Carnap, the Ramsey-sentence and realistic empiricism

Abstract

Based on archival material from the Carnap and Feigl Archives, this paper re-examines Carnap's approach to the issue of scientific realism in the 1950s and the early 1960s. It focuses on Carnap's re-invention of the Ramsey-sentence approach to scientific theories and argues that Carnap wanted to entertain a genuine neutral stance in the realism-instrumentalism debate. Following Grover Maxwell, it claims that Carnap's position may be best understood as a version of 'structural realism'. However, thus understood, Carnap's position faces the challenge that Newman raised against Russell's structuralism: the claim that the knowledge of the unobservable is limited to its purely structural characteristics is either uninformative or unsustainable. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.