Abstract

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