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A Representational Reconstruction of Carnap's Quasianalysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Thomas Mormann
Thomas Mormann*
Affiliation:
Universität München
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Extract

According to general wisdom, quasianalysis belongs to the large family of Carnap's ingenious, but finally failed contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper I want to show that this is not the case. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis is to be considered as a promising theory of a representational constitution of scientific objects. That is to say, I intend to embed Carnap's approach of quasianalytical constitution in the framework of a general theory of meaningful representation (cf. Mundy (1986)).

The outline of this paper is as follows: In section 2 I recall the basics of the quasianalytical approach, taking into consideration not only the well-known account in “Der Logische Aufbau der Welt” (Aufbau) but also a rather unknown first version of quasianalysis (“Quasizerlegung”) which Carnap developed in an unpublished manuscript written in 1923. This paper deserves attention not only for philosophicohistorical reasons, rather it contains quite a lot of interesting features of the quasianalytical approach which do not appear in the Aufbau account.

Type
Part II. Explanation, Induction, and Linguistic Representation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 96 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

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