Reminiscences about Carnap at Chicago (1945-51)

Carnap was at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1952.  He had been brought to Chicago from Prague at the urging of Charles Morris. There was a peculiar schism in the department, with Carnap and Charles Morris, editors and guiding spirits of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, on one side, and Richard McKeon, the classical scholar, and his disciples on the other.  I was a graduate student in philosophy, under Carnap and Morris, from about 1946 to 1951.  This was the Robert Maynard Hutchins--i.e., the Great Books--era at the University of Chicago.  As the youngest Chancellor every appointed, Hutchins had worked a revolution at the University of Chicago. He had banished football, turned the stadium into a laboratory (in which the first sustained nuclear reaction was achieved), banished grading in undergraduate courses, made attendance optional, accepted students of any age if they qualified (whether they had a high school diploma or not), integrated the undergraduate curriculum into four major fields--Humanities, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences, and made the Great Books the textbooks for these courses.  You didn't read a chemistry text; you read Lavoisier; you didn't read a biology text; you read The Origin of the Species.  In this era, with its emphasis upon the Great Books, the McKeon faction generally ruled the philosophy department, so those of us who were students of Carnap and Morris were in the minority.  It was all very exciting.

The thing that struck me most about Carnap was his almost selfless drive for truth.  He really took seriously the idea that there is progress in human knowledge, that science is a cooperative enterprise whose protagonists share a common goal.  He absolutely submerged his ego in that enterprise, more than anyone I have known, and he would generally give others the benefit of the doubt--assuming that they too were joining in a selfless and disinterested search for truth.  He seemed vaguely astonished (and maybe later bitter) when he came up against the more common picture of the academy, as a viciously competitive place where everybody is out for his or her own reputation and power at whatever cost-- a laissez faire, backbiting, envy-ridden kind of place--in which the failure of your competitor can be more valuable to you than his or her achievements.

One of the consequences of Carnap's ability to submerge his ego in the search for truth is that he had no hesitation in changing his mind.  It was a striking feature of the logical empiricist movement, led by Carnap, that most of its flaws, so widely discussed today, were discovered by the logical empiricists themselves. And as they discovered a flaw, they changed their positions.  By the way, Hilary Putnam (whom many people regard as the pre-eminent philosopher of science today) made an interesting comment about this. In Representation and Reality, Putnam argued against the functionalism which he himself had earlier advanced.  He wrote:

The fact that I change my mind...has been viewed as a character defect.  When I am lighthearted, I retort that it might be that I change my mind so often because I make mistakes, and that other philosophers don't change their minds because they simply never make mistakes.  But I should like now, for once, to say something serious about this.  I have never forgotten the conversations I had with Rudolf Carnap in the years 1953-55, and in particular, I have never forgotten how Carnap---a great philosopher who had an aura of integrity and seriousness which was almost overwhelming--would stress that he had changed his mind on philosophical issues, and changed it more than once.  "I used to think...I now think." was a sentence construction that was ever on Carnap's lips...  For me Carnap is still the outstanding example of a human being who puts the search for truth higher than personal vanity.  A philosopher's job is not to produce a view X and then, if possible, to become universally known as "Mr. View X" or "Ms. View X."   

This was also my impression of Carnap.   In this connection, I am saddened by the fact that most people today take Carnap's first book, the Logischer Aufbau.., published in 1928, as characteristic of the logical empiricists' position.  The primitive phenomenalism of this book--the idea that private sense data are the primary objects of knowledge--was abandoned (or possibly relativized to a logically possible but arcane position) by Carnap within two or three years.   Moreoever, under the influence of Neurath, Carnap abandoned even the idea that there is a "rockbottom basis of knowledge," phenomenal or physical. Recall here Neurath's metaphor, that we are in the predicament of being in a lifeboat which we have to reconstruct as we go along.  Already in the early 1930's, this had become a central thesis of the movement.  Incidentally, this gave rise to the rather peculiar situation that had Nelson Goodman, in 1951 in The Structure of Appearance defending the Logischer Aufbau... approach against Carnap, who had scarcely looked at the Aufbau for twenty years.

In fact, Carnap rarely looked back.  He was ahistorical as has been said.  This is not to say that he was uninformed.  He was widely read in the history of philsophy and science, particularly mathematics, but he believed that we could not avoid and should not avoid seeing the past from the perspective of the present.  The historian of science, he thought, should not only give a description of scientific theories, but also a critical judgment of them in the light of present scientific knowledge. 

This put him in a peculiar situation at the University of Chicago, with its emphasis upon learning from the Great Books, and especially in the philosophy department, ruled, so to speak, by the great classical scholar and medievalist, Richard McKeon.  There was a kind of medieval atmosphere about the department, even the building in which it was housed.  This was Swift Hall, a gothic pile which also housed the theology department.  I remember a cartoon that someone had posted on the bulletin board.  It showed two students talking to one another about academic requirements:  One was asking the other: "Is it necessary to have a revelation to matriculate?"

McKeon held, if I understood him (which wasn't easy), that you had to get inside a philosopher's head to achieve understanding, that you could not understand a philosophical system from the outside.  In any study of a philosophical system of historical importance, it was necessary to approach the system from the philosopher's own perspective, without leveraging it on what you now know or think you know. I remember how pleased I was when I found the following verse, I think by Robert Frost, which seemed to characterize McKeon perfectly.  I pasted it into my copy of McKeon's Aristotle, where I found it when I was getting these remarks together:

      [He] sits back on his fundamental butt

      With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,

      (He almost looks religious but he's not),

      And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,

      At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,

      At the other agreeing with another Greek..

This was anathema to Carnap.  It was quite clear to him, for example, that modern logic, independently of any particular philosophical point of view, had shown the alleged ontological proof of God to be logically invalid.  Actually, it was Gottlob Frege who had demonstrated the invalidity of the ontological argument to Carnap, using his so-called "concept-writing," which he, Frege, had invented to investigate the foundations of mathematics.  Carnap was one of Frege's very few students, and probably, during the first half of the century, the only person who had read Frege's work other than Bertrand Russell and maybe Wittgenstein.  And from then on, Carnap would regard it as his major task to investigate various symbolic languages, with the expectation that such a language, or perhaps more than one, would be ideal vehicles for settling disputes and avoiding nonsensical, "metaphysical" discourse in the enterprise of science.  But that is another story.

Carnap resigned from the Chicago faculty in 1952.  When I visited him at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton that year, he was quite indignant about Chicago, which had been insisting that he leave the Institute and resume his teaching duties immediately.  He resolved then to leave the department; I think he believed that there was some petty envy and backbiting behind this imperative, as well as contempt for his belief that ”metaphysics” has no place in a scientific world view.

Seth Sharpless