Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprint) [Paperback]

Rudolf Carnap (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226093476 | ISBN-13: 978-0226093475 | Publication Date: February 15, 1988 | Edition: 1

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence. . . . The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter for argument."—Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal

Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (February 15, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226093476
• ISBN-13: 978-0226093475
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,855,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Meaning at Midcentury: Carnap's Rules of Ramifying Order, March 9, 2004

By 

Jeffrey Rubard (Beaverton, OR US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprint) (Paperback)

Though Willard van Orman Quine taught a generation of analytic philosophers to disparage Rudolf Carnap's *Meaning and Necessity*, in reality (as in Carnap's private helps to understanding this period of his work) there is very little to dislike about this book. Carnap's "assimilation" of Tarski and Goedel's limitative results with respect to the logical syntax of language did not cause him to completely abandon the habits of mind he had accustomed himself to, but led him to write a series of books on semantics. And in this third volume, his last major work on the philosophy of language, Carnap extends his analysis to include modal phenomena (possibility and necessity) which were formerly intellectually distasteful to the Vienna Circle. The volume is rounded out with a number of papers, including Carnap's famous "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" and a discussion of Charles W. Morris' tripartite division of semiotics.

Although Quine (whom Carnap engaged in a spirited correspondence with concerning these topics) spent a great deal of time during the '50s and '60s demonstrating the logical inconsistency of Carnap's analysis, this book is very much an "implementation" of Carnap's Principle of Tolerance concerning modalities and their role in semantic analysis: although Carnap is usually understood as a slightly lax Fregean, here he presents a formalization of Frege alongside multiple theories of his own. Furthermore, all subsequent work in intensional logic and the semantics of modal logic owes something to Carnap's treatment of "possible worlds" in terms of state-descriptions: contemporary modal logic has rather less to do with the metaphysics of modality than with the issues of descriptive adequacy raised by possible-worlds semantics and addressed at length in Barwise and Perry's *Situations and Attitudes* (a book which would not have existed but for this one, as perhaps could be honestly said of many linguistic works informed by "generative semantics"). All in all, an important document of postwar intellectual life and a model for genuinely critical analysis -- an excellent buy.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A philosophy of language primer for late 20th century, March 27, 2007

By 

Randall McCutcheon (Bexley, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprint) (Paperback)

It's somewhat incredible just how much of the philosophy of language to emerge in the last half of the 20th century was anticipated by Carnap here. Indeterminacy of translation, primary and secondary intensions; there are passages that foreshadow Kripke as well. There is very little to object to. Indeed, just about everything Carnap says seems pretty obvious. Still, this seems to be the really hard thing to pull off, judging by the missteps many other philosophers manage to talk themselves into. One is continually awed in Carnap by his tremendous judgement. Like Russell before him, he sees very clearly that when it comes to the choice of a semantic method, that is, a method of interpretation of utterances (assignation of "meaning"), "right" and "wrong" aren't useful categories. (Almost all philosophers these days speak of their opponents' theories being "wrong", "false", "obviously false" or "demonstrably false", a real disaster not only for the ill will it engenders.) Various theories may be more or less useful for one purpose or another.

Now, there are some well known objections to much of what is here. Carnap does make a point of separating the meaning ("intension") from the truth ("extension") of an utterance and hence views interpretation as being analyzable into two dissimilable components, one a sort of armchair process and the other empirical. Quine's objections to this are legendary but not particularly useful to science. Indeed, if one were to do a probabilistic analysis of Quine, one would find that what he's worried about are events of asymptotically vanishing probability. This sort of theme is common in mathematics; there are notions of stability and instability that are second-nature to most scientists that ordinary philosophers don't seem to really have. All of Quine's imagined "alternate conceptual schemes" are almost certainly wildly unstable; all of the aliens *we'll* ever meet are tremendously likely to see and discuss the same sorts of everyday objects we see and discuss; this is because natural probabilities are a much different lay of land than "metaphysical possibilities" or "logical possibilities". In truth, of course, you only need to know that other humans have similar conceptual schemes. Searle was onto this in answer to Quine, though he didn't really have the resources to say it very well. (He speaks of a "background" or some such nonsense when he really should be talking about brain architecture.) On the other hand Carnap (shockingly) was really ahead of this all along if you read him closely; he properly sidesteps the issue of ontology altogether.

Reading back over the paragraph I just wrote, this is probably the most disjointed review I have ever written. Partly this is because I haven't fully digested Carnap's achievement in this book--which is a vast one.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly technical, May 8, 2006

By 

Matthias Brendel "math" (Oulu, Finland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Midway Reprint) (Paperback)

This bookis interesting for you only if you are really interested in complex, technical views about semantics or modal logic, or the pphilosophy of Carnap.

If you are jsut interested in Carnap's philosophy, but want to read some interesting stuff, then this is not your book. Try Introduction to Philosophy of Science, or try the autobiography of Carnap.