The Vienna Circle's 'Anti-Foundationalism'

Thomas E. Uebel has recently claimed that, contrary to popular opinion, none of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists were proponents of epistemological foundationalism. According to the considerations of the current discussion, however, Uebel's conclusion is erroneous, especially with respect to the work of Moritz Schlick. The chief reason Uebel offers to support his conclusion is that current attempts to portray Schlick's epistemology as foundationalist fail to overcome its 'ultimate incoherence'. In contrast, it is argued that current interpretations, based on the unpublished as well as the published record, provide understandings of Schlick's foundationalist epistemology as not only coherent, but plausible. In closing, Uebel's own treatment of Schlick's work, which purports to show that the most feasible candidates for foundational statements are 'meaning-theoretic' clarifications of the content of expressions, itself fails to accurately represent Schlick's own characterizations, and pictures Schlick's epistemology as a confused mix of epistemic and semantic insights. In a recent essay, Thomas Uebel claims that, contrary to popular perception, or 'the received view' of early Logical Empiricism, the members of the Vienna Circle were not epistemological foundationalists at all (Uebel [1996]). Uebel has maintained elsewhere that Otto Neurath's philosophical work in the heyday of the Circle can only be understood as an effort to develop a fully naturalized epistemology (Uebel [1992], esp. Ch. 10). Currently, Uebel is more concerned to show that other leading Circle members, though perhaps not devoted to a full-blown naturalized epistemology, were certainly not committed to its arch-rival, epistemological foundationalism. Though Uebel makes his argument for both Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick, it is especially contentious in the case of the latter, who penned the essay 'On the Foundation of Knowledge'. Despite the fact that Schlick's essay was regarded, by his ' In the case of Camap, Uebel argues that epistemological foundationalism entails 'epistemological realism', the idea that 'our justificatory ascriptions and practices recapitulate an objective order of reasons, an order that exists independently of our ascriptions and practices' (Uebel [1996], p. 426). Uebel concludes that, since the constructions of Camap's Aufbau significantly involve, at several junctures, the adoption of conventions, which function as constitutive determinants of objective reality, Camap must reject epistemological realism and, a fortiori, epistemological foundationalism. © Oxford University Press 1998