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  1. Carnap and the Tractatus' Philosophy of Logic.Oskari Kuusela - 2012 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (3):1-25.
    This article discusses the relation between the early Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s philosophies of logic, arguing that Carnap’s position in The Logical Syntax of Language is in certain respects much closer to the Tractatus than has been recognized. In Carnapian terms, the Tractatus’ goal is to introduce, by means of quasi-syntactical sentences, syntactical principles and concepts to be used in philosophical clarification in the formal mode. A distinction between the material and formal mode is therefore already part of the Tractatus’ view, (...)
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  • Wissenschaftliche Philosophie im Exil: Cassirer und der Wiener Kreis nach 1933.Thomas Mormann - 2016 - Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis 23:159 - 179.
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  • Neo-positivist metaphysics.Alyssa Ney - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):53-78.
    Some philosophers argue that many contemporary debates in metaphysics are “illegitimate,” “shallow,” or “trivial,” and that “contemporary analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued” (Ladyman and Ross, Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized , 2007 ). Many of these critics are explicit about their sympathies with Rudolf Carnap and his circle, calling themselves ‘neo-positivists’ or ‘neo-Carnapians.’ Yet (...)
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  • Artificial Language Philosophy of Science.Sebastian Lutz - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (2):181–203.
    Abstract Artificial language philosophy (also called ‘ideal language philosophy’) is the position that philosophical problems are best solved or dissolved through a reform of language. Its underlying methodology—the development of languages for specific purposes—leads to a conventionalist view of language in general and of concepts in particular. I argue that many philosophical practices can be reinterpreted as applications of artificial language philosophy. In addition, many factually occurring interrelations between the sciences and philosophy of science are justified and clarified by the (...)
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  • Nicolas Rashevsky's Mathematical Biophysics.Tara H. Abraham - 2004 - Journal of the History of Biology 37 (2):333 - 385.
    This paper explores the work of Nicolas Rashevsky, a Russian émigré theoretical physicist who developed a program in "mathematical biophysics" at the University of Chicago during the 1930s. Stressing the complexity of many biological phenomena, Rashevsky argued that the methods of theoretical physics -- namely mathematics -- were needed to "simplify" complex biological processes such as cell division and nerve conduction. A maverick of sorts, Rashevsky was a conspicuous figure in the biological community during the 1930s and early 1940s: he (...)
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  • The Vienna Circle in the Nordic Countries: networks and transformations of logical empiricism.Juha Manninen & Friedrich Stadler (eds.) - 2009 - New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
    One of the key events in the relations between the Central European philosophers and those of the Nordic countries was the Second International Congress for the ...
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  • Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna circle : epistemological meta-themes in harmonic theory, aesthetics, and logical positivism.James Kenneth Wright - unknown
    This study examines the relativistic aspects of Arnold Schoenberg's harmonic and aesthetic theories in the light of a framework of ideas presented in the early writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the logician, philosopher of language, and Schoenberg's contemporary and Austrian compatriot. The author has identified correspondences between the writings of Schoenberg, the early Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle of philosophers, on a wide range of topics and themes. Issues discussed include the nature and limits of language, musical universals, theoretical conventionalism, word-to-world (...)
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  • (1 other version)Carnap’s Logical Empiricism, Values, and American Pragmatism.Thomas Mormann - 2006 - Journal of General Philosophy of Science 38 (1):127 - 146.
    Abstract. Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were con-sidered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaning-less me-taphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive (...)
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  • Replies to Rosen, Leiter, and Dutilh Novaes.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):817-837.
    Gideon Rosen, Brian Leiter, and Catarina Dutilh Novaes raise deep questions about the arguments in Morality and Mathematics (M&M). Their objections bear on practical deliberation, the formulation of mathematical pluralism, the problem of universals, the argument from moral disagreement, moral ‘perception’, the contingency of our mathematical practices, and the purpose of proof. In this response, I address their objections, and the broader issues that they raise.
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  • Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication.Paul L. Franco - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (48):1378 - 1402.
    In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing (...)
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  • Carnap, Quine, and the humean condition.Sean Morris - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13283-13312.
    In his “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine embraces a form of Humeanism. In this paper, I try to work out the significance of this Humeanism. In particular, I argue that it represents an anti-metaphysical position that Quine shares with Carnap. Crucial to my account is that contrary to much contemporary thinking on metaphysics, Carnap, and Quine following him, recognize both an ontological and an epistemological sense of metaphysics. As commentators have frequently acknowledged, Carnap and Quine disagree over rejecting metaphysics in the ontological (...)
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  • Carnapian frameworks.Gabriel L. Broughton - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4097-4126.
    Carnap’s seminal ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ makes important use of the notion of a framework and the related distinction between internal and external questions. But what exactly is a framework? And what role does the internal/external distinction play in Carnap’s metaontology? In an influential series of papers, Matti Eklund has recently defended a bracingly straightforward interpretation: A Carnapian framework, Eklund says, is just a natural language. To ask an internal question, then, is just to ask a question in, say, English. (...)
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  • Verificationism and (Some of) its Discontents.Thomas Uebel - 2019 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (4):1-31.
    Verificationism has had a bad press for many years. The view that the meaning of our words is bound up with the discernible difference it would make if what we say, think or write were true or false, nowadays is scorned as “positivist” though it was shared by eminent empiricists and pragmatists. This paper seeks to sort through some of the complexities of what is often portrayed as an unduly simplistic conception. I begin with an overview of its main logical (...)
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  • Grounding Reichenbach’s Pragmatic Vindication of Induction.Michael J. Shaffer - 2017 - Polish Journal of Philosophy 11 (1):43-55.
    This paper has three interdependent aims. The first is to make Reichenbach’s views on induction and probabilities clearer, especially as they pertain to his pragmatic justification of induction. The second aim is to show how his view of pragmatic justification arises out of his commitment to extensional empiricism and moots the possibility of a non-pragmatic justification of induction. Finally, and most importantly, a formal decision-theoretic account of Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification is offered in terms both of the minimax principle and the (...)
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  • Metametametaphysics and Dialetheism.Suki Finn - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Logic 14 (1):128-146.
    This paper reflects on metametaphysics and as such develops a metametameta-physical view: that quietist metametaphysics requires dialetheism, and in turn a paraconsistent logic. I demonstrate this using Carnap’s metametaphysical position in his 'Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology' as an example, with regard to how it exhibits self-reference and results in inconsistency. I show how applying Carnap’s position to itself produces a dilemma, both horns of which lead to a contradiction. Such inconsistency commonly arises from meta-theories with global scope, as the 'meta' (...)
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  • Carnap’s epistemological critique of metaphysics.Darren Bradley - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2247-2265.
    Many who take a dismissive attitude towards metaphysics trace their view back to Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’. But the reason Carnap takes a dismissive attitude to metaphysics is a matter of controversy. I will argue that no reason is given in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, and this is because his reason for rejecting metaphysical debates was given in ‘Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy’. The argument there assumes verificationism, but I will argue that his argument survives the rejection of verificationism. The root (...)
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  • The Possibility of Naturalized Metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen
    This project investigates naturalized metaphysics as a recent trend in analytic metaphysics originating in the naturalist attitude of James Ladyman and Don Ross in their seminal work Everything must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007). The primary focus, however, will be the more recent article “Neo-Positivist Metaphysics” (2012) by Alyssa Ney that originates in this tradition. The project will conclude that naturalized metaphysics is an unsuccessful attempt at an answer to the question ’how is metaphysics possible’. More precisely, the project will establish (...)
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  • (1 other version)Carnap’s logical empiricism, values, and American pragmatism.Thomas Mormann - 2007 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 38 (1):127-146.
    Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap's mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values and value judgments were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally (...)
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  • Ordinary Language Philosophy, Explanation, and the Historical Turn in Philosophy of Science.Paul L. Franco - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (December 2021):77 - 85.
    Taking a cue from remarks Thomas Kuhn makes in 1990 about the historical turn in philosophy of science, I examine the history of history and philosophy of science within parts of the British philosophical context in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, ordinary language philosophy's influence was at its peak. I argue that the ordinary language philosophers' methodological recommendation to analyze actual linguistic practice influences several prominent criticisms of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation and that these criticisms (...)
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  • Facts and Values in Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism: Addressing the Eclipse Narrative.Matthew Silk - 2018 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (1):89-119.
    The story of the rise and fall of pragmatism is sometimes called the eclipse narrative. This paper addresses a specific version of this narrative that the logical empiricists arrived in North America in the 1930s and within 30 years had supplanted the pragmatists as the dominant philosophy there. Philosophers such as Alan Richardson and Cheryl Misak have challenged this view by emphasizing the similarities between these two movements. While both seem to admit that there is a distinction between the two (...)
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  • Vienna circle.Thomas Uebel - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • S. S. Stevens and the origins of operationism.Gary L. Hardcastle - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (3):404-424.
    Despite influencing the social sciences since the 1930s, S. S. Stevens' "operationist" philosophy of science has yet to be adequately understood. I reconstruct Stevens' operationism from his early work and assess the influence of various views (logical positivism, behaviorism and the "operational viewpoint" of P. W. Bridgman, among others) on Stevens. Stevens' operationism emerges, on my reconstruction, as a naturalistic methodological directive aimed at agreement, founded in turn on the belief that agreement is constitutive of science, the scientific community, and (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering and operationalism in psychology.Elina Vessonen - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10615-10637.
    This paper applies conceptual engineering to deal with four objections that have been levelled against operationalism in psychology. These objections are: operationalism leads to harmful proliferation of concepts, operationalism goes hand-in-hand with untenable antirealism, operationalism leads to arbitrariness in scientific concept formation, and operationalism is incompatible with the usual conception of scientific measurement. Relying on a formulation of three principles of conceptual engineering, I will argue that there is a useful form of operationalism that does not fall prey to these (...)
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  • Carnap’s Transformation of Epistemology and the Development of His Metaphilosophy.Thomas Uebel - 2018 - The Monist 101 (4):367-387.
    Carnap’s lectures at the 1935 Paris Congress for the Unity of Science marked the beginning of his mature metaphilosophy. This paper considers what role remained for epistemology once it was “purified” of all psychological elements as Carnap there demanded. It is argued that while this did mean the end of traditional epistemology, room was found for nontraditional versions in the course of the further development of Carnap’s logic of science.
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  • Criteria of Empirical Significance: Foundations, Relations, Applications.Sebastian Lutz - 2012 - Dissertation, Utrecht University
    This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific (...)
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  • The Strategic and Paradoxical Usage of Phenomenology in Foucault’s Archaeology.Kwok-Ying Lau - 2022 - Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 53 (2):121-143.
    It is well-known that the mature Foucault, while recognizing the influence of phenomenology on him during his youth, declared his anti-phenomenological position since his archeological breakthrough. This paper tries to argue and show that though phenomenology is an object of criticism of Foucault’s archaeology, it nonetheless plays a paradoxical and strategic role in the construction of the archaeological project. Though Foucault undertakes in The Birth of the Clinic a critical deconstruction of phenomenology as positivism, against the open anti-positivist declaration of (...)
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  • Wittgenstein, Carnap and the new american Wittgensteinians.P. M. S. Hacker - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):01–23.
    James Conant, a proponent of the ‘New American Wittgenstein’, has argued that the standard inter- pretation of Wittgenstein is wholly mistaken in respect of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics and the attendant conception of nonsense. The standard interpretation, Conant holds, misascribes to Wittgenstein Carnapian views on the illegitimacy of metaphysical utterances, on logical syntax and grammar, and on the nature of nonsense. Against this account, I argue that (i) Carnap is misrepresented; (ii) the so-called standard interpretation (in so far as I (...)
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  • Old problems for neo-positivist naturalized metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (2):1-19.
    In her paper “Neo-positivist metaphysics” (Philosophical Studies, 160(1), 53–78, 2012), Alyssa Ney promises a naturalized metaphysics that is acceptable even by positivists’ – and specifically Carnap’s – standards. This neo-positivist metaphysics takes its outset in the findings of our best science and relies on them to inform a metaphysics that can avoid the dependence on linguistic frameworks that is inherent to Carnapian deflationism. Neo-positivist metaphysics attempts to sidestep these problems by inheriting its semantic credentials directly from science itself. This paper (...)
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  • A non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism in the early twentieth century.Bohang Chen - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3):50.
    In biology the term “vitalism” is usually associated with Hans Driesch’s doctrine of the entelechy: entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Since vitalism defined as such violates metaphysical materialism, the received view refutes the doctrine of the entelechy as a metaphysical heresy. But in the early twentieth century, a different, non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism was endorsed by some biologists and philosophers, which finally led to a logical refutation of the doctrine of the entelechy. (...)
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  • When meaning goes by the board, what about philosophy?Jaroslav Peregrin - manuscript
    Philosophy is usually considered to be searching out the most general, and hence also the most necessary and the most eternal, truth; its central part, ontology, is often assumed to be fastening upon whatever might be "the form of the world". And because our world is the world as formed by the way we comprehend it and by the way we cope with it by means of our language, it is often assumed that its form must be brought out by (...)
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  • Carnap, Kuhn, and revisionism: On the publication of structure in encyclopedia. [REVIEW]J. C. Pinto de Oliveira - 2007 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 38 (1):147-157.
    In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly regarding Carnap’s work. In this paper, I argue against the interpretation that Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having been published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the revisionist idea that Carnap “would have found Structure philosophically congenial”. I claim that Kuhn’s book, from Carnap’s point of view, is not in philosophy of science but rather in history of science (...)
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  • Analyticity and language engineering in Carnap's Logical syntax.Sam Hillier - 2010 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6 (2):25-46.
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  • Three challenges to the complementarity of the logic and the pragmatics of science.Thomas Uebel - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 53:23-32.
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  • Doing Worlds with Words: Formal Semantics Without Formal Metaphysics.Jaroslav Peregrin - 1995 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory (...)
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  • Degradation of logical form.Dallas Willard - 1997 - Axiomathes 8 (1):31-52.
    The title is meant to emphasize the immense loss of status I take logic to have undergone in recent decades, and to suggest something about its causes. The loss is most obvious in the context of higher education, where almost no post-secondary institutions now have effectual general requirements in standard formal logic, as that was easily understood thirty or more years ago. Courses in so-called 'critical thinking' are, with rare and noble exceptions, only a further illustration of the point, for (...)
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