CARNAP’S LOGICAL EMPIRICISM, VALUES, AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM

Abstract. Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted f rom value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaning-less metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper i s to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive attitude concerning values. It is argued that Carnap’s non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never properly dissolved tension between his conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap’s non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between logical empiricists and American pragmatists. Carnap’s persisting adherence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris’s and Kaplan’s pragmatist theses that cognitivism might well are compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy. 0. Introduction. A major point on the agenda of history of philosophy of science is to u n