The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (70 page)

(d) The Early Wittgenstein

Carnap’s rejection of the synthetic
a priori
in favour of a simple binary classification of all truths is fully in keeping with Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
. But the specific account that he gives of what it is for a truth to fall on one side or the other of his divide is much less so. Indeed, there is tension between Carnap’s understanding of what it is for a truth to be analytic and Wittgenstein’s. This tension is clearest in the logical pluralism that we have just witnessed in Carnap. Wittgenstein is as keen as Carnap to insist that there is an arbitrary element in our use of language. But he also insists that
there is a non-arbitrary element in it, and that logic, which ‘must look after itself’ (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 5.473), pertains to the latter (ibid., 6.124; cf. 3.342).
²³
Again, Carnap’s insistence that it must always be possible to confirm a synthetic truth by appeal to sense experience has no precursor in the
Tractatus
. All we find there is the insistence that it must never be possible to confirm an analytic truth in that way (ibid., 6.1222).
²⁴
Finally, Carnap’s dichotomy is intended as an altogether cruder instrument of destruction than Wittgenstein’s. Its destructive power should not be exaggerated, as I urged in §1. Nevertheless, as we shall see in §5, Carnap’s use of it to expose illusions of sense shows much less respect than we find in Wittgenstein for the various impulses that make such illusions possible, impulses which, after all, Wittgenstein spent the
Tractatus
engaging, exploiting, and arguably even fostering (see
Ch. 9
, §§5–8).
²⁵
All these differences bear witness to the Humean empiricism at work in Carnap – but not in Wittgenstein.
²⁶

Another difference, to which we shall return in §5, is that Carnap, unlike Wittgenstein, acknowledges a kind of nonsense in which perfectly meaningful words are combined in a way that violates their logical syntax, for example ‘Caesar is and’ (‘Elimination’, §4). What Wittgenstein would have said about this example is no different from what he would have said about ‘Caesar is quirxaceous’, namely that its nonsensicality is due simply to the fact that the third word in it, which is functioning here as an adjective, has no adjectival meaning; it is not that there is something somehow illegitimate about the very combination of words (Wittgenstein (
1961
), 5.473ff.; see
Ch. 9
, §3).

Finally, one very important similarity between the two is that Carnap shares Wittgenstein’s conception of good philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrine (‘Elimination’, p. 77; cf.
Philosophy
, Lecture I, §1, and p. 31). Admittedly, they have somewhat different views about the scope of the activity. In particular, Carnap has higher hopes than Wittgenstein
has for how much it can achieve and for how systematic it can be. For Wittgenstein, the proper function of philosophy is purely negative, to combat bad philosophy. For Carnap, it can also make a positive contribution to scientific enquiry. Indeed he goes as far as to say that it can ‘lay logical foundations for factual science and for mathematics’ (‘Elimination’, p. 77). He thinks it can do this by clarifying the workings of particular linguistic frameworks, so that scientists and mathematicians can then choose between them. Still, he agrees that what Wittgenstein identifies as the sole legitimate aim of philosophy is one of its principal aims: the elimination of what I called above ‘bad philosophy’ and what they both call ‘metaphysics’.

(e) The Later Wittgenstein

The continuity in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy means that this last cluster of comparisons applies equally to the later work. But the contrasts are now if anything more pronounced. Although Carnap distinguishes sharply between philosophy and other sciences, ‘other’ is the operative word. Philosophy is itself a scientific enterprise for him: systematic, governed by general principles, detached. This view is an anathema to the later Wittgenstein, for whom philosophy has to be piecemeal, contextual, engaged. Relatedly, we find in Carnap support for the objection that I brought against the later Wittgenstein in the previous chapter. Carnap sees no reason why philosophy should be restricted to clarifying extant linguistic frameworks that have been misunderstood in one way or another, why it should not present us with brand new linguistic frameworks. In fact such innovation is in Carnap’s view the very business of philosophy. Precisely what philosophers should be doing is striving to provide (other) scientists with options for couching whatever sense they make of things, there being no obvious reason why the linguistic frameworks they already use are best suited to this purpose.
²⁷

But as for the very idea of a linguistic framework, that has much about it that would be congenial to the later Wittgenstein.
²⁸
He too holds that there are rules determining how we are to represent things without themselves representing anything, and that whether or not we are right to adopt these rules is a matter of utility rather than a matter of truth or falsity.
²⁹
And he too holds that for us to adopt such rules is, in part, for us to be prepared to affirm certain propositions, such as – to revert once more to our stock example – that aunts are female. Conversely, the Wittgensteinian idea that these very propositions may come to play a representative role instead
(
Ch. 10
, §3) has its counterpart in Carnap, who acknowledges that linguistic and non-linguistic pressures can transform analytic truths determined by the rules of one framework into synthetic truths assertable within another (
Logical Syntax
, pp. 318–319).

4. Glances Ahead

(a) Quine

In the next chapter we shall see Quine taking possession of the empiricism handed down by the logical positivists, just as they take possession of that handed down by Hume.
³⁰
We shall also however see him discarding some of its embellishments, which it has acquired from the analytic mould in which it has been cast. Quine will attempt to revert to something rawer. This is not because of any opposition to analytic philosophy. On the contrary. He wants to refashion analytic philosophy, not to reject it. It is as though he wants to reverse the functions: to let the basic empiricism that he inherits be the mould and to let the fundamental precepts of analytic philosophy (the respect for clarity, the methodical attention to language, etc.) be what gets poured into that mould. In particular, we shall see him invoking empiricist principles to challenge the very distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, as well as the idea, implicit in much of the logical positivist literature, that each meaningful statement stands in relations of confirmation and confutation to different possible courses of sense experience, independently of other statements.
³¹

Full discussion of these matters will have to wait until the next chapter (see in particular §4). But it is relevant to note here that, whatever may be true of other logical positivists,
Carnap
is far from being a straightforward target for Quine. (I do not mean to suggest that Quine is under any illusions on this point.) Carnap’s own analytic credentials are nuanced enough for him to be at least out of Quine’s direct firing line, if indeed he is not himself already firing in the same direction. Thus concerning the analytic/synthetic distinction there is the subtlety mentioned at the very end of the previous section, whereby in Carnap’s view a truth’s status as one or other of these can change.
³²
And concerning the point about the confirmation
and confutation of meaningful statements, Quine’s famous ‘countersuggestion[, namely] … that our statements … face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body,’ can, as Quine himself notes, already be found in Carnap (Quine (
1961b
), p. 41).
³³
Thus in
Logical Syntax
we find:

[A] test applies, at bottom, not to a single hypothesis but to the whole system of physics as a system of hypotheses
. (p. 318, emphasis in original)
³⁴

(b) Heidegger

Carnap thinks that, as often as not, the nonsense that metaphysicians produce involves violations of logical syntax. (For further discussion, including comparisons with Wittgenstein, see the next section.) In §5 of ‘Elimination’ he selects a passage from Heidegger as an especially graphic illustration of what he has in mind. The relevant passage occurs just after Heidegger has proclaimed that science is concerned with the investigation of what he calls ‘beings’. Heidegger writes:

What should be examined [i.e. in science] are beings only, and besides that – nothing; beings alone, and further – nothing; solely beings, and beyond that – nothing. (Heidegger (
1993a
), p. 95)
³⁵

He then asks, ‘What about this nothing?’ (ibid.) And he ventures various suggestions about it, including the notorious suggestion that ‘the nothing … noths.’
³⁶
In Carnap’s view this is a paradigm of the kind of confusion against which a proper training in logic, in particular Fregean logic, can serve as a bulwark: Heidegger is treating the quantifier ‘nothing’ as a name and is getting into an unholy muddle about that whose name it is.
³⁷
(Not that familiarity with logic is any guarantee against such confusion. As Carnap laments, Heidegger knows full well that he is flouting certain fundamental principles of received logical wisdom and thinks that the fault lies with
received logical wisdom (‘Elimination’, pp. 71–72; see Heidegger (
1993a
), pp. 96ff.).)
^38
,
39

5. The Implications for Metaphysics

What are the implications of Carnap’s views for metaphysics? As with some of our earlier protagonists, this question divides into two. What are the implications of his views for metaphysics on his own conception? What are their implications for metaphysics on mine?

(a) The Implications for Metaphysics on Carnap’s Own Conception of Metaphysics

Carnap defines metaphysics as ‘the field of alleged knowledge of the essence of things which transcends the realm of empirically founded, inductive science’ (‘Elimination’, Supplementary Remarks, p. 80; cf.
Aufbau
, §182, and
Philosophy
, Lecture I, §2).
⁴⁰
And his views immediately preclude such knowledge. There are only two kinds of knowledge for Carnap:
a priori
knowledge of analytic truths determined by the rules of some linguistic framework, and empirical knowledge of synthetic truths expressible within such a framework. Beyond these there is neither knowledge nor indeed sense-making. Metaphysics is a sham. It has to be exposed. And it has to be eliminated. (See ‘Elimination’, esp. §§5 and 6, and
Pseudoproblems
, esp. Pt II.)

I said in the previous section that Carnap takes metaphysicians’ nonsense often to involve violations of logical syntax. This can easily put us in mind of Wittgenstein. But there are two important reasons for resisting any simple assimilation of the two. The first and more basic reason is that, while the idea that metaphysicians misunderstand logical syntax is certainly Wittgensteinian, the idea that they violate it is not. Or at least, it is not early-Wittgensteinian. (It is arguably not later-Wittgensteinian, either.
⁴¹
) As I commented in §3(d), where Carnap sees logical syntax being violated, Wittgenstein sees only words being used without meaning. But second, and more significant in this context, Wittgenstein counts such deviant linguistic behaviour – the use of words without meaning due to a misunderstanding of logical syntax – as more or less a defining characteristic of metaphysics, whereas for Carnap it is but a symptom of metaphysics, as already defined. The essence of metaphysics, for Carnap, remains the underlying urge ‘to discover and formulate a kind of knowledge which is not accessible to empirical science’ (‘Elimination’, p. 76). He writes:

Since metaphysics does not want to assert analytic propositions, nor to fall within the domain of empirical science, it is compelled to employ words for which no criteria of application are specified and which are therefore devoid of sense, or else to combine meaningful words in such a way that neither an analytic … statement nor an empirical statement is produced.
⁴²
In either case pseudo-statements are the inevitable product. (‘Elimination’, p. 76)

Sometimes, Carnap thinks, when we appear to be engaged in perfectly legitimate metaphysics, what is illusory is not that what we are engaged in is perfectly legitimate, but that what we are engaged in is metaphysics. Moreover, the source of the illusion in such cases is the same as in cases where the illusion is the other way round. It is a failure on our part properly to grasp the logical syntax of our own language. More specifically, it is a failure on our part to register that certain words are being used to draw attention, not to what they are standardly used to draw attention to, but to themselves. For instance, suppose I want to convey that the word ‘rose’ is a noun, or a ‘thing’-word. Then one quite acceptable way for me to do this is to say, ‘A rose is a thing.’ Here it looks as though I am making a metaphysical claim about the essence of roses. Really, I am making an analytic claim
about how the word ‘rose’ functions.
⁴³
(See
Philosophy
, p. 62.) In Carnap’s own terminology, I am adopting
the material mode of speech
. Had I said, ‘The word “rose” is a “thing”-word,’ I would have been adopting the less misleading
formal mode of speech
(
Logical Syntax
, Pt V.A, and
Philosophy
, Lecture II, §8).
⁴⁴