I begin by considering the connection between Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics and A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Knox and Donagan believe that “between 1936 and 1938 Collingwood radically changed his mind about the relation of philosophy to history.” Donagan contends that this break stemmed from Collingwood’s having “come to endorse Ayer’s view that the propositions of traditional metaphysics are unverifiable.” Recently, Vanheeswijck and Beaney have claimed that Collingwood in effect endorsed Ayer’s verificationism. There is a considerable gulf between their claims and my own view of what Collingwood thought about logical positivism. In my view, Collingwood denied logical positivism flat-out. My chapter lays out and assesses the main points Vanheeswijck and Beaney use to support their view. I develop a viable alternative, one that takes account of Collingwood’s treatment of absolute presuppositions (in particular, on the vexed question of whether they can be determined to be true or false) and at the same time avoids the conclusion that Collingwood had, mistakenly, bought into logical positivism in his discussion of absolute presuppositions.

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, Mill’s deductive method was criticized by defenders of more positivistic or modernist views of economic methodology, which I criticize in chapter 11. A number of economists, including Terence Hutchison, Paul Samuelson, Fritz Machlup, Milton Friedman, and Tjallings Koopmans argued that Mill’s deductive method is insufficiently empirical and that economic models should be judged by the agreement of their implications with economic outcomes. Yet they rarely practiced what they preached. This chapter thus highlights the methodological schizophrenia of many economists, in which methodological pronouncements and practice contradict one another.

Many informed readers of Carnap (and Quine) have taken Quine’s objections to Carnap’s account of analyticity in terms of semantical rules to have failed. This paper counters this, arguing that Quine actually saw himself as applying Carnap’s own philosophical standards more strictly than Carnap himself did. Quine was, as he later reported, “just being more carnapian than Carnap.” This paper offers a careful analysis of Section 4 of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which shows Carnap conflating two senses of “semantical rule.” Although the first is clear, Quine sees it as being of no use in defining analyticity. The second, though integral to Carnap’s method of defining analyticity, Quine shows to be left unexplained by Carnap’s definitions.

Recognition that people are divided by a common language is typically marked by a search for culprit ambiguities – but rarely so when name philosophers are involved, for whom continued talking past each other may seem the easier option.Whether the case of Carnap and Quine fits this profile is my quarry here. I begin with Quine’s conjecture that it was Neurath’s influence that made Carnap introduce the paragraphs into the Aufbau that promised, without elaboration, a conceptual genealogy on a physical basis. I argue that are good grounds to support Quine here. The analysis will be supplemented with remarks about later disagreements between Carnap and Neurath.

While a number of commentators have argued that Quine’s account of Carnap’s paper in terms of the category/subclass distinction is simply a misunderstanding of Carnap, this essay argues that it is not. Instead, Quine was correct to construe Carnap’s external questions of existence as all being category questions. Quine’s second claim – that answers to internal category questions of existence are trivial and analytic – was, however, incorrect. Here, this essay then dissents from a view of Ebbs, who has recently argued that Quine was right on both points. Instead, it is argued that epistemic considerations that support Quine’s first point undermine his second point.

While Quine is often taken to have broken the Viennese straitjacket of Logical Positivism, which rejected metaphysics, as an a priori but non-analytic, substantive discipline, allowing speculative metaphysics to be reborn, this paper argues against this. Instead, for all their much-discussed disagreements over analyticity and ontology, Quine shared Carnap’s more fundamental commitment to ‘scientific philosophy’: to the idea that legitimate philosophy is the work of handmaidens, site managers or accountants of science. Their primary role is to act to clarify, precisify and make explicit the methods and deliverances of science. The essay then brings Carnap and Quine to bear on more recent analytic trends towards metaphysics by specifically contrasting Carnap and Quine’s scientific philosophy with recent work by Timothy Williamson. This essay stresses Carnap and Quine’s considerable distance from Williamson; and that from Quine’s point of view as well as from Carnap’s, this recent ascendance of metaphysics will seem a departure from science without sufficient justification.

Both Carnap and Quine see an element of practical choice in our scientific theorizing but that they diverge on its significance, particularly with regard to a theory of meaning. From Carnap’s standpoint, linguistic frameworks are practically adopted without any prior constraints and then provide for a theory of meaning. In contrast, Quine sees a theory of meaning presupposing a more general assumption that all meaningful elements stand in a systematic relation before translation begins. Without this assumption, there is no work for a theory of meaning to do. In this sense, the dogmas of empiricism can only do explanatory work if the meaningful elements are already systematically linked in a way that translation might recapture.

The arguments for the indeterminacy of Translation in Quine’s Word and Object (1960) form a turning point in his thinking. Quine may have started out as a disciple of Carnap’s, but in the 1940s and 1950s the most salient feature of Quine’s work is a deep asymmetry. Such extensional notions as reference and ontology are central and fully intelligible. Intensional notions such as analyticity and synonymy are not intelligible, and epistemic concerns are, in his published writing, not central. The arguments for the indeterminacy of translation undermine the asymmetry and initiate changes to the role of ontology and reference, to the status of simplicity, to Quine’s understanding of analyticity and synonymy, and to the character and centrality of his epistemology, ultimately including even a return to a two-tier epistemology. The changes do not amount to a wholesale rejection of earlier views, but exist uneasily alongside those previous views. In the aggregate, however, the changes were significant and brought Quine’s position back much closer to Carnap’s.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book and the individual chapters.

This essay examines the very beginning of Carnap and Quine’s philosophical relationship, focusing on Quine’s visit to Europe during the academic year 1932–33, during which he spent five weeks in Prague with Carnap. Verhaegh details what initiated Quine’s trip, the events leading up to his arrival in Prague, and finally the momentous philosophical exchange between Quine and Carnap that began there and that would carry on for the rest of Quine’s career, even after Carnap’s death in 1970.

This essay considers Carnap and Quine’s views on ontology. While both Carnap and Quine see their disagreement over the status of ontology as a legitimate philosophical undertaking as ultimately rooted in their disagreement over the analytic/synthetic distinction, it argues that this cannot be so since Quine comes to accept a notion of analyticity without changing his views on ontology. Instead, it is argued that the more fundamental point underlying the disagreement about the status of ontology is Carnaps advocacy of the Principle of Tolerance, which Quine never comes to accept.

This essay argues that despite Quine and Kuhn’s reputation for bringing to a close the era of Carnap and logical empiricism as the dominating philosophy of science, Carnap, Quine, and Kuhn all share in rejecting traditional realist and anti-realist analyses of ontology. They all reject a version of what Putnam called metaphysical realism and then also resist making the move to an equally extra-scientific anti-realist position. For all of them, science itself is to be the final arbiter of what there is.

This essay explores pragmatic aspects of Carnaps and Quines philosophy. It begins with a (schematic) characterization of pragmatism, pointing to recurring themes in the writings of leading American pragmatists, such as fallibilism, the social dimension of language and knowledge, the relation between belief and action, and the critique of skepticism, essentialism, foundationalism, and the fact/value dichotomy. It then examines aspects of Carnaps and Quines thinking that appear to be related (conceptually rather than historically) to pragmatism. Carnaps Principle of Tolerance and Quines critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction are primary examples, but there are others, such as their positions on scientific method, truth, and realism. Despite the similarities between Carnap and Quine emerging from this examination, the paper also identifies significant differences between their ways of understanding pragmatism. These differences, I suggest, are related to the difference between the European and American traditions regarding the meaning and use of the term pragmatism

This chapter examines the influence that the Logical Positivists had on Kuhn. Though he did not discuss their views extensively, he was reacting against a particular interpretation of their view.

Kuhn has been hailed as one of the main critics of logical positivism since the publication of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But the image of science he criticizes in the published version of the book is not considered sufficiently clear and has left room for doubt as to whether or not positivism, rarely directly cited, is a real target of this criticism. In the first manuscript of the work, written in 1958, the traditional image of science becomes clearer due to the contrast Kuhn makes between science and art. This chapter shows that the traditional image of science that Kuhn presents through the contrast with art in the first manuscript is the same as the one logical positivists present in the contrast with philosophy, particularly in the context of one of their most important and characteristic ideas, the proposal of a scientific philosophy. This allows a proper assessment of the share of responsibility of logical positivism in the construction of the traditional image of science Kuhn criticizes and, thus, a better understanding of Kuhn’s relationship with positivism.

Stoppard’s fascination with philosophy spans his whole career, from early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet to Darkside and The Hard Problem. Though he was extraordinarily conversant in the disciplinary questions of British analytic philosophy, even striking up correspondences with some of its leading figures, Stoppard also always harboured reservations as to philosophy’s utility and insight, finding it in many cases insufficient compared to the depth of human exploration available in the theatre.

Ernst Mach and William James were personal friends and intellectual allies. Might there have been an American pragmatist influence on Logical Positivism via James’s influence on Mach? I explore the relationship between these two friends, arguing that, if anything, Mach’s instrumentalism about science actually influenced James more than James’s pragmatism influenced Mach. What is more, empirical and not philosophical issues dominated their intellectual exchanges, and I examine the three topics about which they most frequently engaged one another: the role of the semicircular canals in the perception of bodily orientation, the question of whether there is a distinctive 'feeling of effort' (Innervationsgefühl), and the nature of visual spatial perception. The debate over the Innervationsgefühl is particularly interesting because James apparently convinced Mach to reverse his position on the matter. In short, we remember Mach as a master experimentalist and James as a philosophical populariser, so it is a surprise to learn that the main philosophical influence apparently flowed from Mach to James, while the main influence when it comes to matters of empirical interest actually flowed the other way.