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Darren Bradley, Ontology after CarnapEdited by Stephan Blatti and Sandra Lapointe, Analysis, Volume 77, Issue 4, October 2017, Pages 858–861, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anx093
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Extract
‘Carnap is not completely unknown to us’ comments Richard Creath in his contribution to this book. ‘We often know just enough to be baffled’ (193). It will be no surprise to anyone when I say that this book will not unbaffle us. But it does give us a collection of rewarding papers that each wrestle with the legacy Carnap has left us. The introduction contains a helpful summary of each paper, so rather than giving my own, I will trace one thread of argument that runs through a few of the papers.
Perhaps the only feature of Carnap’s views that can be found throughout the book is his distinction between internal and external questions, according to which internal questions are good, external questions are bad and metaphysical questions are external. But the degree to which this distinction can be separated from Carnap’s verificationism and the extent to which it can be co-opted by contemporary philosophers remain sources of disagreement. Some offer a revisionary account of this distinction. For example, Kraut, in his contribution, suggests that the internal/external distinction should be understood as the distinction between descriptive and expressivist language. And Hofweber suggests that the internal/external distinction should be understood in terms of two different functions of the quantifier – an inferential role function which merely relates quantified statements to other sentences in one’s language, and a domain conditions reading which can be used to make claims about objects.
