Scepticism under new colors?
Stroud's criticism of Carnap
pp. 133-147
in: Thomas Bonk (ed), Language, truth and knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
Several writers have attributed to Carnap an important attempt to solve the traditional sceptical problem of our knowledge of the external world.1 That Carnap's oeuvre should contain a substantial response to traditional scepticism is on first sight a surprising claim. There is little in Carnap's work, compared with Russell or Wittgenstein's, say, by way of a direct and sustained explication of the concepts of knowledge and certainty or of other issues traditionally associated with scepticism. Moreover, there is a sense in which Carnap is a sceptic. Carnap, at least in his later writings, rejected "knowledge" as a vague term — like "bald" or "big" — and as of limited use in the sciences in favor of an account of rational belief in terms of subjective probability and rules of acceptance and rejection. If knowledge requires subjective certainty and infallibility, as the traditional account has it, then no one has knowledge, except where the sentence in question is analytic. Richard Jeffrey has placed Carnap's position broadly within the tradition of the academic scepticism of Carneades of Cyrene.2
