Carnap’s Turn to the Thing Language

Abstract

Rudolf Carnap’s contributions to the Paris 1935 Congress for scientific philosophy signal three important changes in his philosophy: his semantic turn; what would later be called the “liberalization of empiricism”; and his adoption of the so-called thing language as a basis for the language of science. This paper examines this third change. In particular, it considers Carnap’s motivation for adopting the thing language as the protocol language of unified science and the virtues of the thing language in comparison with other types of protocol language.