Logic and Carnapian Truth

Alan Richardson

My talk will discuss Rudolf Carnap's semantic program in order to ascertain what its philosophical point was meant to be. I will argue against the twin towers of Harvard analytic philosophy---W.V. Quine and Hilary Putnam---to the conclusion that Carnap's adherence to the analytic/synthetic distinction has little to do with his empiricism, much less his alleged verificationism. I hope to make plausible the view that for Carnap the analytic/synthetic distinction solves two problems at once: it answers long-standing methodological issues within his own philosophy of science regarding the place of mathematics in the system of knowledge and it makes possible his technical vision for philosophy. That is, Carnap's move to semantics was motivated by two overarching concerns: the promulgation of a scientific philosophy given shape and precision as the logical syntax and formal semantics of artificial languages and a commitment to exhibiting the virtues of such a philosophical vision by defusing, rather than answering, the questions at the heart of the disputes over the foundations of mathematics and the place of mathematics in empirical knowledge.