3 nd TiLPS History of Analytic Workshop

Yemima Ben-Menahem (Shalem), Objectivity and the Variety of Language: Quine, Putnam, Davidson

Quine has developed two arguments that point to the obstacles facing an objective understanding of the language-world relation: the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference, or, as it is also called ontological relativity. This paper begins with a brief examination of these arguments, both in terms of their connections to earlier epistemic positions and in terms of their evolution in Quine's writings. It then moves to explore Putnam's and Davidson's responses to the challenge and inspiration of Quine. Davidson affirms his agreement with Quine's theses in many places, and Putnam advanced a number of model-theoretic arguments that reinforce Quine's critique of an objective reference relation. The paper argues, however, that despite these apparent similarities and avowals of consent, there are highly significant differences between the three philosophers on the question of the word-world relation and its objectivity. Moreover, the paper seeks to show that while Quine, Putnam, and Davidson could all be said to respond to the skeptical arguments they have encountered with a kind of pragmatist anti-skeptical stance, their routes to this pragmatist stance were rather diverse.

Joan Bertran San-Millan (ASCR, Prague) Frege and Peano on Axiomatisation and Formalisation

In contemporary historical studies Peano is usually linked with the logical tradition pioneered by Frege. I shall question this association. Specifically, I shall defend, on the one hand, that Frege's and Peano's axiomatisations of logic relied of divergent notions of calculus; and, on the other, that they developed different notions of formalisation that resulted from incompatible approaches to logic. Cleber Correa (São Paolo/MCMP) Carnap and Neo-Quineans on Ontological Questions

Carnap and Quine are two relevant names for contemporary metaontology. According to the received view, Carnap and his successors hold a dismissive perspective according to which ontological disputes are trivial and unsubstantial. Neo-Quineans, in turn, are often portrayed as holding the opposite view. I offer reasons to think that the contrast between Carnap’s stance and Neo-Quineans’ is not as clear as described above. I argue, first, that the scope of Carnap’s dismissivism excludes what Neo-Quineans are not dismissive about. Second, I argue that Carnap’s strategy for answering practical questions agrees with a relevant aspect of Neo- Quineans’ method for ontology: the balancing of theoretical virtues.

Fons Dewulf (Ghent) Leo Apostel and : The Development of Logical Empiricism in Post-War Europe

In this paper I uncover the afterlife of Rudolf Carnap’s views on ethics in Europe after the Second World War. To that end I discuss the institutional struggle of the Belgian philosopher, Leo Apostel (1925-1995), who aimed to found a politically engaged, logical empiricist inspired program at between 1959 and 1965. Uncovering Apostel’s attempt, I claim, is interesting because it not only sheds new light on Carnap’s ethical position, but also on the reception of logical empiricist philosophy in post-war Europe.

Joshua Eisenthal (Pittsburgh) A New Role for Ontology: The Expressive Resources of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

On its surface, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus seems to contain a bold and speculative ontological theory. Although a number of commentators deny that the Tractatus relies on such an ontological theory, a major challenge for such commentators is to offer an alternative interpretation of Wittgenstein’s “simple objects”. To address this challenge, I argue that it is necessary to appreciate the extent of the influence of Heinrich Hertz. I argue that Hertz’s notorious hypothesis of “hidden masses” exemplifies a particular logical role for the introduction of unfamiliar ontological entities, and that this in turn leads to a logical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s simple objects.

Jim Hutchinson (Bloomington) Frege on the Generality of Logic

Frege claims that the laws of logic are characterized by their “generality,” and he seems to have a kind of normative generality in mind. But what exactly does this generality amount to? I argue that we can only understand it by connecting what Frege says about generality with his thinking about truth, judgement, and science more generally. For him, the laws of logic as those that appear in every one of the scientific systems whose construction is the ultimate aim of science, and in which all truths have a place.

Junyeol Kim (Connecticut) Frege on Logic qua the Science of Truth

Frege takes logic as the science of truth throughout his career. However, the mature Frege makes remarks which seem to go against the idea that logic is the science of truth. This paper shows that the tension we find in the mature Frege’s comments on the relationship between logic and truth can be explained away by accepting that truth is an object. Frege explicitly claims that truth is the True, which is an object. There is a substantive sense in which logic is the science of the True for the mature Frege. His seemingly problematic comments on logic and truth go hand in hand with the conception of logic as the science of the True.

Daniel Kuby (Konstanz) On the Benefits of the Cold War: The Case of Paul Feyerabend and the Third Vienna Circle

Paul Feyerabend’s formative years in post-war Vienna (1946-1955) raise an interesting conundrum: On one side, primary sources (like his dissertation 1951) indicate that his intellectual formation occurred on the background of scientific philosophy and, in particular, Logical Empiricism. On the other hand, virtually all historical evidence attests that by the mid 1930s the philosophical landscape in Europe had been purged from most scientifically oriented philosophy. In this talk I offer a solution to this puzzle by giving a socio-historical account of the (brief) re- emergence of Logical Empiricism in post-war Vienna due to upcoming Cold War.

Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge) Carnap’s Internal Platonism

In his Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, Carnap famously argued that we can do anything a mathematical Platonist does – quantify over numbers, hold them to be mind-independent, claim that numerals refer to mathematical objects – without committing ourselves to any dubious . I will develop a new argument showing that this internal Platonism is unstable, by combining Beth’s argument from non-standard models (Beth 1963) with Gödel’s consistency objection (Gödel 1995a).

F. A. Muller (Rotterdam) Wittgenstein on Russell’s Paradox in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The last sentences of 3.333 of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922):

This at once clear if instead of `�(��) ', we write (∃�) ∶ � �� . �� = ��′ (1) Herewith Russell's paradox vanishes.

Remarkably, all commentators and interpreters of Wittgenstein's Tractatus smoothly glide over these last two sentences of 3.333, in particular they all fail to answer the question: How does the formal expression expresses Russell's Paradox? We shall inquire into whether Russell and Wittgenstein ever corresponded about the issue under investigation, whether Wittgenstein corresponded with others about (1), and whether there is anything to be found about it in the Nachlass. (Spoiler Alert! The result of this inquiry will probably be disappointing.) We further argue: (i) that (1) cannot be understood as an expression of Russell's paradox; and: (ii) that it can be understood as an expression of Russell's paradox if and only if (1) is adapted. For (ii), several adaptations and interpretations of (1) will be explored.

Matthias Neuber (Tübingen) What We Talk About When We Talk About THIS Being Blue: C. I. Lewis and R. W. Sellars on the Object of Perception

There is currently some reawakened interest in the relationship between American pragmatism and American critical realism. Both currents shared many aspects, but there were also significant differences. One of these differences pertains to the object of perception or, more precisely, to the question of what we talk about when we talk about this, for example, being blue. By re-addressing that question, some light can be shed on the historical development of analytic philosophy in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. My case in point are the respective positions of C. I. Lewis and R. W. Sellars. I shall point out that Sellars’s view has more to recommend it because it better explains the actual mechanism of perception.

Nathan Oseroff (King’s College) Correcting Three Popular Philosophic Myths Concerning Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Demarcation

Here are three popular philosophical myths: (1) Falsifiability, Karl Popper’s demarcation criterion, sets out the boundaries of the natural sciences from non- science. (2) The criterion explicitly applies solely to single universal theories. (3) It is is his sole criterion. I demonstrate that (1)-(3) directly contradict Popper’s writings on demarcation. In reality: (1*) Popper’s demarcation problem is to determine if there are necessary and sufficient conditions for drawing conventional borders between what epistemic communities classify as ‘empirical’ and ‘non-empirical’. (2*) The criterion of falsifiability explicitly only applies to large sets of statements. (3*) Popper set forward a second criterion of demarcation that classifies individual statements as either ‘empirical’ or ‘non-empirical’ if they increase the empirical content of a theoretical system by entailing one ‘basic statement’ not entailed by the theoretical system alone.

Flavia Padovani (Drexel) What the Young Reichenbach Might Have Said to Carnap and Quine about the Analytic- Synthetic Distinction

Hans Reichenbach was, together with Carnap, one of the founding fathers of Logical Empiricism. Although many of his writings (especially the earliest ones) consider the possibility of a priori knowledge, Reichenbach never directly participated in the debate between Quine and Carnap about the analytic-synthetic distinction. In the early 1920s, however, while presenting the conceptual foundation of his axiomatization of relativity theory, he developed an approach involving holism that may suggest what his position could have been with respect to the Quine/Carnap debate. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct such a position.

Gurpreet Rattan (Toronto) Mates’ Puzzle and the Cognitive Significance of Higher-Order Senses

Mates’s Puzzle is one of a family of semantic puzzles, a family that includes Frege’s Puzzle and the Paradox of Analysis. The paper explains how Mates’s Puzzle is related to these puzzles and in particular explains how Mates’s Puzzle is a generalization of Frege’s Puzzle. We are argue that properly understanding Mates’s Puzzle requires not only the distinction between sense and reference, but also the distinction between customary sense and the higher-order senses of Frege’s hierarchy. We review recent thinking about the puzzle and show how a failure to recognize the relevance of the higher-order senses and the hierarchy compromises various proposals for understanding and deploying Mates’s Puzzle. We close the paper with an account of the cognitive significance of higher-order senses, according to which higher-order senses play a role in allowing thought to keep track of the distinction between and amongst minds.

Moriz Stangl (Tübingen) Proposition and Configuration: Syntactical and Topological Models of Semantics in Frege and Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein expands Frege's linear structure of facts: To be an argument, according to the early Wittgenstein, is to exist in more-dimensional "space", constituted by neighborhoods of different values: color spaces, spaces of pitch or of degrees of hardness. This semantic space builds a transitional level between the metaphysical, featureless "substance of the world" (tract. 2.0231) and the atomic facts by ways of unstable, dynamic "configurations" of changing properties (ebd. 2.0271). The semantic structure of configurations seems insufficient as a truth-condition, since it can link featureless objects to contradictive properties. In order to understand the concept of configuration in the Tractatus, we should not rely on syntactical models or spatiotemporal metaphors, but rather describe the semantic space structured by configurations as a topology: The difference of two objects mapped onto one point in a topological space remains unexplained, unless the topological space is embedded into a space of different separation axioms. Whereas in one topology the mapping would be non-injective in another it could be injective. The Coexistence of different kinds of topologies according to which the objects are mapped differently could be used to describe the notion of configuration as the semantic field which primordially constitutes the factual world.

Marij van Strien (Wuppertal) Schlick and Cassirer on the Implications of Quantum Mechanics for Causality

In this talk, I examine the impact of the quantum revolution of 1925-26 on conceptions of causality, focusing on Moritz Schlick and Ernst Cassirer. Both argue for a modified principle of causality in light of quantum mechanics. Whereas Cassirer argues for a neokantian account of causality, for Schlick, the fact that quantum mechanics leads to changes in causality is ultimately a confirmation of empiricism. But I argue that there are significant similarities between their positions: both define causality in terms of lawfulness and both end up with a very weak formulation of the principle of causality.

Marta Sznajder (MCMP, Munich) Janina Hosiasson on Analogical Reasoning: New Sources

A prominent theme in inductive logic is a formal analysis of analogical reasoning. I will show that the history of this endeavour is longer than what is commonly assumed and traces back to the work of Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum in the early 1940s. Drawing on published and archive materials, I will analyse her approach to inductive reasoning and reasoning by analogy. Through an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions that Hosiasson derives for the justification of analogical reasoning, I will show how her work anticipates some proposals made decades later by Rudolf Carnap and modern confirmation theorists.

Shunichi Takagi (UCL) ‘Das Denken hat eine Solche Form nicht’ (Ramsey and Wittgenstein, September 1929)

In this paper, I shall first offer a critical exposition of Ramsey’s manuscripts in which he recorded his criticisms of Wittgenstein’s Tractarian view. Thus, I describe the way Ramsey came to regard Wittgenstein’s philosophy to be scholastic by reflecting upon the nature of logical analysis. I shall then argue that Ramsey’s critique of the Tractarian philosophy should be seen as an attack of transcendental philosophy from a pragmatist’s standpoint. Lastly, I shall suggest that on the way towards the Investigations while Wittgenstein abandoned transcendental assumptions of his early philosophy he nevertheless did not simply surrender to Ramsey’s pragmatism, either.

Thomas Uebel (Manchester) Other Minds in Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism

This talk will consider how the problem of other minds was treated by two theorists often thrown into the same logical positivist/empiricist pot: Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer. It will be argued that there obtained major differences of approach between them -- already before Ayer turned "apostate" in 1940. But apart from demonstrating the distance between Language, Truth and Logic and the Vienna Circle doctrines it claimed to represent, this talk will also explore what potential Carnap's position held once it is recognised that he was not, as is standardly claimed, a "logical behaviourist".

Wim Vanrie (Ghent) Deleuze reads Russell (and Frege): The Power of Paradox

Russell’s and Frege’s responses to Russell’s paradox reflect their views of logic, either as articulating the constitutive logical structure of language (Frege), or as a dynamic activity of proposing, testing, and revising theories akin to the sciences (Russell). I argue that, if we move beyond his self-characterizations, we can find a third option exhibited in Russell’s theory of types, which I articulate by employing some of the philosophical tools presented in Deleuze’s Logique du Sens. In an nutshell, the idea is to exploit the notion of paradox to conceive of logic as at once constitutive of thought and dynamic.

Sander Verhaegh (TiLPS, Tilburg) The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters (1929-1932)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) the American philosophical landscape in the late 1920s, and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism.

Andreas Vrahimis (University of Cyprus) Lebensphilosophie and the History of Logical Empiricism

The history of early analytic philosophy, and especially the work of the logical empiricists, has often been seen as involving antagonisms with rival schools. Though recent scholarship has interrogated the Vienna Circle’s relations with e.g. phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism, important works by some of its leading members are involved in responding to the rising tide of Lebensphilosophie. This paper will explore Neurath’s reaction against Spengler, Schlick’s musings on Nietzsche and the meaning of life, and Carnap’s configuration of the relation between Lebensphilosophie and the overcoming of metaphysics.