Abstract

This dissertation criticizes the received view and defends a new interpretation of Rudolf Carnap's Der Logische Aujbau der Welt . There Carnap presents a method for defining scientific concepts in terms of sense experience, and he outlines a system of such definitions. This system would display references to physical objects as dispensable shorthand for talk about experiences. Accordingly, philosophers have seen the project as an attempt to establish the radical empiricist conclusions that scientific knowledge shares the certainty of sense experience, and that it does not commit us to the reality of physical objects. However, the text does not support this reading. Carnap denies that immediate experience is epistemologically privileged, and he claims that his project has no consequences for ontology. Thus we need a new interpretation of the Aufbau. ;First I argue that the experiential system is intended to show how concepts arising in subjective experience may nevertheless be objective or intersubjectively valid, and that in pursuit of this goal Carnap embraces a holistic method of definition. This emphasis on objectivity makes his concepts of knowledge and experience look more Kantian than empiricist, but I suggest that his epistemology is best seen as a form of conventionalism. Next, I turn my attention to his general theory of definition, which asserts the possibility of both experiential and physical systems. This assertion would be incoherent were reduction motivated by an exclusive ontological commitment to either experiences or physical objects. However, if the goal of reduction is taken to be the unity of science, the contradiction disappears. Understood as the claim that there are no logical "gaps" between the concepts of the physical, psychological and social sciences, the unity of science follows from a reduction of scientific concepts to either experiences or physical objects. Finally, I compare Carnap's position in the Aufbau to the contemporary disunity of science movement and argue that they share a notion of "moderate constructivism."