Carnap, Quine, and Putnam on Methods of Inquiry

This volume critically examines the work of three eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, engaging with and developing their answers to key methodological questions.

Gary Ebbs (Author)

9781107178151, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 June 2017

288 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Ebbs' volume … is an important publication from both an historical and a systematic point of view. It offers a new perspective on the relation between Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, as well as a substantive contribution to ongoing systematic debates about truth, justification, and language use. As such, it will be of interest and value not only to historians of analytic philosophy, but also to all philosophers who believe that Carnap's, Quine's, and Putnam's most fundamental insights deserve continuous discussion and adaptation.' Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Carnap, Quine, and Putnam held that in our pursuit of truth we can do no better than to start in the middle, relying on already-established beliefs and inferences and applying our best methods for re-evaluating particular beliefs and inferences and arriving at new ones. In this collection of essays, Gary Ebbs interprets these thinkers' methodological views in the light of their own philosophical commitments, and in the process refutes some widespread misunderstandings of their views, reveals the real strengths of their arguments, and exposes a number of problems that they face. To solve these problems, in many of the essays Ebbs also develops new philosophical approaches, including new theories of logical truth, language use, reference and truth, truth by convention, realism, trans-theoretical terms, agreement and disagreement, radical belief revision, and contextually a priori statements. His essays will be valuable for a wide range of readers in analytic philosophy.

Part I. Carnap: 1. Carnap's logical syntax
2. Carnap on ontology
Part II. Carnap and Quine: 3. Carnap and Quine on truth by convention
4. Quine's naturalistic explication of Carnap's logic of science
Part III. Quine: 5. Quine gets the last word
6. Reading Quine's claim that definitional abbreviations create synonymies
7. Can logical truth be defined in purely extensional terms?
8. Reading Quine's claim that no statement is immune to revision
Part IV. Quine and Putnam: 9. Conditionalization and conceptual change: Chalmers in defense of a dogma
10. Truth and trans-theoretical terms
Part V. Putnam: 11. Putnam and the contextually apriori.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA], Philosophy: logic [HPL], Analytical philosophy & Logical Positivism [HPCF5]