A Research On Carnap's Concept Of "Meaning Postulates"

Rudolf Carnap was recognized as the main philosophical spokesman of the "logical positivism" movement and was also the main philosopher of the "Vienna School" in the late 1920s and early 1930s.He has made important contributions to philosophy of science,philosophy of language,probability theory,inductive logic,and modal logic.He believes that metaphysics is meaningless because metaphysical statements cannot be verified or falsified.He asserted that many philosophical issues are indeed pseudo-issues and are the result of language misuse.When we focus on the choice between different language frameworks,some philosophical issues can be solved.Therefore,the logical analysis of language becomes an important means to solve philosophical problems.Since everyday language is unclear,Carnap proposes to study philosophical problems in an artificial language.This language is based on logic and mathematical rules.He studied the meaning of statements and the differences in probabilities within this language system.Explain and distinguish the differences between analysis and synthesis,a priori and posterior,and inevitable and accidental statements.For logical positivists,all statements can be divided into two categories:analytical propositions and comprehensive propositions.There is no a priori comprehensive proposition that Kant considers.One of the most important aspects of Carnap's philosophical work is his attempt to distinguish between analytical propositions and synthetic propositions and gives a precise definition.In the logical syntax of language,Carnap studied a formal language that expresses classical mathematics and scientific theory.When he learned about the incompleteness of mathematics published by Godel in 1931,he realized that although mathematical theorems are logical inheritances,some statements cannot be proved by mathematical axioms.However,he still did not understand that Tarski published his thesis on semantics in 1933.Tarski considers logical inheritance as a semantic concept in his thesis and defines it through model theory.Under the influence of Tarski,Carnap recognizes the semantic nature of analytic concepts,discovers the value of semantics as an independent discipline,and begins to establish his own semantic system.But before that he retained the analytical concept of semantics:if and only if the sentence is logically true,the sentence is analyzed;if and only if the sentence is logically invalid,the sentence becomes contradictory In any other case,the sentence is called synthetic.Later in the Meaning and Necessity,Carnap used the semantic rules in the language system to determine the sentence L-true conditions,and then gave a formal definition by describing the state as L-true or analytical.In 1951,Quine published "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," and he disputed the distinction between analytical propositions and synthetic propositions.In response to Quinn's censure of analytical definitions,Carnap partially changed his views on this issue.His first response to Quinn came from "Meaning Postulates"(1952).Carnap thinks that the analytic nature of the statement can be derived from the axioms of "Meaning Postulates" that define the meaning of non-logical words.Subsequent "Meaning Postulates" influenced the connotation and semantics of later philosophers such as Kripke,Lewis,and Montague,and "Meaning Postulates" served as a norm in the context of possible semantics.The role of constraints,but there is also a huge difference between the two.Before Montague,Carnap's " Meaning Postulates " was not applicable to natural language analysis.In the PTQ language system established by Montague,he applied the meaning publicly to the connotation logic and analyzed and explained the natural language.