 'real' self", well then Carnap's explanation of the 'external' question is simply inadequate, although I think it fair to say that if something does exist then it would make sense for it also to be pragmatically useful. It seems to me that things like numbers, properties etc are so fundamental to human thought that it doesn't seem adequate to simply say we can just add a framework and that's enough to bring them into being, especially when the things we are talking about seem to be presupposed already in our mental capacities before we already ask the question.

[amritansh]

thank you for posting this lecture, really helped me with my mid semester, thank youuu!!!

[Eta_Carinae__]

Australian from Perth here. The property "large" seems too vague for us. That is all.

[isakerem]

there is actually a language, Pirahã, which lacks numbers and I dont think linguists ever asked what resources (what adverbs, for instance) would need to be added to this language so that it would end up having numbers. This is, I think, a very interesting research programme for linguistics.

[philosophyversuslogic]

Does anyone have this video subtitled? I'd like to have some text copy to be able to translate the video to Russian. These lectures are indeed great and informative.

[vantroll]

thank you for the videos that you are posting, they are really helpful :)

[Firmanful]

It's hard for me to understand because there's no subtitle. I think it is good if you attach the subtitle in order to make people like me easy to understand. Thank you :)

[stanleyogden]

Perth, Australia has 1.94 million people, the city of Perth in Scotland has 50, 000 people, huh. I always thought a city was a town which had a cathedral, but that only seems to be a UK thing.

[bomichaels]

imagine a cheese wheel. flat on the top, flat on the bottom, and a round side.

3 sides, not a triangle

[myothersoul]

"when language collides with philosophy reason fails" -MyOtherSoul