Carnap’s Logical Empiricism, Values, and American Pragmatism

Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted f rom value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper i s to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive attitude concerning values. It is argued that Carnap’s non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never properly dissolved tension between his conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap’s non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between logical empiricists and American pragmatists. Carnap’s persisting adherence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris’s and Kaplan’s pragmatist theses that cognitivism might well are compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy. 0 . Introduction . A major point on the agenda of history of philosophy of science is to u n derstand how the European and the American version of logical empiricism were related. Eu ropean logical empiricism is said to be not "intellectually continuous" with its American sucessor. According to Giere "[T]he cause of this discontinuity was clearly not primarily intellectual. It was the forcible dislocation of many of the major participants from the culture of Germanspeaking Europe during the interwar years to the English-speaking world of North America beginning around 1933. It is with this fact that any future history of logical empiricism in North America must begin." (Giere 1996, 336) Others blame WWII, the Cold war, or McCarthyism to be responsible for the transformation of European logical empiricism, conceived as a "progressive" and "enlightenment-oriented"