Dale wonders in "English composition"
"Did ANYBODY say anything this clearly before? [i.e. Carnap's Aufbau, 1928] Did Frege or Russell? Can someone point it out to me? I'd be really eager to see this, but I have never found such clarity in either Frege and Russell or anyone else before this time."
Agreed!
I would venture that perhaps A. N. Whitehead and B. A. W. Russell provided the right inspiration for Carnap, there? I think Carnap loved the way Russell and Whitehead (Whitehead and Russell, technically) had aimed at a system. And without it, perhaps Carnap would never have felt the inspiration to proceed.
Grice plays with the 'heirs of Principia' in WoW:Retrospective Epilogue, when he refers, p. 372 to
"the Modernists, sparheaded by Russell and other mathematically-oriented philosophers".
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These are who in "Logic and Conversation" he has as the formalists. I always loved the detailed way, if cursory in ways, too, that Grice provides a summary of what philosophy (regarding language) lies behind the formalist credo.
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From wiki:
"The Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913."
So I would suspect that Whitehead and Russell provide for quantification formulae something that may relate to what Carnap is doing for things like "Homo habet canem"?
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Yes. I really believe it is clear that Russell and Frege set the ground for the thinking. But, I find it so amazing that I can't find such a clear statement before Carnap (1928). This IS what people (Russell, Frege, etc.) were thinking before. But, on the other hand, how could they be thinking such a complex thing and never come to actually SAY it? Especially because both Russell and Frege were so excellent at clear statements of difficult things. Why didn't they ever SAY this clear thing this clearly?
ReplyDeleteTrue. And I was thinking, too, that part of the complications that may lie behind Carnap, and why the History of Philosophy did not treat him too fairly, is that at the time fellow philosophers started reading him, they found him to be a pragmatist, if that's the word on the
ReplyDelete-- physicalism/phenomenalism
issue that was starting to be dominant. I mean, Carnap does allow for a 'general function', he calls it, regarding objects (Grice's obbles) and their 'general' relations (Grice 'fids') and those objects featuring this feature, again to quote from Grice, of 'fing' or 'fang'.
In things like "Homo habet canem" -- the type of syntactic structure for which Carnap provides a general function -- one wonders how that FITS in a, say, phenomenalist intepretation of "Aufbau".
He did manage to choose a rather complicated structure. What can WE say, other than what Carnap did, about the 'general' function that makes a reference to a 'relation' between to 'objects', one of which is apparently "doing" something to the other. Think of the
subject-object
distinction he is eventually dealing with there. The man has a dog. Why is the 'accusative' (I think is the term Carnap explicitly refers to) necessary here?
Perhaps without saying it, I would think that 'Anglophone' philosophers in particular (unlike German-speaking ones -- since case _is_ productive in German) would agree with those early remarks by Occam that 'philosophers' (qua students of something like Fodor's Language of Thought -- what Occam called 'sermo interioris' discussed by Geach in _Mental Acts_) should be case-free.
It seems to me that if we conceive of our primitive obbles (or objects) as something like sense data, it does not seem like something too primitive to think of this function, Rxy, with 'y' in the accusative case, too, as being in the grounding blocks, as it were, of the 'aufbau' or structure of the world?
But I'll try to locate something like what Carnap is referring to in Russell's work, too!