Rudolf Carnap
Philosopher & Logician
關於
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) was a German-American philosopher and a leading figure of the Vienna Circle, the group that shaped logical positivism. He sought to rebuild philosophy on the model of logic and science: The Logical Structure of the World (1928) tried to construct all knowledge from elementary experience, and The Logical Syntax of Language (1934) treated the rules of a language as a formal system one is free to choose (his 'principle of tolerance'). After emigrating to the United States in 1935 he taught at Chicago and UCLA, developing formal semantics (Meaning and Necessity, 1947) and inductive logic. That machinery — measuring the content of a statement by the possibilities it excludes — underwrote his collaboration with Yehoshua Bar-Hillel on a theory of semantic information (1952), the early attempt to put meaning back into Shannon's meaning-free measure.
主要貢獻
- A central figure of the Vienna Circle and logical positivism
- Wrote The Logical Structure of the World (1928), a landmark program for grounding knowledge in logic
- Introduced the principle of tolerance in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934)
- Built formal semantics and inductive logic (Meaning and Necessity, 1947; Logical Foundations of Probability, 1950)
- Co-developed a theory of semantic information with Bar-Hillel (1952), measuring content by excluded possibilities
