Carnap, Rudolf

German-American philosopher. A leading logical positivist, Carnap proposed in "Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World)" (1929) and "Logische Syntax der Sprache (The Logical Syntax of Language)" (1934) that all meaningful assertions in a description of reality must be derived from basic statements of experience. Carnap's influential articles "Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy" (1928) and "The (1932) propose that many traditional philosophical disputes amount to little more than differences in poetic rhetoric. His "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950) considers the degree of ontological commitment entailed by linguistic reference to abstract entities. In "Meaning and Necessity"(1947) and "Logical Foundations of Probability" (1950), Carnap tried to devise a purely formal representation of the degree of confirmation to which scientific hypotheses are susceptible. Carnap's notions about the formation of scientific theories are expressed in "Philosophical Foundations of Physics" (1966).