Logic & Philosophy of Science Group Talk (Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau, Toronto)

Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. His areas of interest include logical empiricism and the history of analytic philosophy, particularly pragmatism, Bertrand Russell and Frank Ramsey.

Join the meeting on Zoom: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/84071526657

Talk Title

Origins of Logical Tolerance

Talk Abstract

Carnap famously claimed in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934) that logic is based on conventions and that we can freely choose our logical language (Carnap’s “Principle of Tolerance”). The talk reconstructs how this idea of logical tolerance slowly emerged in debates within the Vienna Circle. I will especially focus on the moment when it became increasingly visible that the conception of logic in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was untenable and that therefore a new “logical syntax” was needed. The conception of logic and mathematics as a freely chosen calculus emerged as a replacement of the Tractarian view of logic. This new view was defended by Wittgenstein and Waismann. I will retrace how this idea of a calculus was discussed by Carnap and Waismann, how it was extended to the view of language as a calculus and how it influenced the Carnapian idea of logical tolerance. I will also emphasize how two different conceptions of the construction of languages emerged from this debate, a Carnapian and a Waismannian conception.