Carnap and Logical Truth

Abstract

Kant’s question ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ precipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwithstanding, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant’s own clearest purported instances, drawn from arithmetic, were sweepingly disqualified (or so it seemed; but see § II) by Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic. Attention was thus forced upon the less tendentious and indeed logically prior question, ‘How is logical certainty possible?’ It was largely this latter question that precipitated the form of empiricism which we associate with between-war Vienna — a movement which began with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and reached its maturity in the work of Carnap.

This paper was written early in 1954 at the request of Professor Schilpp, for inclusion in a volume on Carnap which he had been planning. The paper has since appeared in Italian translation as ‘Carnap e la verità logica’, Rivista di Filosofia, vol. 48 (1957), pp. 3–29. Selected portions, running to somewhat less than half, have appeared also in American Philosophers at Work (Sidney Hook, ed.), Criterion Books, New York, 1956.