Abstract
This chapter considers how knowledge of other minds is dealt with in Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic (LTL) of 1936 and then reported in his later works to the end of his career. It endeavors to show, first, that the theory outlined in LTL differed from the theory which Ayer himself criticized LTL for proposing when only a few years later in The Foundation of Empirical Knowledge of 1940 he offered an alternative theory of our knowledge of other minds (which also was rejected later on) and ever since. Second, this paper documents that this change in how Ayer presented the LTL argument coincided with a sharp change in how he understood his own philosophical position: from a highly idiosyncratic version of logical positivism Ayer reverted back to a largely traditional phenomenalism of the British empiricist variety. If another indication were needed of how inappropriate it is to think of Ayer’s ideas as representative of Vienna Circle philosophies, this paper provides one. The interest and significance of Ayer’s philosophy rather lies in the distinctive failures that are peculiarly its own and which, as regards knowledge of other minds, display in an instructive fashion the tension between competing intuitions that condemn still-residually Cartesian epistemologies like his to futility.
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Notes
- 1.
To be precise, Ayer offered no elaboration except for a separate remark on abandoning phenomenalism that could be understood as related, but calls for comment on its own; see Fn. 26 below. Wisdom’s quip is quoted without comment also in Ayer (1977, 220).
- 2.
All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946 which incorporates the text of the first edition of 1936 (see Ayer 1936a) unchanged but adds an “Introduction,” thus altering the pagination compared to the first; references to that Introduction are marked as “1946a,” to the original text as “LTL.” For consistency, I use (except in titles) the American spelling of “behaviorism” throughout.
- 3.
It might be wondered, of course, why my puzzle should merit any grown-up’s time at all. The answer is that for those persuaded to turn the page of analytical philosophy on the issue of other minds at least broadly in the way, following up on Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Davidson, suggested by Anita Avramides nearly two decades ago (2001), Ayer’s rejection of his LTL account presents a veritable morality play; but even for those not yet so persuaded there’s interest in discovering the complexity of earlier failures to solve the issue.
- 4.
For Ayer, philosophical analysis is ideally a “complete philosophical elucidation of any language” by means of certain definitions which “would reveal what may be called the structure of the language in question” (LTL, 62). The validity of the definitions provided “depends solely on their compatibility with [the] conventions” which characterize the language under analysis (LTL, 70). The aimed for “increase [of] our understanding” (LTL, 61) provided by analysis consisted in “dispel[ing] those confusions which arise from our imperfect understanding of certain types of sentences in our language” (LTL, 62).
- 5.
I cannot discuss this seemingly neutral monist assumption here, but may note that it does not appear to survive until 1940; see Sect. 7.9 below.
- 6.
Ayer noted: “[T]he assertion that tables are logical constructions out of sense-contents is not a factual assertion at all in the sense in which the assertion that tables were fictitious objects would be a factual assertion, albeit a false one” (LTL 63).
- 7.
Ayer offered this remarkable non sequitur: “[W]e know it must be possible to define material things in terms of sense-contents, because it is only by the occurrence of sense-contents that the existence of any material thing can ever be in the least degree verified. And thus we see that we have not to inquire whether a phenomenalist ‘theory of perception’ or some other sort of theory is correct, but only what form of phenomenalist theory is correct” (LTL, 53).
- 8.
The term “logical behaviorism” was employed in Hempel (1935) where it as understood as a meaning thesis and applied to the views of Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath who did not use it either. In fact, Neurath (1933) coined the term “behavioristics” (“Behavioristik”) to distinguish the physicalists’ perspective on psychology from Watson’s behaviorism. Weitz (1951) applied the term to Ryle (1949) where also it is not employed. Unless explicitly qualified the term “logical behaviorism” here refers to Ayer’s LTL version.
- 9.
Note that Carnap likewise characterized the relevant “sub-thesis of the general thesis of physicalism” as asserting that the content of a psychological sentence “has the same content” as a sentence “which asserts the existence of a physical structure characterized by the disposition react in a specific manner to specific physical stimuli” (1932b/1959, 165 and 170).
- 10.
Logical positivists like Carnap and Neurath often are said to have adopted a reductive version (in the sense of excluding descriptions of intentional behavior), whereas ordinary language philosophers like Gilbert Ryle are said to have adopted a non-reductive version (in the sense of including descriptions of intentional behavior). This too oversimplifies, as will be seen for Carnap and Neurath in Sect. 7.5 below and as is argued for Ryle by Julia Tanney (2007/2015, §8) who absolves him altogether of a program of analysis.
- 11.
Here Ayer added the footnote: “This was formerly my own view” and referred to LTL, Ch. 7.
- 12.
This version of the LTL argument was in fact outlined by Ayer in a retrospective discussion as a possible view that he could have taken then but did not (1992a, 599).
- 13.
That the official argument does not accept the properly mental nature of third-person ascriptions is also the most obvious reading of Ayer’s remarks at (1940, 162–163; 1956, 214–215 and 1992a, 598–599), but it is stressed especially at (1946b, 190–191). There he begins by speaking of having taken “the bold course of identifying the inner experiences of others with what would ordinarily be called their outward manifestations,” but adds concerning third-person attributions that he “put forward an interpretation” which makes them “refer [...] exclusively to this behavior” and that making such statements is “to say something, which may be indeed very complicated, about his actual or possible behavior, and that it is to say no more than this.” In the same vein, see also Shearn (1949–50, 26) who then went on to stress the implausible consequences of further radicalizing this behaviorist interpretation to one’s own case.
- 14.
Foster called attention to this distinction and to the fact that Ayer did not note it in LTL and used it for a wide-ranging critique (1985, 22–26); see also Gower (1987, 17–18). I am employing the distinction to explain a puzzle Foster did not comment on. In a retrospective paper Ayer commented obliquely on the distinction noted by Foster and declared the content-principle “wrong” and the thereby required logical construction of physical objects—now called “reduction of physical object statements”—to (statements of) sense-contents “manifestly inadequate” (Ayer 1987, 29).
- 15.
Note that Ayer’s full, more or less formal specification of the verification principle (LTL, 39) was meant to implement the evidence-principle and allow for meaningful theoretical sentences by means of the condition that “some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those premises alone.” Unfortunately, it let metaphysical nonsense in; the envisioned repair (1946a, 13) failed as well. But these are not our worries here.
- 16.
Unlike the evidence principle, the content principle also renders all purely theoretical objects of science metaphysical. Needless to say, this is highly problematical, but also not our quarry here. Likewise, whether it is the content-principle that demands that verificationism issue in phenomenalism and all objects of knowledge be reduced to logical constructions from sense-contents is an interesting question that cannot be pursued here.
- 17.
- 18.
Also recall that Ayer defined personal identity in terms of bodily identity (see quotation from LTL, 127 in Sect. 7.2 above). That this body was ultimately dissolved into sense-contents did not reinstitute the categorical mind-body distinction.
- 19.
Note that for Ayer it is, for example, the harmony of intersubjective behavior—centrally involving speech behavior—that constitutes mutual understanding: see the quotation from (LTL, 132–133) discussed in Sect. 7.8 below.
- 20.
Ayer claimed that Carnap’s verificationist private language argument was simply “due to a mistranslation from the material to the formal mode of speech” (1940, 150) but Ayer only demonstrated his alternative construal of knowledge of other minds—which presupposed precisely what Carnap disputed.
- 21.
- 22.
What Ayer relied upon here was a reading of the verifiability condition of meaningfulness that turns on the logical conceivability of doing so (not on the nomological possibility, given the physical laws obtaining); for discussion see the beginning of Sect. 7.6 below. For a persuasive counter against Ayer’s new argument here see the end of Sect. 7.6 below.
- 23.
Likewise Ayer claimed that “our inhabiting a common world is in no way inconsistent with the privacy of our individual experiences” for that two people perceive the same material object “each person can determine by reference to his own sense-data” (1940, 161).
- 24.
Needless to say, Ayer did not problematize the constancy of language use, as Neurath’s then already long published (and Wittgenstein’s still unpublished private language arguments) did—but Carnap’s did not (see Uebel 2007, Ch. 7). Ayer did not recognize that it was only the intersubjectivity of the shared language, afforded by the publicity of its referents, that could ensure accounting for the constancy of language use. Instead, Ayer assumed that each person’s understanding of their own (private) languages of sense-contents was unproblematical. Note that Ayer held on to the possibility of a wholly private language still in his discussion of Wittgenstein’s own argument in (1954/1963, 48) and inveighed against Carnap’s physicalism again in (1956, 209–212). He only conceded that the “private sectors” which are possible in a language “could not absorb the public sectors” in the early 1960s in a footnote appended to the reprint of (1959/1963, 78). However, since he already had admitted the failure of eliminative phenomenalism in (1946–7/1954—see Fn. 26 below), even this concession did not amount to abandoning his belief in largely private languages grounding his residual phenomenalism.
- 25.
Again, Ayer relied on a reading of the verifiability condition of meaningfulness that turns on the logical conceivability of doing so; see the beginning of Sect. 7.6 below.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
To show knowledge of other minds accountable, Ayer argued that “whereas it is logically inconceivable that I should observe a transcendent object, inasmuch as it is by definition beyond the limits of all possible experience, it is not logically inconceivable that I should have an experience that is in fact owned by someone else” (1940, 169). What he meant was that “with regard to any experience that is in fact the experience of a person other than myself, it is conceivable that it should have been not his but mine. The point is that there is nothing in an experience considered by itself, apart from the relations that it happens to bear to other phenomena, to make it form part of one’s person’s history rather than another’s. And so I think it may be concluded that the sense in which the experiences of other persons are inaccessible to my observation is not such as to make the hypothesis of their existence inaccessible to my understanding” (1940, 169).
- 30.
By contrast, Ryle later, in the Concept of Mind, dismissed the argument from analogy in so many words as a pseudo-solution for a pseudo-problem (1949, 59–60).
- 31.
- 32.
Ayer’s reason remained sketchy but he appears to have challenged his employment of the notion of conceivability for he stressed that, “while it is possible to imagine circumstances in which we might have found it convenient to say of two different persons that they owned the same experience, according to our present usage, it is a necessary proposition that they do not” (1946a, 20). In short, the criterion of logically conceivable verification has to respect the existing linguistic conventions in its determination of meaningfulness of a given string of words.
- 33.
- 34.
In his last paper Ayer (1991, 15–16) wrote: “I have not yet found a solution to the problem [of other minds] which entirely satisfies me, though I believe that it is to be found in some combination of the admittedly shopworn argument from analogy with the theory that the ascription of conscious states to others supplies the best explanation for their overt behavior.”
- 35.
- 36.
Ayer noted there (1956, 215 Fn.) and later (1992a, 598; cf. Honderich 1991, 216–217) that the inconsistency argument was due to his doctoral student Martin Shearn in his A Study of Analytical Behaviourism, described as a PhD thesis in the University of London, but without a date. Watling (1954, 13) refers to this work by Shearn in the same terms, but a search in relevant archives has not so far located a dissertation. Wollheim (1991, 26) identifies Shearn as one of Ayer’s students at the time he took up his own lectureship at University College in 1949. Notably, the topic knowledge of other minds and Ayer’s struggles with it was also engaged with by other members of Ayer’s department: see Wollheim (1950–51) and Watling (1954 and 1956).
- 37.
Ayer once stated in discussion of the inconsistency charge against the LTL argument that when writing LTL he “had no other option” than to interpret statements about the experiences of other persons behavioristically (1992a, 599), so what constrained him was evidently the content principle. What Ayer recalled here was the official LTL argument, not the original which claimed precisely to overcome this limitation.
- 38.
- 39.
Incidentally, this problem finds a perfect equivalent in Carnap’s Aufbau (which, as noted, is partially modeled on) where a pre-theoretic understanding of intersubjectivity is announced as aimed for but only an intersubjectivity-in-the-image is delivered (1928a/1967, §§ 66 and 146).
- 40.
It seems that, unlike that of sensations, ascriptions of propositional attitudes were considered more or less unproblematically open for behavioral translation; see, for example, Shearn (1949–50, 15).
- 41.
In a paper charting what Ayer and Ryle learnt from each other in the 1940s, Michael Kremer noted (2017, 177) that already Ayer drew attention to the fact that in Concept of Mind Ryle “did not go to the length of dispensing altogether with any form of sentience” (1970, 58). In light of the passages cited from LTL it may be added that Ayer himself had made early steps partly in the direction of non-reductive or soft logical behaviorism—still before abandoning it altogether—and that, accordingly, Ayer’s and Ryle’s learning from each other traces back to the late 1930s.
- 42.
Note that this criticism fits the original argument much better than the official one.
- 43.
In Foundations, Ayer declared the aim of phenomenalist analysis to be only the provision of “a very general and simplified description of the main assumptions of the structure of phenomena that are involved in the everyday use of physical terms” (1940, 263). In the Preface to the 2nd edition of LTL, he spoke of providing only a “schema” (1946a, 25) of what kinds of relations have to hold between sense-contents for material object statements to be true. Soon after, in “Phenomenalism” Ayer conceded “to treat our beliefs about physical objects as constituting a theory, the function of which is to explain the course of our sensory experiences,” because he had to concede that “it may not be possible wholly to rewrite [statements about physical objects] as statements about sense-data”—all the same, he continued to grant epistemological primacy to sense-contents (1946–7/1954, 165; cf. 1956, 132–133).
- 44.
To prevent confusion at this point, it is important to note that the notion of “reduction” at play in the “non-reductive behaviorism” adverted to in the original argument and the notion of “reduction” at play in the “anti-reductionist argument” to which Ayer gave way by 1940 are different. As we saw, LTL’s non-reductionist behaviorism consisted in allowing behavior to be specified in much broader terms than mere bodily movement, including speech and other behavior expressing content. What the anti-reductionist argument established, by contrast, was that the phenomenalist reduction had failed.
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
For convincing argument that Carnap was not a logical behaviorist, see Crawford (2013, 2015). It is easy to be misled by Ayer’s talk of definitions in use as not providing “synonyms” (LTL, 60) to take him to agree with Carnap’s extensionalism, but this did not prevent him from reading what for Carnap were fallible physicalist criteria for mental state ascriptions as defining necessary and sufficient conditions.
- 49.
- 50.
Carnap referred back to his own (1938, 57–59) for his explicit rejection of logical behaviorism. It may be noted that both Carnap’s and Ayer’s differently-argued counters to logical behaviorism precede by more than two decades Hilary Putnam’s celebrated Super-Spartans counterexample in his (1965/1975).
- 51.
For the full story, greatly simplified above, see Uebel (2007, Chs. 6 and 7).
- 52.
Ayer castigated Carnap’s claim that there is no higher court of appeal on matters of knowledge than what the scientists “of our cultural circle” deem correct; see Carnap (1932d, 179–180) and Ayer (1936–37/1959, 233; 1940, 92; 1984, 174).
- 53.
While Ayer’s argumentation in (1936–37) in its major points is very similar to Schlick’s in (1934)—albeit wrapped in references to recent interventions by Hempel in Analysis and Popper in his Logik der Forschung (1935) as well as comments on broadly relevant remarks by English philosophers—it is striking that there Ayer makes no mention of Schlick (unlike in his earlier 1935).
- 54.
Interestingly, in making the switch from universal fallibilism to phenomenalist incorrigibility Ayer did not dispose of the point that had persuaded him once of fallibilism—the possibility that I am mistaken in my use of the terms employed to describe my experience—but he reclassified it, as it were, from being a fundamental and principled obstacle to incorrigibility to representing but a qualification of it: “barring verbal doubt.”
- 55.
Writing Foundations was clearly taken by Ayer to offer a fresh start and without saying so explicitly was presented as such. Stepping back from the science-centered perspective of LTL, Ayer tackled the time-honored problem of “our knowledge of the external world” (1940, vii) and related ones strictly on the home ground of British empiricism and then current Oxford philosophy like H.H. Price’s . Vienna Circle thinkers (mostly Carnap and Neurath) were not mentioned until page 85 and then discussed only intermittently and critically; the roots of Ayer’s new views in dissenting anti-physicalist positions in the Circle itself were not mentioned at all (no citation of Schlick here either).
- 56.
If so, Ayer would not have been the only philosopher, even the only positivist, to have forgotten characteristic details that made their first or early works so radical: compare Carnap on the Aufbau in his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1963, 50).
- 57.
- 58.
For discussions of the role of the epistemological and the conceptual problem of other minds in the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Davidson, see Avramides (2001, Chs. 7 and 8).
- 59.
For a relevant argument, see Davidson (1991/2001), first published, incidentally, in a memorial volume for Ayer. Note that already Ayer wrote: “[I]f we really do perceive the physical objects that we think we do, it will follow that they are capable, at least in theory, of being perceived by others. But this means that unless we have reasons to believe that other people could perceive them, we are not justified in believing that we perceive them ourselves, since to say that we really do perceive them is to imply that that they exist and so, in this case, to imply that they are public. Thus the problem of perception depends on the problem of other minds. But the problem of other minds depends in its turn on the problem of perception. For unless we knew that what appeared to be other human bodies really were so, the question of their being inhabited by other conscious persons would not arise” (1959/1963, 78–79). This anticipated, albeit for different reasons, Davidson’s claim that “knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world are mutually dependent; neither is possible without the other” (1991/2001, 213). What Davidson then added to make it his well-known triangular complex of mutual dependencies spelling out condition of the possibility of any knowledge at all was of course what Ayer left free-standing: knowledge of our own minds.
- 60.
I wish to thank audiences in Pécs and Manchester and particularly David Liggins, Fraser MacBride, Graham Macdonald, Joel Smith and Adam Tuboly for helpful remarks and stimulating criticisms.
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Uebel, T. (2021). A Logical Positivist’s Progress: A Puzzle About Other Minds in Early Ayer Resolved. In: Tuboly, A.T. (eds) The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5_7
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