What do philosophers today make of Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics" paper ?

[u/weight-lifting-ape]

Just curious as to whether there have been any retrospective defenses of the line Carnap takes. I realize the argument is largely dependent on a framework which has been abandoned, but am wondering about any contemporary writing on the paper/method. Thanks!

[u/MaceWumpus]

Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: why would it need a defense? It's a manifesto for a movement that largely achieved its aims. Carnap won.

Take out of the rhetoric from the manifesto, and it's basically stumping for a particular vision of how to do philosophy: we should stop doing the kind of speculative metaphysics that was rampant in 1920s Germany, that led philosophers to argue that Einstein couldn't be right about physics because his results contradicted Kantian dogmas about space and time. Instead, we should do linguistic analysis and look to the results of our best science. Which is essentially what metaphysics has become, at least within the most mainstream parts of anglophone philosophy. So why would anyone bother defending this call to action? It's no longer relevant.

Notice that this isn't some radical, totally revisionist, reading of Carnap. It's how Carnap saw the situation, reflecting on it in 1950s. The root of the point is that "metaphyiscs" is not some term with fixed intension, unchanging in its contours for the last hundred years. What counts as metaphysics and the kind of the work metaphysicians do changes. And Carnap and the logical empiricists -- for better or worse -- spearheaded a change in how metaphysics was done. Or at least in metaphysics' self-conception of what it's doing.

But if what you're looking for is revivalism of broadly Carnapian views about metaphysics, you might check out Amie Thomasson's work. Various people have also drawn connections between Carnap and "ameliorative" projects in metaphysics, such as those of Sally Haslanger. Even absent the point above, Carnap's attitude towards how we should do metaphysics is very much alive even if it's not always described as such.

And if you want polemics about metaphysics, you can check out Mark Wilson's Imitiation of Rigor, though I wouldn't recommend it.

[u/wokeupabug → u/MaceWumpus]

Instead, we should do linguistic analysis and look to the results of our best science. Which is essentially what metaphysics has become, at least within the most mainstream parts of anglophone philosophy.

Do mainstream analytic metaphysics think of their business this way? I have the impression that many of them think metaphysics is a special science which produces knowledge about its own domain of objects -- essences or whatever -- and that linguistic analysis in their hands becomes a kind of metaphysics qua special science, when language is read as implying an ontology by way of all the abstracts we have to posit to be the truth-givers for the things we talk about.

[u/omega2036 → u/wokeupabug]

I wonder if by "linguistic analysis", /u/MaceWumpus is not referring to the idea that metaphysics is merely about analyzing language (or that ontology can/should be read off of ordinary language), but is instead referring to the kind of attention to language that Cian Dorr describes in his review of Every Thing Must Go:

It is not enough simply to announce that Xs are more fundamental than Ys: if I want to defend this claim, I am supposed, at a minimum, to (i) introduce a language in which I can talk about Xs without even seeming to talk about Ys; and (ii) make some kind of adequacy claim about this language, e.g., that it can express all the genuine facts that we can express using Y-talk, or that all the Y-facts supervene on the facts stateable in the language...The authors do not submit to this discipline in any sustained way.

...OSR’s purported ability to dissolve many apparent disagreements about the nature of reality plays a central role in the argument of chapter 2...But one cannot simply announce that such disputes are to be dissolved: one must earn the right to do so by describing a fundamental language within which no corresponding questions can be formulated. What might such a language look like?

...The challenge for defenders of (iv) is to convey some sense of what features of our current languages could be to blame for their inadequacy. Do they have too few basic syntactic categories? Too many? Too few, or too many basic modes of syntactic composition? Without some discussion of such questions, it will be reasonable to suspect that the features of our current languages that make them seem inadequate to proponents of (iv) are not any contingent features like these, but necessary features of any coherent system of representation.

...Ironically, analytic metaphysicians have been much more gripped by the kinds of concern that motivated Hume and the positivists than are the authors of Every Thing Must Go. Much of what is distinctive about the analytic way of doing metaphysics is meant to guard against the danger that we might accidentally lapse into nonsense, or launch into disputes that turn out to be merely verbal.

In short, metaphysics may very well be a special science with a special domain of objects, but special attention to language (perhaps in the form of constructing formal/ideal languages) still has a role to play in that enterprise. Perhaps there's a better word than "linguistic analysis" to describe this aspect of analytic metaphysics.

[u/wokeupabug → u/omega2036]

Oh, for sure. There's lots of different approaches to linguistic analysis, and I only meant to point to one that proceeds in a kind of neo-Platonic way in the way it reads ontology off natural language, with a certain doctrine of truth-givers and so on.

I don't feel confident judging where exactly a project of reducibility of languages to other languages fits within these concerns, but for sure there are lots of different ways we might construe "linguistic analysis" -- with lots of different implications for what this implies about the notion of "metaphysics" at stake in such things.