Abstract

It is hard to know what sort of audience the author could have had in mind for this little book. It is for the most part a sort of precis of Carnap’s position on a few problems in semantics, epistemology and philosophy of science. Unless one were familiar with the terminology of the analysts already, much of it would be unintelligible; if one were, the book would be unnecessary. The problems are for the most part not developed, only their ‘solutions’ given in a series of obiter dicta like ‘I assume as axiomatic that every scientific theory is a system of sentences which are accepted as true and which may be categorized under the titles of laws or statements’. Quite an assumption! His semantic conventions are sometimes obscure and occasionally open to serious question. There is an uneasy attempt to modify Carnap’s extreme formalism, but his unquestioning acceptance of such dogmas as the Carnapian version of the analyticsynthetic distinction makes it impossible for him to get very far, and indeed leads him into inconsistencies. The best parts of the book are his critiques of operationalism and of the Dedekind theory of number.