 As we will see in  section 5  below, this and related problems constituted a large part of the Circle’s agenda during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The important thing to keep in mind through all this is that “the verification principle” in its crude form was never advocated by Carnap or any other major figure in the Circle. (More detail on this in the supplement on  The Reconstruction of Scientific Theories (Section 1).)  In the Aufbau, Carnap had, it is true, worked out a finitist, “molecular” phenomenalist language and advocated the epistemological benefits of reconstructing scientific concepts on its basis. During this period, he was attracted to a form of radical positivism that played down theories as mere auxiliary devices for the prediction of observations. The observations that confirm theories, in this view, was really all there was to science, in what amounted to a kind of instrumentalism about theories, as it would later be called.