Carnap, Rudolf

Carnap, Rudolf. The Continuum of Inductive Methods. Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 1952. 

Carnap, Rudolf. 1937. The Logical Syntax of Science, London Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Carnap, Rudolf (1891-1970) German philosopher of science who has had considerable influence on scientists. He taught that statements were meaningful only if they can be related to sensory experience and have logical consequences that are verifiable by observation or experience. This idea led to the philosophical school of logical positivism and to the dismissal, by some people, of most or all of the propositions of metaphysics and religion. 

Carnap, Rudolf. 1934. The unity of science. London Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co. 

Carnap, Rudolf. 1958. Beobachtungssprache und theoretische sprache. Dialectica 12 236-248. 

Carnap, R. 1956. Meaning and Necessity, (pp. 206-221). Chicago University of Chicago Press. Carnap, R. 1963. "Reply to Beth." In P. A. Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. La Salle, IL Open Court. 

In the two preceding sections we have seen that, whether we are considering the thought process or the formation of sentences, the entities we are using or processing refer either to a physical object or to an abstract concept. The question of whether these abstract entities have any real existence (e.g. as in Plato s ideas) or not has been and still is a central one in philosophy, and because we already suspect that the concept of a system will be an entity of the abstract kind, this question could be very relevant to our present quest to place the system concept within the framework of philosophy. However, we shall adopt a point of view put forward by Rudolf Carnap, which effectively allows us to sidestep the question for our purposes. 

In the present article, I hope to convince the reader that the relative neglect of this philosophical topic does not arise from any lack of interesting questions raised by the subject, but rather its eccentricity with respect to mainstream philosophy of science as it has evolved in the twentieth century. Imagining a philosophy of science that would place the relationship between pharmacy and chemistry at its centre would require imagining a history of the philosophy of science quite different from that shaped by thinkers like Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn or even Ian Hacking. 

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