Abstract
Gregory Lavers gives us a timeline of Waismann’s career, an overview of Waismann’s most significant publications in this later period and a detailed walkthrough from the first to the last paper of Waismann’s series on analyticity, “Analytic - Synthetic”. Lavers closes his paper with comparisons of Waismann and Quine as well as Waismann and Carnap. Both Waismann and Quine argue that the concept of analyticity is vague and both reject reductionism. However, behind these superficial similarities we find fundamentally different epistemologies. According to Lavers, the web of inferential relations, spanning from every experience to any item of scientific knowledge, that supports the outlook suggested by Quine, is rejected as manifestly wrong by Waismann. Conversely, Lavers shows that despite superficial contrasts between Waismann and Carnap—Waismann being interested in the subtleties of natural language, Carnap in replacing these through explication—the two do not really oppose each other’s’ views on analyticity and necessary truth.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Letter from Wittgenstein to Schlick, 6 May 1932; translation from Hintikka (1996, 131). Waismann seems to have been careful not to be the victim of the same charge from Wittgenstein as can be seen from the opening footnote to his 1938 paper “I wish to emphasize my indebtedness to Dr. Wittgenstein, to whom I owe not only a great part of the views expressed in this paper but also my whole method of dealing with philosophical questions. Although I hope that the views expressed here are in agreement with those of Dr. Wittgenstein, I do not wish to ascribe to him any responsibility for them.” Braithwaite and Waismann (1938).
- 3.
For a detailed analysis of this paper see Gordon Baker’s (2003).
- 4.
Here he is making several simplifying assumptions, such as ignoring exo-planets, in order for this to come out analytic.
- 5.
He also discusses the objection that we ought not speak of equal here, but should speak of indistinguishable in length. Here Waismann says that there is nothing logical preventing us from using talk of equality here.
- 6.
See for example Walsh (1953).
- 7.
One might respond here, in Quine’s defense, by saying that one person’s manifestly false premise another person’s simplifying assumption. That said, this still points to a significant tension between their philosophical views.
- 8.
Although admitting 2 + 2 = 4 as a tautology is far from admitting all of mathematics as a tautology, when Waismann discusses mathematical examples, he never questions their status as necessary truths.
- 9.
See for instance Carnap (1974). It is interesting to note here that when Carnap talks of an observation language here he does not mean anything phenomenalistic.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the audience at the University of Western Ontario, where I presented an early version of this paper, for a fruitful discussion that led to improvements. I would also like to thank Robert Dillon for suggesting some changes.
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Lavers, G. (2019). Waismann: From Wittgenstein’s Tafelrunde to His Writings on Analyticity. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_7
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