Carnap02

Rudolf Carnap (Born: 18 May 1891, Died: 14 Sep 1970)

  • Der Raum

    Carnap covers the differences between three kinds of theories of space. These three theories are formal, physical and intuitive. Carnap states that formal space deals with the logical side of the principle. Physical space is the object of natural science. Finally, intuitive space deals with intuition.
  • The Logical Structure of the World

    Carnap published "The Logical Structure of the World". In this book Carnap developed a formal version of empiricism, the theory that any meaningful knowledge comes from physical experimentation or observation.
  • Meaning and Verifiability

    One of Carnap's focuses was to introduce logic into the verifiability principle. The verifiability principle states that a synthetic statement is only meaningful if it can be verified. Carnap stated that a statement has meaning only if every non-logical term is definable by realistic phenomena. Later Carnap realized that a phenomenalistic language cannot define physical concepts.
  • The Structure of Scientific Theories

    In the 1940s Carnap started work on philosophical concepts pertaining to semantics. One concept he worked on was the structure of scientific theories. Carnap had two main concerns in this area. The first was to give an account of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements and the second was to give a suitable formulation of the verifiability principle. Carnap did a lot of work on the language of scientific theories during this period.