| Date: 21 April 2011, 00:09
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Introduction
CONCERNING THE TEXT
Carnap's two essays on entropy were written during his tenure of a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton between 1952 and 1954. The Autobiography in the Library of Living Philosophers volume tells about conversations concerning entropy with mathematicians and physicists in Princeton.
I certainly learned very much from these conversations; but for my problems in the logical and methodological analysis of physics, I gained less help than I had hoped for. At that time I was trying to construct an abstract mathematical concept of entropy, analogous to the customary physical concept of entropy. My main object was not the physical concept, but the use of the abstract concept for the purposes of inductive logic. Nevertheless, I also examined the nature of the physical concept of entropy in its classical statistical form, as developed by Boltzmann and Gibbs, and I arrived at certain objections against the customary definitions, not from a factual-experimental, but from a logical point of view. It seemed to me that the customary way in which the statistical concept of entropy is defined or interpreted makes it, perhaps against the intention of the physicists, a purely logical instead of physical concept; if so, it can no longer be, as it was intended to be, a counterpart to the classical macro-concept of entropy introduced by Clausius, which is obviously a physical and not a logical concept. The same objection holds in my opinion against the recent view that entropy may be regarded as identical with the negative amount of information. I had expected that in the conversations with the physicists on these problems, we would reach, if not an agreement, then at least a clear mutual understanding. In this, however, we did not succeed, in spite of our serious efforts, chiefly, it seemed, because of great differences in point of view and in language. [1963, pp. 36-37]
Because of the discouraging reception of his ideas, Carnap abandoned his original plan to publish the two essays together, and then decided against the immediate publication of the two separate essays. They are listed separately under "To Appear: New Works" in Carnap's Bibliography [Benson 1963, p. 1054], but according to Professor Arthur Benson he had kept open the possibility of making revisions.
The decision of Carnap's literary executors to publish the two essays together is reasonable, since it permits the reader to see his program in its entirety. The decision, however, necessitates some editorial changes in the typescript. The most important is the elimination of the first three sections of the second essay, for they were inserted only in order to make the second essay self-contained. This elimination requires the renumbering of the sections and formulas of the second essay. Since section 1, "The aim of the investigation," concerns both essays, it has been placed so as to serve as a preface to both. It was tempting, in fact, to go back entirely to the original scheme and simply call the two essays "Part I" and "Part II" respectively of a single work, which Carnap had named "An Abstract Concept of Entropy." The main reason for not doing so is that his original title is not at all descriptive of the contents of the first essay (or part), which in the editor's opinion is the more interesting of the two. One can conjecture that Carnap's original choice of title was indicative of his initial intentions, as indicated in the first paragraph of §1, but that in the course of working out his ideas he was drawn more deeply into the subsidiary problem than he had anticipated. The final important editorial change is the placement of "A Brief Formulation of My Main Point Concerning the Statistical Concept of Entropy" at the beginning of Essay I, without a section number. This placement accords fairly well with the following footnote to "A Brief Formulation ...":
I felt that a reader of the lengthy discussions in my article might be in danger of losing sight of my main point. Therefore I give here a brief formulation of this point, so that objections can be more easily focused on it. I intend to insert these formulations into §1 of the article.
The editor has corrected without notification a few obvious slips in the typescript.[...]
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