Episode 71: Kent Schmor discusses Carnap's Aufbau
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Who was Rudolf Carnap and what is the _Logical Construction of the World_ about?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and or review and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago. But which today is being brought to you from Pittsburgh. With me is Kenchmore. Visiting instructor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. And he's here to talk to us about Rudolf Karnap's Logischer Aufbau. Ken Schmore, welcome. Ah, thank you for having me. So I think a lot of people may not have heard of Rudolf Carnap. He's very well known within philosophy, but maybe kind of less well known to the outside world. So maybe we could just start by talking about who Rudolph Carnap was and uh what he wrote about.
Sure. So uh Kernapp was uh German born philosopher. He was born in eighteen ninety-one and I'll fast forward to his university career in uh Jena. So he attended the University of Jena uh nineteen ten and nineteen fourteen. And he was interested in a number of topics. He kind of flirted both with physics and with philosophy. And his initial dissertation proposal, he had trouble finding a natural place for it. So he went to the physics department and they said, This is too philosophical Go talk to the philosophy department. So he goes ahead of the philosophy department and says, So they sent me over here. Here's my topic. And they sent, they looked at it, and it was like Bruno Bach at the philosophy departments that looked at it and said, No, this looks like a dissertation to be done in the physics department.
Go back to the physics department. Eventually he was able to hone a topic that he worked on under the supervision of Bruno Bach. Bach in the philosophy department uh in nineteen twenty and the published version of his dissertation was in nineteen twenty-one. And a lot of that dissertation was, not surprisingly, working out How the philosopher and the physicist and the mathematician could all come together in understanding some important achievements early in the 20th century. And from there, his next major work, the Aufbau, published in 1928, although largely written over a number of years leading up to 1928. Right, so the basic idea of the Aufbau is to start. With a few basic scientific concepts and to construct all other scientific concepts using just what Carnap would refer to as logic, which is essentially what we would learn as logic in an introductory logic course, plus a little bit of math, really what we would call basic set theory.
So logic plus what we would call set theory. Carnap just calls that logic in the tradition of other important philosophers working in his tradition like Bertrand Russell and Gottlieb Frege, Frege being one of his teachers. Logic just was what we would call logic plus this bit of math. Using that as the key tool. he would as it were construct all other scientific concepts using that logic from these few basic concepts that were the starting point. And the idea would you end up with this framework that not only contained every legitimate scientific concept from any respectable scientific field, but also would order them in a very particular way. And the way they got ordered would depend on what your purpose is.
So for example, if your purpose was to reconstruct our knowledge of the world, which is the primary purpose that Carnap has in the construction system that he actually begins to lay out in the book, in the work. then you would start with what you might call the epistemic starting point, the starting place in knowledge.
What is the basic strategy of Carnap’s Aufbau – starting from a few logical and set‑theoretic primitives?
Where does all knowledge begin? Carnap looks to the empirical sciences to tell him where that starting point should be, what that basic concept should be. And in his day, uh something called gestalt psychology was very popular. And according to that branch of psychology, uh the starting place of experience was these holistic experiences, not these little like patch of red in my sensory field, but rather this holistic experience that includes colors, sounds, entire visual experience.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Rudolf Carnap and what is the _Logical Construction of the World_ about?
0:00–4:30
2
What is the basic strategy of Carnap’s Aufbau – starting from a few logical and set‑theoretic primitives?
4:30–9:01
3
How does Carnap define the epistemic ordering of concepts from experience to physical objects?
9:01–12:18
4
Why does Carnap propose different construction systems for different philosophical purposes?
12:18–16:26
5
How would a concrete example (e.g., a rhinoceros) be built from elementary experiences in the Aufbau?
16:26–20:58
6
Is Carnap’s method a reduction of higher‑level concepts to lower‑level ones, or something looser?
20:58–25:32
7
What is Carnap’s stance on metaphysical questions versus empirical scientific questions?
25:32–30:40
8
How does the Aufbau model a scientific‑style philosophy and what are its broader ambitions?
30:40–35:38
Speakers
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