VALUES AND LOGICAL TOLERANCE: JOHN DEWEY AND RUDOLF CARNAP

This paper discusses the relation of Rudolf Carnap and the Pragmatism of John Dewey, exploring two points of apparent disagreement between their philosophies. The first one is the claim that Carnap’s logic is committed to the traditional duality between form and content, which Dewey rejects. The second one is the supposition that Carnap would reject Dewey’s treatment of values as a sort of pseudoproblem. Following Carnap’s comments on his Principle of Tolerance and the consequences such principle has in his philosophy of science, this paper shows that there is no fundamental disagreement between the two authors, but only a difference of approach. Carnap doesn’t have the objective of reconstructing philosophy, as Dewey does; he aims at developing tools for the advancement of semantics, which is a specific field of inquiry in Dewey’s sense. On the other hand, it is possible to understand Dewey’s theory of valuation as a legitimate empirical science in the Carnapian sense.