CONCEPT
Carnap's Principle of Tolerance
Rudolf Carnap's liberating declaration that in logic there are no morals—that there is no one correct framework for representing knowledge, only frameworks chosen for their fruitfulness—and its application to an age of many kinds of minds, none of which occupies a framework-independent throne.
In 1934, in The Logical Syntax of Language, Rudolf Carnap wrote one of the most liberating sentences in modern philosophy: “In logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build up his own logic, i.e. his own form of language, as he wishes. All that is required of him is that, if he wishes to discuss it, he must state his methods clearly, and give syntactical rules instead of philosophical arguments.” He called this the principle of tolerance, and it reversed the trajectory of his own thought. He had spent the previous decade seeking the one correct logical language—the true structure of rational thought, the framework that mirrored the world. He had failed, honestly and in public, and he concluded that the failure was instructive: there is no such thing to find. There are only languages, many of them, each defined by its own rules, each to be