Abstract
In this essay I discuss the evolution of A.J. Ayer’s account of the mind-body relation through his career, with an emphasis on his early ideas. The reconstruction of Ayer’s ideas on this particular topic, beyond being interesting in itself, may also be illuminating inasmuch as it provides further details on the path Ayer carved out for himself within the large-scale development of analytic philosophy, progressing from the radical anti-metaphysicalism of the logical positivists in the 1930s toward the (re)birth of analytic metaphysics in the 1960s.
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Notes
- 1.
Research on this paper was supported by the project K120375 of the National Research, Development, and Innovation Office of Hungary (NKFIH), and I am grateful for the support received. All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946 see Ayer (1936/1946), abbreviated in the text as “LTL.”
- 2.
This conception was characterized by Dummett (1979, 3) as follows: “[A] statement of a given class cannot be true, unless some statement, or perhaps set of statements, of some other class, which I shall call the reductive class, is true” (original emphasis).
- 3.
Carnap 1928/1967. Throughout the paper, Aufbau refers to this English edition of Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928).
- 4.
The notion of “empirical parallelism,” as I use it, relates to the psychophysical parallelist tradition, originating from Fechner, which was entrenched in German scientific philosophy from the mid-1850s until the 1920s. The term, however, was not used by Fechner and was coined by James (1890, 1:182). Following Heidelberger “we can distinguish three different kinds of psychophysical parallelism […], each built upon the other. The primary form of psychophysical parallelism is an empirical postulate.” This is what I call “empirical parallelism.” “The second, stronger, form of psychophysical parallelism is a metaphysical theory about the relationship between the body and the mind […] providing a metaphysical explanation for the alleged correlation. […] The third form of psychophysical parallelism is a cosmological thesis […]. It claims that even inorganic processes have a psychical side to them.” The primary form, that is, empirical parallelism “maintains only that there is consistent correlation between mental and physical phenomena. In the living human body, mental events or processes are regularly and lawfully accompanied by physical events and processes in the brain. […] for every mental event there is a correlated brain state.” Thus, empirical parallelism “presupposes nothing about the exact nature of the mental and the physical and how these relate. It is to be taken as a metaphysics-free description of phenomena on which any advanced and scientifically acknowledged mind-body theory must be founded” (Heidelberger 2004, 168ff). This basic doctrine of “empirical parallelism” was accepted by a large number of scientifically minded philosophers, including Spencer, Bain, Tyndall, Taine, and Mach . Riehl, among the logical empiricists by Schlick, already before his positivist period in Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (see e.g. Schlick 1918/1925/1985, 299), and Carnap in the Aufbau (pp. 268–270).
- 5.
Including Hume himself. Or see for example Schlick’s similar approach to psychophysical causation in Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Schlick 1918/1925/1985, 301). Moreover, it is worth noting that according to Gustav Bergmann, “as long as one sticks to cautious generalities all Logical Positivists could still agree that they hold Humean views on causality and induction” (Bergmann 1950/1954, 2).
- 6.
When laying out his objection to the argument from analogy, Ayer refers to Carnap’s “Psychology” paper (1932/1959), where the same objection is put forth. But he does not mention Carnap’s other objections, also in the same paper, claiming that the argument of analogy cannot even be formulated correctly, because one of its premises commits a logical grammatical error. See Carnap (1932/1959, 176–177). For more details about Carnap’s objections against the argument from analogy, see for example, Ambrus (2020).
- 7.
See Ayer (1973, 131). It is worth noting that the same objection against the physicalistic interpretation of protocol sentences was put forward in Juhos (1935).
- 8.
- 9.
By claiming it is a matter of convention, it is not implied that it is arbitrary. There are empirical facts about the world, which support the ordinary use, according to which different observers see the numerically same material object, namely that the structure of their individual sense-data is similar enough. (Were they radically dissimilar then such usage would be unmotivated, see below). But even in the actual case, when the structure of the sense data is similar, is it is not necessary that we accept the ordinary usage, but there may be philosophical reasons for adopting the alternative convention (originating e.g. from certain theories of perception).
- 10.
But not in the sense that a particular sense-datum could exist unowned, not perceived by anyone. See in the section on The Problem of Knowledge, and Ayer (1940, 71–72).
- 11.
- 12.
See Ayer (1956, 190–192). Cf. “There may be actual sense-data which do not enter into the experience of any sentient being. It is obvious that if there were sense-data of this kind, nobody would in fact know of their existence. It is, at best, a logical possibility; but is it even that? I confess that I am very doubtful whether this conception of unowned sense-data has any significance at all” (Ayer 1956, 191).
- 13.
Cf. Wittgenstein 1953, §§ 243–315.
- 14.
“The fact that he behaves as if we understood each other, that he responds in appropriate ways to my statements and requests, may prove that our respective worlds are somehow geared together, but it does not prove that their structure is the same” (Ayer 1956, 208).
- 15.
- 16.
In view of the contemporary use of the term “physicalism,” it is somewhat odd to describe Strawson or Davidson as physicalists, but this common feature explains why Ayer brings them together under this label.
- 17.
Cf. Armstrong (1968, 114ff.). The point is that chicken-sexers are able to tell whether a chick will grow up to be cock or a hen, although they cannot identify the visual clues based on which they discriminate the sexes of the chicks. This is apparently a case of a perception in which qualia, sense-experience does not play a role.
- 18.
One of his arguments infers from the non-transitivity of color-discriminations (i.e. that color C1 may be indistinguishable from C2, and C2 from C3, while C1 is distinguishable from C3) to the claim the secondary qualities have no determinate phenomenal nature, and are thus not real. Ayer was not impressed, however. According to his reply, the fact that the indistinguishability of color pairs is not transitive can be an argument just as well to the point that the identity of colors cannot depend exclusively on their pairwise indistinguishability (Ayer 1982, 184–185).
- 19.
As for propositional attitudes such as standing beliefs, the issue is more complex; for example, Ayer advocated a sort of behavioristic view concerning them in Ayer (1947).
- 20.
For a simple illustrative example of such an account from electrodynamics: the term “charge” (or rather: “point charge”) of physical theories refers to a structural property of bodies, characterizing their behavioral dispositions or causal roles. For example, that body a has charge q1 and body b has charge q2, means that when they are at distance r from each other, they exert force F on each other proportional with the product of q1 and q2, and the inverse square of r, and they are disposed to move such-and-such a way. This description says nothing about the intrinsic quality of having charge.
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Ambrus, G. (2021). The Evolution of Ayer’s Views on the Mind-Body Relation. 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_6
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