Alan Richardson

On the standard interpretation, Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt amounts to a highly derivative work--a rigorous thinking through of Russell's External World program. This dissertation offers a different interpretation of the Aufbau that stresses the importance of Carnap's own epistemological program and is, it is argued, more consistent with the text and Carnap's other early works. Great importance is placed on Carnap's avowed aim of providing an explanation of the objectivity of knowledge. Carnap's place in the Kantian tradition is, therefore, stressed. In particular, an overview of Carnap's pre-Aufbau writings shows that Carnap agrees with his NeoKantian predecessors that mathematical physics is the paradigm of objective knowledge due to its precise concepts and mathematically expressible predictive laws. Carnap attempts to provide a conventionalist account of the relation of such science to experience using the resources of the theory of relations. ;Carnap presents two accounts of objectivity in the Aufbau, each of which can be viewed as informed by this idea. First, Carnap's structuralist account of objective knowledge generalizes on it by altering the operative notion of structure for precise concepts from mathematical to logical structure. Second, the constructed notion of intersubjectivity retains the NeoKantian idea--as is revealed in the manner in which it is constructed. The thesis examines the conflicts between these two notions of objectivity within the epistemic program of the Aufbau. It is further argued that the issues raised for this program by the tensions in the notions of objectivity account for some features of Carnap's development of the program of logical syntax in the years following the Aufbau

On the standard interpretation Rudolf Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt amounts to a highly derivative work-a rigorous thinking through of Russell's External World program. An examination of the aims and methods of logical analysis reveals significant differences between the epistemologies of Russell and Carnap, however. It is argued that Russell's reliance on acquaintance makes logical analysis subservient to empiricist epistemic concerns while Carnap is determined to carry out a broadly Kantian program of guaranteeing the objectivity of science through the application of formal logic

[ Alan W. Richardson] This essay explores the uses that Michael Friedman and Bas van Fraassen have recently made of the work of Hans Reichenbach. It uses Friedman's work to complicate van Fraassen's invocation of Reichenbach's voluntarism in support of empiricism. It uses van Fraassen's work to motivate a concern with Friedman's neo-Kantian reading of Reichenbach. We are, finally, left with questions about the status and content of the account of the epistemic subject available to an epistemological voluntarist. /// [Thomas E. Uebel] This response considers the question whether empiricists are condemned to silence about the epistemic agency their theories attribute or presuppose. It is argued that, unlike Reichenbach or Carnap, Neurath allowed for and indeed provided specifications of the role of epistemic agency in scientific inquiry. If this is correct, it underscores once more the need to distinguish between the various strands of logical positivism which show different strengths and weaknesses

On an ordinary view of the relation of philosophy of science to science, science serves only as a topic for philosophical reflection, reflection that proceeds by its own methods and according to its own standards. This ordinary view suggests a way of writing a global history of philosophy of science that finds substantially the same philosophical projects being pursued across widely divergent scientific eras. While not denying that this view is of some use regarding certain themes of and particular time periods, this essay argues that much of the epistemology and philosophy of science in the early twentieth century in a variety of projects looked to the then current context of the exact sciences, especially geometry and physics, not merely for its topics but also for its conceptual resources and technical tools. This suggests a more variable project of philosophy of science, a deeper connection between early twentieth-century philosophy of science and its contemporary science, and a more interesting and richer history of philosophy of science than is ordinarily offered.

It is no secret that various versions of logical empiricism argued for the importance of unified science. Carnap was a proponent of unity of science views, although he expressed this in different idioms at different times. In the Aufbau (1928) he spoke of the unity of the object domain secured through definability in the constitutional system, in his physicalist period he argued that a physicalist language could serve as the universal language of science, and in his mature philosophical work he investigated a variety of meanings that might be attached to reductionist projects for unifying various scientific fields. Our essay focuses less on Carnap’s several proposals than on a prior interpretive question: what was philosophically at stake for Carnap in the question of the unity of science? We begin with some suggestions in Carnap’s 1963 Intellectual Autobiography, where he calls unity of science “one of the main tenets of our general philosophical conception” and one in which Neurath’s emphasis on the “interdependence of all decisions … made a strong impression” on him. We follow Carnap in the suggestion that an account of his approach to unity of science does not take us into questions of unity of nature but rather of the scientific attitude and the unity of reason.

This Element offers a new account of the philosophical significance of logical empiricism that relies on the past forty years of literature reassessing the project. It argues that while logical empiricism was committed to empiricism and did become tied to the trajectory of analytic philosophy, neither empiricism nor logical analysis per se was the deepest philosophical commitment of logical empiricism. That commitment was, rather, securing the scientific status of philosophy, bringing philosophy into a scientific conception of the world.

Richardson’s study on Carnap’s early philosophy culminating in Der logische Aufbau der Welt of 1928 ,presents a comprehensive and sustained effort at understanding it as deeply rooted in neo-Kantian patterns of thought: thus it belongs to a more recent tradition of viewing the emergence of Carnap’s thought, alternative to the older approach of interpreting it against the background of empiricist themes, and well deserves to be labelled the most thoroughgoing expression this more recent tradition has been given until now

Rudolf Carnap is principally renowned for stating with remarkable precision and rigor a rich variety of philosophical doctrines — doctrines which, thanks mainly to Carnap’s meticulous formulations, the philosophical world now holds to be clearly and fundamentally mistaken. Thus, it is Carnap who, in Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1947), presents in detail the linguistic doctrine of logical truth and the semantic underpinnings of the analytic/synthetic distinction, providing thereby the grist for the mill of Quine’s highly influential and important attacks on precisely these doctrines. Again, it was Carnap who, more than any other, precisely delineated the program of inductive logic. This program is now, thanks largely to Goodman’s (1983) New Riddle of Induction, also considered hopeless. Carnap is now firmly associated with a bewildering variety of discredited views: reductionism and the unity of science; the verification criterion of meaning; logic as an uninterpreted calculus; Russellian logicism even in the face of Gödel’s devastating incompleteness results; etc.

Logical Empiricism is commonly regarded as uninterested in, if not hostile to sociological investigations of science. This paper reconstructs the views of Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank on the legitimacy and relevance of sociological investigations of theory choice. It is argued that while there obtains a surprising degree of convergence between their programmatic pronouncements and the Strong Programme, the two types of project nevertheless remain distinct. The key to this difference lies in the different assessment of a supposed dilemma facing post-Mertonian sociologists of science.

This essay explores some of the issues raised as regards the relations of philosophy and sociology of science in the work of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. It argues that Hans Reichenbach's distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification should not be seen as erecting a principled normative/descriptive distinction that demarcates philosophy of science from sociology of science. The essay also raises certain issues about the role of volition, decision, and the limits of epistemological concern in the work of Carnap and Reichenbach and in some recent sociology of science. The relations of philosophy of science to sociology of science are seen to be more deeply rooted and more interesting than the Science Warriors would have us believe

The received view of the anti-metaphysics of Camap's Aufbau finds that it rests exclusively on verificationism. Alberto Coffa has recently put forward an interpretation of the antimetaphysical stance that claims that Camap was confusedly moving from ontological to semantical ideahsm. After raising objections to both of these views another interpretation is put forward. The crucial aspect of Camap's rejection of metaphysics rests on his reinterpretation of epistemology as the logic of objective knowledge. This leads to a rejection of metaphysics inasmuch as the peculiar status of logic as the framework constitutive of the possibility of rational inquiry means that it neither needs nor allows of completion or interpretation by traditional metaphysics. This view of Camap's is compared to the views of the Marburg and Southwest NeoKantians.