She makes two main points: First, that — contrary to my critique — she did in fact (implicitly) make the principle of tolerance a criterion for distinguishing between the earlier and later Carnap, and second, that Carnap was not against metaphysics but against certain meta-metaphysical connotations of metaphysical positions. (I’m less sure about this second one.)

Regarding the first point, she argues that Carnap’s well-known statement of the principle of tolerance in §17 of the Syntax can be interpreted to mean “that there are ‘frameworks’, some statements are internal and some are external to a framework”. But there is no mention of statements internal or external to a language (the expression “framework” dates to 1950) in Syntax §17, and in fact, as I pointed out in my original post, Carnap already employed frameworks (under a different name) in the Aufbau, as the criterion for distinguishing between “scientific” and “metaphysical” realism. He did not use ESO language there, but the idea is the same. To claim something as “real” is an example of scientific realism, he says in §§175-8, if it is constitutable within the constitution system outlined in the first part of the book, but if it isn’t so constitutable, then this claim is an example of metaphysical realism (and therefore vacuous); so existence is framework-relative (constitution-system-relative) just as in ESO. Since Carnap is explicitly pluralist about constitution systems (and presents the Aufbau as merely an example of a constitution system, not as the definitively correct one), this criterion can be assumed to apply to any constitution system. Carnap is already “tolerant” regarding constitution systems, then, in the Aufbau (as Michael Friedman liked to point out). He is also tolerant about different philosophical ways of articulating the world; he explicitly regards e.g. realism and phenomenalism as merely different façons de parler. But what he is not yet tolerant about is different systems of logic, and different ways of constructing logical and mathematical systems; the principle of tolerance in the Syntax (and in the 1932 paper replying to Neurath about the form of Protokollsätze) specifically extended tolerance to these most basic considerations, and opposed the previous “absolutism” of thinking there was a “correct” way of articulating them.

So “tolerance” in the sense of the Syntax principle of tolerance is not equivalent to the idea “that there are ‘frameworks’, some statements are internal and some are external to a framework”. Carnap had the second idea long before the first. Nor do they imply each other in any way. Take as an example the three competing doctrines about the foundations of mathematics during the Vienna Circle period: logicism, intuitionism, and formalism (the discussion of these is the context of that famous quotation from the Syntax enunciating the principle of tolerance). There is no contradiction between the idea “that there are ‘frameworks’, some statements are internal and some are external to a framework” and the idea that one of those three doctrines about the foundations of mathematics is the correct framework, and the other two mistaken. That is what most people thought, and indeed still think, about these matters — along the lines of the proto-intuitionist Kronecker, who thought “die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.” Carnap’s point was that it’s ALL Menschenwerk; there’s no criterion of correctness anywhere out there in the world to tell us what logic to use or how to conceive of mathematics. There’s no more empirical evidence for deciding between logicism and intuitionism than there is for deciding between realism and phenomenalism. It’s up to us.

So not only does she not mention the principle of tolerance explicitly, as one of her three criteria to distinguish the earlier from the later Carnap, but the principle of tolerance is not even implicit in any of those three criteria, including her third one, in which she claims, in her response, the principle of tolerance is implicit. It is not.

Flocke’s second point concerns the distinction between metaphysics and meta-metaphysics. She says, “I argue that there’s a difference between a metaphysics, e.g. ‘Necessarily, everything is necessarily something’ (necessitism), and a meta-metaphysics, e.g. ‘Necessitism describes the fundamental structure of reality’. Carnap did not want to liberate us from metaphysics (e.g. necessitism), he said to accept a metaphysics is a matter of accepting a framework, which is a fine thing to do. He wanted to liberate us from meta-metaphysical mistakes, such as believing that accepting necessitism is to have a correct view of the fundamental structure of reality.”

I’m not sure how to respond to this. To start with, I guess I would ask, where did Carnap ever say anything remotely like “to accept a metaphysics is a matter of accepting a framework”? Presumably she is aware that he never said any such thing, but relies rather on her interpretation of the Syntax §17 passage she quotes, according to which: “to accept a logic is a matter of accepting a ‘framework’. The types of logic Carnap had in mind when writing the Logical Syntax of Language involved metaphysical claims, regarding the existence and nature of numbers. So, in that regard, to accept a metaphysics is a matter of accepting a ‘framework’.”

But how could the “frameworks” (Carnap did not use this term in the Syntax; there he just called them “languages”) involve metaphysical claims, when they don’t even have interpretations (that came several years later)? They are just bare syntactic marks on a page or a blackboard, with no semantics, just as Hilbert distinguished purely mathematical geometry from physical geometry (a distinction that Einstein claimed was crucial to his own discovery of relativity), and Carnap accordingly called his syntactic approach a “pure geometry of language”. There aren’t even any physics involved, let alone metaphysics!

And then I would want to ask how the assertion of necessitism (using her statement of it) differs from the claim that necessitism (in this same sense) “describes the fundamental structure of reality”. This is essentially the same redundancy as the one we encounter between “The grass is green” and “‘The grass is green’ is true.” — where the first statement is in the object language and the second in a metalanguage. They say the same thing. So I’m unsure what distinction is being drawn here.

Finally I would insist on a certain principle of interpretive charity, or perhaps interpretive integrity or something, according to which the author’s own use of words is to be deferred to when interpreting that author’s work. (Perhaps this is just a principle of sound hermeneutics — in the old, Schleiermacher sense rather than the newfangled Heideggerian, Gadamer sense.) If I advance the startling claim that Kant rejected synthetic a priori statements, it’s off limits — according to this principle — to then say, “oh well, I’m using the words ‘synthetic a priori statements’ to mean ‘Swedenborgianism’, which Kant clearly rejected”. So I really don’t see the point of attributing to Carnap the statement (which he obviously would have rejected outright) that “to accept a metaphysics is a matter of accepting a framework”. I am open to the idea that Carnap became more willing to recognize a grey area between meaningful and meaningless statements in his later years, and in that sense became more tolerant of things some of us might count as metaphysical; I’ve more or less endorsed this view myself. Also I’m open to the idea that some of what Carnap wrote in the Aufbau (notably the sections §§155-7, where he talks about eliminating the basic relation) is, as David Lewis later said, metaphysical by Carnap’s own standards at that time — Fraser Macbride has meticulously documented this. So it’s not like I’m allergic to associating Carnap with metaphysics in any way; but let’s play by the rules!

A kick-off meeting to launch the project and coordinate with the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Rudolf Carnap was held about a month ago, here in Munich, and many of us who launched that project years ago were there, including Rick Creath, Steve Awodey, and Sandy Zabell. That edition will benefit greatly from the coordination; what it lacked, from the beginning, was a central coordinating organization that could follow up on all the many stages each volume has to go through before publication, and keep things on track. That will now be supplied by this new project, which includes the Complete Works as an outreach module, with English translations for an international scholarly audience, alongside the online critical editions of the original texts in their original languages (mostly German for everything before 1935). Only two volumes of the Complete Works have been published so far; vol. 1 (Early Writings) in 2019 and vol. 7 (the Studies in Semantics) in 2024; expect many more volumes to come out in the next couple of years. I am very encouraged by the first steps.

In addition to the Oxford Complete Works, Meiner Verlag of Hamburg (the publishers of the Philosophische Bibliothek, the green volumes used by all philosophy students in German-speaking Central Europe since it was launched over a century ago) will publish print volumes of the RCD critical editions in German. All in all, this project marks a turning point in the reception of Carnap and logical empiricism in their places of origin. Since they were scattered to the corners of the earth in the 1930s by the Nazis, the logical empiricists have been read and discussed mainly by English-speaking philosophers. At the kickoff meeting last month, though, over half the people in the room were Germans or Austrians. Gradually, almost a century after the publication of the Aufbau, Carnap is becoming part of the philosophical canon in his home country.

Since this is the first post on this blog in a couple of years, I should mention that it will now gradually come back to life after this long hibernation. There is a lot to catch up on; I’m not sure exactly where to start, but the first few posts will inevitably be announcements of this sort. Never fear — I’ll get back to the more substantive things that get on people’s nerves before long.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find an English translation yet, and haven’t had time to provide one myself. If anyone finds a decent one, could they let me know? I’ll link that as well. (Or if enough people ask, and I still can’t find one, I might even translate it.)

Flocke makes clear she has only the “late” Carnap in mind, i.e. the Carnap of the principle of tolerance, though she never makes that an explicit criterion for the lateness of the late Carnap; in her mind, the dividing line between early and late Carnap is marked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. And it’s certainly true that they did play a role (as discussed in great detail in the now-ancient papers by Steve Awodey and myself about this transition), but the only role she assigns them is that “Gödel’s discovery showed verificationism to be false” (p. 37). Hm, really? It’s not clear, though, that Carnap ever went in for verificationism, and if he did, it’s not clear what he might have meant by it. When he discusses verificationism in retrospect (in Testability and Meaning), he doesn’t actually say anywhere that he once endorsed it — as he does admit there e.g. to having adhered to finitism in the Aufbau.

Anyway, Flocke says that an opposition to metaphysics can be understood two ways; one can object to metaphysics as subject matter, or one can object to the methods employed; in the latter case, metaphysics can be made acceptable if the methods are changed. The early Carnap, she says, was a subject-matter anti-metaphysician. But the later, post-Gödel Carnap was a merely methodological anti-metaphysician, she argues, and since metaphysicians have changed their methods since his day, Carnap would approve of a lot of present-day metaphysics, such as the examples she gives in her final section.

She does not address the question how and why the pre-Gödel verificationist turned into the open-minded advocate of “a distinctive metaphysical methodology” (p. 45). Still, she discerns three differences between the “early” and the “late” Carnap; the late Carnap, she says, unlike the early one: (1) “distinguishes between framework principles and other sentences”; (2) regards analyticity as a “framework-dependent concept”; and (3) “distinguishes between internal and external statements” rather than regarding any sentence as meaningless that can’t be verified (“or falsified”). The principle of tolerance, it seems, doesn’t enter into it in her view.

Actually, only the second of these distinguishes the earlier from the later Carnap, and that only marginally. Regarding (1), the Carnap of the Aufbau certainly distinguished the components of the constitution system itself (the basis plus logic, including quasi-analysis; these are what individuate constitution systems) from other sentences. And regarding (3), Carnap distinguishes in the Aufbau between “scientific” and “metaphysical” realism. Something is real in the “scientific” sense, Carnap defines, if it can be constituted in the Aufbau‘s constitution system; otherwise it’s metaphysical. This distinction obviously maps very closely onto its successor, the ESO distinction between internal and external statements or questions. Regarding (2), analyticity was certainly framework-dependent in the Aufbau (constitution-system-dependent), but in the text of the Aufbau itself, this is not made explicit, nor is there even implicitly any room for alternative logical and mathematical frameworks. Shortly after the Aufbau was published, though, Carnap made “analytic equivalence” (definability from the rules of the system) the basis of his “New Foundation of Logic” composed in Davos in early 1929 (see my book, pp. 196-203, with the background on the Allgemeine Axiomatik on pp. 191-6), and also used this new approach and terminology when Eino Kaila visited Vienna a few months later. Whereupon Kaila, in his 1930 book about the Vienna Circle — actually just about the Aufbau — organized his discussion of the book around “analytic equivalence,” to Carnap’s delight (Ch. 8 of my book). So Flocke’s (2) doesn’t really distinguish the early from the late Carnap, either.

The almost universal consensus about what distinguishes early from late Carnap is that it was something to do with the principle of tolerance. To which I would add the larger context of what I’ve called the “Carnapian linguistic turn” (to distinguish it from the Fregean one highlighted by Dummett), which began with the well-known “sleepless night” in January 1931 that resulted in the first sketch of the syntax idea, the “Versuch einer Metalogik,” in which Carnap gave up his series of efforts to fuse Hilbert and Wittgenstein and went entirely over to the Hilbert side. And since “meaning” was therefore no longer an issue, of course the critique of metaphysics had to change, since the diagnosis of “meaninglessness” no longer had any traction in the new program (intended initially as purely syntactic). Carnap pointed this out when he first presented his new idea to the Vienna Circle, in June of 1931, and suggested a new approach to the critique of metaphysics. Without yet having invented the terminology, he replaced the classification of metaphysics as “meaningless” with its classification as framed in the “material mode of speech” (inhaltliche Redeweise). Carnap was realistic enough to understand that ordinary language was committed to the material mode, though, and that the Vienna Circle was not going to change people’s ingrained speech habits, so the material mode wasn’t condemned outright — it was portrayed only as dangerously misleading, since it suggested that the meta-scientific items it referred to (such as numbers, or functions, or causes) amounted to more than just language. The criterion of acceptability became translatability into the formal mode of speech, where only linguistic artifacts are referred to (including those of the scientific object language), not (extra-linguistic) things. So the material mode was okay for everyday use provided everything was translatable into the formal mode.

With this new criterion the diagnosis of metaphysics as non-cognitive, in the Syntax, became a matter of classification rather than a claim that it lacked “meaning” and was therefore “nonsense.” But when a straightened form of “meaning” was reintroduced a few years later with Carnap’s embrace of Tarski’s semantics, there was no concerted reversion to the previous exclusion of metaphysics for reasons of meaninglessness. Carnap recognized that by the principle of tolerance he could not, on cognitive grounds, exclude ad-hoc frameworks for just about any metaphysical garbage anyone could dream up. He could still classify a lot of metaphysics as external to the generally accepted frameworks employed in mathematics and empirical science, as practiced in universities and research institutions — and therefore of no cognitive significance by those standards. But as the principle of tolerance had made explicit, anyone can construct any framework they like. So the emphasis shifted, as Cohen and Marschall point out, to the question of the value of an inquiry, and the value judgement that metaphysics has little or no value.

Flocke’s taxonomy of possible Carnapian reasons for rejecting metaphysics (whereby subject-matter and methodological reasons exhaust the possibility space) is therefore seriously incomplete. As we’ve just seen, it’s incomplete both with respect to the early Carnap and with respect to the later Carnap. The early Carnap began with a meaning-theoretical exclusion of metaphysics (as failing to meet a criterion of meaningfulness), then in 1931 moved to a classificatory demotion of metaphysics (as failing the test of translatability into the formal mode of speech), then after gradually assimilating the consequences of adopting the principle of tolerance in late 1932, the later Carnap eventually dropped explicit criteria of meaning and classification altogether (as far as metaphysics was concerned) and focused rather on the low (or negative) value of metaphysics. NB: None of these three successive stances vis-à-vis metaphysics concerns either the subject matter or the method of metaphysics.

The arguments Carnap gives for his value judgement about metaphysics in ESO are articulated as essentially utilitarian. In a stand-off between a realist and a nominalist about mathematical entities, he says:

I cannot think of any possible evidence that would be regarded as relevant by both philosophers, and therefore, if actually found, would decide the controversy or at least make one of the opposite theses more probable than the other. (To construe the numbers as classes or properties of the second level, according to the Frege-Russell method, does, of course, not solve the controversy, because the first philosopher would affirm and the second deny the existence of the system of classes or properties of the second level.) Therefore I feel compelled to regard the external question as a pseudo-question, until both parties to the controversy offer a common interpretation of the question as a cognitive question; this would involve an indication of possible evidence regarded as relevant by both sides. (ESO, p. 219)

The two sides can’t agree on a common standard for the appraisal of arguments for or against their respective positions, therefore both positions, neither internal to any framework acceptable to both, must be excluded as addressing an external pseudo-question. (Which just follows from the definitions.) The value judgement is based, in other words, on the pointlessness of comparing the relative merits of two positions if the holders of those positions can’t agree on what “merit” consists in. This can be interpreted as utilitarian in a narrow (Gradgrind-style) sense, i.e. people shouldn’t waste their time and mental resources on metaphysics rather than something socially useful and productive. That interpretation isn’t exactly wrong, but it is such a small part of the answer as to constitute a fundamental misunderstanding.

In fact, it’s not so distant from the — hostile — misunderstanding entertained by Horkheimer and Adorno about logical empiricism back in the 1930s. They saw Carnap & Co as trying to restrict human dreams and aspirations, so as to force them to conform with dominant social and scientific norms and keep them tame. Since the Frankfurt School rightly thought that unruly human dreams and aspirations need to go beyond what is, and try to imagine what could be, they saw metaphysics as an essential vehicle for the articulation of such aspirational visions. But this was exactly backwards. Carnap not only thought, like Wittgenstein (Investigations 118), that metaphysics failed in this role because it consisted of Luftgebäude (buildings in the air); his main objection to metaphysics was its authoritarian subordination of human aspirations, their imprisonment in a particular version of what is. It did the opposite of what Horkheimer and Adorno imagined it could achieve — by trying to put us in a cage of what really and ultimately is, in realms where humans are actually free to imagine and decide for themselves. (It’s sort of tragic that Adorno of all people set so much store by metaphysics in this aspirational role, since he was after all himself an artist — a composer and student of Alban Berg, as well as close musical collaborator with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus — and would have agreed entirely with Carnap that art was the superior vehicle for the articulation of transcendent aspirations.) It’s this positive aspect of Carnap’s conception that really mattered to him, and this aspect was the whole point of, and motivation for, the critique of metaphysics: the positive idea of liberation from authoritative versions of how things really are and forever have to be.

But, Flocke might object, current metaphysics isn’t the sort that Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind; metaphysics has become much more science-friendly and forward-looking. But the tendency of analytic metaphysics has precisely not been aspirational and imaginative of undreamt new possibilities; on the contrary, as Ladyman and Ross complain, its primary role has been to “domesticate” ideas in recent science that are utterly non-intuitive, i.e. to try to assimilate them somehow to familiar human intuitions, to tame them and render them less disturbing. Instead of utopian imagination we have reactionary conformity to the familiar.

Of the three examples Flocke gives for present-day metaphysics that she thinks would meet with Carnap’s approval, the first (Haslanger’s “ameliorative analysis”) doesn’t fall within what Carnap would have considered metaphysical — it’s just a case of explication. With a different goal from Carnap’s own projects of explication, to be sure (a goal of social progress rather than increased precision), but still basically just explication. Flocke’s other two examples (metaphysical grounding and Williamson’s “necessitism”) lie squarely within the philosophical kingdom of darkness that Carnap wanted to liberate us from. They try to use logical and conceptual tools to argue that the world is fundamentally a certain way, a certain way that in both those cases lies outside the boundaries of what any current science can say anything about. Not only, therefore, does it lie outside of what we can coherently say anything about in explicit language, Carnap would have said, but it tries to imprison us in somebody’s conception of how things have to be. Why would we voluntarily go along with that?

It showed in other predictable ways; Bill often gave parties in his apartment on Everett, to which all sorts of unexpected and interesting characters were invited, to the point where it just never occurred to me any more to ask (myself) when encountering anyone there, “What the hell are you doing here?” The parties were never quite the same, either; they always differed interestingly from each other in their sizes and compositions, in ways suggesting that perhaps Rebecca (Bill’s partner, who lived — still lives — in the apartment next door on the same floor, and was always present at the parties) had a hand in the invitations. Then there were also the reading groups. The longest-running one, and the one I most immediately remember, was about Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics, the long-awaited sequel to Frege: Philosophy of Language. Also present were Steve Awodey, Erich Reck, Mike Price, and (sometimes) Leonard Linsky. The meetings were characterized by Bill’s steadily increasing impatience with both Dummett and Frege, and eventuated in Bill’s ill-tempered “Frege vs. Cantor and Dedekind” in the Linsky Festschrift (Early Analytic Philosophy) that he edited and I published. I do remember that the original version — which we discussed in the reading group — was significantly more ill-tempered than what was eventually published. In any case, the upshot is that when I think back on my overly extended graduate school years in Hyde Park, Bill’s apartment is one of the sites I mainly visualize, as much as Steve Awodey’s on 53rd (the scene of other reading groups), or the Anscombe Lounge in the Classics Building (where the philosophy department was then located), or the Seminary Co-op (when it was still in the basement of the building on the corner of 58th and University, and run by Jack Cella) or the Regenstein.

(Howard’s apartment, in contrast, I was only ever in long after I ceased being a graduate student; he never gave parties or held reading groups — which one wouldn’t expect of an Old Testament prophet anyway, I guess. I remember seeing on his desk a paperback re-issue of the Adam & Tannery edition of the complete Descartes. When I exclaimed at this — knowing well his attitude to Descartes — he made a face and muttered, “Well, as Luther said, you must keep the devil ever before you!”)

After his retirement, Bill maintained regular contact not just with Howard, but also with Leonard; they formed what they called the “Old Fogies Club” whose motto was “Forgotten but not gone” (I can’t remember whether they ever actually had the intended T-shirts made.) Now, suddenly, all three of them are gone. As for the “forgotten”, I think that referred not to the wider world, but to their former department, which all three felt comprehensively alienated from. (Which didn’t prevent Bill from inviting a number of its members to the party he gave at his place after my viva, I was glad to see.) We had the Old Fogies — and their partners, Rebecca West (professor of Italian literature) and Alexandra Bellow (professor of mathematics, who figures prominently under a fictional name in her former husband’s novel The Dean’s December) — over to dinner at our place once. It was lively; perhaps a bit too much so. The political disagreements that led to a cooling-off of relations among the three (mainly Leonard from the other two) were very much in evidence, with Leonard aggressively promoting — and quoting from — the later anti-Islamic provocations of Oriana Fallaci. To put things in perspective: Leonard had grown up in the Fairfax neighborhood of LA, and his brother had died in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. Still, during this period (early oughts), he seemingly lost all restraint, and would bombard anyone he knew with his latest revelations from Fallaci; once I randomly encountered him on the street somewhere, and he launched into it before we could even say hello or anything; I was in a hurry, but it was a huge effort to interrupt him in his flow and get him to acknowledge that I needed to go. A few years later, when he heroically bore the burden of caring for his increasingly dementia-ridden wife Joanie, Bill told me that this gruelling ordeal had finally turned Leonard into a better person.

Bill didn’t have all that high an opinion of Carnap (I don’t think he knew much about him). Nonetheless, though he was initially my supervisor (I had wanted to work on Cantor and Russell), he didn’t object when I wandered off to work on Carnap with Howard, and even insisted on staying on the committee. (It just meant that he made sure to direct the occasional rude remark about Carnap toward me once in a while.) Still, he once, in the context of arguing that the university needed to give more priority and respect to philosophy — not the way it used to with Hutchins, under the baleful influence of Mortimer Adler, but in an enlightened way — suggested that more recognition should be given to the department’s past, which it had little (apart from Adler) to be ashamed of. For instance, he thought, the central roundabout in the middle of the main university quadrangle should be renamed “Carnap Circle”. When someone hesitantly objected, he immediately shot back, “Well, can you name anyone who ever taught here who could possibly deserve it more?”

At Bill’s retirement in 2000, there was a conference in his honor, but unlike the conferences for Leonard and Howard, this one wasn’t published, as no one could be found to edit it at the time. Erich Reck made up for that a few years ago with an entirely new batch of papers by students (including himself and Steve Awodey, my contemporaries) and colleagues (including Charles Parsons, Warren Goldfarb, Tom Ricketts, Geoff Hellman, Sol Feferman, and Michael Friedman — an impressive lineup). This volume was supposed to include a paper by Howard about Christoffel’s theory of numbers (already announced in the program for a conference in Pittsburgh in 1995, but not delivered), which kept being promised but never materialized.

The last time I saw Bill was six or seven years ago. I’d come up to his apartment and as I sat there and we talked, at the familiar table in his dining room, snow began to fall outside, which also felt very familiar. The years in between dropped away; Bill himself had hardly changed; the parties and reading groups felt very recent, as if they were still going on in those walls. But he complained that the three flights of stairs up to his apartment were getting increasingly hard to negotiate and that he and Rebecca were looking for other places to live. So I realized that it might after all be the last time I would be sitting in that familiar place, with the familiar snow falling outside the familiar window, and I shouldn’t be so complacent. And as I now know, with sad finality, it was in fact the last time.

I haven’t really said anything about Bill’s work. Richard Zach has a very good obituary (with a great photo) that goes into some detail on Bill’s contributions to logic, but one could easily get the impression from it — despite Richard’s explicit words to the contrary — that Bill wasn’t all that interested in more general problems of philosophy, and that would be very misleading. I was especially enthusiastic about Bill’s paper at the Boolos Memorial Conference at Notre Dame in 1998, “Beyond the Axioms” (later published in Philosophia Mathematica), in which he apologizes for offering something so potentially vague and inexact in memory of Boolos, who tended to like precision. (And several members of the audience there worried about Bill’s dangerous proximity in that paper to what Jon Barwise had called “the black plague of postmodernism,” which in their view he hadn’t after all, despite his protestations, quite managed to ward off.) To me this paper seems very aligned with my (i.e. Howard’s) understanding of Carnap, and Carnap’s understanding of Hilbert; Bill was surprised when I pointed this out to him. He was working on a larger project — focused on Wittgenstein — along those lines, and in fact signed a contract to publish it with Open Court, but I guess nothing ever came of that, unfortunately.

Of course I’ve hardly been able to ask him things for some years, now. I often sent him videos of my son’s violin (and quartet) performances, which he liked very much, and often commented on by e-mail, and when I was in California in the summer, we talked on the phone sometimes. But nothing like the regular discussions we would have while I was his doctoral student, or even for some years after that, while I still lived in Chicago, or was there regularly, up until about a decade ago. But even though he was obviously getting old, and reading was increasingly hard for him, he was mentally still very much there, and it always seemed like I could ask him about something if absolutely necessary, the possibiity was out there, and it’s devastating to realize, gradually, that it’s no longer even a remote option now.

There will be appreciations, I hope, in journals, perhaps even in newspapers (but what papers, I wonder?), and they will say something about his writing and his students. He was a terrible teacher and a very inspiring one — one never knew, on one’s way in to class, which it would turn out to be on a given day. Sometimes both. I will write more here about his work and his teaching once I’ve recovered a bit from this shock. Could be a while.

I believe Fons Dewulf (University of Tilburg) was able to interview him in some depth at his place in Chicago over a couple of days in January as part of an extensive project (including an oral-history component) about the exiled diaspora of logical empiricism during the 1930s and 40s, of whom Howard knew many, including of course his teacher (and initial doctoral supervisor) Carnap. I very much hope that was a productive conversation, and that it was recorded, or at least notes were taken. I did learn a certain amount about Howard’s life, over the years, but my efforts to get him to write an autobiographical introduction to his collected papers (which I’d contracted to publish at Open Court) remained unsuccessful. He intended to do it, or to try anyway, but said that whenever he tried to think about what to write he found it impossible, his mind went blank. He felt guilty about that, though. (Which of course made me feel guilty in turn, for having inflicted this task on him.) I remember him telling someone once (at a dinner after a talk at the University of Chicago, back when he still used to go to those occasionally) that the reason his papers still hadn’t been published was his own inability to write an introduction. He was very good at self-reproach; one got used to this in his classes. When he later noticed some minor mistake in a proof he’d shown us in class, for instance, he’d begin the following session by announcing solemnly “I have told you an untruth. . .”

I had been hoping to get some feedback from him on a number of names that come up in the remaining volumes of the Carnap diaries that Christian Damböck is editing, especially for the period when Carnap was at Chicago. Since it was hard for Howard to read, I’d been planning to call him this summer when I was back in the US and ask him about some of them by phone. Also I was going to read him some of Carnap’s more pointed comments on various people (such as Richard McKeon) that I knew Howard would enjoy. Alas!

PS (19 March): Eric Schliesser wrote something more like a proper obit yesterday, with a survey of Howard’s work and a deft characterization, including an extremely characteristic quotation from a recent e-mail. Not to be missed!

When his erstwhile tutor Paul Grice declared, “If you can’t put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying,” Strawson retorted: “If you can put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying.”

I actually agree with both of them, I think, though the versions of each I would go along with would insert an “often” or “usually” before “not worth saying.” Carnap, my philosophical grandfather (since Howard Stein, my Doktorvater, was a student of Carnap), would presumably have had more sympathy with Grice in this case than with Strawson (he said as much in his reply to Strawson in the Schilpp volume), but might also have agreed with his student Stein that there are things worth saying that, as Howard put it, can be “usefully vague” (by “vague” I assume he means something like “not amenable at the moment to any sort of formal or symbolic treatment”). He might also have added that the point wasn’t to put something into symbols but to make it more precise, that being “in symbols” is in itself no guarantee of precision, and that precision is (a) a matter of degree; (b) purpose-relative.

Humanities subjects have come in for a lot of criticism these days, especially since the disastrous testimony of those university presidents, where they idiotically walked right into Stefanik’s trap. I suppose most of what we in humanities subjects try to do falls into this grey area between what’s not worth saying because you can’t put it into symbols, and what isn’t worth saying because you can. It’s really hard to avoid those opposite pitfalls, and not everyone in the humanities is always even trying to avoid them, but I still think we should persist. That’s my wish for the new year.

I remember Leonard Linsky once telling me about Carnap in Champaign, where Leonard (in his first job, at the downstate U of I) had invited him for a guest semester, presumably at some point during the 40s. Leonard was appalled that his philosophy department was so unappreciative of their distinguished guest that they hadn’t even offered him an office; he had to sit in the common office room along with the lowly assistant professors like Leonard. So when curious visitors came to meet Carnap (quite a few, Leonard said), he often overheard parts of the conversations. One frequent visitor, he said, was a Catholic priest, who was interested in formalizing proofs of the existence of God. (“Putting it in symbols,” I guess; did that make it worth saying?) Leonard said he marvelled at Carnap’s patience with this guy, who was evidently a bit slow. Only once or twice did Carnap show any impatience; Leonard remembered him saying once, in quite an exasperated tone, “Can we just leave the concept of omnipotence out of this for now?”

(She also calls my post defamatory, though, and that seems disproportionate. The worst thing I accuse her of is — possibly — seeking attention, and she herself seems to think, in her reply to my post, that one possible motivation for pursuing an academic career is to seek attention. My post doesn’t link to her paper or even mention her name; the point of the post wasn’t her paper so much as my perennial gripe that philosophy, like so many of the traditional humanistic disciplines, is succumbing to the economics of attention. I thought her paper was an obvious example of that, but even if I was wrong, I doubt whether my opinion could count as defamatory, even in the more informal sense she probably had in mind.)

There remains a substantive difference, however, which her reply to my post serves to highlight. She says there “I do not accuse Frege of plagiarism. . . I just show that he plagiarized the Stoics. The title [“Frege plagiarized the Stoics”] is descriptive . . .” That claim, as I will now briefly argue, falls apart.

Since she is at Oxford, she is no doubt aware of the notion of “thick ethical concepts” as they were discussed by Philippa Foot and, perhaps most notably, by Bernard Williams in his 1985 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (though much has been written since; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Thick Ethical Concepts” by Pekka Väyrynen gives a good overview). These are ordinary-language concepts that are descriptive but have unmistakable evaluative connotations; typical examples are “tactful,” “boorish,” or “cruel.” These had long been discussed, and it had been assumed, e.g. by Hare, that it was possible in (all) such cases to effect a clean separation between the descriptive and evaluative components of such concepts. Since at latest Williams, that has been controversial. Many now think that the descriptive and evaluative components are so entangled in at least some such concepts that the previously imagined clean separation is a mirage.

Either way, “plagiarism” is clearly a thick ethical concept. It has obvious descriptive criteria (legal ones, in fact, in nearly all jurisdictions, though they vary widely), but is also evaluative; you can’t attribute an act of plagiarism to someone without also “accusing” them of it. Even if Bobzien belongs to the “separabilist” school of thought about thick concepts (like Hare), she can’t diagnose plagiarism in Frege without also “accusing” him of something nefarious. It is just not a merely descriptive word, it has a glued-in evaluative component that can’t be pried off. The word can’t be used in an evaluatively “neutral” way. If Bobzien wants to be evaluatively neutral and merely descriptive, as she claims, she has to choose different words, as “plagiarism” (like other thick concepts) is irrevocably contaminated. There is no way to jettison the normative component.

She might try to Humpty-Dumpty her way out of this, and insist that she only had the descriptive component of “plagiarism” in mind, and if anyone else chooses to understand the word in an evaluative way, that is their problem, not hers. But (to continue with Humpty Dumpty) she is not the master in that realm; by using the word, she is buying into its centuries of use in legal, literary, and academic contexts. By using English, one is agreeing to abide by its rules. Sure, one infraction isn’t going to exclude her from the linguistic community, and in exceptional cases even patent and systematic abuse of language, flying in the face of obvious facts, can be pulled off for decades, if it’s entertaining enough. Most of us boring academics and quasi-academics can’t afford to flout the rules so insouciantly, though (and can’t expect our surrounding communities to put up with it as tolerantly); we have to be more careful, and live by the rules we’ve bought into. “Plagiarism” can’t shed its evaluative component at will (or at all), and whether she likes it or not, Bobzien will be regarded — not just by busybody Kurrintenkacker who draw attention to it — as having a screw loose if she insists (Humpty-Dumpty-like) on her eccentric use of “plagiarism.” (Though as long as she doesn’t declare herself to be the Empress of All Souls she should be safe from anything much worse — lots of us have loose screws!)

“Rude” is another thick ethical concept (I do wish Williams had chosen a better name!). I admit I was rude in speculating about Bobzien’s motives for her linguistic eccentricity, and I apologize for that. Her accusations against me, though, are supposedly factual; she claims that what I said about her plagiarism paper is “false.” Some of it undoubtedly was, especially the stuff that speculated about her motives, but to claim that an assertion is false usually carries no moral implications. To give moral force to “false” she adds “defamatory,” another thick ethical concept. In analogy with her treatment of “plagiarism,” she could presumably claim that “defamatory” was merely descriptive, and that she was not “accusing” my post of being defamatory, just describing it.

The question whether Frege was “really” a plagiarist, or my post about it was “really” defamatory, will be classified differently by moral cognitivists and non-cognitivists. (Where a “quasi-realist” about normative statements like Blackburn would put them I’m not sure.) For non-cognitivists, there can be factual criteria for the descriptive component of the concept, but not for the evaluative component; for cognitivists, there can be both, though they would (for most moral realists) remain distinct and separate. Where everyone agrees is on the descriptive criteria, but note that in a case where they are not met, both components of the concept fail to apply.

Whether Bobzien’s case regarding Frege meets even these descriptive criteria for plagiarism is a different and more interesting question that I haven’t addressed, since it is completely outside my area of competence. I am informed, though, that the original authors of the paper she was supposedly refuting, joined by an authority on ancient logic, are publishing a reply to her plagiarism paper in History and Philosophy of Logic (in English this time), and that she will reply. That exchange, I’m sure, will be refreshingly low-key.

This might seem totally obvious, and not worth writing a paper about, but actually, if you look at analytic philosophy right now, not only is it once again in the grip of metaphysics, but many of those so gripped think their metaphysics is entirely reconcileable with some not-too-nitpicky version of logical empiricism, or of Carnap anyway. Theirs is a chastened metaphysics, they believe, and escapes the strictures pronounced back then. Many of those I’ve criticized on this blog, over the years, are of this persuasion, as are many I haven’t criticized. (Which means that being of this persuasion isn’t a sufficient condition to get yourself criticized on this blog.) Unfortunately, the situation isn’t very straightforward, though; there is no bright line separating the side of the angels from the dark side, and the toleration of analytic metaphysics ranges from zero to 100, with most people somewhere in the middle. So to explain why I think this new Cohen and Marschall paper is so terrific, I need to situate it in a larger picture of the place of metaphysics (and of Carnap) in current analytic philosophy.

Start with a broad, coarse-grained distinction between those who actually do what Carnap would have classified as metaphysics (and claim that it — more or less — escapes logical empiricist strictures) and those who do things that Carnap would not have classified as metaphysics, but which they call metaphysics. A paradigmatic example of the latter are the writings (esp. the book All Things Must Go) of Ladyman and Ross (which I’ve discussed here repeatedly, beginning with this post). They call their own efforts (the direct descendents of Carnap’s and Neurath’s efforts) at unification of the sciences “naturalized metaphysics.” Just to be sure no one confuses them with the first category, though, they begin their book with a comprehensive assault on the whole edifice of analytic metaphysics, portraying its project of supplementing physics with metaphysical “foundations” or “ontologies” or whatever as fundamentally misleading, since it seeks to “domesticate” scientific knowledge by assimilating it into folk terms of ordinary discourse and of human intuitions adapted to the surroundings we’ve evolved to survive in.

I think it’s too bad that Ladyman and Ross call their project “metaphysics” as it tends to empty that word of any meaning at all. It’s long been used in the sciences (and elsewhere) as a term of abuse, to refer to high-falutin’ talk that has lost contact with the shared physical and social environment we are trying to grapple with. The logical empiricists tried to explicate this distinction — between discourse that maintains contact with some part of that shared environment and discourse that has lost any such contact (while dispensing with any substantive notion of “reality”) — in a number of different ways we all know about (actually, only the first, Tractarian version became really notorious). These early attempts failed, as is well known. But the distinction is still worth making; the explicandum is still worth trying to explicate; philosophy is (and always has been, from the beginning) uniquely exposed to the danger of erring unintentionally into what Hume called “fairyland.” And yes, of course we can make that distinction without using the actual word “metaphysics”; it just makes it clunkier and forces us to use circumlocutions like “what Carnap classified as metaphysics.” But that particular circumlocution then raises the historical question of what exactly falls within its scope — and that’s the first reason why the Cohen and Marschall paper is so valuable.

(I have a small quibble with them on this historical question. They do point out that Carnap’s early critique of metaphysics differed from his later one, but they miss out the syntactic step in between, where “metaphysical” meant roughly “metalinguistic without being translatable into the formal mode of speech.” For their purposes, it’s fine to sweep that episode under the rug, I guess, but a footnote would have been reassuring.)

Anyway, the second reason their paper matters is that it shows the ultimate ground of Carnap’s later critique of metaphysics to have been not cognitive (descriptive) but normative (practical). “Cognitively meaningless” terms can of course be given a meaning by constructing a framework on the fly to which those terms are “internal.” (When Carnap informally classified something as “cognitively meaningless” he meant it wasn’t internal to any frameworks in current scientific or practical use.) But as Cohen and Marschall point out, this ad hoc framework-constructing move is pointless if the framework constructed has no intended purpose, i.e. if no one has an actual use for it, or a recognizeable location in a shared mental economy. This “use” needn’t of course be immediately practical, but even if it is purely theoretical it needs to have some relevance to some larger body of theory or practice, either completely detached from anything in the world (i.e. formal or mathematical) or pertaining to some aspect of the world, with the hope that eventually some way can be found to bring empirical observations or practical relevance to bear on it. The “needs to” in that sentence is normative; there is no fact of the matter about this!

Wouters and Marschall are particularly persuasive in their diagnosis of a certain “ontological anxiety” at the basis of much analytical metaphysics, an obsession with reducing the ontological commitments of some discourse to a minimum (a burden inherited from Quine, no doubt, though they don’t go into its genealogy). Again, they argue that Carnap would have wondered what the point was, and that this skepticism would have stemmed from normative rather than cognitive considerations.

I think they’re completely right about this, but they don’t take it far enough. They make Carnap sound a bit like some soulless Gradgrind of a utilitarian; in their portrayal, what motivates this normative rejection of metaphysics is that it diverts human time and attention from profitable to low-return preoccupations, it is a “questionable use of time” (p. 338). But that obscures Carnap’s positive vision, which I once described in print as follows:

From his earliest writings, it was Carnap’s deep conviction that human kind had a responsibility to choose and shape its own institutions — including its scientific language and scientific practices — rather than to accept them passively (Jeffrey 1994).  Philosophy, for him, including especially the entire program of explication, was highest-level linguistic or conceptual engineering, the planning and optimization of the future of the species.  Metaphysical arguments about “what really exists”, or about the true “substance” or “ontology” of the universe, were to be discouraged precisely because they undermined such planning.  They took for granted that the important choices are not choices; they are not a matter of what we want but of what is.  To accept metaphysical terms was to capitulate to our existing, traditional language and the traditional institutions it supported; it was to be overwhelmed by the weight of the past.

Nothing in the Wouters and Marschall paper contradicts that portrayal; they just stop short of attributing any positive views to Carnap at all, so one could easily get the impression that he is concerned only with optimizing human productivity, or something vaguely utilitarian along those lines. But this impression, especially reinforced by his late preoccupation with inductive logic and decision theory, is highly misleading; I think it’s important to stress (as I think that 1958 fragment on “Value Concepts” makes very clear) that this wasn’t anything like the whole picture for him; in fact his conception of ultimate values was radically pluralistic and open-ended. And his own, somewhat utopian values were more about giving full scope to human creativity and imagination than about discouraging people from indulging their metaphysical longings. His point was that these tended to be dead ends, and did nothing, in the end, to free us in any way from the weight of the past, from the burden of human conformity and convention that constrains creativity and imagination. And that normative stance would have applied equally to most of the analytic metaphysics of recent decades.