Book Details

The Limits of Logical Empiricism

Publication year: 2006

ISBN: 978-1-4020-4299-7

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This volume brings together a selection of the most philosophically significant papers of Arthur Pap. As Sanford Shieh explains in the Introduction to this volume, Pap’s work played an important role in the development of the analytic tradition. This role goes beyond the merely historical fact that Pap’s views of dispositional and modal concepts were influential. As a sympathetic critic of logical empiricism, Pap, like Quine, saw a deep tension in logical empiricism at its very best, in the work of Carnap. But Pap’s critique of Carnap is quite different from Quine’s, and represents the discovery of limits beyond which empiricism cannot go, where there lies nothing other than intuitive knowledge of logic itself. Pap’s arguments for this intuitive knowledge anticipate Etchemendy’s recent critique of the model-theoretic account of logical consequence.


Subject: Humanities, Social Science and Law / Proposition / Rudolf Carnap / dispositions / interpret / knowledge / logic / logical consequence / logical empiricism / logicism /metaphysics / modality / philosophy /reduction / science / truth