#michael friedman

Now Carnap, in the Aufbau, has no intention of questioning the legitimacy of the cultural sciences. These sciences acquire their own, relatively autonomous domain immediately after the construction of the heteropsychological realm. At the same time, however, Carnap does maintain the privileged position of the physical sciences, and he does say, in particular, that only the world of physics provides for the possibility of “univocal, consistent intersubjectivization.” But Carnap does not base this claim on any “naïve empiricist” prejudice privileging “thing perception” over “expressive perception.” Carnap has no such philosophical views on the ultimate nature of perception at all. Rather, the language of physics is privileged because its exactness and precision of mathematical representation make it an exemplary vehicle for the kind of purely formal (purely structural) meaning Carnap hopes to capture in his fundamental method of logical construction: “Every scientific statement can in principle be so transformed that it is only a structural statement. But this transformation is not only possible, but required. For science wants to speak about the objective; however, everything that does not belong to structure but to the material, everything that is ostended concretely, is in the end subjective. In physics we easily recognize this desubjectivization, which has transformed almost all physical concepts into pure structure concepts.” Mathematical physics is privileged, for Carnap, because it provides the most highly developed example of what Carrier calls the significative function of symbolic meaning.