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Logical Positivism and Intentionality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
When ‘Freddy’ Ayer asked me to contribute to his volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series (which, regrettably, has still not been published), I was delighted, and while the main topic of my contribution was the sense (if any) in which it can be a ‘necessary’ truth that water is H2O, I devoted a section of that essay to problems that I saw with Ayer's account of the paradigm intentional notion, the notion of reference. Ayer ended his reply by saying that he could not satisfactorily meet my objections, and with characteristic modesty and good humour he added that it was only small consolation that, in his opinion, no one else could satisfactorily account for reference either. The thoughtfulness, fairness, and responsiveness of Ayer's entire reply reminded me of the way in which the same qualities were displayed in Carnap's reply to my contribution to his volume in the same series. These two replies—Carnap's and Ayer's—display the virtues of the philosopher who searches for truth, and who genuinely welcomes serious criticism, in a truly exemplary way. I treasure both of them, and they are bound up with my memories of those two wonderful philosophers.
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References
1 ‘Is Water Necessarily H2O’ is included in my Realism with a Human Face (1990) by permission of the Open Court Publishing Company, which will publish The Philosophy of Alfred Jules Ayer, when that volume appears.
2 It should be noted, however, that Reichenbach disliked the label ‘positivism’, and always referred to the movement to which he and Carnap belonged as ‘logical empiricism’.
3 Cf. Quine, 's ‘Reply to Roger F. Gibson, Jr; Translation, Physics and Facts of the Matter’Google Scholar, in Hahn, and Schilpp, , 1986.Google Scholar
4 For a discussion of philosophical uses of the notion of equivalence, see Chapter 2, ‘Equivalence,’ in my Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (1983), 26–45.Google Scholar
5 Strictly speaking this is only a criterion of equal correctness of reconstructions, and we also need a criterion of correctness. But Carnap would certainly say that a reconstruction is correct if (it is reasonable to suppose, given the imprecision and vagueness of ordinary unformalized scientific language, that) the reconstruction and what is reconstructed (unformalized scientific language) are equally correct in exactly the same sense.
6 Here see note 7.
7 I do not mean to suggest that avoiding this problem was Carnap's motive for methodological solipsism; rather (possible under the influence of Frege) he was moved to methodological solipsism by the belief that elementary experiences are ‘private’ in a sense which implies that I cannot refer to the elementary experiences of other people—a view whose incoherence becomes obvious as soon as one tries to communicate it to another person.
8 For example, ‘Ziele und Wege der physikalischen Erkenntnis’, Handbuch der Physik, Vol. 4: Allgemeine Grudlagen der Physik (Springer, 1929), 1–80Google Scholar; ‘Die philosophische Bedeutung der modernen Physik,’ Erkenntnis 1, no. 1, 49–71 (1930)Google Scholar, Ziele und Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie (Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1931), 64 pp.Google Scholar, a review of Carnap, 's Logische Aufbau der Welt in Kantstudien 38, 199–201 (1933)Google Scholar: translations of all of these are included in Reichenbach and Cohen, 1978.
9 Reichenbach calls these ‘Egocentric language’ and ‘Usual language’. See Reichenbach, , 1938, 135–145.Google Scholar
10 The conventional character of.‘extension rules’ is stressed by Reichenbach in Reichenbach, , 1951, 266–267.Google Scholar
11 For example, in Experience and Prediction, (1938)Google Scholar, ‘truth’ is eventually rejected as a mere idealization of ‘weight’, and ‘weight’ is identified with predictional value (190–191).Google Scholar
12 See ‘Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical’, Chapter 5 of Putnam, 1990, 80–95.Google Scholar
13 Cf. the opening chapter of my Reason, Truth and History (1981)Google Scholar for an attempt along these lines.
14 I believe that one reason for this, in Wittgenstein's case as in my own, was the recognition that causal chains do not simply identify themselves as being causally explanatory, ‘of the appropriate type’, etc., or, indeed, as consisting of ‘causes’. Only when a language is already in place can we think of certain events as forming ‘causal chains of the appropriate type’.