ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 10 number 1 april 2005

1 introduction
erificationism, in the strictest sense, is the
V doctrine that the truth or falsity of every
cognitively meaningful statement can be decided
by finitely many possible observations. The system
of Carnap’s Aufbau1 is verificationist. It is also
reductionist, and the two characteristics are con-
nected: verificationism implies that any meaning-
ful statement could in principle be replaced with
a finite set of predictions about possible observa-
tions. What, in Carnap’s opinion, was the point of
this reductionist, verificationist system? A correct
interpretation of the Aufbau itself obviously
requires a satisfactory answer. But the question
also casts long historical shadows in both
directions.
To take the forward direction first: Carnap, as
we all know, was soon to give up on strict
verificationism. But that was not the end of its
influence on his thought, and thus on the whole
development of analytic philosophy of science.
For one thing, even in much later works he
continues to impose a roughly verificationist
condition on the so-called observation language.2
Even more importantly, however: his verifica-
tionist beginnings defined for him the main
problem about scientific progress. If we begin by
realizing that finite data are not, in principle,
enough to decide the truth or falsehood of our
hypotheses, our attention naturally turns to the
problem of induction: namely, the question of how
finite data can support statements which they
fall short of deductively implying. That was indeed
the central problem for later Carnap. Might
other beginnings, however, have focused attention
elsewhere?
That last question leads from the forward
historical direction to the backward one. Under-
standing Carnap’s later reactions depends on
abraham D. stone
THE CONTINENTAL
ORIGINS OF
VERIFICATIONISM
natorp, husserl and carnap
on the object as infinitely
determinable x
knowing what he thought he was doing in the
first place. And to understand that, we need to
understand the context in which he was at first
operating. If we get that wrong, thus placing
the Aufbau in the wrong historical context, we
will not understand the later works, either. On
Quine’s account, for example, Carnap is placed in
a (somewhat odd, and predominantly anglo-
phone) historical sequence which includes
Hume, Bentham, Frege, and Russell.3 Without
going into details: the upshot of this historical
contextualization is an interpretation in which
reductionism – replacing suspicious theoretical
concepts with ‘‘innocent’’ observational ones – is
understood to be the goal of the Aufbau, and
verificationism a means to that end (74–75).
But this leaves it incomprehensible why Carnap

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/010129^15 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250500225800

129
 origins of verificationism
is still interested in some form of verificationism
after the strict version fails (77), and moreover
makes Carnap’s later concern with ‘‘inductive
logic’’ look like the arbitrary, unmotivated sub-
stitution of an imaginary logical procedure for our
actual psychological process of learning about
the world (78).
Of course, Quine’s once-standard account has
now already been discredited in some circles. More
recent accounts of Carnap’s motivations in the
Aufbau place him against the very different
historical backdrop of Marburg neo-Kantianism.4
But such an account, whatever its advantages, is
worrying from our point of view because the
central problems about scientific progress, for the
Marburg neo-Kantians, were far removed from
the problem of induction. I will say more about
that in a moment. For now, though, and again
without going into details: it is not surprising that
these accounts, while making the Aufbau period
look more interesting, have at the same time
tended both to de-emphasize the role of verifica-
tionism in that period and to emphasize the
discontinuity between it and what followed.
Perhaps there is such a radical discontinuity.
But we should be cautious, if only because
Carnap himself maintained that the project of
the Aufbau and his later projects were essentially
the same – namely, that both were concerned with
‘‘rational reconstruction.’’5
All this suggests that, if we want to understand
both the Aufbau and Carnap’s later works, we
ought to take another look at the ‘‘Continental’’
background of his thought, and in particular to
look for an aspect of it which raises different issues
about scientific progress and provides its own
strong motives for verificationism. Here I will try
to identify such a background, in a preliminary
way, by exploring one particular question:
whether, and in what sense, the object of scientific
knowledge is an ‘‘infinitely determinable X.’’
This question is relevant because when Carnap,
in the Aufbau, presents verificationism as a
response to Marburg neo-Kantianism he does so
by presenting it, in particular, as a rejection of
Paul Natorp’s doctrine that the object of scientific
knowledge is ‘‘the eternal X,’’ i.e., that ‘‘its
determination is an unfinishable task’’ (x 179L,
253). It is therefore worth examining what might
be meant by this terminology in Carnap’s histor-
ical context. We will see that it can have quite
different implications in the mouths of different
thinkers. Thus although both Natorp and his
contemporary, Edmund Husserl, describe the
object of scientific knowledge in these terms,
their meaning and motivations are vastly different.
Not to be mysterious: my ultimate contention
will be that, despite Carnap’s explicit claim, in
the passage in question, that he is responding to
Natorp, his real target is Husserl. I will close,
therefore, with suggestions as to what it was in
Husserl’s system which prompted that attack,
thus giving rise to Carnap’s long flirtation with
verificationism in its various forms. But first, and
for the most part, I will focus on the doctrines
of Husserl and Natorp, respectively.6
II early twentieth-century
quasi-kantian hierarchical systems of
knowledge: two ways to proceed
German epistemology in the early twentieth
century – the milieu from which Carnap’s early
writings emerged – has in general two salient
characteristics.
First, the dominance of Kant, or of self-styled
inheritors and interpreters of Kant. That charac-
terization applies, of course, to the thinkers
generally called ‘‘neo-Kantian,’’ including
Natorp and his fellow Marburgers (most impor-
tantly, Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer), as
well as the so-called ‘‘Southwest School’’ (espec-
ially Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert).
But the dominance of Kantianism in this period
extends well beyond that. In particular, Husserl,
whose roots were in Franz Brentano’s openly
anti-Kantian thought and who initially felt closer
to British empiricism, was by this time also
portraying himself as a Kantian. This was clear
in Ideen I,7 with its frequent explicit mentions
of Kant and heavy use of Kantian terminology.
It became clearer still in 1924 – one of the years
during which, according to Ludwig Landgrebe,
Carnap participated in Husserl’s advanced
seminar.8 In that year Husserl delivered the
memorial address at the Kant-Feier of the
University of Freiburg, in honor of the 200th
anniversary of Kant’s birth. At the same time he
130

prepared a version for publication in his Jahrbuch
für Philosophie und phänomenologische
Forschung.9 The text opens with the statement
that an observation of Kant’s birth is appropriate
to a phenomenological yearbook because ‘‘in
the principled continuing development which
phenomenology has received in my life’s work
[. . .] there has emerged a manifest essential
affinity between that phenomenology and Kant’s
transcendental philosophy.’’
Second, the prevalence of open-ended, stepwise
hierarchical systems. Once again, this clearly
applies to the neo-Kantians, especially to the
later Marburgers.10 But, once again, it applies
also to Husserl’s systems of the Ideen period and
later, and, once again, it extends well beyond
that.11 Typically, moreover (including in Natorp
and Husserl), this second characteristic is
presented as a corollary of the first, in that the
repeated operation which generates the hierarchy
is identified with the Kantian operation of
synthesis: the act by which thought ‘‘unifies the
manifold of sense,’’ supplying a necessary connec-
tion where sense itself would yield only contin-
gently connected data. Thus these systems were
not just supposed to be Kantian and hierarchical;
their hierarchies are themselves supposed to be
Kantian.
To maintain this required considerable inge-
nuity, however, because Kant himself doesn’t
envision any such hierarchy. There are many
important and familiar hierarchies in Kant:
understanding–judgment–reason, for example,
or apprehension–reproduction–recognition. But
those hierarchies are not stepwise – they do not
result from the repeated application of a single
operation – and are therefore also not open ended.
If one wanted to extend them further, there
would be no obvious next step. In many important
respects, moreover, Kant’s system is non-
hierarchical, as is particularly apparent from his
characteristic two-dimensional presentations, for
example of the table of judgments and the table of
categories. By spreading the elements out on the
page in that way, Kant expressly avoids arranging
them in any hierarchical order.
If stepwise hierarchical systems must be
imposed on Kant, however, rather than deriving
from his works, why were they so popular in this
131
stone
time and place? In the most general terms, it may
simply have been a matter of philosophical
fashion, though the increasingly complex hier-
archy of the modern sciences may also have played
a role. As for the more detailed content of
the systems in question, however, there were
apparently two distinct and independent sources.
First, and most obvious, is post-Kantian
idealism, especially Hegel. The well-known
formula ‘‘thesis–antithesis–synthesis,’’ which is
not Hegel’s own, and is in fact even rather
misleading, is nevertheless accurate in one respect:
every stage of Hegel’s method is understood
by Hegel to involve something like Kantian
synthesis.12 A second, less obvious, source,
however, is revived interest in ancient and
medieval doctrines of the orders or modes of
being. Such interest is perhaps most evident in
Brentano and those influenced by him (e.g.,
Husserl and Meinong).13 The original versions
of such systems were metaphysical hierarchies in
which the lower modes or orders of object
depended upon the higher ones as mere images
(phenomena). But after a certain inversion (an
interpretation of Kant’s ‘‘Copernican revolution
in philosophy’’), the ‘‘lower’’ sensibilia or sensible
representations could reappear as the founda-
tions, on the basis of which higher orders might
be erected by thought – that is, by a repeated
process of synthesis.
These two sources are associated with different
understandings of the function of synthesis, and
hence with different types of epistemological
system and different interpretations of Kant.
In the first case, synthesis generates categories:
pure a priori concepts which make possible an
object, and an objective (knowing) consciousness,
as such. The object and the consciousness remain
at each stage the same: in Hegel’s system, they are
the absolute and spirit, respectively, and the
system as a whole is supposed to demonstrate
that the absolute is spirit, i.e., to overcome
(or ‘‘sublate’’) the subject–object dichotomy.
In the second type of system, on the other hand,
the pure a priori concepts at work in synthesis
remain the same as the process continues (at least
in an analogous sense). What synthesis achieves
at each stage is the knowledge or cognition of
a new, higher order of object. And although there
 origins of verificationism
is no hierarchy of either type in Kant’s own work,
the two different understandings of synthesis do
each have their basis in Kant’s transcendental
deduction. Only, as we will see, the main basis
for each is not to be found in the same version of
Kant’s text. Thus we will find that Natorp, whose
system is of the first type, prefers the B-edition
version, whereas Husserl prefers the A edition.
III natorp’s b-edition ‘‘object V x’’
To give an accurate account of either the A- or
B-edition transcendental deduction, let alone of
the differences between them, would be an
enormous task – far too large for me to attempt
here. Given that we are really interested in Kant’s
text as an anchor or jumping-off point for
fundamentally un-Kantian ideas, a more super-
ficial reading may, in any case, actually be of more
use than a deeper and more comprehensive one.
And, at least on such a superficial reading, the main
difference between the two editions lies in the role
of the time series of conscious representations.
In the A edition, the deduction proper begins
with the observation that, since all our representa-
tions belong, as ‘‘modifications of the mind,’’ to
inner sense, all our Erkentnisse – all our cognitions
or items of knowledge – ‘‘are ultimately subject to
the formal condition of inner sense, namely
time, as that in which they must all collectively
be ordered, connected, and brought into relation-
ships.’’14 There follows a description of the three
stages of synthesis mentioned above (apprehen-
sion, reproduction, and recognition), which
appear to be three stages in that ordering process.
Thus Kant’s problem of empirical synthesis seems
to flow in a natural way from a problem already
raised by Hume. Roughly speaking: to consider a
given time series of representations as representa-
tions of one single external object, I must suppose
necessary connections between them. Any true
experience (Erfahrung) must therefore contain
such necessity. But – Kant and Hume agree – such
necessity is never to be found in the data of
sense themselves. Hence the synthetic function
of thought will be to supply the missing
necessity, thus building a new, external, spatio-
temporal object on the basis of the temporally
ordered sensible representations which are
immediately given. To the would-be hierarchy
builder, the thought naturally suggests itself that
this operation could be repeated to yield further
types of object – ones which are, so to speak, even
more external (higher ‘‘above’’ the ultimate
foundation of sense).
In the B edition, in contrast, Kant takes
vigorous steps to displace the temporal order
from any fundamental role. The objective, neces-
sary ‘‘combination’’ (Verbindung) which is to be
supplied by the understanding in synthesis is now
opposed not to the merely temporal order of
inner sense but to any form of sensible intuition
in general (B129–30). Such a combination is
needed by any being whose intuition is sensible
rather than intellectual, or in other words by any
finite (discursive) rational being, whether or not its
sensibility has the forms of time and space (B135);
the pure concepts of the understanding are thus
valid for any such being in general (B148, 150).
As a consequence we can no longer get a clear
picture of the uncombined manifold to which the
understanding brings its necessity: certainly we
are not entitled to assume that it has a serial order.
From a Hegelian point of view, however, this
absence of a picture is a sign that we have moved
from the level of representation (Vorstellung) to
the higher or purer level of the concept (Begriff).
Furthermore, the B edition contains another
hopeful sign for the would-be Hegelian system
builder. For, although the three stages of
synthesis have disappeared from the deduction,
synthesis now pops up in a different and more
interesting place: within the table of categories
itself. In that table, recall, the categories are
organized under four headings: quantity, quality,
relation, and modality. In the B edition, Kant
draws attention to the fact that there are three
categories in each of these ‘‘classes,’’ and adds that
the third is always a ‘‘combination’’ (again:
Verbindung) of the first two (B110–11). Hence
we see, first, that there is indeed some hierarchy
within the categories, at least on a local scale, and,
second – given that all ‘‘combination’’ results
from synthesis as an act of the understanding
(B130) – that synthesis is or can be a transition
between pure concepts, rather than between
different kinds of object.
132

Interpreters of Kant (and of Hegel) might well
disagree about the significance of all this, but
Natorp understands matters as follows. It is,
he says, wrong to imagine a temporal order of
representations preceding the work of synthesis,
‘‘as if the external, spatial world left over an inner,
nonspatial, merely temporal world of psychic
being.’’15 When we consider any ordered manifold
or series, we are already considering an object of
experience (Erfahrung), and thus presupposing
synthesis, the contribution of thought without
which all experience is impossible. According to
Natorp, this was always Kant’s view: the priority
of time in the A deduction is not metaphysical/
epistemic, but merely logical, and it is ‘‘not
actually Kant’s fault’’ if people have gone astray
on this point (ibid.). Still, the B deduction is
superior, because it eliminates all ambiguity
about this and related matters (275–76).
If any order of representations is already the
result of synthesis, then the pure Urerlebnis – i.e.,
primordial ‘‘experience’’ considered as purely
passive and (therefore) as purely subjective, pure
sense without thought – is as such the purely
‘‘undetermined,’’ a pure ‘‘chaos.’’16 It is therefore
not a realm of objects of some fundamental
type, which could serve as the foundation for a
hierarchical system of such types. One ought not
to think of inner and outer sense ‘‘as if we had to
do [here] with two realms of objects lying next to
one another’’ (70). The foundation of Natorp’s
system therefore lies not in the most immediate
objects but in the most immediate concepts:
in logic, ‘‘as ‘transcendental’ logic in Kant’s
sense.’’17 It begins with the ‘‘fundamental act of
knowing,’’ which Natorp identifies with Kant’s
supreme act of synthetic unity, i.e., with the
transcendental unity of apperception, but which
he also explains, in more Hegelian fashion, as ‘‘the
fundamental correlation of separation and
uniting’’ (44). This is the fundamental act of
determination, ‘‘in which there first comes to be
any determinateness whatsoever for thought’’
(39); as such it is the source both of all concepts
and of all judgments, since ‘‘every judgment is the
originary positing of a concept in relation to a
something which is to be conceived’’ (42). What
follows from it first – the system of ‘‘fundamental
logical functions’’ – is therefore to be identified,
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stone
from one point of view, with Kant’s table of
judgments, and, from another point of view, with
his table of categories.18
In developing this system of logical
Grundfunktionen, Natorp takes his cue from
Kant’s remark that the third category in each
class is a combination or synthesis of the first two.
But he goes beyond his Kantian basis in three
respects. (1) Where Kant merely opposes the first
two categories of each class to the third, Natorp
puts all three into a single three-step order, and
moreover maintains, explicitly against Kant,
that the three steps within each class can be
matched up to the three steps of the others: such a
correspondence will appear as ‘‘indispensably
necessary’’ to anyone who understands the origin
of the categories in the ‘‘fundamental process of
synthetic unity.’’19 (2) Natorp sees the exact same
process at work in the transition from one class
to another. The class of relation, in particular, is
represented as resulting from the synthesis of the
two previous classes, which are quantity and
quality (in that order) (66). As for the fourth
class, Kant himself says that it is special: that
the categories of modality are determinations, not
of the object but of its relationship to our cognitive
faculties. Natorp takes this to mean that modality
is a third, synthetic step in a series whose first two
steps are the original Grundakt and the prior
three classes (quantity, quality, and relation) taken
as a whole.20 (3) The three-part series which is
established and repeated, on different levels,
within the system of categories is not confined to
that system; rather, a repeated application of the
same method leads, in the remainder of Natorp’s
book, to a further series of pure concepts: those of
pure arithmetic (including transfinite and complex
arithmetic), geometry, kinematics, dynamics, and
energetics.
That the spatial and temporal orders themselves
appear within this hierarchy of pure concepts
seems to put Natorp in opposition to Kant. Kant
does emphasize, in the B edition, that the temporal
order is not fundamental, but he does so by stres-
sing that the categories are valid even for rational
beings whose intuition does not, like ours, have the
form of time and space. This makes it seem, if
anything, even clearer that the pure form of our
intuition is an independent factor which enters
 origins of verificationism
(via the Schematism) into an explanation of how
we can apply the categories to experience. Natorp
is well aware of this difficulty. He responds, first,
that he and his fellow neo-Kantians have been
forced to abandon this two-factor view by Kant
himself: the very principle of Kant’s transcen-
dental philosophy demands that these supposedly
different factors be understood as a single unity,
which may as a whole be called ‘‘pure thought’’
(2–3). Second, he claims that Kant himself was
guilty more of misleading presentation than of real
confusion on this, and that, in particular, the
B-edition deduction makes it unambiguously
clear that all spatio-temporal order is a result of
synthesis, rather than an independent factor which
could co-determine it (275–76). This, however, is
a very strained reading of Kant: there is every
reason to think of Natorp more as a neo-Hegelian
than a neo-Kantian.
There is, nevertheless, an important disagree-
ment between Natorp and Hegel – one which
clearly marks him, at least in his own mind, as a
Kantian. Hegel famously distinguishes between
two kinds of infinite: ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad.’’ The good
infinite is without limit because it closes in on itself.
The final stage of Hegel’s logic, for example, is the
absolute idea, whose moments are the absolute idea
as such, method, and system: Hegelian logic, in
other words, ‘‘concludes [. . .] by grasping the
concept of itself, as the pure idea for which the idea
is.’’21 The infinite series of pure a priori concepts in
Natorp’s stepwise and open-ended hierarchical
system, in contrast, is a prime example of the bad
infinite, in which ‘‘something becomes another,
but the other is itself something, and so equally
becomes another, and so on in infinitum.’’22
Natorp, in fact, explicitly associates the infinity
of his own method with Hegel’s bad infinite, and
identifies the latter with the infinity of Kantian
idea as merely regulative: as an infinite task or
‘‘ought’’ for the merely finite understanding.23
Thus Natorp’s Kantianism amounts, in his own
eyes, to a rejection of the Hegelian absolute idea in
favor of the Kantian regulative one, or of a closed
system of determinations in favor of an open-ended
series of them.
This one disagreement has far-reaching conse-
quences, as we might expect, given Hegel’s own
emphasis on the importance of the distinction
between good and bad infinities.24 Most funda-
mentally: if we ask what the series of pure logical
determinations are supposed to determine, then,
recall, Hegel can answer either ‘‘the absolute’’ or
‘‘spirit.’’ The good infinity of the system means
that, in its final moment, logic is the pure idea
both in and for itself – the idea both of the
absolute object and of the absolute subject.
Natorp agrees that if ‘‘the work of knowledge’’
could be ‘‘closed off’’ then ‘‘the opposing relation-
ship of the subjective and the objective would be
entirely sublated’’;25 the characterization of the
ultimately concrete subject, ‘‘universal spirit,’’
would at the same time include the complete
characterization of its object.26 As it stands,
however, the tasks of subjectivization and objec-
tivization are both open ended and uncompletable,
and logic has to do unambiguously with the
latter: not with thinking, but with ‘‘the thought’’
(das Gedachte).27
For Natorp, therefore, the hierarchy of pure
a priori concepts is a hierarchy of determinations
of the object. But the object so determined is not
some individual object – a tree, say, or a house.
Indeed, the determinations necessary to think
an individual as distinct from others (that it is
one, of a certain kind, etc.) are only developed as
the process continues. Logic, according to Natorp,
is rather characterized by a turn away from
‘‘objects’’ to ‘‘the object’’ (34). As in Hegel, that
is, we are talking about the one object of the
one unified experience – ultimately, in the ideal
limit, about a single, absolutely necessary connect-
edness which embraces all experience and comple-
tely determines it (69, 277). But since, for Natorp,
this is merely an ideal limit, we are not entitled
to call it ‘‘the absolute’’ (if we want to use that term
for something, Natorp suggests, we could apply
it to the logical method itself (218)). If we call it
‘‘the object,’’ indeed, then we should understand
objectum here as equivalent to Greek problēma
and hence to the German Vorwurf – a problem,
task, or project that is ‘‘thrown before’’ us – rather
than as a determinate something which stands over
against us (an antikeimenon or Gegenstand).28
But, better still, we should let the infinite series of
determinations themselves tell us what is deter-
mined: in itself, before any determination, it is a
mere X.29 This is what it means to say, for Natorp,
134

that the object is an infinitely determinable X,
which corresponds – but always only
inadequately – to a Kantian idea.
But Natorp further associates his bad-infinite,
Kantian logical process with a view of scientific
progress as open ended: even though science at
every stage discovers a priori concepts, which are
secure against any future revolution,30 still there
are always further such concepts to be discovered,
and hence further such revolutions to come.
The series of determinations of the X are thus
not only the stages of Natorp’s stepwise system but
also the stages of scientific progress: a scientific
revolution is always a philosophical discovery, in
which further a priori determinations of the object
of experience come to light. All great scientific
Forscher, from Plato on, have been ‘‘philosophi-
cally disposed’’ (366).31 In this way of under-
standing our epistemic task, in other words – this
way of understanding our progressive determina-
tion of the object ¼ X – the main question will be
not how experience can build up support for our
hypotheses (judgments) but rather how it can lead
us to recognize more objective and determinate a
priori concepts. To find a historical background
against which Carnap’s motivations make sense,
we will have to look elsewhere.
IV husserl’s a-edition ‘‘object V x’’
We have seen, in Natorp, a certain diagnosis of
the relationship between the A- and B-edition
versions of the transcendental deduction. The A
edition, according to Natorp, gives the misleading
impression that there is a special realm of
temporally ordered psychic objects (the realm of
inner sense), presupposed before thought begins
its work of synthesis. But Kant could never have
meant that – after all, an inner, psychic object
would be an object of experience no less that an
external, physical one, and so already a result of
synthesis. Thus Natorp prefers the clearer
formulation of the B deduction.
Broadly speaking, Husserl agrees. He agrees,
that is, that Kant abandoned the A deduction
because it seemed to presuppose a special realm of
objects which, from Kant’s own point of view,
could only be understood as psychic objects of
inner sense. According to Husserl, however,
135
stone
Kant misunderstood his own discovery and made
a terrible mistake. ‘‘The transcendental deduction
of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason
actually already moves on phenomenological
ground’’ – which is to say on the correct ground
for philosophy – ‘‘but Kant misinterpreted that
ground as psychological, and therefore himself
again relinquished it.’’32
It is not surprising that Husserl would say this
about Kant, considering the way he sees the
givenness of external objects. His picture in
Ideen I (and note that we are back with a structure
of which one could easily draw a picture) is
essentially the very one Natorp rejects as absurd.
The fundamental process is the ‘‘constitution’’ of
something external – in the most basic case,
of a Ding, i.e., a sensible object in the realm
of nature – by means of time series of conscious
states, which Husserl calls Erlebnisse.33 Imagine,
for example, that the Ding being constituted is
a tree. Although there are various indirect ways
in which such an external object can be given
or ‘‘posited’’ (for example, one might guess or
deduce or remember that it is or was present),
these all rest, according to Husserl, on the
possibility of an ‘‘originary’’ or ‘‘in-person’’ kind
of positing, which in the case of Dinge is
perception.34 So for the sake of simplicity we
may think of the series of positing Erlebnisse as
a series of tree-perceptions. The two most impor-
tant components of such a perceptual Erlebnis
are the noesis, which is, roughly speaking, an
act of consciousness – in this case, and an act
of tree-perception – and the noema, which is
a kind of proper object of the noesis: in this case,
the tree-percept as such.35 The noema, here,
can be thought of as the claim that a certain
object (this tree here) is present. Or that, rather,
describes the central component of the noema,
the noematic ‘‘core’’ or ‘‘sense’’:36 the noema as a
whole also makes further, ‘‘subjective’’ claims, for
example that the tree is at a certain distance, seen
from a certain point of view, etc. The noesis, on the
other hand, consists of sense data and something
like an interpretation of those data.37 In effect, the
noesis is an act of making the claim of the noema
by so interpreting the data. The positing is
rational if the data ‘‘fulfill’’ the noematic
sense – that is, justify its claim.38 It is when
 origins of verificationism
I carry out such a rational, originary positing
that the tree is actually given: a ‘‘positing ray’’
then leaves my pure or transcendental ego and
travels through the noesis and the noematic sense
to reach the transcendent object (in our case,
the tree).39
The problem of empirical synthesis arises
because such perceptual positing is always ‘‘inade-
quate,’’ in two ways. First, the data never
completely fulfill the noema. When I see a tree,
for example, I see only the side facing me; there
are no data corresponding to the other side. What I
see, however – what the noema claims is present – is
not merely a seen-tree-side, but a tree. Thus,
the noema always makes a claim beyond what the
data can support; the noesis is always an over-
interpreting of the data. Second, the noema itself
never even makes a complete claim about the
object. Suppose, for example, that I have never
seen the other side and have no idea what it looks
like. The noema claims (i.e., I am certain, on the
basis of the data) that there is another side, but
makes no detailed claims about its appearance.
I might, moreover, turn out to be wrong about
the details of even the side I can see: when I get
closer, for example, I might realize that it looks
different than I thought. I will then say that I did
see this tree before – that is, that the central claim
of my old noema was correct, and was justified
by the data in my old noesis – but that that claim
was in detail incorrect. Even the claims which are
actually present in the noematic sense, and even
the justified or ‘‘fulfilled’’ ones, in other words,
are provisional, and require further observation
to back them up.
Positing on the ground of the in-person
appearance of a Ding is indeed rational, but
the appearance is nevertheless a one-sided,
‘‘imperfect’’ appearance; what stands there as
consciously known in-person is not only what
‘‘properly [eigentlich]’’ appears, but rather
simply this Ding itself, the whole, according
to the entire, although only one-sidedly intui-
tive and moreover multiply undetermined,
noematic sense.
A Ding-reality, a being in such a sense, can
in principle appear only ‘‘inadequately’’ in a
closed appearance. (x 138, 286)
Husserl calls the way a Ding like the tree is
given – in stages, each of which is
inadequate – ‘‘adumbration’’ (Abschattung).
For objects so given, there is a Humean,
A-edition problem of synthesis. The determina-
tions contained in a perceptual Erlebnis, or in
a closed series of Erlebnisse, are never sufficient
to posit the transcendent object. In positing
that object, in other words, I must always posit
a further series of such determinations which is
necessarily coming. In positing the tree, for
example, I posit not only the presence of this
tree-side (what is ‘‘properly’’ seen), but also that,
if I walk around the tree, and all goes well, the
other side will necessarily appear. But, since
the determinations which attach to the tree in
my present Erlebnis are not sufficient to require
this series, I seem to have no grounds for positing
its necessity.
Husserl’s solution to this problem is at the
same time his version of the A-edition deduction.
What Kant noticed in the A edition, according to
Husserl, but himself failed to understand, is that
a certain kind of object is not given to us
inadequately: namely, the pure Erlebnisse
themselves. ‘‘We perceive the Ding by virtue of
the fact that it is ‘adumbrated’ according to all
the determinations which ‘actually’ and properly
[eigentlich] ‘fall’ within the perception in a given
case,’’ but ‘‘an Erlebnis is not adumbrated ’’ (x 42,
77). Erlebnisse, that is, are given in intellectual
intuition. Kant rejected the A-edition approach as
psychologistic because he failed to appreciate
this point. Representations conceived as percep-
tible (objects of inner sense), would, as Natorp
says, already presuppose synthesis, and Kant was
confused into believing that representations could
only be given in some kind of sensible intuition
because he blamed the inadequate givenness of
external objects on our defectiveness as knowers.
In fact, however, according to Husserl, the defect
lies in the mode of being of those objects
themselves. Dinge, and everything that depends
on them, are not fully true beings; there is no
complete adaequatio between them and their
cause of being – which, Husserl claims, is my
rational positing. ‘‘Therein is manifested
a difference-in-principle of modes of being: the
136

most cardinal such difference which there is at all,
that between consciousness and reality’’ (ibid.).
This version of Kant’s Copernican revolution,
in which the realm of my consciousness replaces
the intelligible realm (the realm of true beings, of
Dinge an sich), and my pure ego replaces God as
cause of being of the world, suggests a solution
to the problem of empirical synthesis which is
both an interpretation of the A deduction and an
inverted Neoplatonism. The disunity of sensible
objects, on this view – their dispersal into stages,
none of which contains the necessity required
to connect it to the others – is a sign of their
dependency on a higher realm of being. For the
series of all my Erlebnisse is essentially and
necessarily unified: each Erlebnis contains
components (outside its noesis and noema)
which serve as retrospective and anticipatory
‘‘halos’’ of those that precede and follow it.
Hence the ever-present possibility of pure
reflection: that any Erlebnis might, at any time,
become the object of a completely adequate
positing.40 But that necessary unity is itself a
consequence of Kant’s transcendental unity of
apperception: i.e., of the absolute unity of my ego,
and the fact that the Erlebnisse are all mine.41
From that absolute unity (the One Beyond Being)
emanates the essential and necessary unity of
the intelligible world, and the lesser unity and
being of sensible things depend, in turn, on that
essential unity of the Erlebnisstrom. The necessity
which is missing from the Ding-as-posited (from
the positing noeses and noemata as such) is to be
found in the full Erlebnisse of which those
positings are components, in their essential
relation to all future and past Erlebnisse. Thus
the necessity I posit in the future series of tree-
appearances, for example, is nothing that is
found in the tree-itself-as-appearing; it is, rather,
the necessary unity of my own consciousness.
Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to lead me
to recognize this: that my consciousness is a realm
of necessity and truth, compared to which every-
thing external is relative, contingent, and depen-
dent. Thus, unlike Kantian critique, it is
redemptive. It speaks with the voice of the
Gnostic paraclete: it ‘‘redeems us theoretically
from the absolutizing of this world and opens for
us the only scientific entry-gate into the world
137
stone
which alone is true in the higher sense, the world
of absolute spirit.’’42
Having, however, construed the relationship
between consciousness and its objects in this way,
as the ‘‘most cardinal’’ difference in mode of
being, it is natural to recognize other, lesser
differences, and thus to erect something like a
classical Aristotelian/Neoplatonic metaphysical
hierarchy. In Husserl’s system, the device which
generates that hierarchy is ‘‘founded positing.’’43
Roughly speaking: while a direct interpretation
of sense data always yields Dinge, further inter-
pretations can be built on top of that one. Thus, for
example, a Ding in its changes can be taken as
standing for a psychological object (a soul).44
Further layers of interpretation (together with the
incorporation of emotional and volitional data)
then yield ‘‘higher-order’’ objects in the realms
of culture or spirit (Geist). A hierarchy of found-
ing within the positing noeses thus gives rise to a
hierarchy of modes of being in the transcendent
world. This hierarchy, like Natorp’s, is stepwise
and, apparently, open ended: though Husserl
never, to my knowledge, actually says that it is
infinite, nothing in the system prevents its being
so. But the levels in this A-edition system are
not categories, not levels of a priori determination
of the object. They are, rather, different orders of
object: different modes of being, to each of which
the same logical categories (analogously) apply.
So when Husserl says that the object is an infinitely
determinable X, he is not referring to the
potential infinity of this constitutional hierarchy.
To see what he does mean, notice first that
the (‘‘immanent’’) time sequence of the pure
Erlebnisse is not to be identified with the
transcendent time of events in the external
world. When the tree turns out, on closer inspec-
tion, to look different than I originally thought,
Erlebnisse at earlier and later immanent times
each posit the same tree as having been different
throughout transcendent or cosmic time (the tree
always really looked different than it at first
seemed to look). Every Ding, and in general every
transcendent object – every object given by
adumbration – is constantly, with respect to
immanent time, in a state of flux: the determina-
tions with which it is posited (components of the
noematic sense) constantly change, and all are in
 origins of verificationism
principle changeable and replaceable. It follows
that that within the sense which claims the
existence of this object (for example, of this tree
here) is not to be identified with any of them.
Rather, it is something different from all determi-
nations, which always allows and indeed requires
further ones – in principle, an infinite series of
them. What is posited in it is a mere infinitely
determinable X:
We say that the intentional object is constantly
in conscious awareness in the continuous or
synthetic progress of consciousness, but is
always again ‘‘otherwise given’’ therein; it is
‘‘the same’’; it is merely given with other
predicates, with another determination-
content; ‘‘it’’ merely shows itself from different
sides, whereby the predicates which remain
undetermined have been further determined
[. . .] the identical intentional ‘‘object’’ is
evidently distinguished from the changing
and alterable ‘‘predicates.’’ It is distinguished
as the central noematic moment: the ‘‘object,’’
[. . .] the ‘‘identical,’’ – the pure X in abstrac-
tion from all predicates.45
This fits in with inverted Neoplatonism. It is,
in fact, a Neoplatonist version of the passage in
which Aristotle introduces matter: because a
physical substance receives opposite determina-
tions successively, there must be some third thing
(a tertium quid) which receives them, and the
physical substance is essentially just this third
thing, prime matter, which is without any deter-
minations of its own.46 But it is also an interpreta-
tion of the passage where the ‘‘object ¼ X’’ first
turns up in the A deduction:
What, then, does one understand, if one speaks
of an object which corresponds to knowledge,
and thus also is different from it? It is easy
to see that this object must be thought
merely as a something in general ¼ X, because
we have nothing outside our knowledge
against which we could set this knowledge as
corresponding.47
Kant, in the introduction to the A edition, seems
to make this connection himself. A synthetic
judgment, he says, in connecting a subject to
a predicate not contained in it (and possibly
even opposed to it), implicitly bases itself on
some third thing, which Kant calls an ‘‘X’’ (A8).
Under Husserl’s interpretation of Kant, moreover,
the connection is natural. That a Ding, or any
transcendent object, always allows and indeed
requires further determinations beyond what are
found in any positing of it is a consequence of the
fact that the object itself – the subject of all its
predicates – is a mere X: i.e., a consequence of
the object’s materiality. Material beings, which
are always in flux, which become and pass away,
are not fully true beings, but mere phenomena,
and such being and unity as they possess is due
the presence in the Erlebnisstrom of a necessary
law to which they inadequately correspond.
That law is itself something like a concept which
can never be exemplified in experience. Husserl
says: adequate Ding-givenness is ‘‘an idea in
the Kantian sense.’’48
Husserl thus uses the exact same Kantian
terminology as Natorp, and also intends to
interpret (and correct) Kant. But their Kants,
and therefore the meanings of their terms, are
different. If a hierarchy proceeds from bottom
to top, then Natorp’s infinite series of determina-
tions is vertical: it is identical to the series of
hierarchical levels, each of which involves a
further a priori concept to which the object must
conform. For Husserl, in contrast, the infinite
series of determinations is horizontal: what is
determined is a particular object at a particular
level in his hierarchy; it has nothing directly to
do with the generation of the hierarchy itself.
This lends itself to a rather different picture of
scientific progress, and of the problems involved
in its open-endedness. The problem of induction –
which in Natorp’s Grundlagen is nowhere to be
found – now takes on great significance: Husserl
claims, in fact, that it can be solved (non-
skeptically) only by a phenomenological idealism
like his own (x 20, 37; x 79, 159). If that solution
looks unattractive, however, then verificationism
might well present itself as an alternative.
V carnap’s response to husserl
The system of the Aufbau follows that of Husserl’s
Ideen. That is true on the level of terminology
(e.g., Erlebnis, Ding) and of gross structure
(e.g., nature, soul, Geist). But we are now in a
position to see that the resemblance is far deeper.
138

The Aufbau hierarchy is, as Carnap explicitly
says, a hierarchy of ‘‘modes of being.’’49 It begins
with a temporal series of fundamental objects,
and the problem is, given objects of that kind,
how to get to further kinds at higher levels.
In other words, it is an A-edition system of the
same kind as Husserl’s, not a B-edition system
like Natorp’s.
Not that Carnap has been reading only Husserl,
of course: as the bibliography makes clear, he has
been reading many things, Natorp among them.
And, Carnap being who he is, there are attempts in
the Aufbau to treat Natorp tolerantly – to find an
interpretation of him according to which Carnap
can agree with much of what he says and disagree
politely with the rest. In particular, and as others
have noted, the attempt to show that scientific
statements are ‘‘structural’’ does bear some
relationship to neo-Kantian projects.50 Moreover,
Carnap maintains that his constitutional system
is neutral on the distinction between systems of
concepts and systems of objects (x 5, 5), which
sounds like (and is probably intended to sound
like) a declaration of neutrality on the A vs. B
dichotomy we have explored above. Nevertheless,
I think such nods towards neo-Kantianism are
superficial. Without going into the details here,
we can at least see a good indication of that
from Carnap’s treatment of the issue at hand,
namely the infinitely determinable object ¼ X.
Recall that Carnap presents his view as a
rejection of Natorp’s. That is puzzling on two
accounts. First, if we were to take seriously the
idea that the Aufbau system is supposed to
parallel Natorp’s, we should understand the
constitutional levels of the system as progressive
determinations of the object. But there is no
indication that the series of such levels must come
to an end, and, indeed, there is good reason to
think that it does not. Michael Friedman, noticing
this, has remarked that, on the Aufbau system
carefully considered, ‘‘the Marburg doctrine of
the never completed ‘X’ turns out to be correct,
after all, at least so far as physical [. . .] objects
are concerned.’’51 Second, however, and more
fundamentally, this identification of the series
of constitutional levels with the series of deter-
minations of the X is incorrect, as is especially
clear in the passage in question. For the reason
139
stone
that Carnap gives for rejecting the doctrine of
infinite determinability is that a finite number
of ‘‘indicators’’ (Kennzeichen) are always suffi-
cient, given a proper constitutional definition, to
determine whether an object is present. ‘‘If such
a designation [Kennzeichnung] is in place, then
the object is no longer an X, but rather some-
thing univocally determined, whose complete
description then still remains, to be sure, an
unfulfillable task’’ (x 179L, 253). What is meant
by a Kennzeichen here is something like a mark
or feature by which a particular object can
be identified – for example, the identification
of a cobra (Brillenschlange) by the pattern of
broken eyeglasses (Brillen) on its head, or of the
Feldberg by its height and position (x 49, 69;
x 13,16). But such identifying marks or features
have nothing in common with Natorp’s series
of a priori determinations of the absolute object.
They do, however, have everything in common
with Husserl’s ‘‘determinations,’’ which are
precisely marks or features of the posited object.
According to Husserl, a finite series of them is
never sufficient to establish that a given transcen-
dent object is present; what is ‘‘properly’’
(eigentlich) seen always falls short of what is
posited. To this Carnap replies that, however
much beyond mere perception we may use in
identifying an object, it must be the case, if we are
using language scientifically and responsibly, that
we can go back and give a finite basis for our
identification. A botanist, like the rest of us, will
likely establish the presence of a certain tree – say,
a tree of a certain species – ‘‘intuitively,’’ which is
to say: the botanist’s actual psychological process
does not involve first recognizing the indicators
of a certain species, then deducing that
(by definition) it must be present. But
the intuitive recognition [. . .] can be of use in
further scientific development [Verarbeitung]
only because it also is possible to state the
indicators [. . .] explicitly, to compare them
with the perception, and thus to justify the
intuition rationally. (x 100, 139)52
In order to isolate such indicators,
The botanist must ask himself, in reconstruct-
ing the recognition of the plants: what in the
 origins of verificationism

experienced [erlebte] recognition was the found in the data. The point, in other words, is
properly [eigentlich] seen, and what in it to show that the object is not, in Husserl’s sense,
was apperceptive processing [Verarbeitung]? a mere infinitely determinable X, which is in
(Ibid.) principle only ever posited inadequately and
The constitutional system is supposed to accom- provisionally, i.e., as in inadequate correspon-
plish this same task on a grander scale: it is dence with a Kantian idea found in the realm
of pure consciousness.
‘‘a rational reconstruction of the entire, for the
Given the details of Husserl’s system, it is
most part intuitively performed, construction
relatively easy to see why Carnap would want
[Aufbau] of science’’ (ibid.). Hence the fiction
to refute his view on this particular point.
involved in rational reconstruction is not supposed
If objects of any level can in principle be
to be an arbitrary one – not, as Quine puts it, mere
adequately given, then the difference in mode of
‘‘make-believe.’’53 The system does not, of course,
being between pure consciousness and external
aim ‘‘to reproduce the cognitive process in all its
objects is no longer particularly fundamental.56
parts’’: just as the botanist would not include every
If the verificationist principle is correct, however,
mark by which a species can be recognized, it
then it must be the case that every object can be
includes only so many of the relationships among
adequately given, because we cannot even
experiences ‘‘as are required for one to be able, in
meaningfully refer to something for which we
principle, to constitute actuality from them.’’54
are in principle unwilling to produce finite
That selection is indeed arbitrary (it makes no
indicators. But note that the strict form of
sense to ask whether the right indicators have been
verificationism – the form which is tied to strict
chosen, out of the many possibilities). But that
reductionism – is not central to this motivation.
much, also, is mere selectiveness, not fiction. The
The key is ‘‘rational reconstruction’’: that is, the
fiction – the deviation of the reconstructed story
demonstration that finite, discursive knowers,
from the actual psychological process – is not
who – in a context of justification, at least –
arbitrary at all: it is precisely the fiction that,
ought in principle to begin with a finite series
in recognizing the object, we begin with what we
of data, with a finite stretch of the eigentlich
really, actually, ‘‘properly’’ see: with a closed finite
Gesehene, can nevertheless have a right to all
series of the eigentlich Gesehene. The rational
our scientific positings, without recourse to
reconstruction is supposed to show that, under
any supersensible idea of necessity. Thus when
that fictional assumption, it would still be possible
Carnap comes, later, to feel that the strict
to erect the whole structure of actuality, and to do
verificationist principle has failed, he turns natu-
so rationally: in the constitutional system, in
rally to a consideration of less strict ways in which
other words, ‘‘intuitive knowledge is replaced by
such a discursive knower might
discursive reasoning’’ (x 54, 74).
gain a right to posit determinate
But what is the point of showing this, given
objects of experience: he turns,
that, as is clear even in the Aufbau, we do not
that is, to a consideration of
normally have the whole series of indicators in
inductive logic.
hand to make some identification with absolute
certainty?55 To explain the full significance of
notes
this would take us too far afield into Carnap’s
motivations, but it is easy enough to see the 1 Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 4th
immediate point: namely, that if a finite series ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1974) x 179L, 253.
of determinations – one I can in principle expect (This edition is identical to the original one of
1928 except for a new foreword added in 1961
to check for during my finite future – is sufficient,
and a new note and supplemental bibliography
in principle, to establish the presence of some
added in 1966.)
external object, then I am entitled now to claim
(or ‘‘posit’’) the presence of that object without 2 See the conditions on LO in‘‘The Methodological
relying on some necessity which is never to be Character of Theoretical Concepts,’’ Minnesota

140

Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1 (1956): 41^ 42:
observability of primitives, explicit definability of
other terms, existence of a finite model, construc-
tivism, extensionality.
3 ‘‘Epistemology Naturalized’’ in Ontological
Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia
UP,1969) 71^72.
4 See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways:
Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago and La
Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000); ‘‘Carnap’s Aufbau
Reconsidered’’ in Reconsidering Logical Positivism
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1999) 89^113;
‘‘Epistemology in the Aufbau’’ in idem 114 ^ 62;
Alan Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World:
The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1998); Werner Sauer,
‘‘Carnaps Aufbau in kantianischer Sicht,’’Grazer phi-
losophische Studien 23 (1985):19^35.
5 See Aufbau, Foreword to 2nd ed., x.
6 For more discussion of Carnap’s response to
Husserl, see also, in addition to my own
‘‘Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of
Metaphysics’’ (forthcoming), Verena Mayer,
‘‘Carnap und Husserl’’ in Science and Subjectivity:
The Vienna Circle and Twentieth Century Philosophy,
eds. David Bell and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Berlin:
Akademie, 1992) 185^201; Alan Richardson, ‘‘The
Geometry of Knowledge: Lewis, Becker, Carnap
and the Formalization of Philosophy in the 1920s,’’
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 34
(2003): 175; and ‘‘Conceiving, Experiencing, and
Conceiving Experiencing: Neo-Kantianism and
the History of the Concept of Experience,’’ Topoi
22 (2003): 66, n. 5; Sahorta Sarkar,‘‘Husserl’s Role
in Carnap’s Der Raum’’ in Language, Truth and
Knowledge: Contributions to the Philosophy of Rudolf
Carnap, ed. Thomas Bonk (Boston: Kluwer, 2003);
Jean-Michel Roy, ‘‘Carnap’s Husserlian Reading of
the Aufbau’’ in Carnap Brought Home, eds.
Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein (Chicago: Open
Court, 2004) 41^ 62.
7 Ideenzu einerreinen Pha«nomenologie und pha«nome-
nologischen Philosophie [1922], 2nd ed. (reprint,
Tu«bingen: Niemeyer,1993).
8 See Karl Schuhmann, Husserl Chronik
(The Hague: Nijhoff,1977) 281.
9 The intended publication never took place.
The text has since appeared as ‘‘Kant und die Idee
der Transzendentalphilosophie,’’ appendix to Erste
141
stone
Philosophie: Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte,
Husserliana 7, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague:
Nijhoff,1956) 230 ^ 87.
10 Cf. Friedman, Parting of theWays 72, where the
‘‘serial or stepwise methodological sequence’’ of
the Aufbau is taken as evidence of its Marburg
roots.
11 Including to many lesser known figures who get
mentioned in the Aufbau
e.g., Theodor Ziehen
and Hans Driesch (see x 3, 3). Cf. C. Ulises
Moulines, ‘‘Hintergru«nde der Erkenntnistheorie
des fru«hen Carnap,’’ Grazer philosophische Studien
23 (1985):10.
12 See, for example, Enzyklopa«die der philoso-
phischen Wissenschaften (1830) (Hamburg: Meiner,
1991) x 239A,195.
13 See especially Brentano’s Von der mannigfachen
Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg:
Herder,1862).
14 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt,
3rd ed., Philosophische Bibliothek, vol. 37a
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990) (henceforth KrV).
A99.
15 Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten
Wissenschaften (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner,
1910) 292.
16 Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer
Methode, Erstes Buch: Objekt und Methode der
Psychologie (Tu«bingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1912) 78, 80.
Both Erfahrung and Erlebnis are normally
translated as ‘‘experience.’’ But Kant exclusively
uses the first term (and in fact the noun Erlebnis is
apparently not attested until after Kant: for some
discussion of its history, see Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzu«ge einer
philosophischen Hermeneutik, 3rd ed. (Tu«bingen:
Mohr-Siebeck, 1975) 60 ^ 66). Natorp uses
Erlebnis in approximately the way indicated in the
text; Husserl, as we will see, uses it in a
different sense.
17 Grundlagen iv.
18 For the system of logical Grundfunktionen as the
‘‘development’’ (Entwicklung) of the primordial
Grundakt, see 49^52. (Entwicklung is a characteris-
tically Hegelian term in this context.)
Kant’s procedure in the metaphysical deduction
(in which he takes a traditional classification of
 origins of verificationism
judgments for granted and derives the categories
from it) is criticized, but dismissed as inessential
to his method, on 43^ 44.
19 Grundlagen 63^ 64.The three-step process sup-
posedly at work here is to all intents and
purposes the three-step method of Hegelian
logic.The first demand of thought is, in each case,
‘‘that one must in any case say A,’’ but the second is
that ‘‘because one says A, one must then also
say B’’ ^ a B which is not simply other to the A,
but rather ‘‘its other’’ (55). There then follows
a third demand, for a ‘‘continuity of thought, in
which the cases formerly distinguished as A and
non-A again unite under a higher point of view
[Betrachtung]’’ (218). But the ‘‘appearance of a
closed connected whole’’ (Schein des geschlossenen
Zusammenhanges) which arises in this way
‘‘is always again sublated’’ (hebt sich immer wieder
auf) (93). Thus the process of thought itself is
superordinate to its ‘‘individual stations’’; ‘‘every
posited endpoint becomes again the starting
point of a new [. . .] step along the way of thought’’
(50). The primordial law of logic is the law of
this ‘‘process’’ or ‘‘method’’ (14 ^15).
20 See especially Grundlagen 86 ^ 87. For Kant’s
statement in this respect, see KrV A219/B266
(to which Natorp alludes at Grundlagen 84).
21 Enzyklopa«die x 243,196.
22 Ibid. x93,112.
23 Grundlagen 166,168, 51, 69.
24 ‘‘The fundamental concept of philosophy [. . .]
depends on it’’ (Enzyklopa«die x 95A,114).
25 Allgemeine Psychologie 62.
26 Ibid. 227.
27 Ibid.; Grundlagen 40 ^ 42, 36.
28 Grundlagen 32^33; Allgemeine Psychologie 1, 66.
29 See especially Grundlagen 41; see also
Grundlagen 15, 33, 47, 96; Allgemeine Psychologie, loc.
cit.
30 See Grundlagen v.
31 See especially Natorp’s description of Galileo’s
work (358 ^ 60); also, what he says about the
‘‘a priori character’’ of the principle that ‘‘every
event in nature must be represented as a mere
transfer [Wanderung] of ‘energy’’’ (354).
32 Ideen I, x 62,119.
33 I will leave both of these terms untranslated.
The English word ‘‘thing’’ is unsuited to such a
limited technical role: it sounds incoherent to say
‘‘not everything is a thing.’’ (Cf. the confusion
caused by this in Russell, Our Knowledge of the
External World as a Field for Scientific Method in
Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 1915) 89, 213.)
On Erlebnis, see above, n.16.
34 See Ideen I, x136, 282^ 85.
35 See Ideen I, x 88, 213^16; x 96, 199^200. For a
somewhat more detailed discussion of the
components of the Erlebnisse and their role in
empirical synthesis, see my ‘‘On Husserl and
Cavellian Scepticism,’’ Philosophical Quarterly
50 (2000): 11^18. A much more detailed discussion
is to be found in my dissertation, ‘‘On Husserl
and Cavellian Skepticism, With Reference to the
Thomistic Theory of Creation’’ (Harvard, 2000):
see especially x 3.3, 63^ 81.
36 For ‘‘sense’’ and ‘‘core’’ (which are technically
not quite the same) see Ideen I, x130, 269^70;
x 132, 273; and cf. x91,189.
37 Often (e.g., x 85, 171^75), Husserl uses ‘‘noesis’’
more narrowly, to refer specifically to the second,
interpretative subcomponent. See also Husserl’s
marginal note to x 88, published as Appendix 51
to the Husserliana edition of Ideen I, ed. Karl
Schuhmann, and (in English) in Ideas Pertaining to a
Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy: First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston:
Kluwer,1982) 213, n. 2.
38 See again Ideen I, x136, 282^ 85.
39 For the correlation of rationality and actuality
or being, see x135, 280 ^ 81; x 142, 295^97; for the
positing ray, see x 92,192.
40 See x 38, 68 ^ 69; x 45, 83; x 83,167; x 144, 298.
41 See x 78,150.
42 ‘‘Kant und die Idee der
Transzendentalphilosophie’’ 283.
43 There are actually various kinds of founded
positing, only one of which is directly relevant
here. This is not the place to go into all the
details of Husserl’s very complex system.
See Ideen I, x93, 193^94; x x 116 ^19, 238 ^ 49 (note
the reference to the Logische Untersuchungen 248,
n. 1); x 148, 308; also, Ideen zu einer reinen
Pha«nomenologie und pha«nomenologischen Philosophie,
142
 stone

zweites Buch: Pha«nomenologische Untersuchungen zur

Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana 4
(The Hague: Nijhoff,1952) x x 4 ^9, 4 ^21.
44 Ideen I, x17, 32; Ideen II, x14, 32.
45 Ideen I, x131, 271.
46 See Aristotle, Ph. 1.6.189a21^26; Plotinus,
Enn. 6.8.3.12^20.
47 KrVA104.
48 Ideen I, x143, 297^98.
49 Aufbau x 42, 57.
50 See especially x16, 20 ^21 and x x153^55,
204 ^ 09.
51 Parting oftheWays 84.
52 The sense of Verarbeitung here is difficult to
reproduce in English. Carnap uses the same term,
in the following quotation, for the ‘‘processing’’
of the given into objects by the synthetic
components of consciousness. Carnap is suggest-
ing, or rather taking for granted, that the use
of observations about plants, say, in the develop-
ment of higher level scientific classifications
and theories is similar to, or is a continuation of,
that ‘‘processing.’’
53 ‘‘Epistemology Naturalized’’ 75.
54 Aufbau x101,140.
55 This is clear because the constitutional defini-
tions of the Aufbau are all based on the fiction of
‘‘temporal separation of the given from its proces-
sing [Verarbeitung]’’ (x101, 139), i.e., on the fiction
that all of the data (the entire finite series corres-
ponding to the subject’s finite lifetime) are already
in. (Eigentlichkeit requires being-towards-death.)
56 In fact, from a certain technical point of
view there is then really only one realm of objects.
See Aufbau x 4, 4, and see my dissertation,
‘‘On Husserl and Cavellian Skepticism’’ 191, n. 272;
also my ‘‘Heidegger and Carnap’’ (forthcoming).

Abraham D. Stone
Department of Philosophy
University of California Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
USA
E-mail: abestone@ucsc.edu