DOI 10.1007/s10838-007-9033-x
Carnap’s logical empiricism, values, and American pragmatism
Thomas Mormann
Received: 1 September 2005 / Accepted: 1 October 2006 / Published online: 21 June 2007
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values and value judg- ments were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive attitude concerning values. It is argued that his non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never prop- erly dissolved tension between conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap’s non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between logical empiricists and American pragmatists. Car- nap’s persisting adherence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris’s and Kaplan’s pragmatist the- ses that cognitivism might well be compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy.
Keywords Aufbau· Values · Constitution system · Logical empiricism · Pragmatism· Emotivism
1 Introduction
According to common wisdom, the members of the Vienna circle did not have much taste for ethics. For them, assertions about matters ethical were strictly speaking meaningless, and values were considered as artifacts of an abstruse metaphysics. Con- sequently, scientifically legitimate considerations of ethical problems were restricted
T. Mormann (
B
)Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, P.O. Box 1249, 20080 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
to meta-ethical investigations. A closer look might reveal that things were not thus simple, but at least for an exemplary logical empiricist like Rudolf Carnap it seems justified to maintain that he dealt with problems of ethics in his philosophical career only occasionally, and then, only in a meta-ethical vein. This assessment seems to be confirmed by Carnap’s retrospective remark that he “had written almost nothing about values” (Carnap 1963b, 1000). Actually, however, the issue of values was not thus unimportant in Carnap’s philosophical agenda as is commonly thought. This is evidenced by the following facts:
(1) The sketch of the constitution system presented in the Aufbau concludes with the constitution of values as the highest level of the constitutional system (Aufbau
§ 152). The world of the Aufbau was a world of facts and values in which value judgments could be meaningfully asserted.
(2) Quasi-analysis as the constitutional method of the Aufbau was closely related to the value-theoretical distinction between “being” (Sein) and “being valuable”
(Gelten) (cf. Aufbau § 42). The quasi-analytical constitution amounted to a valu- ation of facts as relevant for the practical purposes of the Aufbauer. The consti- tution of facts and the constitution of values followed the same quasi-analytical pattern. More precisely, facts were constituted according to cognitive values such as relevance and salience.
(3) Carnap’s most elaborated reply in the Schilpp volume The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (Schilpp 1963) dealt with Abraham Kaplan’s contribution Logical Empir- icism and Value Judgments. Also another contribution to the Schilpp volume, Morris’s Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism, chiefly dealt with matters ethical.
More generally, issues of values played an important role in the disputes between logical empiricists and American pragmatists throughout the second third of the 20th century.
(4) The Aufbau as well as the Intellectual Autobiography end with chapters on values.
As it seems, throughout his philosophical career Carnap considered the issue of values and value judgments as a keystone to round up his philosophical systems.
This held even after he had come to the conclusion that value judgments were cognitively meaningless.
In Mormann (2006) textual evidence is gathered from the Aufbau and other writings of the early 1920s that the world conception of the Aufbau was deeply influenced by Rickert’s value-oriented Neokantianism of the Southwest school. On the other hand, Gabriel (2001, 2004) pointed out that for Carnap’s overall philosophical ori- entation Lebensphilosophie played an important role. These two strands of thought did not fit easily. In this paper I’ll argue that the tension between Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie was of crucial importance for Carnap’s philosophy even after he had immigrated to the United States in 1935. In particular, it influenced his un- easy relation to American pragmatism concerning the epistemological status of value judgments. This remained true, although Neokantian Wertphilosophie was officially declared as meaningless metaphysics in Overcoming (Carnap 1931/1932). The main thesis of this paper contends that Carnap’s non-cognitivism was a result of a special constellation of German philosophy in early 20th century, namely the tension between Lebensphilosophie and Neokantianism (cf. Gabriel 2004). This unsolved tension was to become the major obstacle for a fruitful collaboration of logical empiricism and American pragmatism as is shown by the fact that issues concerning values resurfaced
in the debate between logical empiricists and pragmatists in the 1940s–1960s time and again.
Carnap undertook two different attempts to overcome the tension between Neok- antianism and Lebensphilosophie:
(1) In the Aufbau he opted for a “comprehensive scientific philosophy” (henceforth (CSP)). According to (CSP) not only facts but also values and other cultural objects belonged to the ken of scientific philosophy. Consequently, the world of the Aufbau was a world of facts and values. Scientific philosophy in the sense of (CSP) was marked by the impetus to bring about an enlightened scientific and rational culture. In this task it collaborated with the sciences, modern art and other progressive movements in all segments of society (cf. Aufbau, xviii, Manifesto (Neurath 1929), 339/340).
(2) About 1930 Carnap came to the conclusion that the program of (CSP) was not fea- sible. Instead, he favored a “restrictive scientific philosophy” (henceforth (RSP)) according to which values dropped out of the realm of reason and were no longer considered as respectable objects of study for scientific philosophy. Instead, they were relegated to the realm of poetry, music and other non-rational endeavors through which one could express one’s Lebensgefühl. This restriction of the realm of scientific philosophy was accompanied by raising the standards of scientificity such that only the purely formal aspects of science were admitted as genuine topics of philosophy of science. From then on, scientific philosophy was restricted to philosophy of science in a narrow sense. The world of scientific knowledge became a world of facts without values.
In more detail the role of (CSP) and (RSP) in the evolution of Carnap’s philosophy can be described as follows: in the early 1920s Carnap ambitiously conceived the Auf- bau as a framework for wissenschaftliche Philosophie überhaupt much in the sense of Southwest Neo-kantianism, in particular Rickert. In the same vein as in Rickert’s approach1 but in a more precise manner, a constitutional system was constructed from of an (almost) unstructured Chaos of Erlebnisse2(cf. Carnap 1922; Rickert 1921;
Mormann 2006). The essential point for the following is that for the Carnap of the Aufbau (fully in line with Rickert) values did belong to the ken of constitution.
Values could be constituted in the constitutional system, and it was essential for the constitution system that this was the case. The world of the Aufbau was a world where values and other cultural objects played an important role.3
1 The influence of Rickert’s Neokantianism on Carnap has been virtually ignored up to now (cf.
Mormann 2006). This paper is not the place to dwell upon this topic in any detail. The following suc- cinct remarks must suffice. Carnap was in contact with Rickert’s philosophy for at least 15 years: After he had begun to study philosophy in Jena in 1910, in 1911/1912 he went to Freiburg and attended Rick- ert’s lectures. Back in Jena he studied philosophy under Bruno Bauch, a former disciple of Rickert.
After the military service (1914–1918) he returned to Jena and completed his philosophical studies with a dissertation under Bauch. In sum, the influence of Rickert and South-West Neokantianism lasted from 1910 to 1925 at least. In Mormann (2006) it has been shown that the Aufbau and Rickert’s System der Philosophie (Rickert 1921) share important similarities.
2 Rickert and Carnap (as many other authors of that time) used “Erlebnisse” as a term to denote those parts in which philosophers and psychologists divided Leben or Erlebnisstrom for methodolog- ical reasons.
3 Evidence for this is the fact that among the “material theses” that described the format of possible construction systems in general there is one that specifically deals with cultural objects characterizing them as constructed with the help of the so called “manifestation” relation that is to be conceived as a special kind of quasi-analysis (Aufbau, § 156).
The original balance between irrational Leben and rational Konstitution got unsta- ble soon after 1928, and the border between the two domains shifted. The terri- tory of values, which once had belonged to the domain of constitution (cf. Aufbau,
§§ 49, 152), was occupied by irrational Leben. When this happened can be determined rather precisely: whilst in 1929 the Manifesto of the Vienna Circle harshly attacked traditional philosophy as metaphysical and theological “rubble” the constitution the- ory of the Aufbau was still considered as the theoretical base of Einheitswissensschaft, and nothing was said against value judgments. On the contrary, the emphasis on the close relation between science and the organization of a modern, enlightened and just society showed that the values of a democratic socialism did play an important role in Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Hence, a naive observer might have con- jectured that values were a topic of rational debate for the logical empiricists. This, however, was not the case. In October of the same year, Carnap gave a lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau where the expulsion of values out of the constitutional paradise was announced at least implicitly. In this lecture he put forward a strict separation between values and facts, and the choice of (basic) values was said to be a matter of Lebensgefühl in which no reasoning was involved. Finally, in Overcoming (1931/1932) value judgments were officially denounced as meaningless metaphysics. This position Carnap maintained for the rest of his philosophical career. Thus it was the (RSP) version of logical empiricism that was imported to America, while (CSP) remained a European episode of Carnap’s philosophical development.
For Carnap, Lebensphilosophie was not so much a philosophical doctrine having an argumentative content, but rather an attitude towards life that took a person’s Lebensgefühl as the ultimate legitimate guide for what he considered as appropri- ate for living his life according to his preferences and inclinations. No philosophical or theological doctrine should violate an individual’s autonomy by reglementing his Lebensgefühle. For Carnap the most repugnant feature of metaphysics as “theology in disguise” was that it intended to regiment by pseudo-arguments what actually belonged to the ken of people’s Lebensgefühle.4This neo-romantic attitude based on Lebensgefühle was not easily compatible with Carnap’s scientific and philosophical interests. This was true all the more, since he began his philosophical career under the influence of Southwest Neokantian philosophy that aimed at a comprehensive system
4 The origins of his dualistic “Cartesian” attitude that strictly separated the practical and the theo- retical may be traced back to his upbringing in a pietist family where religious commitment and the conduct of a pious life was considered a matter of practice and Lebensgefühl rather than an issue for subtle theological disputes (cf. Gabriel 2004). Even after Carnap had lost his religious faith as a young man, he kept a kind of pantheistic orientation to the universe, and maintained respect for religious practice. An impressive evidence for how seriously Carnap took matters of Lebensgefühl was his engaged membership in the bizarre Sera-Circle of Jena in the years before the Great War. This circle, related to the Jugendbewegung, first gathered around the philosopher and pedagogue Herman Nohl (1879–1960), who was influenced by Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie. Latter the bustling publisher Eugen Diederichs organized the circle. Diederichs’s eclectic Weltanschauung was inspired, among other things, by a trivialized version of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The circle propagated a playful neo- romantic return to some idealized Middle Ages. Its members organized excursions where they went vested in self-invented pseudo-medieval garments, they met for dance and theatrical events, and other celebrations, in particular midsummer night festivals. Thereby they aimed to erect, a new, völkisch accentuated, German culture of celebrating life and youth following the lines of an anti-bourgeois sanitized Dionysian cult borrowed from a vulgarized Nietzscheanism. Carnap maintained a life-long friendship with some members of the Sera circle despite their sometimes deep philosophical and political discrepancies. For a detailed account of the Sera-Circle and its cultural context see Werner (2003).
of a science-oriented Weltanschauung and culture, and was engaged in permanent skirmishes with the various currents of Lebensphilosophie (cf. Rickert 1920).
In the early and middle 1920s Carnap was impressed by the systematic Neokantian way of philosophizing that intended to comprehend all aspects of reality (cf. Faust 1927, 6). The Aufbau may be conceived as a young philosopher’s ambitious project to construe a comprehensive philosophical system in the spirit of Southwest Neokant- ianism, but avoiding its traditional weaknesses and limitations. For instance, instead of Rickert’s vague constitutional ideas of Formungen Carnap introduced the precise notion of quasi-analytic constitution based on the relational logic of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica: while Rickert’s system was based on an outdated logic and largely ignorant of the achievements of modern natural science, Carnap took into account the most recent results of contemporary science of his time. More- over, he went beyond Rickert by including insights from Husserl’s phenomenology and Dilthey’s philosophy of history. This thorough modernization of Rickert’s pro- gram should not obscure the fact that the systematic spirits of Rickert’s and Carnap’s endeavors were rather similar.
Seen from the perspective of Lebensphilosophie the Aufbau was overstretching the ken of reason and rationality. In particular, it threatened the autonomy of Leben as the domain of values. Indeed, in the Aufbau, as a general theory of constitutional systems, the constitution of values was envisaged for physical and phenomenological systems.
All of them should comprise ethical, esthetical, economic, social and biological values (cf. Aufbau § 152). A partisan of the autonomy of Lebensgefühle would have felt unduly regimented by the resulting ethics, esthetics, and other normative theories. In any case, about 1929/1930 Carnap came to the conviction that the program of (CSP) as sketched in the Aufbau was not feasible.5Consequently, many of the neokantian con- stitutional projects were tacitly given up. “Cultural objects” and “phenomenological constitutions” disappeared from Carnap’s agenda forever. In particular, the domain of values was abandoned. According to the program of (RSP) philosophy was to be pursued as the theory of the syntax of scientific language or logic of science (cf. Carnap 1934a,b, 1935). In this framework there was neither room for value statements, nor for psychological, sociological, or historical considerations about science.
The move from (CSP) to (RSP) did not mean that Carnap lost interest in “value- laden” topics such as society, politics, and art. Quite the contrary, in the early 1930s Carnap’s political commitment in the Vienna Circle, the Ernst Mach Society, the Bau- haus in Dessau and similar institutions reached its peak. But his commitment was based on his Lebensgefühl and was not related to the results and methods of scientific philosophy in the sense of (RSP). It became characteristic for Carnap’s approach to keep strictly apart the spheres of scientific philosophy on the one hand, and practical action motivated by Lebensgefühl on the other hand. With respect to values, this separation led to a radical emotivism. As will be shown in the following sections the resulting dualism became the main reason for the controversies between logical empiricists and American pragmatists.
The outline of this paper is as follows. To set the stage, in Sect. 2 first the status of values in the Aufbau is sketched, and then the story of the expulsion of values from the constitutional paradise is told in outline. In Sect. 3 we deal with the prag- matist criticisms of Lewis, Morris, and Dewey of Carnap’s value theory (cf. Lewis
5 This, of course, was due also to the different political climate of Vienna compared with that of Jena (cf. Mormann 2006).
1936; Dewey 1944; Morris 1963). Another interesting attempt for a rapprochement between Logical empiricism and pragmatism concerning the cognitive status of value judgments was put forward by Abraham Kaplan (Kaplan 1963). Kaplan’s proposal and Carnap’s response are discussed in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5 we conclude with some remarks on the incompatibles concepts of scientific philosophy as brought forward by logical empiricism and American pragmatism.
2 The expulsion of values from the constitutional paradise
In the contemporary debate on the Aufbau the existence of values inside the consti- tutional system of the Aufbau has been virtually ignored. Hence it may be expedient, first to gather evidence that values actually were respectable objects in the Aufbau, i.e., that they were considered as entities that could be constituted in a constitution system based on Elementarerlebnisse. Then we will consider two stages in the process of their expulsion from the constitutional paradise. In the final part of this section the reasons are discussed that led Carnap to this thorough revision of his original constitutional position.
To set the stage, recall that the Aufbau’s world was a four-layered world consisting of autopsychological, physical, heteropsychological, and cultural objects (cf. Aufbau, Summary, pp. 241/242, Pseudoproblems B.6, 321). Values were cultural objects (§ 152).
Although they belonged to the fourth constitutional level of the system their consti- tution was based on items localized at the lowest level of the constitutional system, to wit, elementary experiences of a special kind:
The construction of values does not continue from the already discussed levels of the cultural and the heteropsychological, but connects with an earlier stage of the constructional system. We have to distinguish between several types of values, for example, the ethical, the aesthetic, the religious, the biological (in the widest sense, including technological and economic values, values of individual and social6hygiene, and others). The construction of values from certain expe- riences, namely Werterlebnisse, is in many ways analogous to the construction of physical things from “perceptual experiences”. . . For the construction of ethical values, for example, we must consider (among others) experiences of conscience, experiences of duty or of responsibility, etc. For aesthetic values, we take into account experiences of (aesthetic) pleasure or other attitudes in the appreciation of art, experiences of artistic creation, etc. The particular nature of the value experiences of the different value types is investigated by the phenomenology of values…(Carnap 1967, Aufbau, § 152).
The constitution of values from an autopsycological base of Werterlebnisse was not, however, the only possibility. Carnap was at pains to convince the reader that the constitution of values could be carried out for systems with a physical base as well:
It could seem to be an open question whether in a constructional system with physical base is room for the domain of values. This doubt, however, has been removed by Ostwald (Werte) with his derivation of values of several types upon
6 “Values of social hygiene” is the palliative translation of the German “rassenhygienische Werte”.
For an explanation of the fact that the concept of “Rassenhygiene” came in the Aufbau, see Mormann (2006).
a basis of energetics7 (based upon the second principle of energetics with the aid of the concept of dissipation). (Aufbau § 59)
This double constitution evidences that he considered values as an integral part of all kinds of constitution systems.
According to the Aufbau, what lied outside the ken of constitution theory belonged to metaphysics, and, vice versa, what was inside the constitution system was part of scientific philosophy. Thus, still in 1928 values belonged to the domain of respectable non-metaphysical entities at least “officially”. One might object that large parts of the Aufbau had been written before 1925, and hence it might well be the case that in 1928 Carnap’s actual stance concerning values differed from the one stated in the Aufbau’s text. This conjecture can be defused at least partially by looking on Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Carnap 1928, b) written 1927 in Vienna. There we find the following distinction between meaningless and meaningful (sachhaltige) assertions:
If a statement p expresses the content of an experience (Erlebnis) E, and if the statement q is either the same as p or can be derived from p and prior experiences …then we say that q “is supported (fundiert) by” the experience E.
…A statement p is said to have “factual content” (ist sachhaltig) if experiences, which would support p or the contradictory of p, are at least conceivable, and if their characteristics can be indicated. …A (pseudo) statement which cannot in principle be supported by an experience, and which therefore does not have any factual content would not express any conceivable state of affairs and therefore would not be a statement, but only a conglomeration of meaningless marks or noises. (Pseudoproblems, 327, 328).
This criterion allowed value judgments to be meaningful since they could be “sup- ported” by value experiences. In other words, still in 1927 values had not been banished from the realm of meaningful entities. In 1929 the situation had changed dramatically as is evidenced by the notes of a lecture Carnap had delivered in October 1929 at the Bauhaus in Dessau.8In this lecture Carnap argued for an instrumentalist role of scientific reasoning based on a pluralism of values. Facts and values had to be strictly separated. The task of science was to investigate the facts; it was not directly engaged in matters of value. One had to distinguish between basic values and derived values.
In principle, the choice of basic values was arbitrary. No rational reasons could be given that one basic value was preferred to another. “Valuation (Wertung) is not the cognition of a fact but a personal attitude” (Carnap 1929, RC-110-07-49-2). Possible basic values were the well being of a group, salvation of one’s soul, or well being of a oneself. Basic values of this kind could be interpreted in various ways. For instance,
7 Ostwald’s energeticism viewed reality essentially as energy, more precisely as a hierarchically ordered system of different kinds of energies. According to the fundamental law of dissipation energy of a lower kind could be transformed into energy of a higher kind by appropriate transformation machines only to a less than optimal degree of efficiency (cf. Ostwald, § 79, 150). Thereby a hierarchy of valuable and less valuable kinds of energies could be defined. The highest kind of energy was the one that manifested itself in intellectual and artistic accomplishments of human beings. It could be generated only by “human machines” (cf. § 161, 340), and therefore was the most valuable energy occupying the high end of the (energetic) value scale (cf. Ostwald 1913, chapter XIV (§ 150ff). Char- acterizing Ostwald’s sketchy story as a “derivation” of values, as Carnap did, amounted to a very flattering description of what he had achieved.
8 As it seems, from this lecture on Geist und Leben only some notes have survived (RC-110-07-49).
These, however, suffice to reconstruct his value-theoretical convictions of that time.
the basic value of the well being of a group could refer to the well being of one’s family, nation, social class, race, or all of humanity. Which basic value was chosen, did not depend upon theoretical considerations but was a matter of personal attitude. Science could only inform about the consequences of a chosen valuational attitude and help to find out the means necessary for the realization of a given end. This meant, in par- ticular, to point at possible inconsequences and internal contradictions of the chosen basic values. Consequently, there was no moral difference between capitalism based on heartless egoism and a humane socialism based on solidarity (cf. RC-110-07-49-3).
It would be a misunderstanding to interpret this attitude as a neutralism that did not wish to take sides in the conflict between capitalism and socialism. Carnap had always been a partisan of a socialist order of society, but this partisanship was a mat- ter of Lebensgefühl and not of rational considerations. Since there was no point of rational arguing for basic values one ended up with an irreducible plurality of basic values that could not be rationally ordered.
Put in a nutshell, then, Carnap’s ethics can be characterized as decisionist conse- quentialism based on an irrationalist Lebensphilosophie. According to it, everybody was free to live his life according to the basic values preferred by him:
Rational thinking is not the guide in life, but a signpost. It does not determine the direction of action (this is done by irrational impulses), but only tells us something about the consequences to be expected. (Carnap 1929, RC-110-07- 49-3)
Values were located outside the sphere of reason, they became biologically, psycho- logically, or socially determined impulses or drives, which could perhaps be influenced by therapy or education, but one could not rationally argue for or against them.
The official dismissal of values as objects of possible philosophical reflection took place in Overcoming (1931/1932) probably the most notorious philosophical piece Carnap ever wrote. Usually it is considered as a somewhat naive antimetaphysical pamphlet best known for the violent attack on Heidegger’s “philosophy of the Noth- ing”, which was submitted to a relentless “logical analysis” that showed that Heideg- ger’s “arguments” were meaningless metaphysical non-sense. Actually Overcoming is worth reading for some other reasons as well, namely as a document in which Carnap reported his own private overcoming of metaphysics which amounted to give up an important part of the Aufbau’s constitutional program.
While the world of the Aufbau had been a world with history, values, and value judgments, for which it made sense to speak of human practice, from Overcoming onwards these features disappeared from the agenda of his scientific philosophy. The world of science became a world of facts (or their linguistic counterparts) without values. Overcoming was the first signpost of the (RSP) conception and marked the separation of his philosophy from its Neokantian origins and announced the begin- ning of the genuine logical empiricist period of his philosophizing. This did not mean that the essential tension between Leben and Geist had disappeared. As will be shown in the next sections it was to resurface in Carnap’s dispute with American pragmatists on the cognitive status of value judgments. Urging Carnap to accept values and value judgments as denizens of the world of science, as American pragmatists did, was to demand that he should fall back to a position that he had given up long ago. This was more difficult than just to adopt a new stance. It would have required a major reassessment of his own philosophical development. It should be noted, however, that Overcoming was not completely negative with respect to metaphysics in so far
as it accepted it as “metaphysical concept poetry”.9Thus, Carnap explicitly accepted Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as that what it was, namely, poetry without cognitive content.
The resulting picture of the world was most clearly presented in his semi-popular lectures Philosophy and Logical Syntax (Carnap 1935) delivered at the University of London in October 1934. These lectures are the manifesto of (RSP) in which the basic theses of that brand of logical empiricism were formulated, which was to become a leading current in American philosophy of science.
In line with the linguistic turn that Carnap had recently adopted according to which all problems of philosophy where problems of language, he distinguished two basic functions of language, namely, expression and representation. This bifurcation led to the following schematic map10of the relations between science, philosophy, art and metaphysics (cf. Philosophy and Logical Syntax, 32):
Expressive Function of Language
ARTS SCIENCE (= the system of theoretical knowledge) PHILOSOPHY EMPIRICAL SCIENCES
Lyrics <---- Metaphysics Physics Psychology --->
Logic
………
Representative Function of Language
Biology
Language is to be understood here in a broad sense: every kind of art, be it poetry, or a non-linguistic art like music, sculpture, or dance was considered as a kind of language apt to express the artist’s (and the beholder’s) Lebensgefühle. In particular, music was considered by Carnap as the non-representational, expressive language par excellence. Thus, the above scheme may be read as just another version of his original dualism between Leben and Geist in linguistic disguise. Carnap subscribed to a neo-romantic fin de siècle conception of life according to which life was the domain of one’s Lebensgefühle; practical aspects of life and science such as work, material production and self-reproduction of the species were ignored. Science is characterized candidly as “the system of theoretical knowledge”. It never occurred to Carnap that science might involve theoretical and practical knowledge. Complementarily, the arts were conceived solely as means for expressing one’s Lebensgefühle. Nothing was said about possible relations between arts, crafts, and techniques. Hence, whatever the virtues of this scheme were it certainly did not square well with any kind of pragmatist philosophy.
From the perspective of (RSP) the (CSP)-position of the Aufbau appeared to be seriously confused. This confusion could be overcome as indicated in the just men- tioned map: the psychological component of traditional philosophy of science was removed to the realm of the empirical sciences, while the metaphysical component,
9 Actually, Carnap’s relation to Nietzsche was rather complex. This topic, however, cannot be treated in this paper.
10 This scheme was adapted from Karl Bühler who in Sprachphilosophie (Bühler 1933) and earlier works had distinguished between three basic functions of language, namely, expression (Ausdruck), appeal (Appell or Auslösung), and representation (Darstellung). As Carnap had no need for the func- tion of appeal, which could be subsumed under expression by interpreting an appeal as an expression of desire, he arrived at a dual scheme distinguishing solely between expression and representation.
for instance the “theory of values” found its new place in the sphere of expressive concept-lyrics (“Begriffsdichtung”) of metaphysics. Only logic as theory of the syntax of scientific language was left as the proper field for philosophy of science.
This scheme of the relations between philosophy, science, and arts, i.e., between the representational domain and the expressive domain, remained essentially intact after Carnap had left Europe and came into closer contact with American pragmatism. Of course, the conception of philosophy of science as syntax of scientific language was replaced by one that took into account also semantical and “pragmatic” aspects of scientific language. But semantics remained as theoretical as syntax, and, as Morris rightly remarked, Carnap’s “pragmatics of scientific language” was a far cry from pragmatism and remained underdeveloped.
Summarizing one may say that already in Europe Carnap had covered a long way towards the “icy slopes of logic” which recently were claimed to characterize “logical empiricism in the age of Cold War” (cf. Manifesto, 339, Reisch 2005, 344ff). The strict separation of “science” and “life” as maintained by (RSP) certainly did not help fos- ter the political and societal commitment of the logical empiricists in the New world.
It was difficult to harmonize European Lebensgefühle with the practical demands of the new intellectual and societal environment in America. Under these circum- stances, it appeared a natural attitude to stick to a strict non-cognitivism concerning values and value judgments, thereby leaving issues of Lebensgefühl officially out of consideration.
3 Remnants of the past: pragmatist attacks on Carnap’s early value theory
By Overcoming and Philosophy and Logical Syntax Carnap might have hoped to have banished values and value judgments once and for all from the agenda of sci- entific philosophy. This, however, was not the case. He was to meet the same old problems about the cognitive status of value judgments in the New world where they reappeared in the debates with the American pragmatists. Already in 1936 Lewis had quoted extensively from the ominous § 152 of the Aufbau where Carnap had sketched the constitution of values by certain “experiences of conscience” in analogy to the constitution of sensible qualities by perceptual experiences. Lewis considered this analogy as “obvious”, and dryly confessed his “inability to interpret this passage in a manner consonant with the general position of the Vienna Circle with respect to the normative…” (Lewis 1970(1936), 152, 153). Carnap never answered Lewis’s question.
A different attack was launched forward by Dewey in the early 1940s when he published A Theory of Valuation in the Encyclopedia of Unified Science edited by Neurath, Carnap, and Morris. Dewey’s contribution was a frontal assault on emotivist accounts of value judgments. He combated non-cognitivism on the ground that it accepted the modern division between irrational life and scientific rationality, instead of fighting against it:
The hard-and-fast impassible line which is supposed by some to exist between
“emotive” and “scientific” language is a reflex of the gap that exists between the intellectual and the emotional in human relations and activities. … The practical problem that has to be faced is the establishment of cultural conditions that will
support the kinds of behavior in which emotion and ideas, desires and appraisals, are integrated (Dewey 1970(1944), 444–445).
Probably Dewey did not know much about the fundamental role that Lebensphi- losophie played for Carnap’s philosophical convictions. Nevertheless he had spotted pretty well the crucial weakness of the Carnap’s position that unduly restricted the domain of rationality to the theoretical. According to Reisch, Carnap “very much liked” Dewey’s contribution (cf. Reisch 2005, 91), but, as far as I know, Dewey and Carnap never entered into a contentful debate on values. Hence, we do not further pursue Dewey’s account of values but concentrate on Morris’s criticism of Carnap’s theory of values.
For more than 25 years Morris served as a mediator between European logical empiricists and American pragmatists aiming at a comprehensive synthesis (“scientific empiricism”) of the two philosophical currents that would combine their respective virtues and avoid their weaknesses (cf. Morris 1937). In his contribution to the Schilpp volume dedicated to Carnap he undertook a last attempt to bring together the two camps urging Carnap to admit that logical empiricism should recognize that value judgments could have a cognitive meaning.
In a similar way as Lewis in 1936, Morris confronted Carnap with his European past, namely, with the Aufbau’s sketch of how values could be constituted from Wert- erlebnisse. He admitted that the pragmatist and logical empiricist positions concerning values and value judgments seemed hardly reconcilable: on the one hand, “it has been a central tenet of the pragmatists that judgments of value are empirical in nature, and so have cognitive or theoretical character amenable in principle to control by sci- entific methods” (Morris 1963, 94). On the other hand, for Carnap value judgments lacked cognitive meaning and therefore were meaningless. At least, this was the log- ical empiricists’s “official” position, as Morris called it. But there were, according to him, “several points that seem to make the apparent opposition less certain”. The bulk of Morris’s contribution was dedicated to the task of bringing to the fore the most important features of this “unofficial” logical empiricist position concerning values.11 For this purpose first he unearthed Carnap’s Neokantian theory of values as it had been sketched in the Aufbau more than 30 years ago:
In the Logische Aufbau Carnap indicates how he would at that time deal with values: they would be constituted on the basis of certain terms already in the terminological system plus certain “value experiences” such as the sense of duty and esthetic satisfaction. It is interesting that Lewis adopted a similar point of view in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, starting from value experiences as the primary data for a theory of value. But Lewis goes on to interpret value judgments as assertions about such value experiences, and hence as empirical and controllable by evidence as are scientific statements. (Morris 1963, 94–95).
As far as I know, nobody has ever followed up Morris’s proposal of investigating a possible affinity between the Aufbau’s constitution of values and Lewis’s pragma- tist account. In particular, Carnap himself ignored it altogether. This is a pity since Morris’s point was well taken and deserved more attention as it received. In order to understand what Morris alluded to let us consider in some more detail Lewis’s
“constitution” of values.
11 In broad terms Morris’s distinction between the “official” and the “unofficial” position of logical empiricism corresponds to the distinction between (RSP) and (CSP), respectively.
Lewis’s starting point was a decidedly pragmatist concept of knowledge according to which “knowledge, action and evaluation are essentially connected. The primary significance of knowledge is for the sake of doing. And action, obviously, is rooted in evaluation” (cf. Lewis 1971, 2). This entanglement of knowledge, action and valuation entailed that
[E]valuations are a form of empirical knowledge, not fundamentally different in what determines their truth and falsity, and what determines their validity or justification, from other kinds of empirical knowledge. (Ibidem, 365).
Value judgments such as “This act was cruel” or “This wine is superb” are to be inter- preted as value predications that ascribe value predicates such as “cruel” or “superb”
to certain objects (objects understood in a broad sense comprising things, acts, or events) analogously as assertions “This stone is round” or “This diamond is hard”
ascribe empirical predicates to material objects. In both cases the empirical confirma- tion or refutation is carried out in more or less the same way, namely by appropriate experiences, which in the case of values corresponded to Carnap’s Werterlebnisse. In order to turn down the objection that this parallelism is misleading since value experi- ences are only “relative” or “subjective”, Lewis pointed out that for the confirmation or refutation of a value assertion not just anybody’s verdict is relevant. Only the con- noisseur or the expert under appropriate conditions is able to pass a valid judgment about the wine’s quality, analogously as only the expert physicist is able to determine the values of a physical constant. Thus the value predicates of objects are constituted by essentially the same kind of procedures as physical properties, namely by certain complex experimental procedures whose ultimate components were Werterlebnisse.
Thus the “objectivity” of value judgments (about “beauty”, “cruelty”, or “quality”) was not in principle different from that of judgments about physical properties (cf.
Lewis, ibidem, 514). In sum, the constitution of external values in the sense of Lewis in broad lines followed the constitution of values that Carnap had sketched in the Aufbau. Of course, there were differences: it would have been difficult to cast Lewis’s constitution by experiental procedures in the formal framework of quasi-analysis.
Indeed, Lewis felt obliged to warn those “who command the techniques of exact logi- cal analysis to apply these to value theory” for the utter complexity of our evaluation practices (ibidem, 511).
Carnap was not particularly happy to be reminded of these old value-theoretical sins of his philosophical youth. In his reply to Morris he passed over in silence the value theory of the Aufbau, as he had already done with Lewis’s analogous comment in 1936. Nor did he respond to the alleged relations between Lewis’s account of value judgments and his own in any detail. Instead, he was content with the rather bland comment: “I am inclined to agree with Morris that the difference between my view and that of the pragmatists is not as large as it might appear at first glance.” (Schilpp, 862). This seems doubtful as long as Carnap insisted on a strict separation between the theoretical and the practical, while the pragmatists emphasized the irreducible entanglement of knowledge and action.
Be this as it may, Morris saw still another possibility for a rapprochement between Carnap’s logical empiricism and pragmatism. It was concerned with the realm of rules and proposals that had become more and more central to Carnap’s philosophy. This option concerned (CSP) and (RSP) alike. As Morris pointed out Carnap often went beyond a mere logical analysis and reconstruction of scientific knowledge:
In the Logische Aufbau Carnap writes that life has many dimensions other than science, and the restriction of the term “knowledge” to science is helpful to the friendly relation between the various spheres of life, for the admission of complete heterogeneity would lessen the strife between them (pp. 257/258) This may or may not be the case, but the statement is certainly more than a logical analysis of science. It contains a recommendation or proposal, made in terms of a theory of the relation of science to other human activities. (Morris 1963, 97) Indeed, making “proposals” or “recommendations” was to become one of the most important characteristics of Carnap’s mature style of philosophizing. Already in the first paper he published in English, On the Character of Philosophic Problems (Carnap 1934b) he was at pains to bar possible misunderstandings concerning the new con- ception of philosophy of science as logic or syntax of science, pointing out that a philosophical theorem, formulated as a proposition of syntax, could be read in two different ways, namely, as an assertion or as a proposal. In the first interpretation it was a thesis of the kind “In the language of science available today. Such and such holds”, while in the second it was to read as something like “I propose to build up the language of science…so that it acquires such and such properties” or “I wish…to investigate a language which possesses such and such properties” (Carnap 1934b 15).
In the following decades this proposal character of philosophy was pointed out again and again (cf. Carnap 1936/1937, 288 and 1950, 208). Still in his Intellectual Autobi- ography he mused about the importance of language planning, and it is hardly an exaggeration to contend that for Carnap the main task of scientific philosophy was the planning and construction of languages designed for the various needs of science, mathematics, and possibly other domains of discourse.
From a pragmatist point of view “making proposals” is a value-laden activity. Pro- posals are not made just for fun, but for realizing certain goals (cf. Lewis 1971). In other words, when assessing the specific advantages and disadvantages of several languages or ontological systems one enters a realm in which pragmatic questions play a crucial role. In his (1950) Carnap called these pragmatic questions “external questions” and contrasted them to “internal questions”, which could be decided by empirical and/or logical methods. He denied that external questions were a legitimate topic of philosophy. Rather, he trusted in a kind of Darwinian conceptual evolution12 that permitted only the fittest concepts or linguistic forms to survive:
The acceptance or rejection of linguistic forms … will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments, the ratio of the results achieved to the amount and complexity of the efforts required. … Let us grant to those who work in any special field of investigation the freedom to use any form of expression; the work in this field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms which have no useful function. (Carnap 1950, 221)
Evidently, a complex net of preferences, evaluations and practical assessments deter- mined this selection process. According to (RSP) this fact was of no concern to philosophy. Rather, the only task of philosophy, as a theoretical activity, was to pro- pose frameworks that could be used, and eventually be approved or rejected by their
12 In other words, Carnap conceived the confrontation between competing linguistic forms as an example of “the struggle for life”. This may be considered as a remnant of Lebensphilosophie. An analogous idea may be found already in the Lebensphilosophie of Dilthey who considered the struggle of Weltanschauungen: “Those Weltanschauungen that lead to useful conceptions of life and foster its understanding, maintain themselves and supersede the lesser ones” (Dilthey VIII, 85). The point is that in both cases arguments and reasons play no role whatsoever.
practionners. From a pragmatist perspective this is but a caricature of what is going on in the practice of science. It makes sense only for someone like Carnap who assumed from the outset a strict separation between the theoretical and the practical.
4 Kaplan’s pragmatist critique of Carnap’s emotivism
While Morris and Lewis unearthed Carnap’s European philosophical past to make a breach in his non-cognitivism, Abraham Kaplan tried to overcome Carnap’s non- cognitivism from a purely American perspective.13That is, he did not refer to Carnap’s (CSP) program and the quasi-analytical constitution of values but concentrated on the theory of values and value judgments that resulted from Carnap’s (RSP).
More precisely, he confronted logical empiricism with a conception of science that took seriously into account not only mathematics and physics but a broader spectrum of scientific knowledge that comprised the behavioral sciences as well. This perspec- tive led him to the basic distinction between “reconstructed logic” and “logic in use”.
With respect to the cognitive status of value judgments he came to the conclusion that the logical empiricists’s emotivism was due to a “fact-value dualism” that he diagnosed as an artifact of the overestimated role of reconstructed logic. An enlightened logical empiricism that realized the limited role of reconstructed logic as a hypothesis would realize that non-cognitivism was not required either by its logic or its empiricism (cf.
Kaplan 1963, 827). More precisely, Kaplan’s fundamental objection against emotivism was that it was based on an implausible and question-begging fact-value dualism:
The basic error in the fact-value dualism lies in the supposition that sooner or later every value judgment must come to rest upon an absolute end, one which is valued unconditionally, without ifs, ands, or buts. Factual considerations relate only to such conditions, and when these have been let go, we are left afloat in a sea of subjectivity. That absolute values are groundless does indeed imply that rationality precludes them; but the conclusion that they underlie all value judgments, which therefore cannot be objective, only begs the question. (Kaplan 1964, 394)
This pragmatist stance of Kaplan directly contradicted Carnap’s Cartesian dualism according to which in a every value judgment one could neatly distinguish between means and ends such that eventually a purely “optative” component could be sin- gled out that had no cognitive meaning whatsoever (Carnap 1963b, 1001).14Carnap was well aware of this difference and unmistakably stated: “In contrast to Kaplan’s conception, I assert: … There are pure optatives. Cognitivism may be defined as the denial of this thesis.” (Ibidem). He went on to explain the difference between the more common impure optatives and pure optatives by the following example:
(1) Let us take road a rather than road b, because a is shorter than b.
13 Abraham Kaplan (1918–1993) obtained his PhD under Reichenbach with the dissertation The Language of Value. A Study in Pragmatics. His most important work in philosophy was The Conduct of Inquiry. Methodology for Behavioral Science (Kaplan 1964). He was mainly interested in develop- ing a philosophy of science that took into account the natural and the social sciences alike. In The Conduct of Inquiry he convincingly criticized the so called “fact-value dichotomy” long before this became fashionable in the 1980s and 1990s.
14 It may be noted that Carnap’s thesis of a purely non-cognitive component in value judgments was contrary to the Southwest Neokantians’ claim that even purely factual assertions contained a value component insofar as they aimed to realize the value of truth (cf. Gabriel 2003, 25).
(2) Let us take road a rather than b.
Carnap insisted that no factual sentence could be logically derived from the pure opta- tive (2). Hence, according to the logical empiricist meaning criteria (cf. Overcoming, 12) the sentence (2) was cognitively meaningless. This was not to deny that sentences like “A believes that it would be more useful for their common purpose to take road a rather than b” or “A wishes that B accept the proposal to take road a” could be
“associated” with (2) in some way or other. Carnap’s point was that such sentences could not be inferred from (2) by deductive logic: they only followed inductively or by some other kind of “impure” reasoning based on probability or plausibility considerations. This was sufficient for him to declare (2) as meaningless. Carnap’s argumentation here is less than compelling. The first thing to note is that it is based on a very strict meaning criterion: only classical deductive logic was capable to bestow meaning to a proposition p, the meaning of p defined as the totality of propositions that could be deduced from it. Inductive logic or any other kind of logic dealing with plausible or enthymematic arguments was denied to convey cognitive meaning to a proposition. This not only flew into the face of any pragmatist account, but also is also hardly plausible in the light of Carnap’s tolerance principle. Moreover, this strict deductivist meaning criterion was at variance with the more tolerant one Carnap had proposed in Pseudoproblems where inductive logic was explicitly admitted as a means for bestowing meaning to statements:
If a statement p expresses the content of an experience E, and if the statement q …can be derived from p and prior experiences, either through deductive or inductive arguments, then we say q is “supported by” the experience E. (Carnap 1928a, 327)
In contrast to the liberal attitude of his (CSP) period, in 1963 Carnap insisted on a strict distinction between sentences that are “logically implied” by a sentence and sentences that are “merely associated” with it (1963b, 1002). In contrast to 1928, in 1963 he denied that inductive logic could be used to bestow meaning to a proposi- tion.15This approach to meaning and decision-making was flatly incompatible with Kaplan’s pragmatist approach. From a pragmatist point of view, Carnap’s proposal to neatly separate factual and optative components of value judgments was not feasible.
As Kaplan was at pains to point out, for every value-laden decision contextuality was essential. The entanglement of facts and values in the fabric of scientific and common sense practices was a constitutive condition for all value judgments. For a pragmatist, the many ceteris paribus and mutatis mutandis clauses that hedge most of our value- laden practical decisions could not be idealized away in the manner Carnap claimed.
Hence, from a pragmatist perspective pure optatives were pure fictions that did not play any role in real decisions.
For Carnap, their existence did make a great difference that can be formulated in the following anti-cognitivist thesis:
It is logically possible that two persons A and B at a certain time agree in all beliefs, that there reasoning is in perfect accord with deductive and inductive standards, and that they nevertheless differ in an optative attitude component.
(Carnap 1934b, 1008).
15 This is more than surprising since for some decades inductive logic was that area in which he had invested the bulk of his philosophical work.
As an example he brought forward essentially the same that he had used 30 years ago in the Dessau lecture to argue for the principal arbitrariness of basic values. Instead of the bald choice between “socialism” and “capitalism”, in 1963 he considered the con- flict between a “democratic” and an “aristocratic” attitude concerning the distribution of rights among the members of a group:16
On the basis of a democratic attitude, A may give equal rights to all members of C, … while B, on the basis of an aristocratic attitude, favors an elite, a cer- tain small minority group C’ of C. … The difference between A and B in their decisions … is based not on a difference in their theoretical thinking but rather on a difference in their preferences … and, finally, in a difference in character.
(Ibidem, 1009)
In other words, at the end of the day one’s Lebensgefühl, solidified in one’s “char- acter”, determined matters of value. Carnap explicitly granted to Dewey and the other pragmatists that “a value statement expresses more that a momentary feeling of desire, liking, being satisfied or the like, namely satisfaction in the long run.” (Ibi- dem) This concession, however, did not suffice to lend values a place in the sphere of reason. Thus, it did not help to resolve the contention between non-cognitive logical empiricism and cognitive pragmatism.
Although Carnap vigorously endorsed the thesis of the existence of pure optatives and even used it for defining non-cognitivism he considered the alternative cogni- tivism versus non-cognitivism to be practically rather irrelevant, since one’s practical decisions would hardly be influenced by the side one took in this issue. He even claimed that this alternative were even theoretically of limited importance only since the rest of one’s philosophical positions would remain unaffected by it. This move is hardly convincing. If he were right, why did he stick so stubbornly to non-cognitivism?
Taking into account that his strict separation between the practical and the theoret- ical was motivated by Lebensphilosophie it is not hard to guess why he was such an eager follower of non-cognitivism. Pure optatives guaranteed the autonomy of the domain of one’s Lebensgefühle. Based on pure optatives decisions concerning fun- damental values stayed outside the domain of reasoning. Kaplan proposed a similar diagnosis. According to him, the logical empiricists’s commitment to non-cognitiv- ism was a symptom of an undigested influence of Wittgenstein for whom ethics was
“transcendental” (cf.Tractatus 6.421).17Because of its commitment to emotivism Logical empiricism has seemed to some to present the ironic spectacle of insist- ing on the importance of logic everywhere save in the important problems of life.
Others, on the contrary, have seen in it that exaggerated respect for logic that expresses itself in a cold disregard for mere matters of human feeling. (Kaplan 1963, 855)
Kaplan considered the two assessments as “equally unjust” (ibidem). He attempted to defuse them by calling Freud for help: “The very nature of reason, Freud once
16 The motivation for this example may be traced back to Carnap’s philosophical youth in Jena:
Bruno Bauch, his thesis supervisor, was a fervent anti-democrat favoring an aristocratically organized society.
17 Kaplan’s explanation is compatible with the one given developed in this paper, since Wittgenstein’s remarks on the relation between Leben and Wissenschaft (cf. Tractatus 6.52) square well with the tenor of Carnap’s Lebensphilosophie. In contrast to Kaplan, I’d like to point out that Wittgenstein was in no way the only source of Carnap’s Lebensphilosophie.
remarked, is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled.” (Kaplan 1963, 856) I think, Kaplan’s argument is not convincing. To show why, it is expedient to quote in full Freud‘s remarks on the relation between “reason” and “emotions”:
[R]eason …is among the forces which may be expected to exert a unifying influ- ence upon men — creatures who can be held together only with the greatest difficulty, and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to control. …Our best hope for the future is that …reason should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that then it would not fail to concede to human emotions and to all that is determined by them the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. (Freud 1933, Lecture xxxv)
Even if one buys into Freud’s enlightened dictatorship of reason, this does not provide a compelling argument for “Carnap’s reason”, since it was not that of Freud and the pragmatists. Rather, as Toulmin and others have claimed, “Carnap’s reason” was a too restrictive and impoverished version of reason as that it could have achieved what Freud and Kaplan hoped for it (cf. Toulmin 2001).
5 Conclusion: scientific philosophy versus philosophy of science
Already in the 1930s Morris had urged the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle to think over their concept of scientific philosophy as syntax of the language of science.
Against this overly narrow conception of philosophy Morris argued for a pragmatist scientific philosophy that comprised four different stages:18
(1) Philosophy as logic of science.
(2) Philosophy as clarification of meaning.
(3) Philosophy as empirical axiology.
(4) Philosophy as empirical cosmology.
Carnap’s purely theoretical account of scientific philosophy as syntax of the language of science figured in the scheme as the first and most restricted level of a comprehen- sive pragmatist scientific philosophy (cf. Morris 1937, 8ff). Morris readily admitted that moving from (1) to (4) amounted to lower the standards of exactness and cer- tainty (ibidem, 19). But he was convinced that scientific philosophy had to pay this price, if it wanted to be relevant for life in a comprehensive manner that took into account theory and practice of human existence. Moreover he pointed out that also
“[s]cience reveals no absolute break between theory and practice, and there is no clear reason why the situation should be different in philosophy” (ibidem, 20).
For Carnap’s (RSP) this program of a comprehensive scientific philosophy was unacceptable. It would have amounted to give up the clear-cut separation between the sphere of reason and the sphere of life, between rational facts and metaphysical values. Thereby it would have blurred the fundamental difference between practical
18 Painting it with a broad brush Morris identified the four stages, or styles, of scientific philosophizing with the names of Carnap, Peirce, Dewey, and Whitehead (cf. Morris 1937, 8ff.)
life and theoretical knowledge on which Carnap’s dualistic conception of philosophy was based since he had given up (CSP) in favor of (RSP).
Thus the relation between American pragmatism and (RSP) resembled that between Neokantianism and (RSP): both Neokantianism and pragmatism aimed at a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the world taking into account all aspects, and both endorsed an ample notion of rationality that had a place for values.
In contrast, (RSP) opted for a purely formal concept of rationality. One need not go so far to conceive pragmatism as a modernized American version of Neokantianism.
My point is that the relation between (RSP) and American pragmatism on the one hand, and the relation between (RSP) and Neokantianism on the other, were similar.
Hence, in the debate with American pragmatism for Carnap was more at stake than what met the eyes of American pragmatists. Endorsing the pragmatist position would have meant to return to his Neokantian past that he had overcome more than 30 years ago. Once again he would have become a follower of a comprehensive system of scientific philosophy very much like (CSP). This he could not do, since it would have meant to give up the clear boundaries between life, attitude, character, Lebensgefühl on the one hand, and theoretical knowledge on the other hand. Instead, he stuck to his established position and maintained a radical Cartesian separation of the domains of scientific theory and the intuitive practice of life. This had far-reaching consequences.
The rigid distinction between scientific facts and metaphysical values restricted the ken of rationality to the realm of theory in a quite implausible manner. The most visible symptom of this shortcoming was his radical emotivism.
Non-cognitivism has sometimes been blamed as the most implausible tenet of log- ical empiricism. It should be realized, however, that it was a position that could not be given up as easily as its pragmatist critics believed. Carnap’s emotivism was not a surface phenomenon. Rather, it was a symptom of a deeply entrenched Cartesian pre- dicament caused by the tension between Leben and Geist typical for much of Central European philosophy of the early 20th century. The radical non-cognitivism of logical empiricism was only the peak of an iceberg, namely the conviction that philosophy and science were essentially theoretical endeavors that should be kept separated from the unfathomable feelings and practices of life. This suggests that logical empiricism (RSP version) and American pragmatism were fundamentally different.
Put it differently, the subliminal, but profound impact that Lebensphilosophie had on the relation between Carnap’s logical empiricism and American pragmatism evi- dences that the really important difference between the currents of 20th century’s philosophy may not be that between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy but rather that between “non-pragmatist” and “pragmatist” philosophical currents. Muta- tis mutandis the comprehensive scientific philosophy of early Carnap might have been compatible with American pragmatism. This does not hold for the (RSP) version. For (RSP), Morris’s project of a synthesizing “scientific empiricism” was doomed to fail probably from the outset.
References
Bühler, K. (1933, 1976). Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann.
Carnap, R. (1922). Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit. Unpublished manuscript, July 1922, RC-081-05-01, Archives for Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Hillman Library.
Carnap, R. (1928a). Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. (Aufbau).
