Scottish fiction, meaning at once fiction produced in Scotland and fiction that made Scotland its topic, became one of the leading genres of European Romanticism in the decade after Waterloo. Its distinctive forms, the three-volume historical novel, magazine tale and fictitious regional memoir, were the product and fuel of a spectacular Edinburgh publishing boom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, which was also characterized by innovations in the periodical genres of quarterly review and monthly magazine. The proportion of British fiction titles produced in Scotland rose steeply from a mere 0.5 percent in the first decade of the century to 4.4 percent in the 1810s and then to 12 percent in the 1820s, reaching 15 percent, or 54 out of 359 titles, in the peak years of 1822-5. Following a nationwide financial crash in 1826, booksellers cut back the production of new novels, especially in Scotland, and invested instead in miscellanies, serials, reprints, and the genres of “useful knowledge.” “Our publishers of the proud northern metropolis seem to have lost all pluck since the lamented death of their great father, Mr Constable,” remarked Fraser's Magazine in 1830: “the vaunted Modern Athens is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling-book and primer manufactory.”

The meteoric career of Scottish fiction, as everyone at the time acknowledged, traced the career of an individual author, Walter Scott. The publication of Waverley in the summer of 1814 accelerated a modest rate of growth into a regional bonanza.

In a 1762 review of John Langhorne's Solyman and Almena, the Monthly's critic stated that there was so little of “invention or originality” in the work that “a reader, who is but moderately acquainted with this modish kind of literature, may anticipate most of the incidents”; “in truth,” he went on to add, “few of the Oriental Novels differ very essentially from each other.” Even as reviewers sometimes complained that moral tales such as Langhorne's bore few signs of the properly Eastern style of the Arabian Nights (first translated as Les Mille et une nuits by Antoine Galland in 1704), works of this kind represented perhaps the dominant if by no means the only form of “oriental” narrative published in English, for most of the eighteenth century. Well-known works such as Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) and John Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet (1761) conceived of the East at the level of neoclassical generality, without much interest in accuracy or specificity of detail, and - although they reflected on topical issues - employed a broadly applicable language of abstract morality, so that one critic noted that the insight into the human condition in Rasselas might be acquired “without going to Ethiopia.” The contemporary sense of what the oriental amounted to in this context was capacious enough for “Igluka and Sibbersik,” subtitled “A Greenland Tale,” to be included in The Orientalist: A Volume of Tales after the Eastern Taste (1764). Charles Johnstone presented The History of Arsaces (1774) as a fiction concerned with “the universal manners of Nature,” and stated that “greater particularity would only have been pedantry,” insisting that the reader would excuse him “not having paid more minute attention to the manners of the times and countries, in which the various scenes of the work are laid.”

Walter Scott's introductory chapter to Waverley: 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), with its brief and breezy survey of the possible titles Scott has not chosen for his novel, offers itself as a clearing of the decks for nineteenth-century fiction. Choosing a supposedly unknown and therefore “uncontaminated name” for his hero rather easily, Scott lingers on the “second or supplemental title,” well aware that it will announce the book's generic allegiances and be “held as pledging the author to some special mode of laying his scene.” Scott rejects both “a Tale of Other Days” and “a Romance from the German” because of the Gothic expectations they raise: “would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page?” “A Tale of the Times” is also passed over for promising “a dashing sketch of the fashionable world . . . a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four-in-hand.” Scott likewise rejects a “Sentimental Tale” for its promise of a “heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage.”

Ina Ferris and Katie Trumpener have alerted us to the many ways Scott obscures his debts to other novels in this opening gambit. Dismissing the “sentimental” along with the other major novelistic genres of the day, for example, Scott will proceed to write a novel that shamelessly exploits sentimental conventions and assumptions. Edward Waverley has all the “powers of apprehension,” “brilliancy of fancy,” and “love of literature” that any sentimental heroine could ever desire; Scott persistently places him before picturesque landscapes or outside the main scenes of action, giving Waverley the role of reporting on what he sees and on how it makes him feel; and then there is Flora, a heroine with a harp easily hauled from castle to grotto. Scott often reminds his “fair readers” that he's not writing a “romance” or that Waverley's troubles do not all arise from “sentimental source[s].”

Rudolf Carnap is, along with Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, one of the outstanding representatives of analytic philosophy - indeed, its most radical, as shown by his attempt to reduce philosophy to the logic of science, thereby seeking to establish philosophy itself as a science. But if we want to understand Carnap, we have to examine the historical situation in which his thought developed. The founders of a new tradition often remain indebted to the tradition they seek to break with. Unlike those who come after them, they are conscious of their opposition to the older tradition, and even when it does not surface as a central theme, their ideas at least bear indirect witness to it. This is certainly true of Carnap, an analytic philosopher whose ideas are deeply rooted in continental European soil, drawing nourishment not only from the “dry” soil of science, but also from Carnap's “rich” experience as an active member of the German Youth Movement. After leaving Europe, Carnap more or less abandoned those roots for political reasons. But in his “Intellectual Autobiography,” he does vouchsafe a few clues about early influences on his intellectual development during his student years and immediately thereafter (Carnap, 1963a, 3-13).

There are two routes by which Rudolf Carnap arrived at his mature philosophy and the central concept of analyticity within it. Both have the same starting point, Kant's conception of the a priori. But the paths themselves were different. One progressed from Kant's theory of space through the development of non-Euclidian geometries, the methodological and metamathematical researches into geometry of Poincare and Hilbert, and Einstein's theory of relativity on to Carnap's own reworking of his philosophy of empirical science in the light of these developments. The other path, which will be emphasized here, traces the history of logic, or perhaps more precisely the history of the philosophy of logic. Even that story is too long to recount here, so I will confine myself to its last step, the point in the 1930s when the basic features of Carnap's philosophy crystallized.

Carnap’s mature philosophy was prompted most immediately by his recognition that there are alternative logical systems. That is, there is more than one body of doctrine that purports to give the general structure of legitimate deductive reasoning, and these alternatives cannot be translated into one common system in any satisfactory way. Carnap’s response in the mid-1930s was to develop a broad philosophic view according to which what we take to be logical truths (and the rest of those commitments traditionally thought to be a priori) do not describe the world in substantive ways but rather jointly constitute or structure the language used to describe that world. There are many such languages, and the choice among them is a question of convenience rather than correctness.

INTRODUCTION

Rudolf Carnap is today the best known representative of the Vienna Circle, even though he was neither its nominal leader (Moritz Schlick), nor its effective founder (Hans Hahn), nor its most prolific writer and propagandist (Otto Neurath). The reason for Carnap's prominence lies in two books - The Logical Construction of the World (1928, better known as the Aufbau) and The Logical Syntax of Language (1934c, translated in 1937) - and a series of papers - including “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932d/1959) and “The Physical Language as the Universal Language of Science” (1932a, translated as The Unity of Science, 1934) - published between 1928 and 1936. In these works Carnap managed to articulate with until then unsurpassed clarity certain theses of extreme boldness and daring complexity that were closely associated with the Circle as a whole. Yet while he provided exemplary articulations of its members' characteristic convictions and also set themes for the Circle's continuing discussions, it must be stressed that the development of these theses was very much Carnap's own and that many of his positions encountered opposition even within the Circle itself. If one is then moved to add that there is more to the Vienna Circle's philosophy than Carnap's, one must also add that there is more to Rudolf Carnap than the Vienna Circle's influence.

INTRODUCTION

Carnap was a leading figure of logical empiricism, but he did not begin as a logical empiricist. Hence, it is natural to ask how he became one. This question not only concerns the individual career of a distinguished philosopher, it is significant also for the wider question of how logical empiricism emerged in the general context of European philosophy in the early twentieth century.

Arguably, Carnap began his philosophical career as a neo-Kantian (cf. Coffa, 1991). But, as can be gleaned from his early writings, he was also influenced by scientists and philosophers such as Poincaré, Frege, Hilbert, Russell, Husserl, and Dingler, who did not belong to the Kantian tradition in the strict sense. Presently, the question of who influenced Carnap how is vigorously disputed among Carnap scholars (cf. Pincock, 2002). The aim of this chapter is not to take issue in this debate presenting a new candidate or offering new arguments in favor of one who is already in the race. Rather, I would like to concentrate on an influential factor of a different kind, namely, the influence philosophy of geometry had on Carnap’s philosophy. It is not difficult gathering evidence that philosophy of geometry was important for the early Carnap: his very first work, “Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre” (1922), was a treatise on philosophy of geometry.

INTRODUCTION

From a contemporary vantage point, the conjunction may appear puzzling. What could Carnap - anti-metaphysical logician, student and “legitimate successor” of Frege - possibly have in common with the founder of transcendental phenomenology? Yet, as Michael Dummett has observed, the German philosophy student of 1903 likely regarded Husserl and Frege as mathematician-philosophers remarkably similar in interests and outlook (Dummett, 1993, 26). To be sure, subsequent developments pushed apart the incipient programs of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Husserl turned to “transcendental subjectivity” in 1905-1907, whereas analytic philosophy around 1930 took a “linguistic turn” precisely to distinguish its methods from those placing cognitive reliance upon intuition or individual subjectivity. Then again, the 1927 publication of Heidegger's Being and Time inexorably changed perceptions of phenomenology as having acquired an expressly “existential” and “ontological” orientation, preempting and obscuring its original Husserlian impulses towards logic and the foundations of mathematics. Epitomizing this history in a memorable metaphor, Dummett notes that the respective influences of Frege, the “grandfather of analytic philosophy,” and Husserl, a patriarch of “continental philosophy,” run through twentieth-century philosophy like the Rhine and Danube, mighty rivers rising close together, briefly running parallel but then diverging to widely separate seas. Extending the metaphor a bit further, Carnap is a central current flowing into one of these seas, while Heidegger is the torrent surging into the other.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses Carnap's work on probability and induction, using the notation and terminology of modern mathematical probability, viewed from the perspective of the Bayesian or subjective school of probability. Carnap initially used a logical notation and terminology that made his work accessible and interesting to a generation of philosophers, but it also limited its impact in other areas such as statistics, mathematics, and the sciences. Using the notation of modern mathematical probability is not only more natural, but it also makes it far easier to place Carnap's work alongside the contributions of such other pioneers of epistemic probability as Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, I. J. Good, L. J. Savage, and Richard Jeffrey.

Carnap's interest in logical probability was primarily as a tool, a tool to be used in understanding the quantitative confirmation of a hypothesis based on evidence and, more generally, in rational decision-making. The resulting analysis of induction involved a two-step process: one first identified a broad class of possible confirmation functions (the regular c-functions), and then identified either a unique function in that class (early Carnap) or a parametric family (later Carnap) of specific confirmation functions. The first step in the process put Carnap in substantial agreement with subjectivists such as Ramsey and de Finetti; it is the second step, the attempt to limit the class of probabilities still further, that distinguishes Carnap from his subjectivist brethren.

As he approached his 71st birthday Carnap wrote a warm letter to Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who was about to turn 90. Dated 12 May 1962, it notes that Russell's “books had indeed a stronger influence on my philosophical thinking than those of any other philosopher” and mentions “the inspiring effect on me of your appeal for a new method in philosophy, on the last pages of your book Our Knowledge of the External World“ (Russell, 1967–1969, 1998, 626). Russell responded a few weeks later in equally affectionate terms: “I believe that your efforts to bring clarity and precision to philosophy will have an everlasting effect on the thinking of men . . . Nothing would be more fitting than that you should successfully realise your theory of inductive probability” (Russell, 1967–1969, 1998, 627; cf. ASP RC 090-06-07).

Here we have the final exchange in a correspondence that stretched back to 1921, when Carnap sent Russell a copy of his doctoral dissertation on space (Carnap, 1922). To appreciate its significance, we need to first briefly review Russell's intellectual career. He is widely seen as the most important early figure of analytic philosophy, who, along with G. E. Moore in the late 1890s, broke with the Hegelian idealism of Bradley and McTaggart and fashioned a new pluralistic and realistic approach to traditional metaphysical and epistemological disputes.

The logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle presented itself as the reconciliation of a thoroughgoing empiricism as regards substantive knowledge with the certainty and necessity of mathematics. According to empiricism, sense experience is the only source of substantive knowledge of facts, but sense experience might always have been different from what it actually was. Moreover, anything we extrapolate from what we experience may be falsified by further experiences. Knowledge grounded in sense experience is thus knowledge of contingencies, and except perhaps for knowledge of what is immediately experienced (“Red here now”), it is revisable on the basis of further experiences. In contrast, knowledge of mathematics appears to be unrevisably certain substantive knowledge of necessary truths. The contingencies of our sense experience thus seem to afford no basis for knowledge of mathematics. In a word, empiricism must be false, because mathematics is substantive a priori knowledge.

The logical empiricist approach to this dilemma is to deny that knowledge of mathematics is substantive knowledge. The apriority and necessity of mathematics is the apriority and necessity of logic. Logic is in its turn grounded in tacit conventions for the use of certain symbols, symbols that do not themselves stand for anything, like the signs for negation and conjunction. As Hans Hahn put it: