Rudolf Carnap: Conception

“For me personally, Wittgenstein was perhaps the philosopher who, besides Russell and Frege, had the greatest influence on my thinking. The most important insight I gained from his work was the conception that the truth of logical statements is based only on their logical structure and on the meaning of the terms. Logical statements are true under all conceivable circumstances; thus their truth is independent of the contingent facts of the world. On the other hand, it follows that these statements do not say anything about the world and thus have no factual content.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Carnap’s intellectual biography (1963), p. 25 as cited in: M. J. Cresswell (2010) " Carnap's logic http://apacentral.org/necessity/Cresswell_Carnap.pdf"

Truth , World , Thinking , Personality

“Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science -- that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science.”

Rudolf Carnap

Foreword
Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937

Science

“After defining semantical concepts like logical truth and related ones, I proposed to interpret the modalities as those properties of propositions which correspond to certain semantical properties of the sentences expressing the propositions. For example, a proposition is logically necessary if and only if a sentence expressing it is logically true.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Carnap’s intellectual biography (1963), p. 62

Truth

“A decisive difference between our method and Frege's consists in the fact that our concepts, in distinction to Frege's, are independent of the context.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 125

Decision

“The task of making more exact a vague or not quite exact concept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logical development, or rather of replacing it by a newly constructed, more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of logical analysis and logical construction. We call this the task of explicating, or of giving an explication for the earlier concept; this earlier concept, or sometimes the term used for it, is called the explicandum; and the new concept, or its term, is called an explicatum of the old one.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 7-8 as cited in: Erich Reck (2011) " Carnapian Explication: A Case Study and Critique http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~reck/Reck-C'ian%20Explic.%20(3rd.%20rev.).pdf"

Life

“Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 124 as cited in: E. Cornell Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. p. 183

Sense

“The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and extending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors.”

Rudolf Carnap

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. v: Preface

Books