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Carnap's Syntactical Method

Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure in the Vienna Circle, visited London in 1934 and gave three lectures at the University of London. These lectures have since been published, most recently as a book entitled Philosophy and Logical Syntax. This book provides a concise overview of the methods being advocated by the Vienna Circle at that time. I have made some notes from the book, which provide an even more compact, if personal, rendition of its content and I present here a distillation of the method, hyperlinked into my notes at various points using the notepad icon: Notes. Neither of these documents is intended to provide a critique, which I hope will eventually emerge in the course of relating more modern formal methods to some of their historical predecessors.
The Rejection of MetaphysicsNotes
The starting position for this method is the rejection of metaphysics (quoting Hume's Enquiry Section XIII part 3 para 4), assigning all matters of fact to empirical science and confining philosophy to logical analysis. The principle of verification, that propositions with no verifiable consequences lack sense, is used against metaphysics, but this plays no major role in the syntactical method which follows, this being more concerned with establishing the status and logical structure of analytic and synthetic propositions.
The Logical Syntax of LanguageNotes
In this lecture are defined those concepts in terms of which logical analysis is to be conducted. These concepts are exclusively of a syntactic nature. A language is defined by a set of formation rules, which define sentences, and transformation rules, which define direct consequence. Properly philosophical (i.e. analytic) statements in "the material mode" have a misleading appearance of not being about syntax, and should be translated into "the formal mode" to reveal their true nature.
Syntax as The Method of PhilosophyNotes
Logical analysis first involves the translation of philosophical sentences expressed in the material mode into the formal mode. Failing this the sentence must either be synthetic or metaphysical (and hence not properly a part of philosophy). Translation accomplished, further syntactic analysis will tell us whether the sentence is analytic, contradictory or indeterminate. By this means philosophy is rendered scientific in the sense intended by Russell.

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