By W. V. Quine

Rudolf Carnap and W. V. Quine, of the 20th century's so much very important philosophers, corresponded at lengthand over an extended interval of timeon issues own, specialist, and philosophical. Their friendship encompassed matters and disagreements that visit the guts of up to date philosophic discussions. Carnap (1891-1970) used to be a founder and chief of the logical positivist tuition. the more youthful Quine (1908-) begun as his staunch admirer yet diverged from him more and more over questions within the research of that means and the justification of trust. That they remained shut, relishing their ameliorations via years of correspondence, exhibits their stature either as thinkers and as buddies. The letters are offered the following, in complete, for the 1st time. The giant advent through Richard Creath deals a full of life review of Carnap's and Quine's careers and backgrounds, permitting the nonspecialist to work out their writings in old and highbrow point of view. Creath additionally presents a sensible research of the philosophical divide among them, displaying how deep the problems lower into the self-discipline, and the way to a wide volume they continue to be unresolved. expensive Carnap, I enclose a replica of a paper which i'm able to ship off for booklet. . . . i'm worried to have you ever glance this over once attainable, to work out even if you may have cause to feel the method contradictory: for it seems to be risky. pricey Quine: I learn your paper very rigorously and with the top curiosity. . . . thus far, i don't see any contradiction within the method itself . . . yet I proportion your feeling that the entire seems to be really harmful.

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Extra info for Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work, Edited and with an introduction by Richard Creath.

Example text

We shall need an implicit definition for this word; that is, we shall need to supplement the rules A)–E) with say one more rule F). This rule will be so fashioned that from A)–F) we can derive all accepted sentences materially involving only the word "event" plus any mathematical or logical notions, but involving other words only vacuously. The sentences thus provided for will express only the completed general properties of events: only the sentences about "event" which, except for the word "event" are entirely logico-mathematical.

This rule might be regarded, in terms of implicit definitions, as implicitly defining the numerical variables, or italic letters. In another sense E) might be regarded as in effect an implicit definition of all , since, as I have explained, a sentence containing numerical variables is to be regarded in the model language as asserted for all values of those variables. I explained also how we could go on and add more rules F), G) and so on, as far as we pleased; and that these could stand as implicit definitions of so-called empirical notions such as "event", "energy", "time" and so on.

Now we saw last Thursday that all logic and mathematics is generable through A)B)C)D)E)—assuming C) and D) to be properly fashioned. docId=ft0c60030x&chunk... A)B)C)D)E). Hence all those sentences are analytic for the specimen language—insofar, of course, as they are sentences at all from the standpoint of the specimen language, while it is to be decided in each case by the formative rules. "Analytic" is a function of the language, and varies from one language to another, as does the "consequence" relation upon which the property of being analytic depends.

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