Abstract
In 1932 Ludwig Wittgenstein accused Rudolf Carnap of plagiarism and seems to have gone so far as to scrawl the word ‘Plagiarism’ on one of Carnap’s offprints and initial that note as well. Priority disputes are inherently distasteful and usually sterile. And they are often impossible to adjudicate fully. I make no such attempt here. But these disputes can also be revealing about what the participants thought they were doing and what they thought they had achieved. It is in this latter vein that I revisit the 1932 dispute. My primary focus will be on Carnap, and I begin by examining the accounts of the dispute by three distinguished philosopher/historians, Jaakko Hintikka, Thomas Uebel, and David Stern. The aim is not a verdict on Wittgenstein’s charge of plagiarism, but to see what the dispute and surrounding documents show about how Carnap’s views were developing in the early thirties, what antecedents those ideas may have had (including in Wittgenstein), and how Carnap saw the changes in his views.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not know whether Hintikka’s claim that Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s views were identical in all these respects will cause more alarm to Wittgensteinians or to Carnapians.
- 2.
- 3.
On this see Stern (2007, 319). There Stern says “…Wittgenstein rejects the very idea of metalogic…” and gives further citations.
- 4.
The distinction is formulated in such a way that it does not survive the introduction of a truth predicate into Carnap’s philosophical work later in the 1930s. But the general idea behind it does.
- 5.
For example, Hintikka takes Quine to be a life-long member of the language-as-universal-medium camp. Quine does not recognize himself in the portrait.
- 6.
Compare what Carnap says about construction/translation of concepts in (Carnap 1928/1967, ix).
References
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Creath, R. (2023). Plagiarism!: Wittgenstein Against Carnap. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07789-0_8
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