Introduction to semantics and Formalization of logic

by Rudolf Carnap

Book by Rudolf Carnap

Genres: Philosophy, Logic

159 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Rudolf Carnap, a German-born philosopher and naturalized U.S. citizen, was a leading exponent of logical positivism and was one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of science, philosophy of language, the theory of probability, inductive logic and modal logic. He rejected metaphysics as meaningless because metaphysical statements cannot be proved or disproved by experience. He asserted that many philosophical problems are indeed pseudo-problems, the outcome of a misuse of language.

Read more : http://www.iep.utm.edu/carnap/

Reviews

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

【The Basic Reading of Non-history / Introduction to Semantics / Rudolf Carnap】

If you're a historical type of philosophy reader, like the one who want to dive into the historical usage of words first (just like some Foucault reader including myself), it's a great stretch of mind. How can we negate the historicity of words without denying them?

This book is very understandable for a person who is yet to call themselves "knowledgeable about semantics." Of course, it might not be something to be called the Bible of semantics for our generation, but still it's cited academically, and hopefully not a bad start. Just like we need basic stretch before reading those dense, thick volumes of epistemology, right?

This book is written in a very understandable manner which is enough to let us know how philosophy can be "legible." It'd be great for a training in academic writing to read Carnap's somewhat literary tinted legibility, just like one you see in a highly sophisticated detective story.

The essential concept of this book would be the amalgamation of logic and semantics by help of L (logic) -concepts (the class of logic in semantics). It's really a great method to get rid of historicity from words, and can taken as a great antidote to the excess of Michel Foucault style, and yet it's still a powerful tool to analyze designation, definition, calculus and even fact checking of history (cf. Circa p159). Also, it'd be quite a big weapon for you if you are equipped with the distinction of sentences from logic discussed circa p137 of this book when you happen to quarrel lol. It'd be equally good if you know the difference between C-comprehensive (consistent in C but unprovable) and C-false (inconsistent), and that the correlation between semantics and syntax makes a true interpretation (p203). For me, the concept of exhaustive calculus which is both true and false dependent on the fact (completely consistent) was really interesting (p219).