Making sense of Carnap's "Aufbau"
pp. 263-286
in: Wolfgang Spohn (ed), Erkenntnis orientated, Berlin, Springer, 1991Abstract
Great philosophical works are neither descriptions nor evaluations, but rather interpretations of "the world", or, to be more precise, of the objects of a more or less extended parcel of our thought. Hermeneutic products such as philosophical systems are neither true nor false, neither valid nor invalid in a straightforward sense. It would be less misleading to apply to them such categories as "rich" and "profound", or "poor" and "trivial", in a way similar (thought not identical, of course) to the application of these categories to a work of art.
