- Length
- 400 pagesSmeaton, The Logical Syntax of Language, Kegan Paul, 1937
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Logical Syntax of Language
The Vienna Circle's most rigorous attempt to make philosophy into a technical discipline, by treating every philosophical question as a question about language. Its principle of tolerance - build whatever language you like, but state the rules - outlived the programme that produced it.
- Date
- 1934
- Author
- Rudolf Carnap
- Region
- Vienna and Prague
- Language
- German
- 1937 English, Amethe Smeaton Fuller than the German original; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 13 years
The most technically ambitious book the Vienna Circle produced, superseded within a decade by its author's own turn to semantics, and read again since the 1990s.
What the book says
A book proposing that philosophy is the logical syntax of the language of science and nothing else. Carnap's starting point is that the disputes philosophers conduct - about whether numbers exist, whether things are bundles of properties, whether the world is made of experiences - look like disputes about reality and are really disputes about which language to use. He distinguishes two ways of speaking. The material mode says that five is a number; the formal mode says that the word five is a number-word, which is a statement about a linguistic framework and can be settled. Recasting philosophical claims into the formal mode dissolves most of them into proposals, and a proposal is accepted or rejected on grounds of convenience rather than truth. From this comes the principle of tolerance, which is the book's most consequential idea: there is no such thing as the correct logic, everyone is free to build whatever language they wish, and the only obligation is to state the rules clearly. Two artificial languages are then constructed in detail to show what such a statement looks like.
What it argues
That philosophy has no subject matter of its own and consists in the logical analysis of the language in which science is expressed. The distinction between the material and the formal mode does the work: apparent claims about reality turn out to be disguised claims about words, and once translated they become tractable. The principle of tolerance follows and is more radical than it sounds. There is no question of which logic is correct, only of which is useful for a purpose; classical logic, intuitionist logic and any system anyone cares to devise are all legitimate, and the choice between them is practical. Carnap also develops, in the course of the book, the technique of arithmetising syntax that he had learned from Gödel, and states a version of Gödel's incompleteness result as a limit on what any such language can establish about itself.
What it answered
The Tractatus, and the metaphysical disputes the Circle wanted to end. His deeper opponent is the assumption that philosophical disagreement is disagreement about facts. Carnap thought this was the source of the discipline's failure to make progress: two parties arguing about whether numbers really exist will never settle it, whereas two parties proposing different languages can compare what each makes possible.
How it argues
By construction. Carnap builds two formal languages, one weaker and one stronger, sets out their syntactic rules in full, and shows what philosophical statements look like when recast within them. This makes the book genuinely difficult and largely unread outside specialists, and it is also the point: the claim is that philosophy can be done precisely, and a demonstration is the only way to make it.
The moment
Vienna in the early 1930s, with the Circle at its height and about to be destroyed. Schlick was murdered by a former student in 1936; the group scattered under Nazism, and Carnap left for Prague and then Chicago in 1935. The tolerance principle has often been read as having a political dimension as well as a logical one, though Carnap presents it as a technical proposal.
How it travelled
As a method rather than a doctrine. The syntactic programme collapsed quickly - Carnap himself accepted Tarski's demonstration that truth requires semantics and cannot be handled syntactically - and Quine's later attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction removed another foundation. But the style survived completely: the practice of settling philosophical questions by constructing an explicit formal framework, and of treating rival positions as rival languages, is Carnap's, and it shaped analytic philosophy even where his conclusions were rejected.
The strongest objection
Quine's, and it is aimed at the foundation rather than the details. The whole programme requires a sharp line between truths that hold by virtue of the rules of a language and truths that depend on how the world is - the analytic and the synthetic - because philosophical statements are supposed to fall entirely on the first side. Quine argued in 1951 that no satisfactory account of the distinction exists and that every attempt to define it moves in a circle. If he is right, the formal mode does not insulate philosophy from empirical claims, and the tidy separation between choosing a language and finding out what is true collapses. Carnap never accepted the argument, and the dispute between them is one of the deepest in twentieth-century philosophy.
Why read it
Only for the tolerance principle and the discussion of the two modes of speech, which can be read from the introductory and concluding sections. The constructed languages are for specialists and the notation has dated. Anyone wanting the position in usable form should read Carnap's later essay on empiricism, semantics and ontology instead.
- First printed
- 1934
- First in English
- 1937
- Digitised
- No
Carnap abandoned the purely syntactic programme within a few years, under pressure from Tarski's work on truth, and moved to semantics in Introduction to Semantics (1942).
Smeaton's 1937 English is the standard and is in copyright; the German is public domain.
Where it stands
Revived. After decades in which Carnap was known chiefly as the target of Quine's criticisms, work since the 1990s has re-examined him seriously, and the principle of tolerance in particular is discussed as a live position in metaontology - the question of whether existence disputes are substantive or a matter of framework choice.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain but the standard English translation is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the syntactic programme fails on internal grounds or only under Tarski's and Quine's pressure is argued. Whether the principle of tolerance is a modest technical proposal or a sweeping anti-metaphysical thesis divides current interpreters, and a great deal of recent Carnap scholarship turns on it. And whether Quine's attack actually lands against Carnap's version of analyticity, as opposed to a cruder one, has been reopened in the last thirty years.