On looking for—and finding—epistemology in the Aufbau. An homage to Michael Friedman (1947-2025)

The next session of the Reconstructing Carnap webinar series will take place on June 11 and will mark the final event of the 2025 edition. On this occasion, the series will host a special event in honor of Michael Friedman. 

Speaker: Alan Richardson (University of British Columbia)
Title: On looking for—and finding—epistemology in the Aufbau. An homage to Michael Friedman (1947-2025)

Time: June 11, 2025 —4:30 to 6:30pm CEST (10.30-12.30 EDT)
Link: meet.google.com/uaq-jqpf-mwr

Further information about the Reconstructing Carnap Webinar Series is available on the official website:  Reconstructing Carnap Webinar Series. Recordings of the talks can be found on YouTube: youtube.com/@reconstructingcarnap

On looking for—and finding—epistemology in the Aufbau

An Homage to Michael Friedman (1947-2025)

By Alan Richardson (University of British Columbia)

Among the provocations of Thomas Uebel’s talk in this series is his claim that “stretching it just a little bit, Aufbau didn’t do epistemology at all, but only developed a ‘constitution theory’ … This theory could be used for epistemology but wasn’t.” Stretching it just a little bit, one can read Uebel as claiming that one might read the Aufbau with the intent of finding epistemology in it, but one will be frustrated in that search. In “Epistemology in the Aufbau” (1992), Michael Friedman, however, by his own lights, succeeded in finding epistemology in the Aufbau, albeit an epistemology quite unlike the one Quine and the Carnap of the 1950s found in it.  In this talk I will offer an account of why Friedman sought what others had already been found, why he found something that those others had not, and why, within his larger account of Carnap, the nature and fate of the Aufbau’s epistemology is central the structure of Carnap’s mature philosophy.  I will end by answering on behalf of Friedman and others a challenge presented to Friedman’s history in Frederick Beiser’s new book on Early German Positivism; I will endeavour to show the interplay between the rejection of the Kantian synthetic a priori and tolerance in Carnap’s logic of science as reconstructed by Friedman.  This will allow us to grant the sort of positivist rejection of Kantianism that Beiser points to does find expression in Carnap but that Friedman is right that for scientific philosophers such as Carnap, Frank, and Reichenbach only the revolutionary advances of the exact sciences secure the philosophical grounds of anti-dogmatism and the rejection of the universalist account of the synthetic a priori.