QUINE'S COPY

CARNAP, RUDOLF.

Testability and Meaning (+) Testability and Meaning - Continued. Reprinted from Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1936 (+) Vol. 4, No. 1, January, 1937.

(Cambridge, Mass.), 1936-37 8vo. Both works together in the original stapled wrappers (with "Testability and Meaning printed to front wrapper). Spine worn and very minor loss to extremities of front wrapper. Wrappers with minor soiling. All in all a nice copy. Pp. (419)-471 (+) 40 pp.

Scarce off-print (both parts), Quine's copy, of the first printing of one of Carnap's most important contributions to philosophy and certainly his first major publication in English, in which he introduces semantic concepts. With W. V. Quine's ownership signature on the first page. Carnap's "Testability and Meaning" was published merely two years after Quine published his first book.

According to Carnap, a statement is analytic if it is logically true. It is self contradictory if it is logically false. In all other cases the statement is synthetic. The ideas put forth in the present paper constitute the essence of Carnap's philosophy which he was to further develop and elaborate over the next 20 years.

The paper is based upon the two fundamental questions: "The first question asks under what condition a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false." (From the introduction to the present paper). To this Carnap concludes that "the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible." (Ibid.).

Carnap's "1936[-paper] marks a radical rejection of the positivist program of eliminating such metaphysical entities as Aristotelian objective necessary connections and such metaphysical aspirations as those of Gadamer." (Addis, Ontology and Analysis... p. 209).

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), one of the most influential logicians of the 20th century, influenced Carnap academically as well as personally. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and two years later, in 1935, Carnap moved to the United States, helped by Quine, whom he had met in Prague in 1934. Quine stated that: "Carnap is a towering figure. I see him as the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930s onward, as Russell had been in the decades before...Some philosophers would assign this role rather to Wittgenstein, but many see the scene as I do.".

Quine bases his main thesis ("A System of Logistic") on his consideration of the linguist - a subject closely related to Carnap - who attempts to translate a hitherto unknown language. There are different methods that the linguist could apply as to the breaking down of sentences and distribution of function among the words. Quine reaches the conclusion that if any hypothesis of translation needs to be defended, this can only be by appeal to context, by determining what other sentences the language user would utter in the language that is unknown to the linguist. But even here the indeterminacy of translation sets in, because, according to Quine, any hypothesis can be defended, if only enough other hypotheses of other parts of the language are adopted.
This indeterminacy of language also applies to the known languages, and even one's own, and thus Quine implies that there are no such entities as "meanings" of right and wrong. Quine thus denies any absolute standards in translating one language into another, but he admits that there are good and bad translation, -this is just not philosophically or logically relevant. Translation can be inconsistent with behavioral evidence, however and thus Quine propounds his pragmatic view of translation.

Order-nr.: 44734