Carnap’s and Quine’s debate on semantic austerity:  Revaluing their empiricist extensionalism

Sofia Inês Albornoz Stein

doi:10.15210/dissertatio.v49i0.14525

Sofia Inês Albornoz Stein Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15210/dissertatio.v49i0.14525

Resumo

In this paper I will show why Carnap’s and Quine’s sympathy for the extensionality thesis can be considered equivalent to their concern with clear logical criteria for the manipulation—that is, identification and permutation—of empirical linguistic terms and also why Carnap renounced to the extensionality thesis in the late 1930s. Quine’s inclination to see extensionality as an avoidance of semantic confusion triggered his profound admiration for Carnap’s early works, which are very much of an extensionalist nature. But Quine realizes, as early as the 1930s, that Carnap does not have the same resistance to admitting intensional objects. Already in the Aufbau (1928), Carnap’s phenomenalist and structuralist approach to knowledge, and his pragmatic approach to language systems, leads to the conclusion that the self-psyche and others’ psyche are not something, in principle, inaccessible to knowledge, and, therefore, that intensional—including intentional—objects could, in principle, be scientific objects. In addition to the historical development of semantics—which influenced Carnap—there are two fundamental reasons for Carnap’s increasing tolerance of intensional terminology and analysis in the philosophy of language. In the first place, Carnap thinks it possible to maintain a discourse on intensions without this leading to an ontological commitment to abstract intensional entities. Second, the behaviourist criteria for the identification of intensions that he offered demonstrates that he believed it possible to meet clear identification criteria for intensions. I will show why Carnap disagrees on these two points, in his semantic period, with Quine.

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Biografia do Autor

Sofia Inês Albornoz Stein, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos

Pesquisa nas áreas de filosofia da linguagem, epistemologia e ciências cognitivas e é bolsista PQ do CNPq. Após estudo das obras de Willard van Orman Quine, defendeu, em 1996, dissertação na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul intitulada O Holismo Semântico de Willard Quine: uma tentativa sistemática de compreender o significado. Desenvolveu pesquisa em 1998 na Universität Bielefeld, Alemanha, acerca das obras de Willard V. O. Quine e Rudolf Carnap e, em 2011, na University of Pittsburgh, investigou acerca do naturalismo na semântica, sob a supervisão de John McDowell. Atualmente é professora pesquisadora do Programa de Pós-graduação em Filosofia da Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos e da Especialização em História da Filosofia, coordena o Grupo de Pesquisa Social-Brains e o Laboratório de Filosofia Experimental e Estudos da Cognição. Investiga, desde uma perspectiva naturalizada, questões relativas à aquisição linguística e à compreensão do significado de frases, assim como questões acerca dos processos de percepção, e de como seus conteúdos estão relacionados à expressão linguística.

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