 How then can Vienna Circle philosophy be absolved of foundationalism? As noted, it is the Aufbau (and echoes of it in the manifesto) that invites the charge of phenomenalist reductionism. To begin with, one must distinguish between the strategy of reductionism and the ambition of foundationalism. Concerning the Aufbau it has been argued that its strategy of reconstructing empirical knowledge from the position of methodological solipsism (phenomenalism without its ontological commitments and some of its epistemological ambitions) is owed not to foundationalist aims but to the ease by which this position seemed to allow the demonstration of the interlocking and structural nature of our system of empirical concepts, a system that exhibited unity and afforded objectivity, which was Carnap’s main concern. (See Friedman’s path-breaking 1987 and 1992, and Richardson 1990, 1998, Ryckman 1991, Pincock 2002, 2005. For the wide variety of influences on the Aufbau more generally, see Damböck 2016.) However, it is hard to deny categorically that Carnap ever harbored foundationalist ambitions. Not only did Carnap locate his Aufbau very close to foundationalism in retrospect (1963a), but a passage in his (1930) led Uebel (2007, Ch.6) to claim that around 1929/30 Carnap was motivated by foundationalist principles and reinterpreted his own Aufbau along these lines (around the same time that Wittgenstein entertained a psychologistic reinterpretation of his own Tractatus that was reported back to the Circle by Waismann). To correct this foundationalist aberration was the task of the Circle’s subsequent protocol-sentence debate about the content, form and status of the evidence statements of science.