Table of Contents

Part I. Carnap: 1. Carnap's logical syntax; 2. Carnap on ontology; Part II. Carnap and Quine: 3. Carnap and Quine on truth by convention; 4. Quine's naturalistic explication of Carnap's logic of science; Part III. Quine: 5. Quine gets the last word; 6. Reading Quine's claim that definitional abbreviations create synonymies; 7. Can logical truth be defined in purely extensional terms?; 8. Reading Quine's claim that no statement is immune to revision; Part IV. Quine and Putnam: 9. Conditionalization and conceptual change: Chalmers in defense of a dogma; 10. Truth and trans-theoretical terms; Part V. Putnam: 11. Putnam and the contextually apriori.

Promotional Information

This volume critically examines the work of three eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, engaging with and developing their answers to key methodological questions.

About the Author

Gary Ebbs is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Rule-Following and Realism (1997) and Truth and Words (2009), and co-author of Debating Self-Knowledge (Cambridge, 2012). He has also published articles on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, logic, and mind, as well as epistemology and the history of analytic philosophy.

Reviews

'Ebbs' volume … is an important publication from both an historical and a systematic point of view. It offers a new perspective on the relation between Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, as well as a substantive contribution to ongoing systematic debates about truth, justification, and language use. As such, it will be of interest and value not only to historians of analytic philosophy, but also to all philosophers who believe that Carnap's, Quine's, and Putnam's most fundamental insights deserve continuous discussion and adaptation.' Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews