Abstract
The received view in the history of the philosophy of psychology is that the logical positivists – Carnap and Hempel in particular – endorsed the position commonly known as “logical” or “analytical” behaviourism, according to which the relations between psychological statements and the physical-behavioural statements intended to give their meaning are analytic and knowable a priori. This chapter argues that this is sheer legend: most, if not all, such relations were viewed by the logical positivists as synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. It then traces the origins of the legend to the logical positivists’ idiosyncratic extensional or at best weakly intensional use of what are now considered crucially strongly intensional semantic notions, such as “translation”, “meaning” and their cognates, focussing on a particular instance of this latter phenomenon, arguing that a conflation of explicit definition and analyticity may be the chief source of the legend.
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Notes
- 1.
Carnap also refers the reader to his reply to Goodman in the Schilpp volume (Carnap 1963) where he says that the identity of extension must fulfill an additional requirement, which “consists in the condition that the correspondence hold, not merely accidentally, but on the basis of general regularities, e.g., physical laws or empirical generalizations” (p. 946).
- 2.
Even by Quine, to some extent, for as Nelson Goodman (1963, p. 555n5) has pointed out, “The avowed extensionalism of so outstanding a monument of phenomenalism and constructionism as the Aufbau would seem to confute Quine’s recent charge [in ‘Two Dogmas’] that the notion of analyticity is a ‘holdover of phenomenalistic reductionism’.”
- 3.
Cf. (Putnam 1969).
- 4.
- 5.
The only writers I know of who explicitly do not hold the analytic entailment interpretation are Alston and Nakhnikian (1963, p. 391), Hempel (1958, 1969), Cirera (1993) and Kim (2003). I am grateful to my colleague Thomas Uebel for drawing my attention to Cirera’s important article as well as to Hempel (1969) and much other relevant literature, as well as for many edifying discussions of Carnap and logical positivism, which prompted several changes to this chapter.
- 6.
In a letter he wrote to Herbert Feigl in 1933 (translated by and quoted in Feigl 1963, p. 255), Carnap explicitly states that the two sentences are not analytic. He offers two translations of “N. has a visual image of a house” (A), “The organism of N. is in the state of house-imagining” (B1) and “In the organism of N. there is an electrochemical condition of such a kind (described in terms of electrochemistry)” (B2), and then remarks that:
Both B1 and B2 are translations of A. According to my recently adopted terminology, I assert: A is equivalent (“gehaltgleich”) to both statements … ; viz., L-equivalent (logically equivalent) with B1; but P-equivalent (physically equivalent) with B2, i.e., mutually translatable (derivable) using besides the logical laws also natural laws as rules of inference, incorporated as transformation rules in the scientific language. You are therefore right in saying that B2 is only synthetically equivalent with A.
As Ramon Cirera (1993) importantly points out, while B1, unlike B2, is claimed by Carnap to be L-equivalent to A, it is not behavioural – in fact, it is not even physical. Neither Feigl nor Cirera say what the point of B1 is. One possibility is that it is an adverbial analysis of (A) intended to avoid commitment to the intentional object apparently designated by the phrase “visual image of a house”, and hence to avoid intentional language, thus making the ultimate goal of a physical translation into B2 easier. Such adverbial techniques were sometimes employed by Russell in order to avoid commitment to intentional objects (and by some of the American New Realists in a quasi-behaviourist spirit) and Russell of course influenced Carnap. Chisholm (1955–1956) famously criticized such adverbial strategies for avoiding intentional language but I know of no response by Carnap to Chisholm on this point.
- 7.
And perhaps not even that, owing to the fact that the connection between the two may not even be nomological, as we shall see presently.
- 8.
Hempel’s discussion in “The Logical Analysis of Psychology” (1935, esp. §V) is considerably less clear about this, and this lack of clarity may well have contributed to the legend, especially given that Hempel’s article is more widely reprinted than Carnap’s “Psychology” (it appears, e.g., in the highly influential collection Readings in Philosophical Analysis (Feigl and Sellars 1949)). Hempel there confusingly claims that it is logically contradictory to say that all the symptoms obtain but the psychological state does not. This seems to be because, first, unlike Carnap, he is using the term “symptoms” (sometimes putting it between inverted commas) to cover not only the external behavior but also the internal physiological processes associated with the psychological state, and, second, he is heading off a dualist objection. Still, given that Hempel maintains that all these “symptoms” are discovered empirically (cf. note 21 below), he cannot really mean that their presence with the absence of the psychological state is logically contradictory. Rather, the sentence describing such a situation would be (at best) what Carnap (1934, §52) calls P-contravalid (i.e., nomologically impossible). Hempel’s confusion here may be of a piece with the one Feigl and others make about the nature of definition, as discussed below in §3.
- 9.
The inner event of excitement that is the cause of the outer behavioural symptom is eventually to be identified with the inner neurophysiological state that is the cause of the behavioural symptom, à la later causal-role functionalism. See immediately below for more on this.
- 10.
I discuss Carnap’s empirical procedure of physicalization in slightly more detail in Crawford (2013).
- 11.
Moreover, as Carnap himself later pointed out (1952, p. 71) – and as is noted by Hempel (1951, p. 72; 1952, p. 28) and Arthur Pap (1958, Chap. 11) – if there is more than one partial or conditional definition, e.g., a pair of (either unilateral or bilateral) reduction sentences for a given term, as obviously Carnap expected their to be for theoretical terms of behavioural psychology, then one can derive a synthetic statement from them, from which it follows that at least one of the definitions must be synthetic. See Carnap (1936–1937) for the notion of a reduction sentence. I discuss the difference between reduction and definition in §3 below. Carnap (1952) ingeniously goes on to suggest a procedure to overcome the fact that pairs of reduction sentences introducing a theoretical term will have synthetic consequences, by taking a weaker (material) conditional sentence, whose antecedent is a statement of the empirical content of the reduction pair (the “representative sentence”, as he (1936–1937) called it) and whose consequent is the reduction pair, as the “meaning postulate” introducing the theoretical term, because none of its logical consequences containing only the original defining (basic) terms are synthetic. However, it is important to note for present purposes that while none of these logical consequences are synthetic, they are analytic only in the narrow sense, that is, they are logical truths. Such meaning postulates cannot therefore underwrite behavioural definitions for psychological terms in the spirit of textbook logical/analytical behaviourism, which obviously requires a broader notion of analyticity. See immediately below for further relevant discussion of this point.
- 12.
Actually, as Quine points out in “Two Dogmas” (§1, p. 41), even in the modal-logic phase of Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1947) in his later “semantic period”, when he defined analytic truth semantically as truth in all state descriptions, Carnap’s definition was still only of the narrower notion of analyticity as logical truth.
- 13.
Awodey (2007, p. 244n 30) endorses this take on the matter, which does indeed seem to be Carnap’s own view, at least in some of his later writings (e.g., Carnap 1964/1994, p. 259). It is absolutely clear, however, despite what Carnap says in these writings, that he was alive to the importance of the distinction between narrow logical truth and broad analyticity as far back as 1943 (and probably earlier). See, e.g., the letter Carnap wrote to Quine on 21 January, 1943 (printed in Creath 1992, pp. 303ff). The nature and development of Carnap’s views on how to define formally the difference between narrow analyticity as logical truth and broad analyticity as essential predication has not to my knowledge been studied in detail let alone resolved in a fully satisfying manner. I hope to discuss it in future work.
- 14.
Unless – ironically – one is explicitly thinking of Carnap’s (as opposed, e.g., to A.J. Ayer’s) phenomenalism and logical constructionism. See note 2 above. So while there is a parallel between Carnap’s phenomenalism/logical constructionism and logical behaviourism, it is precisely the opposite of what that parallel is usually taken to be. Carnap’s phenomenalism and his behaviourism were both synthetic.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
It must be conceded that Hempel (1935, §V) may not have been altogether free of this conflation either. See note 8 above.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
Moreover, as Hempel makes clear, even if necessary and sufficient observational conditions for a theoretical term could be discovered inductively for a merely partially defined theoretical term introduced by reduction sentences, the bi-conditional representing this finding, “Q iff O”, where “Q” is the theoretical term and “O” the observational one, “clearly does not express a synonymy; if it did, no empirical investigations would be needed in the first place to establish it. Rather, it states that, as a matter of empirical fact, ‘O’ is co-extensive with ‘Q’, or, that O is an empirically necessary and sufficient condition for Q” (Hempel 1958, p. 192). But see note 8 above.
- 22.
See Carnap’s 1957 addendum to the reprinting of Carnap (1932b) in Ayer (1959), Carnap’s 1961 addenda to the reprinting of Carnap (1935) in Alston and Nakhnikian (1963), Carnap’s preface to the second edition of the Aufbau (Carnap 1928/1961/2003), and Hempel’s 1972 “Author’s preamble” to the reprinting of Hempel (1935) in Marras (1972, p. 115), which are all but identical to Hempel’s 1977 “Author’s prefatory note” to the reprinting in Block (1980). As Hempel notes in these addenda, physicalization was liberalized even further with the later introduction of “hypothetical constructs” connected to the observation language via “correspondence rules.” See also Carnap (1956) and Hempel (1951, 1952, 1958).
- 23.
See Crawford (2013) for more detail.
- 24.
Although, again, as discussed in note 8 above, Hempel (1935) is admittedly not entirely clear about this.
- 25.
Moreover, to come full circle, the first of the two main changes Carnap announces in the preface to the second edition of the Aufbau (the second being the one discussed by Chalmers and Leitgeb which I mentioned at the outset, namely, the shift from extensionality to either logical or nomological intensionality) is the “realization that the reduction of higher level concepts to lower level ones cannot always take the form of explicit definitions. … The positivist thesis of the reducibility of thing concepts to autopsychological concepts remains valid, but the assertion that the former can be defined in terms of the latter must now be given up and hence also the assertion that all statements can be translated into statement about sense data. Analogous considerations hold for the physicalist thesis of the reducibility of scientific concepts to thing concepts and the reducibility of heteropsychological concepts to thing concepts” (Carnap 1928/1961/2003).
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Crawford, S. (2014). On the Logical Positivists’ Philosophy of Psychology: Laying a Legend to Rest. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_49
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