On the Vienna Circle: Six of Eight -- and a pause

Let's return to the issue of logic, or the issues of mathematics-and-logic, which was (were?) always of great importance to the Vienna Circle.

As we have mentioned, the VC came together at a time of a lot of argument about the foundations of mathematics. The "logicists" said that mathematics is a stern necessary outcome of logic. The "intuitionists" said it is, at least at the margins, a matter of social convention. Both sides in that dispute presumed that their positions were incompatible: social convention is one thing, logic is something utterly different. 

Rudolf Carnap, though, offered an distinctive approach to logic.  He said logic itself is a social convention, not a successful flight from conventions. [The illustration for this blog entry is my silly pun, the name "Carnap" never fails to lead me to think of catnip.]

Anyway, Carnap, the son of a successful capitalist (the elder Carnap owned a ribbon-making factory), studied at both the University of Berlin (1917-1918) and the University of Jena, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy for a thesis on the Kantian view of space. Accepted a position at the University of Vienna in 1926. He was already by that time within the Vienna Circle's orbit, and he helped Hahn and Neurath write the manifesto of the group, a manifesto that I mentioned last week. 

In 1931, though, Carnap moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia, for an academic post there. He stayed in touch and his best-known book, THE LOGICAL SYNTAX OF LANGUAGE (1934) is an exposition of ideas, Edmonds tells us, that Carnap had originally developed in day-to-day contact with his Viennese friends. 

What is important for us about TLS of L is that here Carnap introduces the "principle of tolerance." He writes, and Edmonds quotes, "In logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build up his own logic, I.e. his own form of language, as he wishes. All that is required of him is that, if he wishes to discuss it, he must state his methods clearly, and give syntactical rules instead of philosophical arguments." Logic is embedded in a language. If your natural language does not yield the logic you want, you are free to develop your own formal language. There is no reason to choose among language on the basis of which are right or wrong.  One might prefer a principle of economy, but that is an aesthetic decision. Chiefly the question will be: does your preferred language and the logic that provides its syntax produce for you the results that you want from it.

But what we have here is an epistemological circle. Consider the "unity of science" argument we discussed last week.  We can see biology as reducible to chemistry and chemistry as reducible to physics. Extend that a bit. Sociology to psychology. Psychology to biology. Biology to chemistry. Chemistry to physics. Physics to mathematics. Mathematics to logic. Logic to ... according to Carnap ... logic, too, has an element of sociology.

In 21st century terms, we might think of computer coding within what is called there, precisely, a language.  The language, which will be the logic of the computers that run it, attains the results desired by the community of coders that use it.  

Yet such all-encompassing circularity is not necessarily a refutation. It might well be considered a feature, not a bug. Edmonds' book has some fine pages on the Vienna circles ambivalent relationship to foundationalisms.   

But in the passage on Carnap I have been following here, Edmonds adds this: "There were clear affinities here with the American pragmatist tradition represented by thinkers ... who held that theories or beliefs were to be evaluated according to whether they worked, their practical application." 

Ah, we have come home. James might not have accepted without demur any of those reductionisms proposed above, but he would have been delighted by the thought that they end up, not by reaching a foundation, but by showing up at their starting-point again. And after we have become dizzy following the circle, we can seek to regain our balance with reference to some particular task before us. Does the idea of X help me get what I want? Do it help me help my neighbor, if the two of us want to collaborate on getting what we variously want? 

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There has been a change of plan. I won't be finishing up this series of posts this week after all. Instead, I will say something about a recent business-news event tomorrow and perhaps share an old joke the day after that.  But I still do have parts 7 and 8 outlined, so we will finish up our discussion of the Vienna Circle as seen through the eyes of David Edmonds, next week. I want to say something more about the philosophy of science, specifically the boundary between real science and pseudo-science. And I want to bring the whole series to a rousing conclusion. In spite of something wise that William James wrote at the end of his life, "What has concluded that we should draw conclusions?"