Multitude, tolerance and language-transcendence

Matti Eklund

pp. 833-847

in: Sten Lindström, Erik Palmgren, Dag Westerståhl (eds), The philosophy of logical consequence and inference, Synthese 187 (3), 2012.

Abstract

Rudolf Carnap’s 1930s philosophy of logic, including his adherence to the principle of tolerance, is discussed. What theses did Carnap commit himself to, exactly? I argue that while Carnap did commit himself to a certain multitude thesis—there are different logics of different languages, and the choice between these languages is merely a matter of expediency—there is no evidence that he rejected a language-transcendent notion of fact, contrary to what Warren Goldfarb and Thomas Ricketts have prominently argued. (In fact, it is obscure just what Goldfarb and Ricketts claim about Carnap.) Toward the end I critically discuss Michael Friedman’s suggestion that Carnap believed in a relative a priori.

Cited authors

Carnap Rudolf

Friedman Michael

Goldfarb Warren