Dr Stephen Read is Senior Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics and Reader in History and Philosophy of Logic in the Department of Logic and Metaphysics.

Recent research in philosophy of logic has dealt with truthmaking and in particular, what makes disjunctions, and what makes necessary truths, true. Recent publications concern harmony and autonomy in rules of inference, ideas stemming from a comment of Gentzen's in his fascinating paper on Logical Deduction. Recent work has been on facts, truth and logical pluralism.He has been Editorial Chairman of The Philosophical Quarterly since 1999.

His main research interest remains the notion of logical consequence; and extends from medieval theories in the philosophy of language, mind and logic, to the more modern concerns of relevance logic and the philosophy of logic.

Stephen Read's Books
(Joint with E. P. Bos) Concepts: the treatises of Thomas of Cleves and Paul of Gelria: an edition and systematic introduction, Peeters (Louvain), 2001, XII + 148 pp.

Thinking about Logic: an introduction to the philosophy of logic Oxford U. P.: Oxford Paperbacks University Series (OPUS), 1995, viii + 262 pp. translated as Philosophie der Logik: eine Einfuhrung Rowohlts Enzyklopadie, 1997, 312 pp. also translated into Chinese, 1998 and into Swedish 1999 (Att Tänka På Logik, Thales, ISBN: 91-87172-94-1) and into Hungarian, 2001 (Bevezetés a logika filozofiájába, Kossuth Kiado, ISBN: 963-09-4272-0)

Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar: Acts of the Ninth European Symposium for Medieval Logic and Semantics held at St Andrews June 1990 (edited with an introduction) Kluwer Academic Publishers: Nijhoff International Philosophy Series vol. 48, 1993, xvii + 421 pp.

Relevant Logic, Blackwells 1988, viii + 199 pp.
(It is now out of print. However, I have a few copies I could supply at half price to anyone who is interested. Just ask me.) A list of errata can be obtained from Relevant Logic: Errata. If you notice any errata not listed, please let me know. Thanks.

History of Analytical Philosophy
Carnap and Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy

1. Carnap’s Neutral Stance

(i) Carnap’s basic outlook:

(a) philosophical disputes arise from a failure to analyse concepts adequately
(b) logical empiricism: an empiricist reliance on science as the only real source of knowledge, supplemented by modern logic as a theory of science (or knowledge)

(ii) Metaphysics: Carnap’s view matured:
(a) in the Aufbau, metaphysics is dismissed as not science
(b) from the Pseudoproblems onwards (influenced by Wittgenstein), metaphysics is dismissed as nonsense, as lacking in sense (literally nonsense, not just silly, or contradictory, or obviously false).

(iii) The neutral stance:
(a) the example of the starry night (Aufbau § 162): suppose the stars were all equally bright (i. e. all of one type). Now consider the (apparent) distances between them, the triangles marked out by any three stars, and so on. Are there many different types of thing in the sky—stars, distances, triangles and so on? No, the latter are all dependent on the stars. One should think of constitution theory like this. There is only one uniform type of element (the given), but many different order forms. This is the unity of science.

(b) The empirical concept of reality (Aufbau § 170): Bodies are called real if they are constructed as physical objects within physical space-time: the comprehensive, regular, uniform and coherent world of physics. This conception is extended to heteropsychological and cultural objects: every real object belongs to a comprehensive system governed by regularities. The empirically real is whatever can be placed in a constructional system. (Kant’s “empirical objectivity”)
(c) Verifiability: a criterion of factual content for meaning. The meaning of a statement lies in the fact that it expresses a possible state of affairs. Meaning is not (simply) verification, for a meaningful statement may not be testable here and now. But if it is impossible to test, it is a pseudo-statement. Every meaningful statement must go back to the given (in the Aufbau: sense data; later, physicalist language): the protocol sentences.


2. The Elimination of Metaphysics
(i) Meaningful statements comprise:
(a) Tautologies: they say nothing, are not factual, but serve to transform factual statements.
(b) Contradictions: false in virtue of their form.
(c) Empirical statements, which reduce to protocol sentences.


2 Everything else is meaningless. Meaningful metaphysical statements are impossible, because metaphysics aims to discover a kind of knowledge not accessible to empirical science.
(ii) Pseudo-statements arise in two ways:
(a) a word may lack meaning: it may designate a pseudo-concept, e. g., when a word’s meaning changes, and it loses the old one without gaining a new one. The syntax of a word, ‘a’, is given in the simplest sentence S(a) containing ‘a’
(e. g. ‘x is an a’). There are three aspects to syntax, all equivalent: • what is S(a) deducible from, and what follows from it (metalogic) • when is S(a) true or false • how is S(a) verified. This allows us to reduce the meaning of ‘a’ to observation sentences (protocol sentences)—“the given”: qualia (Russell), erlebs (Carnap), physical objects
(Neurath). Examples of meaningless words:
(a) arche (principle): x is the principle of y (e. g. water—Thales, fire—Heracleitus, number—Pythagoras, the forms—Plato, matter, mind, etc.). But the answers are vague, or ambiguous, and not empirically observable. Otherwise it would be physics. So the alleged mythological meaning does not exist.
(b) God: in its original mythological meaning, it was empirically verifiable, but falsified. In its metaphysical use, it is not verifiable, and so empty of sense. In theology, it oscillates between the two.
(b) the constituent words may have meaning, but be syntactically incompatible:
(a) • Jupiter sits in his cloud (but nothing indicates his presence) • This rock is sad • This triangle is virtuous • Berlin horse blue • And or of which • bu ba bi • —)(*—*
(Pseudoproblems § 7) If any of these were meaningful, so would be the others—there is no real distinction. (A “little-by-little” argument—cf. the Sorites.)
(b) • Caesar is and • Caesar is a prime number
(‘The elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language’ § 6, tr. in Ayer, Logical Positivism) Equally bad—a type confusion. They 3 are neither true nor false, and so meaningless. Unfortunately, not all metaphysical nonsense is so easily detectable.
(c) Carnap’s strongest words are aimed at Heidegger, in particular, at his talk of ‘nothing’, culminating in the claim that “Nothing noths”. (Cf. Edwards and Pap, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry on ‘Nothing’.) ‘noths’ is a meaningless verb, and ‘nothing is syntactically misused as a name. (‘The elimination of metaphysics’ § 5)
(iii) The traditional metaphysical (epistemological) positions are meaningless:
(a) Realism. A special metaphysical sense of ‘real’: independent of cognizing consciousness:
(a) perceived physical things exist in themselves
(b) other persons not only act like me but have their own consciousness The concept of reality as independent of consciousness cannot be constructed
(Aufbau § 176). For if I touch something, it changes, so according to realism it cannot be real. But things on the moon don’t change as a result of my will, so they must be real. So both realism and idealism are false. (Cf. Coffa, pp. 225-6)
(b) Idealism:
(a) the external world is not real but only a representation
(b) (solipsism) only my own consciousness is real There is no experiment which could test these claims.
(c) Phenomenalism: this comprises three possible positions, of which Carnap rejects two:
(a) Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1905): “Phenomenalism: 1) The theory that all knowledge is limited to phenomena
(things and events in time and space), and that we cannot penetrate to reality itself.
2) The theory that all we know is a phenomenon, that is, reality present to consciousness, either directly or reflectively; and that phenomena are all that there are to know, there being no thing-in-itself or object out of relation to consciousness. … It is obvious that the two senses differ radically from each other, the first having its point in the assertion of a real but unknown thing-in-itself; the latter in its denial.” By ‘phenomenalism’ Carnap appears to mean (1), but he would also reject
(2). (Aufbau §§ 175, 177)
(b) linguistic phenomenalism: a view which developed out of logical positivism
(in e. g., Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge: see §22): material objects are constructions out of sense data. All talk of material objects can be reduced to, or explained as, talk about sense data. Carnap would have no 4 quarrel with this: “what the statement that material things consist of sense data must be understood to designate is not a factual but a linguistic relationship” (Ayer p. 232).
(iv) Ethics is also meaningless, unless it is simply an empirical study of what people actually value (in which case it is psychology, not philosophy). Statements of norms are not assertions, but commands.
(v) Construction theory is neutral between the three metaphysical claims above. It does not contradict realism, idealism or phenomenalism (in senses 1 and 2) in any point.

3. Philosophy
(i) Carnap says that traditionally philosophy consisted of three areas: metaphysics, psychology and logic.

(ii) Metaphysics is nonsense, and so must be eliminated.
(a) Metaphysics expresses an attitude, not anything cognitive.

(b) The “worm”-objection: If you say the worm wriggles, I step on it. If you say it feels pain, I desist. But this is empathy, an emotional difference but not a cognitive one.

(c) Is there any real difference between a Dedekind cut and an irrational number?—can one say that mathematicians operate with irrational numbers and not with Dedekind cuts? Construction theory (structuralism/logicism) works not only for mathematics, but also for science. “Metaphysicians are like musicians without musical ability.” (‘The elimination of metaphysics’, § 7)

(iii) Psychology, as with all other sciences, which were originally part of philosophy, must now be recognised to be an empirical science and given its autonomy.
(iv) Logic remains as logical analysis: the true role of philosophy, to clarify by analysis. Philosophy is logical syntax (see Handout 11). Metaphysics could not be expressed in a logically constructed language.