To speak of "metaphysics" alla Carnap seems elusive, since we are concerned, rather, with the basis for his rejection of the alleged philosophical discipline as such.
Jones commented on "Aristotle: Carnap and Grice on the metaphysics".
Jones writes:
"There seem to me lots of issues with the page there that I read. So often people writing about Carnap attribute to him view that don't seem to me correct. For example here, talk about Carnap not accepting the meta-language "point of view" till late, when we know that it was an important element of his inspiration for Logical Syntax which occurred at the time of Godel's incompleteness result, 1931. But it does look like we find Carnap taking Aristotelian metaphysics at face value (i.e. as metaphysics in his own sense) whereas I am frequently arguing that things which typically are called metaphysics don't actually qualify as such relative to Carnap's conception. There is here some gap between the conclusions I draw from Carnap's (stated) position and the conclusions he himself drew."
Which is interesting and possibly VERY valid!
For we have to distinguish between 'metaphysics' as the pre-socratics felt it: they seem to be engaged in 'physics'.
Aristotle's commentary on these physical claims by the pre-socratics.
Aristotle's theory of being as belonging to 'logic' rather.
Grice's exegesis of Aristotle as analytic in character.
We are left with something very different as being Carnap's target of attack: metaphysicians engaged in transcendent truths.
While I mentioned Russell's doctrine of Aristotelianism (substance-attribute ontology) as 'stone-age metaphysics' (where it should read 'stone-age physics') perhaps, within the Griceian context, the author to consider as metaphysician is BRADLEY, adored by so many Oxonians!
The following are excerpts from the "Metaphysics" section in the Bradley entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at
Candlish, Stewart and Basile, Pierfrancesco, "Francis Herbert Bradley", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
I append it as a ps for consideration.
And I'm reminded of C. L. Dodgson's "Hunting of the Snark" which has often been read as a critique, avant la lettre, of Bradleyianism. "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see".
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ps.
Metaphysics
Candlish, Stewart and Basile, Pierfrancesco, "Francis Herbert Bradley", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
"After the completion of The Principles of Logic, Bradley turned to the task of giving a full account of his metaphysics. The result was Appearance and Reality (1893). But Bradley was philosophically active for a further thirty years thereafter, continuing to elucidate, defend and refine his views, and engaging with critics and rivals (notably, and revealingly for both sides, with Russell). Concentration upon Appearance and Reality alone, therefore, risks placing undue weight upon what turn out to be temporary features of thought or expression, and this has in fact contributed to the distorted impressions of his thinking so often to be found in the textbooks of analytic philosophy."
"Appearance and Reality is divided into two books."
"The first, ‘Appearance’, is brief, and its aim destructive, arguing that ‘the ideas by which we try to understand the universe’ all bring us ultimately to contradictions when we try to think out their implications. Some of these ideas belong especially to philosophy, such as the view that only the primary qualities are real and the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself; others, for instance the notions of cause, motion, self, space, thing and time, are deployed in everyday life. The second book, ‘Reality’, is long; its aim is to provide a positive account of the Absolute — the ultimate, unconditioned reality as it is in itself, not distorted by projection through the conceptual mechanisms of thought. A large proportion of his discussion is devoted to consideration of natural objections to this positive account."
"Much of Book I involves presentation of familiar suggestions which make only part of Bradley's case: he alleges, for example, that motion involves paradoxes, and that primary qualities alone cannot give us reality, for they are inconceivable without secondary qualities, and that the notion of the thing-in-itself is self-contradictory, for if we really know nothing about it, then not even that it exists. But Chapters II and III — respectively entitled ‘Substantive and Adjective’ and ‘Relation and Quality’, are uniquely Bradleian, alarming in the breadth of their implications, and have caused intermittent controversy ever since. In generalized form, Bradley's contention is that relations (such as greater than) are unintelligible either with or without terms, and, likewise, terms unintelligible either with or without relations. Bradley himself says of the arguments he wields in support of this contention (p. 29)."
Bradley writes:
"The reader who has followed and has grasped the principle of this chapter, will have little need to spend his time on those which succeed it. He will have seen that our experience, where relational, is not true; and he will have condemned, almost without a hearing, the great mass of phenomena."
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The entry goes on:
"It is clear that his views on relations are both highly controversial and central to his thought. In view of this, it would appear a serious tactical error on Bradley's part to present his arguments so sketchily and unconvincingly that even sympathetic commentators have not found it easy to defend him, while C.D. Broad was able to say later, ‘Charity bids us avert our eyes from the pitiable spectacle of a great philosopher using an argument which would disgrace a child or a savage’ (Examination, p. 85)."
"In spite of Bradley's laconic style, however, the exegetical errors of his critics are hard to justify. The impression that Bradley's crucial metaphysical arguments are negligible arises in part from reading them as designed to prove the doctrine of the internality of all relations — that is, either (1) their reducibility to qualities, or (2) their holding necessarily, depending on the sense of ‘internal’, Russell having interpreted the doctrine in the former way, Moore in the latter. Whichever sense we take, this is a misreading — and an impossible one, if we take ‘internal’ in Russell's sense, because of Bradley's rejection of the subject/predicate account of judgment as ‘erroneous’. If, however, we use Moore's sense of ‘internal’, the reading is understandable, albeit still inexcusable: in Chapter III Bradley confusingly applies this word to relations in a metaphysically innocent way which has no connection with the doctrine of internality as this is understood by Moore, while in other parts of Appearance and Reality he openly flirts with the doctrine of internality, repudiating it clearly only in later works less often read, such as the important essay ‘Relations’ left incomplete at his death and published in his Collected Essays of 1935. Further, Bradley does uniformly reject the reality of external relations, and it is easy, though not logically inevitable, to interpret this as a commitment to the doctrine of internality."
"Bradley's treatment of relations originates in Chapter II with a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing. How can we make sense of the fact that a single thing, such as, say, a lump of sugar, is capable of holding a plurality of different properties into a unity, such as its sweetness, whiteness and hardness? We cannot postulate the existence of an underlying substance distinct from its qualities, for this would commit us to the existence of a naked, bare particular, the absurd conception of a something devoid of all qualities. Moreover, the original difficulty as to the unity of the thing is left unsolved by this move, since it becomes possible to ask what it is that binds the qualities to their substance. The alternative is to conceive the thing as a collection of qualities, yet what is the nature of the ontological tie that binds them into the unity of the thing? We are left with an aggregate of independent, substance-like qualities, rather than with an individual thing. At this point, the problem of relations emerges in its full ontological significance, for it now looks as if only a relation could provide the required nexus."
"Bradley's considered view in Chapter III is that neither external nor internal relations possess unifying power and must therefore be rejected as unreal. This is the proper conclusion of a set of condensed arguments which he deploys as a team, systematically excluding the possible positions available to those who would disagree. One crucial consideration is based upon the insight that a relation is the ‘ground’ of its terms as well as ‘founded’ upon them. ‘So far as I can see’, he says, ‘relations must depend upon terms, just as much as terms upon relations’ (Appearance, p. 26). The relation is said to ‘depend’ upon its terms, because it requires at least two terms in order to exist; and terms ‘depend’ upon relations, because they are partly constituted by the relationships in which they stand to one another (albeit Bradley provides no illustration, this can be made plausible by considering two different shades of colour: blue would not be blue, if it were not darker than yellow). Once this is recognized, Bradley goes on to argue, one sees that a related term A is really made up of two parts, one functioning as the foundation of the relation, A1, and the other determined by it, A2. Thus, each related term turns out to be a relational complex, in this specific case, A turning out to be the complex R(A1,A2). This launches a regress, for by the same logic A1 and A2 will have to be made up of two distinct parts, and so on without end."
"The member of Bradley's team of arguments which has attracted the greatest polemical attention, however, is the one which alleges that if a relation were a further kind of real thing along with its terms (as, e.g., Russell later assumed in his multiple relation theory of judgment), then a further relation would be required to relate it to its terms, and so on ad infinitum. It is clear from this argument (which is an obvious descendant of The Principles of Logic's attack on the traditional analysis of judgment), as well as from his own explanation, that for him ‘real’ is a technical term: to be real is to be an individual substance (in the sense commonly found in Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza). On this understanding, to deny the reality of relations is to deny that they are independent existents. It is this argument which explains reactions like Broad's: in common with others, he took Bradley to be assuming that relations are a kind of object, when what Bradley was doing was arguing by a kind of reductio against that very assumption."
"These remarks make it clear that Bradley is using the term ‘appearance’ in an ontological sense, as referring to what lacks full individuality, rather than in an epistemological sense, as referring to what is present to a subject. And indeed, he does not wish to deny the obvious fact that we experience a rich diversity of things; relations and plurality in some sense exist, and therefore belong to reality. The denial of the reality of relations does not imply their absolute non-existence; rather, his conclusion is that relations and terms should be conceived as aspects within an all-embracing whole. Instead of ascribing to Bradley the doctrine of internality, it would therefore be better to see him as advocating a ‘holistic’ theory of relations. As against Russell, Bradley was wholly explicit on this fundamental point."
Bradley writes:
"This is the doctrine for which I have now for so many years contended. Relations exists only in and through a whole which can not [sic] in the end be resolved into relations and terms. ‘And’, ‘together’ and ‘between’, are all in the end senseless apart from such a whole. The opposite view is maintained (as I understand) by Mr. Russell... But for myself, I am unable to find that Mr. Russell has ever really faced the question. (Principles, 2nd edn, Ch. II, additional note 50)."
"Interestingly, one philosopher who faced Bradley's question squarely was Russell's pupil, Wittgenstein. In his Tractatus he tried to avoid Bradley's regresses by getting rid of relations. His simple objects do enter into the formation of unified facts, yet no extraneous connecting principle is required:‘In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, like the links of a chain.’ (2.03). The metaphor of a chain, however, provides no real answer to the problem raised by Bradley, especially so in light of the fact that it is all but clear that Wittgenstein's logico-ontological atoms can be said to possess a form; surely, they differ from Democritean atoms in that they lack material properties (cf. 2.0331 and 2.0232). Moreover, Bradley could still argue that the very idea of two distinct but unrelated objects makes little sense."
"The implications of Bradley's treatment of relations are not solely metaphysical."
"They are also epistemological."
"Some have thought that the denial of the reality of relations amounts to the assertion that all relational judgments are false, so that it is, for example, not true that 7 is greater than 3 or that hydrogen is lighter than oxygen. Such an interpretation is made credible by Bradley's account of truth, for on that account no ordinary judgment is ever perfectly true; in consequence, to one who reads him under the influence of the later but anachronistic assumption that truth is two-valued, his claim appears to be that relational judgments are all false. On Bradley's account of truth, however, while for ordinary purposes it is true that 7 is greater than 3 and false that oxygen is lighter than hydrogen, once we try to meet the more exacting demands of metaphysics we are forced to recognize that truth admits degrees and that, while the former is undoubtedly more true than the latter, it is not fully true. The imperfection of even the more true of these judgments, though, is nothing to do with the its being relational rather than predicative. For, as was observed above in the section on Logic, Bradley thought all judgments to be defective in that representation can proceed only on the basis of separating in thought what is not separate in reality: when, for example, we say ‘These apples are hard and sour’, we not only implicitly abstract the apples from their container but detach the hardness and sourness from each other and abstract them from the apples themselves. A perfect truth, one completely faithful to reality, would thus have to be one which did not abstract from reality at all; and this means that it would have to be identical with the whole of reality and accordingly no longer even a judgment. The final truth about reality is, on Bradley's view, quite literally and in principle inexpressible. Eventually, it is this mystical conclusion which explains his forceful rejection of Hegel's panlogism; contrary to Hegel's view in the Science of Logic, Reality is not a system of interrelated logical categories, but transcends thought altogether."
"It is, however, possible to give an outline."
"The impression of reality's consisting of a multiplicity of related objects is a result of the separations imposed by thought; in fact ‘the Absolute is not many; there are no independent reals.’ (All quotations from here on are from Appearance and Reality, Ch. XIV.) Reality is one — but one what? Experience, he says, in a wide sense of the term: ‘Feeling, thought and volition (any groups under which we class psychological phenomena) are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible.’ The immediate argument he gives for this unintuitive doctrine is brief to the point of offhandedness, merely challenging the reader to think otherwise without self-contradiction; his greater concern is to make it quite clear that this experience does not belong to any individual mind, and his doctrine not a form of solipsism. But he is not quite as offhand as he appears, for he soon makes clear that he thinks the whole book to be a best-explanation argument for this objective (or absolute) idealism: ‘This conclusion will, I trust, at the end of my work bring more conviction to the reader; for we shall find that it is the one view which will harmonize all facts.’
So ‘the Absolute is one system, and ... its contents are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of any kind, can fall outside its limits.’ But how can we understand this diversity to be possible, when it cannot be accounted for through terms and relations? Bradley's answer is that we cannot understand this in detail, but can get some grasp on what he means by considering a pre-conceptual state of immediate experience in which there are differences but no separations, a state from which our familiar, cognitive, adult human consciousness arises by imposing conceptual distinctions upon the differences. Reality is like this primitive state, but not exactly like, for it transcends thought rather than falls short of it, and everything, even conceptual thought itself, is included in one comprehensive and harmonious whole. Appearances thus contribute to Reality in a fashion analogous to the ways in which segments of a painting contribute to the whole work of art: detached from their background, they would lose their significance and might in isolation even be ugly; in context, they can themselves be beautiful and make an essential contribution to the beauty and integrity of the whole."
"Such limited comparisons are all the help we can get in understanding the Absolute and its relation to its appearances: Bradley rejects as impossible the demand for detailed explanations of how phenomena like error and evil belong to the Absolute, instead trying to shift the burden of proof to critics who express confidence in their incompatibility. His general answer is that anything that exists, even the worst of evils, is somehow real: the Absolute must comprehend both evil and good. But, just as truth admits of degrees, a judgment being less true the further it is from comprehending the whole of reality, so (consistent with ‘the identity of truth knowledge and reality’) reality itself admits of degrees, a phenomenon being the less real the more it is just a fragmentary aspect of the whole. The Absolute is in such a way further from evil than from good, but is itself neither, transcending them both as it transcends even religion — it is in a sense a Supreme Being, but not a personal God. The proper object of a complete system of metaphysics should be that of adjudicating the relative degree of reality of any fragmentary existent, yet as some critics objected, it is difficult to see how this could be carried out even in principle, given Bradley's contention that the Absolute is, strictly speaking, unknowable."
"Bradley also devotes some time to a consideration of issues that arise in the philosophy of nature; albeit it is evident that he feels the attraction of panpsychism, this is a view he never explicitly endorses. As T.S. Eliot recognized, a Leibnizian strand pervades Bradley's philosophy, one which finds expression in his doctrine of finite centres of experience. On this view, the Absolute articulates itself in a plurality of lesser sentient wholes, unified psychical individuals of the nature of the human soul. Bradley thus comes close to holding something very like a theory of monads, yet this is incorporated within the general framework of his monistic metaphysics. Interestingly, the doctrine of the Absolute can be seen as a solution to the problem of monadic interaction; like Leibniz's monads, Bradley's finite centres are incapable of a direct sharing of content (e.g., they are said to be ‘not directly pervious to each other’; Appearance, p. 464) and of causal interaction; however, they are coordinated to one another in that they are all partial manifestations of the same overarching Reality. A similar attempt at reconciling Absolute Idealism and monadism had been made by Lotze, and in both cases it remains an open question whether this is not pre-established harmony in disguise. What is clear but usually overlooked is that Bradley himself saw Leibnizian monadism as the greatest challenge to his own brand of idealism: ‘Monadism’, he says, ‘on the whole will increase and will add to the difficulties which already exist’ (Appearance, p. 102). He was surely right in this, as later British metaphysicians — such as James Ward, J.M.E. McTaggart, Herbert Wildon Carr, and Alfred North Whitehead — preferred Leibniz over Kant and Hegel as their main source of inspiration.
In Bradley's often rhapsodic descriptions of the Absolute, a conception of the world based both on his sceptical scrutiny of the inadequacies of philosophers' accounts of judgment — and, it is clear, on a kind of personal experience of a higher unity which in another context might have made him one of the world's revered religious mystics —, we can see why, at the start of this article, his metaphysics was described as ‘a striking combination of the rational and the mystical’. The very idiosyncrasy of this combination has meant that few subsequent philosophers have been convinced by it. Nevertheless, in its bold and direct confrontation of what he called ‘the great problem of the relation between Thought and Reality’, it stands in Western philosophy as a permanent and unsettling challenge to the capacity of discursive thought to display the world without distortion; unsettling because it arises, not from the imposition of an external standard which could be rejected as arbitrary or inappropriate, but from the demand that our mechanisms of representation meet the standards they themselves implicitly set."
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