The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics: Austrian Philosophy 1874-1918 (The Oxford History of Philosophy) 9780198769828, 0198769822

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The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics

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THE OXFORD HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY French Philosophy 1572–1675 Desmond M. Clarke The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 Jonardon Ganeri American Philosophy before Pragmatism Russell B. Goodman Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960 Gary Gutting British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing Thomas Hurka British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century Sarah Hutton The American Pragmatists Cheryl Misak Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Science, Rationalism, and Religion T.M. Rudavsky The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy Jan Westerhoff

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The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn against Metaphysics Austrian Philosophy 1874–1918 MARK TEXTOR

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark Textor 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943359 ISBN 978–0–19–876982–8 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Contents Acknowledgements The Players

Introduction 1. Soul-Searching in Central Europe 2. Austrian Philosophy and its Significance 3. Methodology: Rug Dealers and Eccentric Colleagues

xi xiii

1 1 7 14

PART I. THE EVAPORATION OF THE SOUL AND OTHER SUBSTANCES 1. Psychology, the Science of the Soul 1. Introduction 2. Herbart: Putting Metaphysics into Psychology 3. The Impossibility of Self-Observation and Metaphysical Psychology 4. Back to Parmenides: The Given and Herbart’s Eleatic Conception of Substance 5. The Neo-Soul Movement: The Herbartians and Lotze 6. The Soul and the Possibility of Psychology as an Independent Science 7. The Soul and the Unity of Consciousness 8. A False Lead: Composition via Substance 9. Active Attention and the Unity of Consciousness 10. From the Unity of the Attention Process to the Lotzean Soul 11. Looking Ahead: From the Unity of Consciousness to Cognition

17 17 18

2. ‘Psychology without a Soul’ 1. Introduction: Hume and Lichtenberg: No Soul in Sight 2. Lange: Psychology as a Subject without an Object 3. Introducing Brentano 4. What is Psychology a Science of ? Brentano’s Answer 5. Brentano on Observing Mental Phenomena 6. Herbart’s (and Kant’s) ‘Great Error’ 7. Wundt: No Mental Substance, but a Logical Subject 8. Introducing Mach 9. Mach I: The Ego Must Be Given up! 10. Mach II: Practical Unity and the Picture Theory 11. Lotze Responds to the Empiricists: The Soul IS Observable 12. Can Sensations Be Prior to the Ego? Lotze versus Mach

44 44 49 50 51 53 56 59 64 66 67 69 73

20 26 29 33 34 36 37 39 42

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3. From Substance and Accident to Complex and Element 1. Introduction 2. Lotze and Stumpf against Substance 3. Avenarius and Mach against Substance 4. Persistence: Laws Squeeze out Substances 5. Mach against the Appearance/Reality Distinction 6. Is Antimetaphysics Self-Undermining? 7. From Properties to Elements 8. Can the Same Element Be Part of Different Complexes? 9. Objects Perceived by Different Individuals: Schlick against Mach 10. Summary

78 78 79 81 87 89 94 96 100 102 103

PART II. MANAGING WITHOUT THE SOUL: INTENTIONALITY, DUALISM, AND NEUTRAL MONISM 4. The Mental and the Physical, Only a Matter of Perspective 1. Introduction 2. Fechner, the Pioneer of Neutral Monism

107 107 110

2.1. The Inner and the Outer Standpoint 2.2. Neutral Appearances in Fechner’s Atomenlehre

110 113

3. Neutral Monism: Main Theme and Problems 4. Mach: Dual Dependence and Neutrality 5. Wundt: Two Standpoints or Neutral Monism with a Subject 6. Lipps: Neutral Monism and the Will 7. Riehl: Neo-Kantian Neutral Monism 8. Preview

117 119 123 125 127 130

5. The Mental and the Physical, an Intrinsic Distinction 1. Introduction 2. Another Way down: Brentano’s Concept-Empiricism 3. Clarifying ‘Mental Phenomenon’ and ‘Physical Phenomenon’ 4. The Basics of the Aristotelian-Scholastic View of the Mind 5. The Fundamentality of Intentionality 6. Akt/Inhalt/Object: The Tripartite Distinction 7. Diaphaneity AKA Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit in Austro-German Philosophy 8. Diaphaneity and the Spectre of Neutral Monism

131 131 132 134 140 142 145

6. The Intentionality Challenge 1. Introduction 2. The Intentionality of Sensation

156 156 157

2.1. Against Mach’s Identity Thesis 2.2. Perceptual Constancies: Husserl against Mach

150 155

157 163

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 3. The Intentionality of Thought 3.1. Mach’s Picture Theory of Judgement and Cognition 3.2 Brentano’s Self-Fulfilling Expectation Argument 3.3 Intellectual Unease 4. Preview

vii 164 164 169 174 175

PART III. FROM PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT A SOUL TO PSYCHOLOGY WITH A SELF AND BEYOND: THE ANGLO-AUSTROGERMAN AXIS 1886–1918 Introduction to Part III: ‘Shocked and Disappointed’

177

7. Cambridge Psychology between Lotze and Brentano 1. Ward: Psychology with a Subject, but without an Object/Content Distinction

183

1.1. The Metaphysically Neutral Subject 1.2. The Biological Dog, the Individual Mind, and the Psychological Subject 1.3. The Personification of Consciousness and the ‘Ghost of the Subject’ 1.4. On the Wrong Track

2. Stout: Psychology without a Subject, but with an Act/Content/ Object Distinction 2.1. The Brentanian Tripartite Distinction and Perceptual Constancy 2.2. Expunging the Subject

183 183 189 191 193

193 193 199

8. The Rise and Fall of the Subject: A Case Study 1. Introduction: The Fundamental Role of the Subject 2. Russell 1911–13: Saving the Subject from the Neutral Monists 3. Russell 1913: Making the Subject Intelligible and the Unity of Experience 4. Russell 1918: Persistent Persons and Momentary Subjects

202 202 203

9. Act/Content/Object, Act/Object, or Just Object? 1. Introduction: Four Positions 2. Background: Idealism and Intentionality

215 215 217

2.1. ‘Getting Outside the Circle of Our Own Ideas’ 2.2. Russell’s ‘Exceedingly Simple Argument’ against Idealism 2.3. The Fundamental Distinction between Mind and Matter

3. Against the Content/Object Distinction 3.1. Is Intentionality an Internal Relation? 3.2. Are Contents Superfluous? 4. The Debate about the Act/Object Distinction 4.1. Diaphaneity, or Has Moore Shot Himself in the Foot? 4.2. James’s Response to Moore 4.3. James on Mental Pointing

208 212

217 220 221

223 223 225 229 229 231 234

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 4.4. Moore’s Search for the Act/Object Distinction from 1903 to 1910 4.5. Russell Changes Tack: A Non-Introspective Act/Object Distinction 4.6. Russell’s Argument for the Neutrality of Sensation 4.7. Russell’s Defence of the Tripartite Distinction for Thought

5. Conclusion of Part III

237 240 243 246

248

PART IV. INTUITION, METAPHYSICS, AND THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE Introduction to Part IV 1. German Pragmatism and Voluntarism 2. Schopenhauer and Mach on How Cognition Serves the Will 3. Mach’s Ally: Jerusalem’s Voluntarism 4. Constructive Criticism and Synthesis with Criticism: Schlick 5. The Road Ahead: Two Terms or One?

249 249 251 255 257 259

10. Brentano’s One-Term View of Judgement 1. Introduction 2. The Two-Term Dogma 3. Brentano’s Empiricism at Work 4. Brentano’s Argument from Perception 5. Brentano against the Two-Term Prejudice 6. Summary

261 261 261 264 266 273 275

11. Judgement in the Service of the Will: Mach and Jerusalem 1. Mach: Memory, Judgement, and Well-Being 2. Jerusalem’s Urteilsfunktion 3. Jerusalem’s Circularity Argument against Brentano’s Judgement Primitivism 4. The Token Complexity Thesis and the Linguistic Articulation Argument 5. The Argument from the Function of Judgement 6. A Response to the Argument from the Function of Judgement

277 277 281

12. The Nature of Knowledge: Avenarius and Schlick 1. Introduction 2. Riehl’s Criticism + Avenarius’ Economy Theory = Schlick’s Erkenntnislehre 3. Avenarius and Schlick: ‘Cognition is Re-Cognition’ 4. Scientific Knowledge, Cognitive Sloth, and Theoretical Economy 5. Cognitive Economy and Intellectual Hedonism 6. Mundane Knowledge and General Presentations 7. Scientific Knowledge and Concepts 8. Scientific Concepts and Implicit Definition 9. The Concept of Existence and Necessary Ignorance 10. Schlick versus Brentano

293 293

282 283 287 291

293 299 301 304 306 308 311 312 315

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13. Drawing the Limits of Knowledge 1. Introduction 2. Metaphysics and Intuitive Knowledge 2.1. What is Metaphysics? 2.2. Inductive Metaphysics and Intuition

3. Intuition as the Source of Metaphysical Knowledge 3.1. Schopenhauer and Bergson 3.2. Lotze: Cognitio Rei versus Cognitio Circa Rem 3.3. Husserl on the a Priori Science of Essence 3.4. Avenarius and Mach 4. Schlick against Intuitive Knowledge 4.1. Overview 4.2. The Argument from the Metaphysics of the Knowledge Relation 4.3. From the Aim of Cognition to its Metaphysics 4.4. Knowledge, Foreknowledge, and Factivity

ix

318 318 318 318 321

325 325 329 330 331 332 332 332 334 335

14. Beyond the Limits of Knowledge: Intuition and Value 1. Introduction 2. The Drive to Perceive and Sensory Pleasure 3. The Theoretical versus the Practical Standpoint 4. Non-Conceptual Evaluation and Life 5. Schlick and Schopenhauer on Acquaintance as Immersion 6. Conclusion

338 338 338 341 342 347 350

References Index

351 373

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Acknowledgements I want to begin at the beginning: this book grew out of an idea that Peter Momtchiloff suggested to me. I am grateful to him for the suggestion and his comments. In the early stages of the project Charles Siewert and Thomas Uebel gave me feedback and encouragement: thank you. I am grateful to Nick Allott, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Michael Beaney, Thomas Binder, Johannes Brandl, Bill Brewer, John Callanan, Nilanjan Das, Jeremy Dunham, Landon Elkind, Alex Grzankowski, Keith Hossack, Sam Lebens, Jessica Leech, Rory Madden, Fintan Malory, Eliot Michaelson, Matt Soteriou, James Stazicker, Bob Stern, and Sarah Tropper for comments on and discussion of parts of the book. Nils Kürbis and Hamid Taieb deserve special thanks for reading big ‘chunks’ of evolving drafts of the book. Christian Beyer and Dolf Rami organized the workshop Von Brentano zum Wiener Kreis in Göttingen in 2017 at which I presented early drafts of Part IV. Many thanks for organizing and participating in this enjoyable workshop. In 2017 I participated also in the Franz Brentano Centenary Conference in Vienna. I am grateful to Johannes Brandl, Kevin Mulligan, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and David Woodruff Smith for criticism, comments, and suggestions. I taught an MPhilStud seminar on topics in Parts I and II of the book at King’s College London in 2018. I am grateful to the students and my colleagues—first and foremost David Papineau—for helping me to improve my half-baked ideas. In 2019 Arnaud Dewalque organized a workshop in which I presented the main ideas of Parts I–III. The workshop was very helpful to sharpen my thoughts. I am grateful to Arnaud, Davide Bordini, Charlotte Gauvry, Guillaume Fréchette, Andrea Marchesi, and Alberto Voltolini for their feedback. A big ‘Thank you’ to Guillaume for discussions and for sending me manuscripts and papers that are hard to find. In 2019 I also participated in, and presented a paper at, Rory Madden’s seminar ‘The Self in Early Analytic Philosophy’ at University College London and got a lot out of it. Thanks to Rory, Mark Kalderon, and Tim Button for feedback and discussion. Many thanks to Denis Fisette, Guillaume Fréchette, and Josef Stadler, the editors of a special issue of the Vienna Circle Yearbook, for allowing me to reprint parts of the paper ‘How Many Terms Does a Judgement Have? Jerusalem versus Brentano’ (Vienna Circle Yearbook 24 (2020)). I am also grateful to the Journal of the American Philosophical Association for the permission to reprint parts of my paper ‘Schlick on the Source of the “Great Errors in Philosophy” ’ (JAPA 4.1 (2018), 105–25) and to HOPOS: The Journal for the International Society for Philosophy of Science for permitting me to reprint me a portion of my paper ‘Mach’s Neutral Monism’ (forthcoming, April 2021). Finally I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a research fellowship that allowed me to focus on the book project.

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The Players The book draws on the work of a number of philosophers. It will therefore be helpful for the reader to have an overview of the ‘players’. Below are the main figures that, I think, need an introduction. I will introduce Avenarius, Brentano, Lotze, Mach, and Schlick in further detail later. Richard Avenarius (1843–96): German-Swiss philosopher. He worked with Wundt in Leipzig; from 1877 until his death he held a professorship for philosophy in Zurich. In 1877 he founded the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. Franz Brentano (1838–1917): German philosopher. He moved in 1874 from Würzburg to a chair in Vienna and became one of the founding fathers of Austrian Philosophy. George Dawes Hicks (1862–1941): first professor of Moral Philosophy in University College London. He did his graduate work in Leipzig and he helped to introduce Austro-German philosophers such as Lotze, Lipps and Meinong into the British philosophy-scene. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87): German philosopher and psychologist based in Leipzig. His work laid the foundations of experimental psychology and he is the pioneer of psychophysics: the scientific study of the relationship between physical stimulus and psychological response. Philosophically, Fechner is a theistic panpsychist. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841): German philosopher, psychologist, and founder of pedagogy as a scientific discipline. After studies in Göttingen, he was appointed to a professorship, previously held by Kant, in Königsberg in 1809. In 1833 he returned to Göttingen. Herbart’s work is the starting point of attempts to develop a science of psychology. Alois Höfler (1853–1922): Austrian philosopher, psychologist, and pedagogue. Student of Brentano and Meinong. Professor for pedagogy in Vienna from 1907 onwards. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938): Founder of the Phenomenological Movement. Student of both Brentano and Stumpf. William James (1842–1910): American philosopher and psychologist (and brother of Henry James). He ran one of the first psychological laboratories in Harvard in 1874–6. His philosophical and psychological work is influenced by Brentano, Lotze, Mach, and Stumpf. Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923): Austrian philosopher, pedagogue, and psychologist. He is one of the pioneers of ‘German Pragmatism’.

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Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75): German philosopher and social reformer. One of the founding members of the ‘Marburg school’ of Neo-Kantianism. His main work Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung für die Gegenwart is ‘the bible of the thinking natural scientist’ (Stumpf 1918, 25). Theodor Lipps (1815–1914): German philosopher, well known for his work on empathy and his defence of unconscious mental states. Hermann Lotze (1817–81): German philosopher and medic. He studied and worked in Leipzig and succeeded Herbart as professor of philosophy in Göttingen in 1844. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was ‘the single most influential philosopher in Germany, perhaps even the world’ (Sullivan, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Like his Leipzig colleague Fechner, Lotze is an Idealist. Ernst Mach (1838–1916): Austrian physicist and psychologist. Mach held from 1895 to 1901 the newly founded chair in the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences in Vienna. In physics his criticism of the Newtonian view of absolute space influences Einstein’s development of the theory of special relativity. In philosophy and psychology he develops an influential version of Neutral Monism. Anton Marty (1847–1914): Swiss Austrian philosopher, a student of Brentano in Würzburg (1868–70) who taught from 1880 onwards at the Charles University in Prague. The philosopher of language of the Brentano School. Alexius Meinong (1853–1920): Austrian philosopher who studied with Brentano in Vienna. Now well-known (notorious) for his acceptance of nonexistent objects. He moved in 1882 to Graz where he founded in 1894 the first psychological laboratory in the Habsburg Empire. Paul Natorp (1854–1925): a member of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism who made contributions to the foundations of psychology (‘critical psychology’). Otto Neurath (1882–1945): Austrian philosopher, sociologist, and political economist. Member of the Vienna Circle and historian of its prehistory in Austria. Alois Riehl (1844–1924): Austrian Neo-Kantian philosopher. He started out as a professor in Graz, then moved to Freiburg, Kiel, Halle, and finally Berlin during 1905–21. His Neo-Kantianism (Criticism) has close affinities to the Positivism of Avenarius and Mach. Riehl became one of the editors of Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie after Avenarius’ death.¹ Mortiz Schlick (1882–1936): German philosopher of science (physics) (‘the very first professional scientific philosopher’ (Friedman 2012, 2)) and ethics. He succeeded Mach in the chair for the philosophy of inductive sciences in 1922 and became the central figure in the Vienna Circle.

¹ For more on Riehl see Heidelberger (2004) and Beiser (2014, chapter 14).

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George Frederick Stout (1860–1944): British philosopher and psychologist. Student of James Ward and a teacher of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. As editor of Mind (1892–1920) and teacher of Moore and Russell he is a link between Austro-German (Brentano, Herbart, Lotze, Twardowski) and Cambridge philosophy. Carl Stumpf (1848–1936): German philosopher and psychologist, student of both Brentano and Lotze. Became professor in Würzburg at the age of 25, later professor in Halle, Munich, and Berlin. One of the founders of Gestaltpsychology. Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938): Austrian philosopher who studied in Vienna with Brentano, in Leipzig with Wundt, and in Munich with Stumpf. In 1895 he became an extraordinarus in Lvov (then Lemberg) in Poland (now in Ukraine) where he founded the Lvov-Warsaw School. James Ward (1843–1925): Student of Lotze, first professor for Mental Philosophy and Logic at Cambridge in 1897. Teacher of Moore, Russell, and Stout. Stephan Witasek (1870–1915): Austrian philosopher and psychologist, based in Graz he became the head of Graz’s psychological laboratory in 1914. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920): German philosopher and psychologist; founded in 1879 the first institute of psychology in Leipzig and in 1883 the first journal for psychology, the aptly titled Philosophische Studien.

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Introduction 1. Soul-Searching in Central Europe They that know the entire course of the development of science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who, limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (1883) This book aims to give a problem-oriented account of Austrian philosophy and its role in the conception of analytic philosophy and logical empiricism. ‘Problemoriented’ because given the wealth of historical facts, developments, and views that deserve to be called ‘Austrian philosophy’ one needs to separate the important from the unimportant, the philosophically interesting from the philosophically uninteresting. In order to do so I have organized the book around questions that the philosophers who shaped Austrian philosophy—Franz Brentano and his contemporary Ernst Mach, as well as philosophers influenced by them—posed and pursued. These questions concern mind and matter, substance and accident, and knowledge and experience. The answers given to them by Austrian philosophers constituted a fundamental change in how philosophers conceived of the fundamental building blocks of the world and our relation to them. Working through the arguments for this change will help us to understand the philosophical issues under consideration as well as an important strand in the history of philosophy. The first three parts of the book revolve around the question whether the totality of spatio-temporal objects and processes is divided into minds and the mental on one side, and non-mental objects and events on the other side. We are all inclined to answer: Of course there is such a distinction. We distinguish between thoughts and things, between the mental and the physical. We believe that there are things, ourselves among them, that perceive and/or feel and/or reason. These things, we say, have a mind. Other things—my bike or Ben Nevis, for instance— don’t have minds: they don’t perceive and/or feel and/or reason. We believe, too, that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, mental acts and states, are very different

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from events and processes like combustion etc.¹ Our relationship with objects that have no mental states etc. is of an entirely different kind than our relationship with things that have them. We have respect for other people and we feel sorry for the dog that injured his paw. But we don’t pity the table that lost its leg. Hence, the distinction between the mental and the physical is of importance for us and appears to be a fundamental divide. A clarification is necessary at this point. In the debates that I will be concerned with, ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ are correlative terms. If one has determined the realm of the mental, one has thereby also determined the realm of the physical or nonmental. There is no independent determination of what is physical. For example, the physical is not, ‘what is dealt with in physics’.² The science of physics changes and we cannot predict what future physics will deal with. The authors I will be concerned with use ‘physical’ basically to mean the property of being non-mental and debate whether the mental versus non-mental distinction is a joint in nature. Now, common-sense distinctions and beliefs are not sacrosanct. Often, while of practical use, they are corrected and replaced after reflection. Common sense, for instance, distinguishes between five senses. But it turns out that the distinction between the senses is hard to articulate and difficult to incorporate into science. Yet many philosophers have not thought of the distinction between the mental and physical as revisable. Why not? Descartes answered that he can ascertain from the first-person point of view that he is essentially a thinking thing, while many of the things he thinks about are not essentially thinking, but essentially extended. Descartes is a thinking substance—he depends for his existence only on God—and some of the essentially extended things are substances too. There are, then, two kinds of substances that differ in their nature: thinking and extended substances. No thinking substance or soul can be an extended substance and vice versa.³ Extended and thinking substances have different kinds of properties (modes). Mental acts and states are supposed to be distinct from physical events and states because they are properties only of a thinking substance, whereas physical events and states belong only to extended substances. If the distinction between the mental and the physical is grounded in a distinction between two kinds of substances and their properties, and if this is a fundamental distinction in reality, one might think that both sides of the distinction can be the objects of science. Hence, one will expect there to be two ¹ See Moore (1953, chapter 1) for a detailed articulation of our common-sense view of thoughts and things, especially pp. 16 and 25. Moore’s lectures were given in 1910. See also Russell (1913a, 6): ‘The division [between mind and matter] is so familiar, and of such respectable antiquity, that it has become part of our habits, and scarcely seems to be a theory.’ ² See, for example, Russell (1914, 145). See Hempel (1980) for problems for the ‘what is dealt with in physics’ idea. Spurrett and Papineau (1999) recommend restating theses about the mental/physical distinction as theses about the mental/non-mental distinction. ³ See Descartes (1644, 210).

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fundamental sciences: psychology—the science of the soul—and physics—the science of extended substance. If psychology is the science of the soul, what is its source of knowledge? At this point things get interesting. Hume and Lichtenberg could not find the soul when they tried to observe it in introspection; Kant undermined the soul in other ways. If there is no soul or the soul is merely an object of faith, not knowledge, psychology cannot be the science of the soul. Two questions arise from this problem. First, is the distinction between the mental and the physical nothing more than a ‘superficial’ distinction that will be revised when science progresses? Second, can one reconceive psychology in such a way that it is still a fundamental science, but not the science of the soul? Enter Brentano, Mach, and co. My two protagonists and their followers pursue these questions.⁴ Mach answered YES to our first question and set the second question aside. There is no soul and consequently the distinction between the mental and the physical is only of practical value. We carve up the world into thoughts and thinkers as opposed to physical objects, but this is an entirely practical matter. The distinction does not mark a joint in nature and does not ground the distinction between two fundamental sciences. Mach is a (Neutral) Monist. The resulting scientific world-view is closer to Buddhism than to the tradition of Western philosophy. Mach wrote in a letter that he could not make any claims of originality with respect to Buddhism.⁵ In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) Brentano also rejected the soul, but argued that psychology is the science of mental phenomena. Brentano found the property that unifies mental phenomena in Aristotle and the Scholastics: All and only mental phenomena are intentional or directed. Psychology is the empirical science of intentional phenomena and consciousness is the source of psychological knowledge. The distinction between thoughts and things, then, is the distinction between some mental acts, perceivings, and what they are about. Brentano is a Dualist, but not a Substance Dualist. In Brentano’s picture the role of the soul is played by mental phenomena or mental acts. The questions that Hume and Lichtenberg asked about the soul arise now for ‘acts of consciousness’: When we, for example, hear a note, are we aware of our mental activity as well as the note? If the answer is negative, why should we treat mental acts any differently from the soul? If we trust our observations, neither the soul nor mental acts exist. There are only objects that appear to us.

⁴ The themes discussed here overlap with the topics discussed in the first part of Rorty (1979). But he shows neither awareness of nor interest in the detailed discussions that took place in nineteenthcentury Austrian philosophy. ⁵ See Mach’s letter to Mauthner 22.10.1912 reprinted in Haller and Stadler (1988, 242).

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With these guiding questions about the nature and existence of the soul and the subject-matter of psychology, if any, in mind, we can now look at the structure of parts I to III of the book. The book is divided into four parts. Part I is an opinionated introduction into the debate about the soul in Austro-German philosophy between 1850 and 1918.⁶ The result of the debate is that the soul is rejected as the central posit of psychology. The main parties of the debate are, on the one hand, the so-called Metaphysical Psychologists and, on the other, the Empirical Psychologists. Metaphysical Psychologists like Johann Friedrich Herbart and Hermann Lotze regarded ‘psychology as a part of philosophical metaphysics, its chief effort is directed toward the discovery of a definition of the “nature of soul” that shall be in accord with the whole theory of the metaphysical system to which the particular psychology belongs’ (Wundt 1897, 6–7).⁷ Consider the telling title of Herbart’s influential book Psychology as Science: Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics and Mathematics (Herbart 1824/5). Psychology is an empirical science—hence the ‘experience’ in the title—based on and complemented by metaphysics, a metaphysics of the soul. The slogan of empirical psychologists is ‘psychology without a soul’ (Albert Friedrich Lange). Brentano, Mach, and Wundt are fully signed up to this project.⁸ For instance, Mach (1914, § 12) famously declared the ego to be unsavable. Chapter 1 introduces the main metaphysical psychologists, Herbart and Lotze, and their arguments for the existence of the soul. The arguments will draw on the problematic nature of introspection and the unity of consciousness. Chapter 2 details the responses by empirical psychologists. Inspired by Hume, Lichtenberg, (and Buddha) these philosophers and psychologists deny that the soul is needed in psychology. Their aim is to show that psychology can be done independently of metaphysics. The antimetaphysical orientation of empirical psychology inspires and provides a model for the criticism of the traditional metaphysics of substance and accident. Avenarius, Mach, and Stumpf argue that one should replace it with an element/complex ontology. This is the topic of Chapter 3 that concludes the first part. On to Part II. While both Brentano (for a period of time) as well as Mach and other Positivists rejected the soul and other substances, they disagreed about the philosophical consequences of this move. Broadly speaking, Mach et al. argued that if there is no soul, the distinction between the mental and physical is not fundamental. In contrast, Brentano et al. take the distinction between the mental

⁶ The soul is still a concern in the Vienna Circle Manifesto of 1929. The authors of the Manifesto see the metaphysics of the soul as hampering the development of psychology, see Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath (1929, 312). ⁷ Judd mistranslates ‘Seele’ as ‘mind’. I have changed the translation. ⁸ Later Brentano would reintroduce the soul. See Textor (2017b) for discussion.

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and the physical to be a fundamental distinction even if there is no soul. Part II is devoted, as we will see, to the rather one-sided ‘debate’ between these parties. Neutral Monism’s basic thought is that fundamental reality is intrinsically neither mental nor physical. Neutral Monism is now firmly associated with Bertrand Russell’s work after 1918. But while the term ‘Neutral Monism’ is due to Russell, he is by his own admission a latecomer to Neutral Monism. For Neutral Monism, under different names, was already formulated in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Alois Riehl, and Ernst Mach before William James and long before Russell picked it up. Chapter 4 is devoted to the arguments of these pioneers of Neutral Monism. Chapter 5 introduces the view of psychology articulated by Brentano in his Psychology. There is no soul and there may be no physical substance. But there is an intrinsic distinction between the mental and the physical: mental phenomena and only they are directed on something (have intentionality). The distinction between thoughts and things is not merely practical. So it does properly give rise to different sciences: psychology and physics. Who is right, Brentano or Mach? Brentano engaged with Mach’s Neutral Monism in detail. In Chapter 6 I will work through Brentano’s arguments against Mach. According to Mach’s Neutral Monism, intentionality is not a fundamental feature of the mental. Brentano and his students went on to tease out the counterintuitive consequences of the rejection of the intentionality of sensation and thought. Chapter 6 probes these arguments. On to Part III. At least since the 1980s the influence of Austrian philosophers on the formation of analytic philosophy has been a topic in the literature on the history of analytic philosophy. Simons (1986) proposed to speak of an ‘AngloAustrian Analytic Axis’; Dummett (1993, 1) argued that analytic philosophy, given its historical context, is better called ‘Anglo-Austrian’ than ‘Anglo-American’. In Part III I will look at the influence of Austrian philosophers on the inception of analytic philosophy in detail. I will argue that Austrian philosophy is only one important influence on analytic philosophy. For the leading philosophers of mind and psychology in Cambridge in the period before the First World War, James Ward and Frederick Stout, were influenced by both Brentano and Lotze. Ward and Stout, in turn, were the academic teachers of G.E. Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Moore’s and Russell’s ‘revolt against idealism’ is now widely seen as one of the events that started analytic philosophy in Britain. Part III will discuss how ideas from Austro-German philosophy operated in this revolt. In Chapter 7 I will introduce the background of Moore’s and Russell’s contributions. We have seen in Part I that Austro-German philosophers gave up the soul. A striking feature of Cambridge philosophy at the time of Russell and Moore is its Lotze-inspired reliance on ‘the subject’, a replacement of the soul. Moore’s and Russell’s revolt against idealism is based on the idea that a subject can relate in

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thought to objects that are independent of this thought. In Chapter 8 I will work through Russell’s attempts to save the subject from its critics. The subject figures importantly in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, a satisfactory treatment of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the topic is beyond the scope of this book. Part III can be seen as providing the historical background for Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the subject. Chapter 9 is devoted to Russell’s and Moore’s reworking of the Brentanian distinction between act, content, and object and looks in detail at their response to the diaphaneity problem. On to Part IV. If thinking is not an activity of an immaterial simple substance, it can be studied like any other natural phenomena. In Austria Mach is at the forefront of this new approach to thought. In his inaugural lecture as Rector of the University of Prague in 1883 Mach said: Scarcely thirty years have elapsed since Darwin first propounded the principles of his theory of evolution. Yet, already we see his ideas firmly rooted in every branch of human thought, however remote. Everywhere, in history, in philosophy, even in the physical sciences, we hear the watch-words: heredity, adaptation, selection. (Mach 1883, 216–17 [245–6])⁹

Our mental faculties have evolved like other faculties, too. Hence, we should try to extend to them the framework provided by Darwin.¹⁰ The philosophical naturalists, Avenarius, Mach, Jerusalem, apply the ideas of selection and survival value to cognition, especially judgement. They suppose that judgement has a biological purpose—to make an unfamiliar object familiar by applying a general representation to it. Wilhelm Jerusalem devoted a whole book to judgement because: [t]he psychology of the act of judgement is the ground and presupposition of the complete theoretical philosophy. (Jerusalem 1895, 2)

Jerusalem coined a slogan for the core idea: ‘judgement has two terms’. What does this mean? A judgement, the philosophical naturalists claim, relates the unfamiliar to the familiar—so, one term to the other. One may think of ‘terms’ here as perceptions related to stereotypes and/or representations of kinds. This brings us to the question that will be at the centre of the fourth part of the book: Does cognition and judgement necessarily have several terms?

⁹ I will follow in this book this policy: if there is an English translation of a German primary text, I will give first the pagination of the translation, then the pagination of the original in square brackets. If there are no square brackets, the reference is to the original pagination and the translation is mine. ¹⁰ On Mach’s Biologism see Čapek (1968).

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Brentano provided arguments for the negative answer to this question. He argues that there are judgements that have only one term and uses them to analyse inner and outer perception. I will expound these arguments in Chapter 10. In Chapter 11 I will turn to Jerusalem’s arguments against Brentano. Jerusalem tried to show that (a) judgement satisfies a functional need and (b) it can only satisfy this need if it has at least two terms. The most sophisticated proponent of the view that a judgement or cognition must have two terms is Moritz Schlick. In his General Theory of Knowledge (1st edition 1918, 2nd edition 1925) he took up the two-term slogan and ran with it. For Schlick the view that knowledge must have two terms is the central premise in his Neo-Kantian project. He is a Criticist: he wants to draw the limits of knowledge. There is no metaphysics—a body of knowledge of the truly real—because metaphysical knowledge, if there were any, would need to consist per impossibile in an attitude with only one term. There is only scientific knowledge and philosophy itself is a science. But the ‘uptake’ of value is not subject to the demands of knowledge. Beyond the limits of knowledge lies our engagement with value. I unpack this line of thought in Chapters 12–14. In Part IV I will discuss what lies in and what lies beyond the limits of knowledge. I will treat Schlick as the philosophical highpoint of one line of Austrian philosophy and take his articulation of the limits of knowledge as my endpoint.

2. Austrian Philosophy and its Significance This book is not intended as a study of the internal unity of Austrian philosophy, rather it aims to highlight the philosophical contributions made by Austrian philosophers, put them in historical context, and assess their philosophical significance. Although the book is not a work of historiography, writing it commits me to take a stand on the existence and unity of Austrian philosophy or, to be more cautious, of a period in Austrian philosophy. We need therefore to sharpen our understanding of ‘Austrian philosophy’. I will do so by considering the socalled ‘Neurath-Haller thesis’. For reasons that will emerge soon, I prefer to split the thesis up into a Neurath and a Haller Thesis. I will start with Neurath’s Thesis. Otto Neurath outlined in several articles the prehistory of the Vienna Circle. He wrote: In England, France, Poland, and further countries we can draw a continuing line, which approximately runs from Nominalism via Positivism and Materialism to the Logical Empiricism of our time. This does not hold for Germany; no contributions to an empirical direction, which could remind one of Comte, even in sub-areas, which could remind one of scientism, have been seriously undertaken. (Neurath 1936a, 685)

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Neurath’s historical thesis concerns Germany, not the German-speaking world apart from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His thesis is that there is no tradition of Empiricism and scientific philosophy in Germany, while there is one in other European countries. England has the Empiricists, France Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the father of Positivism. In Germany there is no comparable continuous development of Empiricism.¹¹ Rather there is a tradition of a priori philosophical system-building associated with Kant, Hegel, and Schelling.¹² In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially in Vienna, the absence of Kantianism allows Herbart’s empirical-oriented philosophy to take hold; later, Brentano builds on Comte’s Positivism. Now to Haller’s Thesis. It is composed of two theses. Haller set out to defend:¹³ [F]irst, that in the last 100 years there has taken place an independent development of a specifically Austrian philosophy, opposed to the philosophical currents of the remainder of the German-speaking world; and secondly that this development can sustain a genetic model which permits us to affirm an intrinsic homogeneity of Austrian philosophy up to the Vienna Circle and its descendants. (Haller 1981, 2)

What are ‘the philosophical currents’ Haller has in mind when proposing his first thesis? Austrian philosophy is largely characterized indeed, in its opposition to all transcendental and idealistic tendencies, by its realistic line. (Haller 1981, 4)

Haller does not say what the distinctive Austrian ‘realistic line’ is. As we will see later, Mach, for example, is difficult to characterize as a realist in many senses of ‘realist’. But we can use the alleged opposition to idealism and transcendental philosophy to sharpen Haller’s first thesis. The philosophical currents in the ‘remainder of the German-speaking world’ are supposed to be idealism and transcendental philosophy and Austrian philosophy is characterized by its opposition to them. Haller’s first thesis—Austrian philosophy is opposed to the philosophical currents in the remainder of the German-speaking world—is different from Neurath’s thesis about differences in the development of philosophy in ¹¹ According to Damböck (2017), there was an Empiricist tradition in Germany. ‘German Empiricism’ (used in a technical sense) is, roughly, the view that philosophy is itself an empirical science whose method is descriptive and metaphysics anti-platonist, see, for instance, Damböck (2017, 35–6f). ‘German Empiricism’ is distinct from the scientific philosophy and the traditional view of empiricism that see experience as the only source of concepts and knowledge. Brentano is not a ‘German Empiricist’, see 112ff. Neurath’s thesis concerns only empiricism in the sense just outlined. For discussion see Fréchette (2020). ¹² See Neurath (1936b, 705). ¹³ See also Smith (1997).

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Germany and the Habsburg Empire. For instance, there may be no tradition of scientific philosophy and Empiricism in Germany, yet these philosophical trends may be ‘newcomers’ that took hold without such a tradition. Is Haller’s first thesis plausible? For two reasons I don’t think so. First, ‘the philosophical currents of the remainder of the German-speaking world’ are not exhausted by transcendental and idealistic tendencies. If we take all mainstream philosophical currents in Germany and parts of Switzerland at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century into account, the alleged opposition between Austrian philosophy and philosophy in the rest of the German-speaking world becomes difficult to maintain.¹⁴ For example, Simons notes problems with the geographical term ‘Austrian’ as well as the ‘opposition’ to trends beyond the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire:¹⁵ Prague, Vienna, Graz, and Lwów were all cities in the Austrian half of the dual Monarchy, sharing the same education system and beholden to the same bureaucrats in Vienna. But in view of the affinities and connections with the developments outside the border of the Empire—Lotze in Göttingen, Frege in Jena, Stumpf in Berlin, Russell in England—the epithet ‘Austrian’ would have been too narrow, even without the misunderstanding it is now apt to prompt. (Simons 1992a, 5)

Parts I, II, and III will support Simons’s extension of the reach of the ‘Austrian’ tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century there are different trends in German philosophy. Among them are the Herbartians (Drobisch, Waitz, Volkmann) that want to eliminate metaphysics from psychology, German Pragmatists (Ostwald, Simmel, Vaihinger), the Leipzig psychophysicists and psychologists (Avenarius (for a time), Fechner, Lotze (for some time), Wundt), the scientifically oriented Neo-Kantians (Riehl, Helmholtz) and Brentanians (Stumpf after 1894) in Berlin, and phenomenologists and psychologists in Munich (Lipps).¹⁶ These trends and schools are not opposed to Austrian philosophy. Quite the opposite. For instance, Mach called Fechner his ‘fatherly mentor’ and stressed that the affinity between his and Richard Avenarius’ views ‘is as great as can possibly be imagined where two writers have undergone a different process of ¹⁴ For an overview of the philosophical landscape in Germany around 1870 by a contemporary of Brentano et al. see Wundt (1877). ¹⁵ See also Glock (2008, 74). In a response Mulligan (2011, 106) tries to defend the thesis by claiming that affinities obtain only between Austrian philosophers and philosophers in southern Germany. Given that, to name a few, Göttingen (Lotze), Leipzig (Avenarius, Fechner, Wundt), and Zurich (later Avenarius) are not in southern Germany, I remain unconvinced of the weakened thesis. ¹⁶ See Damböck (2020, 175) for a list of influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers in Germany and Austria that overlaps with mine. I agree with his main points. On German pragmatism see Marcuse (1955).

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development, work in different fields, and are completely independent of one another’ (Mach 1914, 46–7 [38–9]). The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) sees his fictionalism confirmed and made palatable by the success of Avenarius and Mach.¹⁷ Jerusalem (1905, chapt. xii) discussed Schopenhauer’s and Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology and his own work is influenced by these thinkers. Brentano drew on Lotze in his work and corresponded with Fechner. There is also Austro-German collaboration at the institutional level: the journal Vierteljahrsschrift für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie (1877–1916) did what it says on the tin: it published work on scientific philosophy, that is, philosophy which takes itself to be a science, namely the science of science.¹⁸ Its founding editor is Avenarius. Avenarius was born in Paris, did his graduate work in Leipzig, and held a chair in Zurich. After Avenarius’ death in 1896 Mach, then based in Vienna, and the Criticist Alois Riehl, originally from Graz, then based in Kiel in northern Germany, joined the editorial team. Here we have a collaboration of philosophers based in the Habsburg Empire, Germany, and Switzerland that share a view of what philosophy is and should aim for.¹⁹ Second, even if ‘the philosophical currents of the remainder of the Germanspeaking world’ would have been uniformly or dominantly idealistic and Kantian, Austrian philosophers were influenced by these tendencies themselves. Let us consider two examples. (A): One of the main influences on Brentano’s Psychology is Lotze’s Microcosmos Mikrokosmos.²⁰ Brentano read Lotze’s book in 1871 while working on his Psychologie and praised it as a masterful discussion of Herbart’s school.²¹ But Lotze is an Idealist. He holds the view that every real contingent being is a limitation of the absolute.²² Now one may argue that Brentano separated the scientific wheat from the Idealistic chaff in Lotze’s work. However, whether such a separation is possible is a difficult philosophical question. (B): We will see in Part IV that the idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) influenced the work of Mach, Jerusalem, and Schlick.²³ Rather

¹⁷ See Vaihinger (1922, xiv) (first edition 1911). ¹⁸ See Avenarius (1877, 12–14). See also Riehl (1883, 246). On the history of scientific philosophy see Richardson (1997). ¹⁹ Are the German philosophers listed above merely ‘on the fringes of German philosophy’ as Smith (1994, 9 fn. 3) argues? Answering this question requires an independently motivated criterion for centrality and Smith does not provide one. Richardson (1997, 425) comments that if ‘scientific philosophy occurred only at the “the fringes” [ . . . ] of German philosophy, then German philosophy had many important fringes indeed’. ²⁰ For a representative example see PES, 114–15 [I, 208–11]. ²¹ See Brentano’s letter to Stumpf from 8.5.1871 in Brentano and Stumpf (2014, 48); see also Brentano and Stumpf (2014, 54). ²² See, for example, Lotze (1883, § 48). ²³ See Luft (1983) on Schopenhauer’s significance for Austrian intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century in general and for his influence on Mach in particular see pp. 65.

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than being critics of idealism these philosophers took a core thesis of Schopenhauer—the Will created the Intellect—and ran with it (more in Part IV). In sum: It is complicated. Neither idealism nor German-speaking philosophy outside the Habsburg Empire are so uniform that they can easily be contrasted with Austrian philosophy. In light of the problems of demarcating Austrian philosophy from philosophy in other German-speaking countries, Simons proposed to speak of ‘Central European Philosophy’. Sadly Simons’s terminology has not caught on, but for the reasons above I take ‘Austrian Philosophy’ in a broad sense in which it covers a philosophical tradition that extends beyond the border of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire. Simons included Bertrand Russell among his ‘Austrian’ philosophers. I will devote Part III for similar reasons to the ‘British Brentanian tradition’ (Nasim 2008, 26). I think the inclusion of this tradition will be justified by the light it sheds on both Austrian and early analytic philosophy. The fact that Austrian philosophers as well as groups of philosophers in Germany and Switzerland are driven by shared concerns is not to deny that there is a philosophical tradition that deserves the name ‘Austrian philosophy’ or that it arose and was furthered by special cultural and social conditions in the Habsburg Empire, only that it is a singular and isolated phenomenon. Now to Haller’s second thesis about Austrian philosophy. In contrast to Haller’s first, his second thesis seems fruitful. In Haller’s ‘genetic model’ the origin of Austrian philosophy is the publication of Brentano’s Psychology:²⁴ The birth of Austrian philosophy can be seen to lie in the appearance of The Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874. (Haller 1981, 3)

Haller’s claim that Austrian philosophy begins with Brentano’s Psychology is also controversial, but is in my view defensible.²⁵ The Bohemian philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) is widely seen as a notable antecedent to analytic philosophy.²⁶ He worked in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before Brentano and Mach. Why does Austrian philosophy not begin with Bolzano? Because Bolzano did not start a philosophical tradition or school: he was little studied during his lifetime and only rediscovered later by some of ²⁴ Smith’s book Austrian Philosophy. The Legacy of Franz Brentano identifies Austrian philosophy with the Brentano School, that is, with philosophers that studied with either Brentano or one of his pupils. For discussion of Smith’s approach see Brandl (1997). For a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of the Brentano School see Kriegel’s (2017) handbook. ²⁵ Glock (2008, 74) reads Neurath as proposing that Austrian philosophy starts with Bolzano. But, Glock argues, ‘The idea that there was a single Austrian tradition going back to Bolzano is a propagandist invention of Neurath’ (2008, 75). On a more charitable reading Neurath (1936a, 688; 1936b, 705) proposed the non-propagandist thesis that Bolzano prepared the ground for the scientific world-view of the Vienna Circle. Whether there is a ‘single Austrian tradition’ is left open by Neurath. ²⁶ See Simons (1992a, 6). For a comprehensive and detailed introduction to Bolzano’s work see Rusnock and Sebestik (2019). See also Lapointe (2011), Simons (1999, 110–5), and Textor (2013). See also Uebel (1999, 257–61).

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Brentano’s students and members of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Group. There are also differences in interest and method to later Austrian philosophers. Bolzano is a believer in the metaphysics of monads and therefore, as we will see, hardly fits the anti metaphysical orientation of Mach and Brentano (at the time of Psychology). However, if you disagree with Haller’s thesis about the origin of Austrian philosophy, you can—and I very much hope you do—still read on and take this book as exploring an important phase in Austrian philosophy, namely the phase in which criticism of metaphysics becomes a central concern. Brentano is not the sole source of Austrian philosophy. The other is Brentano’s contemporary, the physicist and ‘philosopher’ Ernst Mach (1838–1916).²⁷ Haller (1981, 10) sees ‘a shared theoretical tendency’ in Brentano’s and Mach’s work. Fréchette (2019, 57–60) provides historical and textual evidence for such a shared tendency and shared concerns. The Brentano of Psychology and Mach are empiricists about concept-acquisition and scientific knowledge. They aim to free science, especially psychology, of metaphysics. For example, Brentano’s inaugural lecture in Vienna was titled ‘On the reasons for discouragement in the realm of philosophy’. One reason for such discouragement was that philosophers set themselves unachievable tasks: One says further that the mode of explanation and grounding that the philosopher demands is completely different in kind from the one the natural scientist aims for. The philosopher wants to penetrate the inner what and why of things to which observation and experience have no access.—We respond by saying that this is only a consequence of the lagging behind of philosophy. It is a sign that indicates that it has not yet got clear about the limits of possible knowledge and the right way way in which to pose its questions. (GEPG, 95)

The wish to learn about the essences of things (‘the inner what’) is an irrational wish. We have no source of knowledge that allows us to satisfy it.²⁸ Philosophers need to change their ambitions and start asking questions that have answers that can be known by observation, conceptual clarification, and reasoning. So understood, philosophy is a science that can make progress by employing the methods of natural science and drawing on, in particular, psychological theories. Hence, the youth of Vienna can be encouraged to study philosophy. The rejection of metaphysical knowledge and the interest in drawing the limits of knowledge bring Brentano close to Mach, Avenarius, and later Schlick. As we will see in Part II, Brentano and Mach will come to blows about the distinction

²⁷ I put ‘philosopher’ in scare quotes because Mach himself insisted that he is not a philosopher. On Mach’s place in the development of twentieth-century philosophy see Hintikka (2001). ²⁸ For examples of philosophers who disagree see section 13.2.

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between the mental and physical. But this disagreement is based on a shared understanding of what philosophy is supposed to be and aim for. These points support Neurath’s claim that there are four foundations of the Austrian tradition in philosophy: Antimetaphysics, empirical conceptions of general kind, the inclination to draw on logic, mathematization of all sciences: These were [ . . . ] the four [foundations] of the modern scientism in Austria and Vienna as well as in England and France although they had not been prepared by a similarly long tradition. (Neurath 1936a, 693; I have modified the translation.)

While there is rather little inclination to draw on logic in Brentano and Mach, the other three foundations—antimetaphysics, empiricism, mathematization—are at work in the development of psychology as an empirical discipline.²⁹ Austrian philosophy (or an important phase of it) is built on these three foundations. If Austrian philosophy (or an important phase of it) is a philosophical tradition characterized by the fundaments antimetaphysics, empiricism, mathematization, what has it to do with Austria? In his historical essays Neurath argued that the culture and politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire helped to create an ‘atmosphere’ in which the antimetaphysical tradition could develop. In particular, church and state oppose Kant’s philosophy, as it is taken to be a ‘child of the French revolution’ (Neurath 1936b, 705). The cultural politics of the AustroHungarian Empire explain why this tradition flourished in ‘Austria’. But if the tradition is based on the three fundaments it can be continued by philosophers everywhere. Neurath’s foundations of Austrian philosophy capture, as Chapters 1–3 will make plausible, themes and attitudes that tie together a group of philosophers that are central to Austrian Philosophy.³⁰ Austrian philosophy so conceived is a philosophical force. Without the philosophy of Brentano and his school analytic philosophy would have taken a different course and Moore’s and Russell’s ‘revolt against idealism’ would have lacked motivation and direction. Mach’s and Avenarius’ psychology of knowledge acquisition is a foundation of Moritz Schlick’s project to draw the limits of knowledge; Mach’s view that commonsense objects are complexes constructed out of subject-independent elements informs Carnap’s Logical Construction of the World.³¹ And so on.

²⁹ For Brentano psychology has greater authority than Aristotelian logic. He proposes a reform of logic to bring it in line with the psychology of judgement. See Simons (2004). ³⁰ For example, Neurath (1936a, 693) conceded that Brentano was ‘strictly speaking an adherent of metaphysics’. The Brentanian Oskar Kraus (1872–1942) wrote a series of scathing letters (‘Everything is wrong’) to Neurath about his account of the role of Brentano in the development of the Vienna Circle. See Binder (1993, 14–15). ³¹ See Carnap (1928, § 3; 1963, 15).

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In the course of the discussion an important further commonality of Austrian philosophers will emerge. They reject anything like a soul or ego. In this point they are opposed to early and recent analytic philosophers who are happy to speak of conscious subjects and characterize experience as a thing being presented or present to a subject.

3. Methodology: Rug Dealers and Eccentric Colleagues This book is part of a series in the history of philosophy. How does it fit methodologically? Perler (2018) gives a helpful outline of three models of investigations in the history of philosophy. According to the dialogue model, the historian of philosophy interrogates historical texts with respect to their contemporary relevance. Historical figures are treated as if they were colleagues and their arguments are discussed as if they were contributions to a philosophy journal. In contrast, the rug dealer model takes the historian of philosophy to be interested in a philosophical view or text for its own sake and to be understood in its own particular historical contexts. Perler (2018, 148) himself opts for a third—the alienation model that sees the historian of philosophy both as engaged in philosophical evaluation of his sources, but also as treating them as alien, quite unlike the manuscripts of his colleagues. My own approach is rather a hybrid of all three. A historical investigation needs to take into account origins and contexts to contrast the views and texts discussed with what we do and think now. But I shall also treat historical figures as eccentric colleagues with something to say about problems that move us, but with a significantly different take on them. In order to appreciate what they bring to the table we must see ‘where they come from’. In this book I will treat Austrian philosophers as colleagues with eccentric and interesting views. Some of them try to stop us from thinking about familiar problems. Others try to formulate these problems in better ways. The task of the book is to make clear where these philosophers are coming from and—with this in place—to see what can be learned from them.

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PART I

THE EVAPORATION OF THE SOUL AND O THER SUBSTANCES

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1 Psychology, the Science of the Soul Psychol/ogy: [ . . . ] the science of the human soul; specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and functions of the human soul, so far as they are known by consciousness; a treatise on the human soul. Webster’s International Dictionary 1894 Edition

1. Introduction In 1904, William James spoke of ‘the evaporation of the definite soul-substance’ (James 1904a, 478). James’s description seems to me to be spot on: the mental substance or soul is the key topic in nineteenth-century German-speaking philosophy and psychology. Herbart promoted the idea of empirical psychology as the study of the functions of the soul based on inner experience with the help of metaphysics and mathematics. This view of psychology comes under pressure in the second half of the nineteenth century when Neo-Kantians like Lange, Austrian Pragmatists like Mach, and empirical psychologists such as Brentano (at the time of Psychology) and Wundt hold that we are not aware of a soul in consciousness. Lotze famously pushed back: the unity of consciousness requires the existence of a soul. But to no avail. By 1916 the soul seems to have ‘evaporated’. The Austrian Neo-Kantian Robert Reininger (1869–1955) reported that the meaning of ‘soul’ had changed in philosophical discourse: The name ‘Soul’ is [ . . . ] almost exclusively used as a mere shorthand for the totality of what is labeled ‘mental’ and serves in this sense as a personative or summative fiction. (Reininger 1916, 14)¹

Part I will be a running commentary on the replacement of the substance/ property metaphysics with a complex/element ontology that is driven by the

¹ The suggestion that the soul is a ‘personative or summative fiction’ is from Vaihinger (1922, 412–3; first edition 1911). A summative fiction is not a kind of fiction, rather it is an expression that is grammatically a singular term, but that abbreviates a sum or arrangement of singular terms. ‘The soul of X’ is not a definite description satisfied by one soul, but a shorthand for a list of mental acts.

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   

criticism of the soul as a posit of psychology. In this chapter I will expound the view that psychology is the science of the soul.

2. Herbart: Putting Metaphysics into Psychology One foundation of Austrian philosophy is, we learned from Neurath, ‘antimetaphysics’. Let’s make ‘antimetaphysics’ more precise. ‘Antimetaphysics’ can mean the wholesale rejection of metaphysics—the science of the fundamental constituents of being—as an independent science that has its own source of knowledge. This conception of antimetaphysics will concern us in Part IV, but it is not the antimetaphysics that drove philosophers like Brentano and Mach. Their antimetaphysics is an answer to problems in German psychology in the nineteenth century. Consider how the British philosopher and psychologist James Sully (1842–1923) described the state of German psychology of that time: We find little patience in the observation and classification of mental phenomena, little penetrative insight into the causal relations of these phenomena; on the other hand we see abundant metaphysical ingenuity in building new hypotheses on arbitrarily selected groups of facts. These dominant features of German psychology might be illustrated by reference to the systems of all the professional writers on the subject from Leibnitz downwards. The method of philosophising common to these thinkers is the reduction of psychology to metaphysic [ . . . ]. (Sully 1876, 21–2; my emphasis)

This is the cue for the antimetaphysics of Brentano, Mach, and Wundt. They argue that the reduction of psychology to metaphysics or, in effect, any metaphysical foundation of psychology is scientifically unwarranted. In Chapter 2 I will turn to their arguments for this conclusion. In this chapter I want to understand the arguments for the reduction of psychology to metaphysics that is common in Germany in the nineteenth century. I trust that contemporary readers will find the very idea of a metaphysical foundation of empirical science puzzling. Yes, there is a metaphysics of science, but this area of metaphysics tries to get clear about metaphysical questions that arise in science. It is not the attempt to base empirical science on metaphysics. A contemporary physicist that drew on metaphysical theories to advance physics would face severe criticism. In the early nineteenth century when the then new empirical science of psychology took shape this was different. In Germany, Johann Friedrich Herbart’s Psychology as Science: Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics and

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Mathematics (1824) was the first work in which the conception of an empirical science of psychology is developed.² Herbart was unsatisfied with faculty psychology, that is, the study of mental faculties and their function.³ He wanted to study the processes and mechanisms by which the function ascribed to a mental faculty is realized. As the title of Herbart’s book indicates, he argued that psychology is founded on experience, mathematics, and metaphysics.⁴ The metaphysics under consideration posits mental substances, souls, and their accidents. We need to sharpen our understanding of substance in due course. But here it suffices to say that a substance is supposed to be a bearer of properties that does not depend for its existence on anything else and that has no parts. Herbart (1776–1841) was a student of the German Idealist Johann Gottlob Fichte. In his 1877 overview of German philosophy in Mind Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), one of the founding fathers of empirical psychology, listed Kant, Hegel, and Herbart as ‘the thinkers of greatest influence’ (Wundt 1877, 510).⁵ In his Principles of Physiological Psychology (Wundt 1874, vii) he named Herbart as the greatest influence on his own work second only to Kant. Brentano concurred: his overview of German philosophy of mind begins with Herbart and details his influence.⁶ Ernst Mach, now famous for inspiring the antimetaphysics orientation of the Vienna circle, started out as a Herbartian.⁷ In a letter from 1865 Fechner refers to the then 27-year-old Mach as a ‘disciple of the Herbartian school who demands a simple seat of the soul’.⁸ Mach’s ‘Lectures on Psychophysics’ (Mach 1863, 364, 365–6) defended Herbart against criticism and endorsed the soul. In his Knowledge and Error, published in 1905, Mach acknowledged Herbart’s achievements, but also highlighted the big problem with Herbart’s psychology: It was Herbart’s main merit to have examined the mechanics [Getriebe] of ideas as such, yet even he spoiled his whole psychology by starting from the assumption that the soul is simple. Only lately [has one] begun to accept a ‘psychology without soul’. (Mach 1976, 8 [12]; I have inserted the quotation marks that were missing in the translation and changed the translation of ‘Getriebe’.)

² See Ribot (1886, 24). Before Herbart, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) introduced the distinction between rational and empirical psychology. He published in 1732 an Empirical (Psychologica Empirica) and in 1734 a Rational Psychology (Psychologica Rationalis). Ward (1919, 13) called Wolff ’s Psychologica Rationalis the ‘zenith of Descartes’ mental philosophy’. But Wolff had little impact on Austro-German Philosophy and his ‘empirical psychology’ was not taken seriously as a scientific contribution, see Wundt (1874, 8 [8]). ³ See Stout (1888, 322). See Huemer/Landerer (2018) for an overview of Herbart’s philosophy of mind and Huemer/Landerer (2010) for the role of Herbart in the development of psychology and its importance for Austrian Philosophy. See Ziehen (1900) for an evaluation of Herbart from the perspective of empirical psychology of the time. ⁴ See Boring (1929, 242) on Herbart’s psychology as a metaphysical science. ⁵ For an excellent introduction to Herbart’s thought on mind and psychology see George Frederick Stout’s (1866–1944) three-part critical discussion of Herbart’s and the Herbartians’ philosophy in Mind in 1888. ⁶ See Ä, 53–7. ⁷ See Banks (2003, 47). ⁸ Reprinted in Thiele (1978, 44).

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   

Why does the empirical science of psychology need to start from the metaphysical assumption that there is a simple soul? And: Why does this assumption spoil Herbart’s psychology and why should one develop a ‘psychology without soul’? I will take the first question first; the second question will be answered in Chapter 2.

3. The Impossibility of Self-Observation and Metaphysical Psychology In a nutshell, Herbart’s answer to the first question was that psychology cannot be an observational science and the psychologist must therefore draw on metaphysics as a further non-observational source of knowledge of the objects she is interested in.⁹ In the next sections I will unpack this influential idea. According to Herbart, the psychologist is worse off than, say, the physicist when it comes to observing the things they want to find out about. To many philosophers this will sound deeply counter-intuitive. Do I not have privileged access to my present thoughts and feelings? Yes, but the problem Herbart sees does not concern the privileged access to our own mental processes, but the psychologist’s ability to observe their own mental processes. Consider the distinction between hearing a melody and listening to it; seeing a bird and watching it. When you hear the melody or see the bird, your interest and attention might be engaged elsewhere. You won’t have a detailed and comprehensive knowledge of most things that you see and hear. But when one listens to the melody or watches the bird, one directs one’s attention on them for a purpose. One wants to find out more about the bird by seeing it or appreciate the melody when hearing it. If you are a physicist you can observe physical processes, that is, focus your attention on them for the purpose of coming to know facts about them. The problem that drives much of nineteenth-century psychology and philosophy of psychology is that observation of one’s mental processes and events is supposed to be impossible. Herbart gave two main reasons for this impossibility. First, mental activities pass too quickly to be observed.¹⁰ Just as you cannot observe a momentary flash of lightning, you cannot observe short-lived mental events like judgements. Second, the attempt to observe one’s mental activities ‘interferes’ with them. Imagine that you want to listen to yourself while you discuss with others; pay attention to your anger while being angry. Herbart points out that the attempt to observe one’s own activities changes them. If you manage to focus your attention on your anger, the emotion changes. He (Herbart 1824, 206) argued that the

⁹ See Stout (1888, 322–3).

¹⁰ Herbart (1824, 206).

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emotion to be observed is often replaced by affects that are motivated by one’s view of oneself. When I try to attend to my anger, my anger changes into embarrassment that I got so angry etc. Hence, the anger eludes my observation.¹¹ Forming the intention of paying attention to a mental act brings about the frustration of the formed intention. If we make this clear to ourselves, it is no longer rational to form this intention. Herbart used a suggestive analogy to illustrate the problem. Someone who tries to observe her own mental activities, says Herbart, is like a spectator of a play who also tries to participate in it. If one manages to participate in it, one changes the action on stage and no longer sees the play one came to see. But can one stop oneself from forming the intention to participate? Does one want to prevent that the spectator intervenes in the acting plot? Does one intentionally let oneself go in order to apprehend purely what happens inwardly by itself? Only more easily will everything that was there to be seen be swallowed by darkness and very soon the spectator will observe only himself and his own waiting. To observe themselves constantly and strictly for an hour, indeed even for a whole day, in order to observe the presently obtaining inner state at each time: this could be recommended as one of the strongest selftorments to those that see a merit in it [introspection]. (Herbart 1824, 206)¹²

Whereas an enthusiastic biologist might enjoy observing a rare animal for hours, the psychologist will fruitlessly torment herself when trying to observe her mental life for an extended period of time. One can formulate the problem Herbart sees as a dilemma. First horn: If one forms the intention to observe one’s mental activity, the forming of the intention changes the object to be observed and thereby frustrates the intention formed. Second horn: If one tries to form no intention to observe, nothing will be observed at all. Conclusion: Observing one’s own mental acts is an impossible task.¹³ Please note here that Herbart is not a sceptic about self-knowledge, but about self-observation. He in fact holds that we have knowledge of our mental life that is not due to observation:

¹¹ Before Herbart the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96) had already discovered and articulated the problem in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, see Reid (1785, 62). ¹² The first sentence of the quoted passage is ‘Will man verhüten, dass nicht der Zuschauer in die Handlung eingreife?’ The ‘nicht’ does jar with the intended meaning. One does not want to prevent the spectator from not intervening with the acting plot. I have corrected this in my translation. ¹³ Stumpf (1939, 307) compared the problem of inner observation with the limitations of determining simultaneously the speed and location of an electron.

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    Unintentionally everyone is his own audience during his whole life, and in this way gains his life story. He also brings this life story, and the knowledge of his person, to every self-observation; the first is the subject to which the second shall provide the predicates. And already for this reason can the intentional selfobservation never deliver pure results; the observer knows itself, the object he wants to come to know, already much too well. (Herbart 1824, 207; my emphasis)

We are unintentional spectators of our mental life and have knowledge of it. But we cannot set out to systematically explore it by observing it. Imagine you wanted to be an astronomer, but you could never plan to train your perception on particular stars and have only occasional glimpses of them. This is, according to Herbart, the situation the psychologist finds herself in. In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant 1786, 7) Kant had already used this problem about observation as one of the reasons for the conclusion that there can be no science of the soul nor an ‘experimental psychological doctrine’.¹⁴ The father of Positivism, Auguste Comte (1797–1857), went further than Kant. Comte (1858, 10) used the problem of self-observation to argue that there can be neither scientific observations of the passions nor intellectual observation of the intellectual functions.¹⁵ Comte concluded that psychology, whatever it is, cannot be an empirical science. He excluded therefore the ‘illusory’ psychology from the (positive) sciences and saw in psychological theories the last phase of theological thinking.¹⁶ In the theological phase observed phenomena are explained by positing persons with special powers. In the case of ‘psychology’ mental phenomena are explained by positing a soul, a person-like entity. Psychology is theology pretending to be a science! The question whether inner observation is possible or not is a constant theme in Austro-German philosophy of psychology. Herbart and later, for instance, Lange (1873/5 III, 175 [II, 479–80]), Brentano (PES, 22 [I, 44]), Horwicz (1872, 168–73), and Wundt (1888, 296) give reasons for a negative answer.¹⁷ What does this mean for the prospects of psychology as an empirical science? Consider an illustration.¹⁸ You want to check whether the light in your fridge goes out when the door is closed. You cannot find out whether it does by observation: in order to look into the fridge you need to open it and this switches ¹⁴ For a response to Kant’s arguments against the possibility of psychology as an exact empirical science see Wundt (1874, 6–7 [6–8]). What Kant’s claim exactly means is controversially discussed among Kant exegetes. See, for example, Kraus (2018), Nayak and Sotnak (1995), and Sturm (2001). ¹⁵ James (1884, 2) agreed with Comte and gave a modified version of Comte’s argument. ¹⁶ Comte’s Course was published in six volumes from 1830 to 1842 and translated in abridged form into English in 1858. ¹⁷ For contemporary pessimism about introspection see Schwitzgebel (2008). Schwitzgebel is concerned about the reliability of introspection; Herbart et al. take self-observation to be impossible. ¹⁸ Thanks to Jess Leech for the example.

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the light on. The attempt to observe a fact interferes with the fact to be observed. Although your sight may be perfectly reliable, you cannot observe what you want to observe. If you want to know whether the light goes out when the fridge door is closed, you need to rely either (a) on a faculty different from sight or (b) on nonobservable facts about the make of the fridge, its current condition, and its recent history. These general facts allow you to make inferences about the light in the fridge. According to Herbart, we are with respect to our mental life in a similar situation as the person who wants to know whether the light in the fridge goes out. There is no inner observation. But, unlike Kant and Comte, Herbart did not conclude that there can be no empirical science of psychology. How can we, then, systematically extend our knowledge of the mind, that is, pursue psychology? Can we pursue option (a)? Some Kant exegetes have argued that this was Kant’s preferred option: we study the mind not only through introspection, but also ‘through attention to one’s actions’.¹⁹ Herbart (1824, §§ 4–5) agreed that we learn about mental processes through the testimony of others and our own actions. But he considered this a method to learn about the mental that depends on introspection. I can learn that I feel tense by considering how I act or the quality of my current performance. But the feelings indicated by my performance need to be known by introspection. Moreover, knowledge of my actions will not put me into a position to analyse feeling tense into psychological parts etc. This leaves option (b). As we need to draw on non-observational knowledge and make inferences to answer the ‘fridge question’, we need to combine what we learn from consciousness about our mental processes with non-observational knowledge. Which non-observational knowledge? Knowledge of metaphysics. The things consciousness puts us in contact with have a place in the metaphysics of substances and accidents. Herbart proposed to make progress in psychology by deducing what we seem to know by inner sense from the truths of the metaphysics of substance and accident. Herbart’s book is full of complicated inferences that start from metaphysical premises; Brentano (Ä, 56) criticized Herbart for his ‘deduction and construction drive’ (Deduktions- und Konstruktionslust). There is an empirical science of psychology, but it is not independent: it depends on metaphysics. Later critics of inner observation moved to the view that physiology complements our introspective knowledge.²⁰ There is a lawful connection between mental and neurophysiological processes and we can use our observational knowledge of these processes to correct inner observation. Wundt subsumed both approaches under the label ‘metaphysical psychology’:

¹⁹ See Sturm (2001, 175–6).

²⁰ See, for example, Horwicz (1872, 200–5).

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    After a metaphysical concept of mind has [ . . . ] been established, the attempt is made to deduce from it the actual content of psychical experience. The characteristic that distinguishes metaphysical from empirical psychology is, then, its attempt to deduce psychical processes, not from other psychical processes, but from some substratum entirely unlike themselves: either from the manifestations of a special mind-substance, or from the attributes and processes of matter. (Wundt 1897, 6–7)

According to both kinds of metaphysical psychology, psychology depends on other sciences. If one wants to defend the view that psychology is an independent science and free it from reliance, for example, on metaphysics, one needs to engage the arguments of the critics of inner observation and show that something like observation is possible in the realm of the mental. And this is what Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and Wundt in his Principles of Physiological Psychology set out to do. In Chapter 2 I will discuss Brentano’s approach in detail in due course. Let us now expound Herbart’s view further. He called his own approach ‘hypothetical complementation’.²¹ One complements beliefs about mental phenomena with metaphysical assumptions. Herbart’s method of complementation explains the occurrence of mental phenomena by positing ‘hidden entities’: What science knows more than experience it can only know because the experienced cannot be thought without the presupposition of the hidden. For nothing else than experience is given in it: in it [experience] it must find the traces of everything else and recognize, what happens and acts behind the curtain. (Herbart 1824, 220; my emphasis)

Any science will go beyond the facts and make hypotheses that explain why certain facts and not others obtain. Psychology is not different. Psychologists aim to develop: a science of the soul that is similar to the science of nature insofar as it presupposes the completely regular connection of appearances everywhere and traces it by examining the facts, careful inferences, bold, checked, justified hypotheses, finally, where possible, by considering magnitudes and calculation. (Herbart 1824, 198)

How does the metaphysics of the soul complement introspection to yield psychological insight? ²¹ See Herbart (1824, 219) on ‘hypothetical complementation’ (Ergänzung). On Herbart’s notion of complementation see Stout (1888, 323–4) and Heidelberger (1993, 46–7).

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Let us consider an example of how hypothetic complementation is supposed to work. Imagine that you want to pay attention to yourself in introspection. Herbart asked: Do we ever find in self consciousness only Us ourselves and simply such a knowledge of ourselves? Not at all. Always some individual determination intrudes; one finds oneself thinking, willing, feeling, suffering, acting with a specific relation towards that, which has just been thought, willed, felt, suffered, acted on. Is this individual determination something alien in the self, whereby it is contaminated? (Herbart 1824, 267)

One plausible answer: NO. In introspection we are given a number of mental events and acts and these make up one self. If we answer NO, we take the thoughts and emotions that we have to be essential for being the thing we are.²² We conceive of ourselves as complexes, Herbart says ‘aggregates’, of mental events and processes. Another, equally plausible answer that Herbart develops at length is YES. For we can give reasons to think that we are not merely aggregates or series of the mental acts and processes. For example, Herbart writes: [A]n aggregate has no real unity; it is many; but one talks of me as one, and as real. (Herbart 1824, 270)

In short, our beliefs about ourselves are inconsistent and we cannot use observation to resolve the problem. Hence, metaphysics needs to come to the rescue. How does metaphysics help in this situation? Herbart has a long answer to this question which I need to shorten here.²³ Metaphysical reflection provides us with the model of a unity of a manifold of mutually opposed processes. The processes or phenomena are effects of other things on one simple being that, so to say, tries to fend them off in order to preserve its simplicity. If we bring such metaphysical speculation to bear on introspectively based views about ourselves, we can explain the apparent inconsistency away. It points us to our underlying nature: we are simple substances. The view that we are simple substances is arrived at by metaphysical speculation about introspective inputs and the problems they give rise to and, in turn, it will yield psychological explanation. In the next section I will develop Herbart’s substance conception and its role in his psychology in more detail.

²² See Herbart (1824, 268). ²³ I take the main points to be in Herbart (1824, 289, 294–5) and (1825, 289).

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   

4. Back to Parmenides: The Given and Herbart’s Eleatic Conception of Substance Herbart argued, as did Descartes before him, that we are thinking substances. The ‘nature and essence’ of a thinking substance is that it thinks.²⁴ Thinking is construed as a determinable with more specific modes of thought as its determinates. The nature and essence of corporeal substance is extension. Herbart’s view of substance and therefore soul differs importantly from Descartes’. The Scottish philosopher Robert Adamson (1852–1902) draws our attention to the fact that Herbart found his inspiration in Greek philosophy: Herbart, following the older Eleatic and Atomist thinkers, placed in opposition to the dominant philosophy of his time. For him as for the Eleatics, the real was characterised by changelessness of being, simplicity and permanence; but with the Atomists, he admitted multiplicity of being. The real he found in the absolutely simple, positive, specifically qualified essences to the notion of which he thought we were driven in order to make consistent our empirical conceptions. (Adamson 1885, 579)

Adamson’s characterization of Herbart’s metaphysics is spot on. Herbart made the connection with the Eleatics himself: My substances are simple, like the Eleatic One, but there are many and one has to think of them as located in intelligible space like Leibnitzian monads; they are unlike the Leibnitzian monads in that they are not originally living and perceiving; but similar to them, in that all true activity is inner activity, and only allows an analogy with intellectual activity; their spatial powers are mere appearance, but this appearance, although different from a Kantian appearance, is nonetheless completely lawful, and initially determined by the laws of attraction and repulsion, [ . . . ]. (Herbart 1825, 198–9)

Parmenides of Elea wrote of being as essentially one and complete. A Herbartian substance is a One in the sense that it has no parts. For example, it cannot like an organism change in virtue of changing parts, yet retain its structure. The view that the soul is one and indivisible will become important throughout this and the next chapter. It is worth noting right at the outset that Herbart’s Eleatic view of substance builds very strong assumptions into the notion of substance. For instance, according to Descartes (1644 I, § 63), the same soul can

²⁴ See Descartes (1644, 210).

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think different thoughts. In contrast, the Herbartian soul has essentially only one simple presentation. What are Herbart’s reasons for his Eleatic view? On the page after the quotation Herbart will attempt to unify the different features substances are supposed to have by giving an account of how we come to acquire the notion of substance.²⁵ Herbart’s starting point is the sensory given or immediately sensory given (das sinnliche Gegebene).²⁶ ‘The Given’ will become later a key term for Mach and will figure in twentieth-century discussions about ‘the Myth of the Given’. The immediately given is what we experience and what we experience are aggregates of sensory features.²⁷ Some of the aggregates we take to be one thing.²⁸ When I see a red surface, I take the sensory features to belong to one object. In this instinctive belief I go beyond the sensory given and that’s where the problems start. For MANY sensory features are not ONE object. Herbart (1825, 201) works this out by means of ‘equations’. If we take the features to be one object, we equate them with it: Snow = white + cold + powdery But this can’t be right. For we also judge that snow is white. Herbart construes this judgement as a judgement of identity: Snow = white He goes on to derive the false equation: white + cold + powdery = white by applying the transitivity of identity to his identity judgements. His general conclusion is that ONE substance cannot be MANY features. The problem with his argument is that he does not consider the possibility that judgements like ‘Snow is white’ may not be identity-judgements, but, for example, judgements to the effect that the complex we refer to with ‘snow’ contains the feature ‘white’. Herbart’s (1825, 200) own response is to introduce a pair of technical concepts: bearer and inhering. The bearer is distinct from the aggregate of features, but the features inhere in the bearer. If the bearer is distinct from some features jointly considered, the wrong equation is no longer derivable.

²⁵ Herbart’s genetic account is a forerunner of Avenarius’ and Mach’s error theories of substance that I will discuss in Chapter 3. ²⁶ Herbart (1825, 200, 202) and (1829, 18ff, 77–8). ²⁷ Herbart (1825, 200). ²⁸ Herbart (1829, 77).

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However, in his Metaphysik (Herbart 1829, 79–80) Herbart argues that the introduction of a bearer of properties does not solve the initial problem as long as one bearer can have more than one property. His argument is complex and hard to fathom. Since I don’t want to be sidetracked too much into Herbart exegesis, I will look at Stumpf ’s (1886/7, 447–8) clearer rendering of Herbart’s line of thought. Assume that the fact that the tomato is soft and red is really the fact that the features softness and red inhere in one bearer. But redness is a property of surfaces, whereas softness is a property of a whole with parts. So the one propertybearer needs to have distinct parts: a surface and other parts to which the distinct properties inhere. But then we have no longer one bearer, but two. There is no real unity underlying the predication. The assumption that one thing has several properties is in Herbart’s view inconsistent. A fundamental property-bearer is simple and therefore one thing that has only one property at any time. So the tomato turns out to be a family of simple substances held together by a relation we don’t know much about yet. Each of these simple substances has only one property. In the course of expounding Herbart’s difficulties with the notion of a propertybearer Stumpf goes beyond Herbart’s own conclusion. Stumpf assumes with Herbart that a thing or substance is not a whole of properties, but something that bears properties: Now we have to distinguish three things: for example the body, heaviness, and possession of heaviness. Now possession of this property is a property and one has to assume a possession of a possession of a property ad infinitum. Or if the body itself is the possessor of heaviness it must also be the possessor of colour. (Stumpf 1886/7, 448)

Stumpf is here close to anticipating what is now known as ‘Bradley’s Regress’ which Bradley himself introduced in published work in 1893. There can be a body and the property of heaviness without the body possessing heaviness. Hence, we need the body, possessing the property of heaviness, and heaviness. But again these three things can exist without the body being heavy. So we need the body, possessing the property of heaviness, possessing the property of possessing heaviness and heaviness, and so on. However, Stumpf does not draw the conclusion from this regress that one should give up on propertybearers and properties. He is less interested in a regress of possession relations between property-bearers and properties than in Herbart’s problem of how one and the same thing can bear different properties. Nonetheless the regress is suggestive. If the introduction of bearers of properties AKA substances leads to an infinite regress, are we not better off without them? In Chapter 3 we will see that there is a broad consensus for a positive answer to this question.

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We have now more detail about Herbart’s Eleatic notion of substance: it is a metaphysically simple property-bearer that can bear only one property at any time. The same goes for mental substance. We have seen in the previous section that Herbart argued that our introspective views about ourselves need to be systematized by means of the metaphysical notion of substance. What is the psychological importance of this complementation? By way of answer, consider an example. Assume you are subject to the MüllerLyer illusion: two lines look of different length to you, but you know that they are of the same length. This is an unhappy situation in which the deliverances of your vision conflict with your beliefs and judgements. One resolution to the conflict is to distinguish parts in the thinker. For example, contemporary psychology takes the mind to be fragmented into modules. Your ‘vision part’ works in part independently of your ‘belief-box’. Herbart’s Eleatic substance view requires a different solution. The bearer of mental properties is one and therefore a real unity: it has no parts. It bears only one property; is in only one simple mental state. Therefore the conflict must be resolved or the soul perishes:²⁹ The great principle that guided less obviously my previous investigations and with increasing clarity needs to determine the following ones is the unity of the soul. Because presentations are all together in One thinker as activities (selfpreservations), they need to constitute One intensive doing insofar as they are not opposed to each other and inhibited. For this very reason they need to inhibit each other, as far as their opposition requires it. They can neither remain undisputed nor uncombined [ . . . ]. (Herbart 1824, 359)

The Eleatic metaphysics of the soul gives us a psychological framework to explain the introspective data. Any multiplicity in consciousness is opposed to the nature of the simple soul and needs either to be explained away or to cease for the soul to survive.³⁰ The ‘mechanics of the soul’ is the process of presentations either inhibiting each other so that only one becomes conscious or merging to one presentation. Herbart’s Eleatic metaphysics informs and constrains his empirical psychology.

5. The Neo-Soul Movement: The Herbartians and Lotze Herbart’s soul psychology was pursued by a number of followers. The most influential were Moritz Drobisch (1802–96), Theodor Waitz (1821–64), and Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1801–77).³¹ The Herbartians are not uncritical ²⁹ See also Herbart (1816, § 113). ³⁰ Stout (1888, 324). ³¹ See Stout (1889) for an illuminating study of the Herbartian school.

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   

disciples of Herbart. For example, ‘metaphysics’ is conspicuous by its absence in the title of Drobisch’s Empirische Psychologie nach naturwissenschaftlicher Methode. In the introduction Drobisch (1842, 32) diagnosed a tension in Herbart’s work: on the one hand Herbart aimed to disentangle psychology from philosophy and to integrate it into the natural sciences, on the other hand he based psychology on a metaphysics of the soul. Consequently he (Drobisch 1842, 33) set himself the task to ‘eliminate all metaphysics from psychology’.³² As we will see, this makes Drobisch sound like Brentano or Mach. But Drobisch only objects to Herbart’s complementation approach that uses metaphysics to control empirical research. Psychological theory building is not guided or corrected by metaphysics, but it can yield metaphysical results. For Drobisch the assumption that there is a simple and unchangeable soul is a proposition of theoretical psychology. The metaphysics of the soul is established by an inference to the best explanation.³³ The soul must be posited as the principle of unity of a mental life. There is an object that is neither a presentation nor a complex of presentations, but a simple ‘in’ which presentations are. I will not look at Drobisch’s argument in detail. For my purposes it suffices to highlight that the soul is now connected to the unity of consciousness and that the Herbartians are unified in their belief in the soul. The Herbartians believe in the soul, but they take this belief to be justified by observations about our mental life. A philosopher who is often taken to be close to the Herbartians is Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81). The relation between Lotze and Herbart’s followers is actually complicated. In his overview of German philosophy Wundt (1877, 513) sees Lotze as a follower of Herbart; Brentano (Ä, 58) groups him with Herbart and the Herbartians, but registers problems with this grouping. For Lotze himself denied being a Herbartian and Drobisch devoted a forty-page paper to detailing the relation between Lotze and the Herbartians. Drobisch wrote: [Lotze] starts with the investigation of the reason for the assumption of the soul as a distinctive being and arrives at the result: the assumption is necessary and the soul is a simple supersensible being. We [Herbart and his school] find ourselves in complete agreement with him with respect to this proposition and its grounds. (Drobisch 1859, 6)

There is agreement about the fundamental importance of the soul for psychology, but there are also many disagreements: Lotze (1852, § 140) argues that the simple soul can change and that the Herbartian ‘mechanics of mind’ does not explain the unity of consciousness.³⁴ But the agreement about the soul joins Lotze to the

³² See also Stout (1889, 357). ³⁴ See Drobisch (1859, 7–10).

³³ See Drobisch (1842, 341). See also Stout (1889, 354).

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Herbartians and they form together a family of views that sees psychology as the study of the soul. In this and the next chapter I will focus on Lotze (and not the Herbartians) for two reasons. First, Lotze expands in a novel way on a theme in metaphysical psychology: he developed the theory of the soul in tandem with a theory of the unity of consciousness and independently of Herbart’s Eleatic metaphysics. Lotze’s view is in fact so different from the Herbartian metaphysics that it will be difficult to assess whether he is a critic or friend of the soul. In Lotze’s Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele the soul figures as a substantial being, whatever that may be.³⁵ Later he will be critical of the notion of a substance as a simple being that grounds appearances.³⁶ According to William James, Lotze changed from a friend to a foe of the soul: [Lotze], who in his early work, the Medizinische Psychologie, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the Soul-Substance theory, has written in §§ 243–5 of his Metaphysik the most beautiful criticism of the theory which exists. (James 1890 I, 349)

Second, Lotze ‘crops up continuously as an éminence grise behind numerous significant developments in the late nineteenth century’ (Simons 1986, 153). Not only in late-nineteenth-century philosophy, but also in early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy and Pragmatism. ‘Lotze’, wrote George Dawes Hicks (1938, xiv), ‘combined in singular measure the speculative instinct of the constructive metaphysician with the cautious attitude of the trained scientific inquirer, and the numerous detailed researches undertaken by him prepared the way for a more radical change in the interpretation of experience than he himself discerned’. Lotze’s metaphysical side is attractive for Idealists: he is read and discussed, for example, by British Neo-Hegelians. Lotze’s scientific side informs his metaphysical theory-building and makes him an interlocutor for empirical psychologists. As we have seen in the introduction Lotze influenced Brentano’s Psychology. Brentano recommended to Stumpf that he study with Lotze. Stumpf wrote between 1868 and 1873 his PhD and his Habilitation under Lotze’s supervision. Stumpf ’s book on the notion of space Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (Stumpf 1873) criticized Lotze’s nativist theory of space.³⁷

³⁵ Brentano (PES, 12 [I, 26]) lists Lotze as a defender of the view that mental phenomena have a substantial bearer. Beiser (2013, 6) argues that Lotze uses different concepts of soul in Lotze (1846) and (1852). ³⁶ Lotze’s pupil Stumpf (1939, 28) described Lotze as a lifelong critic of the Aristotelian notion of substance. Stumpf should know. See Santayana (1889, 153) on Lotze as changing the meaning of ‘soul’ etc. ³⁷ See Stumpf (1918, 2) in which Stumpf gives an overview of Lotze’s philosophy and his life.

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   

In his time in Göttingen Stumpf overlapped with Gottlob Frege, the grandfather of analytic philosophy, James Ward (1842–1925), and John Cook Wilson (1849–1915).³⁸ Cook Wilson would become the Wykeham Professor of Logic in Oxford and the founder of Oxford Realism. Ward studied with Lotze in 1869–70. In 1897 Ward would be appointed to the newly founded Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic in Cambridge. Ward said of himself, ‘What I am two men have made me: Hermann Lotze and Henry Sidgwick’ (see Crampton 1978, 68). Ward was the teacher of George Frederick Stout, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell. Through Ward Lotze’s metaphysical psychology was operative in Moore’s and Russell’s arguments against Idealism. Another important British student of Lotze was James Sully. Sully was Grote professor for philosophy in University College London from 1892 to 1903 and a founder member of the British Psychological Society in 1901. Later, in 1875–6, the American Idealist Josiah Royce (1855–1916) came to Göttingen to study with Lotze. William James was not a student of Lotze, but his writings draw heavily on Lotze.³⁹ Mach commented on Lotze’s theory of space perception in his first publication in 1863. Many of Mach’s ‘Antimetaphysical Remarks’ are directed against Lotze’s metaphysics of the soul. In sum, introducing Lotze in more detail will pay off in Chapters 2 and 7. Although Lotze was the leading Post-Hegelian philosopher of mind, psychology, and metaphysics between 1850 and 1880, his work is now unduly neglected in contemporary philosophy and he needs an introduction.⁴⁰ Lotze studied both philosophy and medicine in Leipzig and belonged with Fechner to a circle around the idealistic philosopher C.H. Weisse.⁴¹ In 1844 Lotze was appointed as Herbart’s successor in Göttingen. Lotze’s Medizinische Psychologie (1852), Mikrokosmos (1856–8), and Metaphysik (1879) were widely read and the last two translated into English. Lotze’s theory of local signs is a major contribution to the theory of spatial perception/representation in the nineteenth century. It seeks to give an explanation of how we arrive at spatial representations on the basis of representations of non-spatial properties only.⁴² Lotze’s methodology is close to functionalism: one understands the nature of something by saying what causal, or broader, functional role it plays.⁴³

³⁸ On Cook Wilson in Göttingen see Pritchard (1919, 297). Frege went to Lotze’s lectures on philosophy of religion in 1871, see Kreiser (2001, 99). The question whether, and if so, how Lotze influenced Frege is a matter of controversy. ³⁹ See, for instance, Kraushaar (1936) who traced the influence of Lotze on James in detail. ⁴⁰ See Hatfield (2008, 98). ⁴¹ See Heidelberger (1993, 58). ⁴² See Hatfield (1990, 158–65). ⁴³ See Kraushaar (1940, 444–5).

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6. The Soul and the Possibility of Psychology as an Independent Science For Lotze the soul plays a foundational role in psychology. Lotze’s Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (1852) opens with a remark about the epistemological problems of a science of psychology that is reminiscent of Herbart’s impossibility of self-observation: 1. It is granted to other sciences to have their object before them in immediate and indubitable perception; natural history can refer to plant, animal and rock like firmly painted pictures of a world of perception that is available to all of us. The beginning of psychology is more cumbersome. Already at the beginning we are embroiled in a debate about the existence and delimitation of its subject. The dispute is fueled and confused with the passion of the many prejudices that such a great topic that touches upon all interests of human life necessarily engenders. The events, which we count as belonging to the realm of mental being, all those forms of consciousness, sensations and re-expressions of inner states are always only objects of proper observation for us in indissoluble connection with changeable states of the living body. If language had been satisfied to extract from the set of these distinct and changeable events the similar and corresponding ones under the name mental events it would have designated the actually existing object of a possible science without prejudice. But, as ever, anticipating, it simultaneously theorized, and, in forming the concept of a soul, it weaved into our range of ideas [Vorstellungskreis] a great and important assertion in the form of an unscientific prejudice that ought to be the result of a strict investigation. For by placing under the name soul a subject in the middle of the observed appearances that cannot be detected in any observation it stated that the group of appearances does not only point to a ground of explanation in virtue of its inner relatedness, but that this ground can only be found in the assumption of a particular substantial being. 2. The possibility of developing psychology as an independent science or the necessity of including it as a domain in the applications of the other natural sciences depends on the truth or falsity of this prejudice that we see repeated in the formation of every language and that we need to take to be one of the most constant products of human reflection. (Lotze 1852, 9–10)

Like Herbart, Lotze sees psychology as epistemologically disadvantaged. The mineralogist can pick up a rock, point to it, and say that he and his colleagues will explore things of the kind this rock belongs to. The mineralogists can all see and check each other’s findings about the rock by repeating their experiments with the same rock. The psychologist can’t present the things he investigates and make them available to all of us.

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   

How can the psychologist, then, determine what psychology is a science of? How can she argue that there is an independent science at all? Lotze sees only one plausible answer. Either there is a soul, and psychology is the science of the soul, or there is no soul and there is no such science as psychology.⁴⁴ Lotze details how natural language encodes the ‘unscientific prejudice’ that there is one thing, the soul, that has mental states and undergoes mental processes. This prejudice is the product of an instinctive drive to explain what we experience. He pictures natural language as an agent that designs our words in a misleading way.⁴⁵ Natural language goes beyond the mental events we experience by ascribing them to something that has them. I report that I have experiences, not that experiencing is going on or that I am some experiences. The way Lotze has set up the discussion, one expects that he will take the expressions that purport to refer to a bearer of mental acts and states to be misleading expressions and reject metaphysical psychology. However, the opposite is true. Yes, the belief that there is a soul is an unscientific prejudice. But this prejudice can be justified: common sense is right: there is a soul. Because the unscientific prejudice can be justified, psychology is an independent science. In the next sections I will work through Lotze’s attempt to make the existence of the soul plausible.

7. The Soul and the Unity of Consciousness Herbart’s main reason for adopting the view that psychology is the science of the soul was that the psychologist cannot observe mental phenomena. The lack in observational knowledge of the mental needs to be compensated by metaphysical knowledge of the soul. If one finds a different way to solve the problem of selfobservation, positing a soul would be unnecessary. However, Herbart has also a more direct reason to believe in the soul. Yes, when we try to pay attention to our mental life, we are never aware of a mental substance that makes judgements or perceives. But we are also not aware of one perception, judgement, or feeling after another. We are aware of a unity in our mental life that is hard to describe, yet manifest. Herbart described this unity in a particular way and tried to infer the existence of the soul from it. He wrote with reference to Kant that the careful philosopher starts from the deliverances of inner perception:

⁴⁴ Kant (A682–3/B710–11) argued that we need the idea of a simple soul to distinguish between the mental and the physical. But the idea of a soul has no object. It is a useful fiction for psychological theorizing. See Vaihinger (1922, 624) and Kraus (2018, 82–3). ⁴⁵ We will encounter this theme again in Chapter 2.7. Many words that we use invoke biases, stereotypes, or prejudices that are helpful in many situations in ordinary life. These prejudices often lead to philosophical problems.

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But he does not infer from the I think as the general subject of all presented objects to the existence of a subject that never can be a predicate. Rather he infers from the mutual penetration [gegenseitigen Durchdringung] of all our presentations and their concentration in one consciousness the impossibility to provide a composite substratum for this interpenetration and unity in whose components the presentations were scattered. (Herbart 1824, 250; my emphasis)

I am never aware of many distinguishable presentations and feelings, but only of one that may be the result of interpenetration of different presentations. This simple global presentation cannot be in a complex substratum. Or so Herbart (1824, 251) argued. Hence, there must be a simple distinct from the totality of mental acts. In Herbart the unity of consciousness is explained by the simplicity of the soul. The idea of the soul as principle of unity figures also importantly in the Herbartians and Lotze.⁴⁶ According to Lotze, everyone finds himself with a belief in the soul. Here is how he described what this belief consists in: [T]he living intelligence of all nations has in the name Soul expressed the conviction that not merely a difference of outward appearance distinguishes internal phenomena from corporeal life, but that an element of peculiar nature, differently constituted from the formless materials [gestaltlosen Stoffe], lies at the base of the world of sensations, of emotions, of strivings [Strebungen], and by its own unity binds them into the whole of a rounded-off development. (Lotze 1869, 143–4 [160]; I modified the translation.)⁴⁷

What we believe in when we believe in the soul is something like an organizing principle. I will fill this out as we go along. But do really people of all nations find themselves with a conviction that there is such a principle? Lotze seems ignorant of the Indian Buddhist tradition that denies the existence of a soul. Be that as it may, Lotze argues that the unexamined conviction that there is a soul needs and admits of proof. He argued for the existence of the soul on the basis of assumptions of the unity of consciousness. Lotze articulated his Argument from the Unity of Consciousness first in his handbook article ‘Seele und Seelenleben’ (Lotze 1846, 12–6), then in Medizinische Psychologie (Lotze 1852, 15–20, Mikrokosmos (Lotze 1869, book II, chapter 1), and finally in his Metaphysik of 1879 (Lotze 1879a § 242–46). The arguments differ, but develop the same theme. Here I will rely mainly on the most detailed version of the argument in Lotze 1869 but incorporate material from other works to shore up the reasoning.

⁴⁶ See Drobisch (1843, 340–2) on the soul as a unit of measurement. ⁴⁷ The first edition of the first volume of Lotze’s Mikrokosmos was published in 1856.

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Lotze’s reasoning starts from an observation about the difference between physical and mental composition. First, composition in physics. Two forces can compose a new force. Let two billiard balls, B₁ and B₂, hit a third one, B₃: the movement of B₃ is a function of the movement of B₁ and the movement of B₂, but the movement of B₃ does not contain these movements as parts. The movement of B₁ and the movement of B₂ cannot be retrieved from the movement of B₃. Then, composition of mental elements to one consciousness. Lotze wrote: The idea of the fusion of several states into one blended state of resultant forces or results springing from the meeting of particular activities, has had a far from beneficial effect on the explanation of internal phenomena; it is worthwhile to point out how absolutely different is the nature of thought, and how utterly in this sphere are we deserted by the ordinary conceptions of physical science, which we have hitherto seemed to treat as directly applicable to the case in point. (Lotze 1869, 163 [182–3])

When different colours are sensed by me, they don’t result in the experience of one colour that is a ‘mix’ of the ones I sense. Lotze points out that Herbart (1824, 240) got the phenomenological facts wrong: physical forces interpenetrate to one new simple force. But my consciousness at any one time is complex: I am aware of colours, sounds, shape, possibilities, etc. In general, there is no ‘mutual penetration’ of presentations etc. These elements are unified into one consciousness, yet, unlike physical forces, the mental events are kept distinct and don’t fuse to a new simple state. How is this possible?

8. A False Lead: Composition via Substance I will start answering this question by setting a tempting answer aside, namely that some mental elements compose to a unified consciousness if, and only if, they are accidents of one and the same mental substance. A substance in the sense of a simple property-bearer can unify different accidents. The unity of a substance at a time is the unity composed of all attributes and/or parts of one substance at a time. Is the unity of consciousness nothing but the unity of a mental substance in this sense? In more detail: do some mental elements M₁ to Mn compose a unity of consciousness at t if, and only if, (∃y) (y is mental substance and M₁ to Mn are accidents of y at t)? Surprisingly, Lotze’s answer is NO. In his ‘Seele und Seelenleben’, he distinguished between the unity of the mental substance on the one hand and the unity of consciousness on the other. Why?

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Because the unity [the soul] would award its states is only such a connection as the unity of a substance can give its states, namely one that is itself not known; but that this connection [the unity of consciousness] consists in an all-manifold penetrating knowledge of this manifold; that therefore the obtaining connection is at the same time a presentation of this connection follows only by subreption from the unity of the soul. For as there are unconscious presentations in it [the soul] this connection can be a merely obtaining one that is not perceived by consciousness. (Lotze 1846, 125)

I think Lotze reasons here as follows: if the soul is a substance, it unifies all its accidents. But the unity of consciousness concerns only some accidents of a soul. For example, a soul is a substance. But the property of being a soul does not belong to the unity of consciousness. Can this problem be finessed by including only mental accidents that are unified by one soul? No, unconscious presentations are also accidents of a soul, but not part of a unity of consciousness. In sum: the assumption that the soul is mental substance does not help to explain the unity of consciousness. If Lotze’s prime reason for introducing the soul is the unity of consciousness, we should therefore expect his soul to be unlike the traditional soul. Fechner, Brentano, and later James all understood Lotze as arguing in Medizinische Psychologie as well as in Mikrokosmos for the conclusion that there is a simple bearer of mental properties and criticized him for it.⁴⁸ It should now be clear that they got it wrong: Lotze did not defend the ‘soulsubstance’.

9. Active Attention and the Unity of Consciousness The soul-substance does not play any role in Lotze’s attempt to answer the question how distinct mental elements are unified into the unity of consciousness while kept distinct. According to Lotze, the distinct elements are unified precisely because they are distinguished and compared to each other: [C]onsciousness keeps those which are different asunder at the very moment when it seeks to combine them; it does not indistinguishably merge the various impressions, but leaves to each its peculiar character, moves comparing among them, and at the same time is aware of the amount and kind of the transition by which it passes from the one to the other. It is in this act of relating and comparing [That des Beziehens und Vergleichens], the [first seed] of all judging, that we have what answers in the wholly different mental sphere to the

⁴⁸ See Fechner (1864, 248). See also Brentano (PES, 13 [I, 26]) and James (1890 I, 349).

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    composition of results in the material; here, at the same time, lies the true meaning of the unity of consciousness. (Lotze 1869, 164 [183]; my emphasis, in part my translation)

Lotze’s talk of a pre-judgemental ‘activity of relating and comparing’ cries out for further analysis and explanation. Consider the following example from Stout that illustrates what Lotze has in mind nicely: Suppose that I am counting a heap of stones, one by one. I am throughout interested in finding out how many there are, and this unity of interest constitutes the unity of the attention-process. I attend to each stone in turn. But I do not attend to each in isolation. I attend to each as being a unit in a sum-total. If I count the stones in groups of three instead of one by one, I may be said to be simultaneously attending to three different things. But I attend to them as forming a single numerical group, and to this group as forming part of the number of stones. (Stout 1899, 49)

Stout counts the stones, so he needs to visually attend to the stones in the scene before his eyes. His attention moves from one stone to another, committing the fact that the stone has already been seen to memory. Active visual attention is exercising one’s vision for a purpose. This purpose gives your visual attention its unity. When your visual attention moves from one stone to another, you feel yourself as persisting in an activity that has not yet run its course. In one and the same process of visual attention, the objects attended to change: you attend to different stones at different times. On the one hand, there is the feeling of an ongoing and not yet completed process; on the other hand, there is an awareness of a turn-over in objects attended to in this process. The process of active attention is experienced as persisting and in experience contrasted with changes in objects attended to. The process of actively attending is the unity in the manifold of different experiences. It is not only the unity in the manifold; it is experienced as such a unity, a persisting process that unfolds over time. This analysis of active attention takes us closer to understanding Lotze’s conception of the soul. We have an example of ONE process—attending to some things in order to count them—that is felt to persist over time and to be distinct from the things on which it ‘operates’. At the same time, the result of the process is knowledge of a collective property that some stones have. Let us read, with this in mind, another pregnant passage from Lotze’s Metaphysik: This is the spiritual being, which carries out the wonderful feat [Leistung], not only to distinguish sensations, presentations, feelings from itself, but at the same time to know them as its states and that embraces the succession of mental states in combining memory through its own unity. I would be misunderstood if one interpreted me as saying that the spirit is able to subsume itself and its inner life

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under the relation of a being and its states or recognise itself as so subsumed. It is rather that the spirit recognises that there is such a relation in the moment in which it experiences its own activity and only its later reflexion on itself generates for its thinking the general concept of this relation, in which only it alone stands without any other example. Only in sensation which simultaneously rejects the sensed content as distinct from us and discloses it as ours does it become clear what is meant by saying that we grasp some a as the state of a being A; only in virtue of the fact that our relating attention embraces past and present in memory, while at the same time the presentation of a persisting self arises to which both belong, does it become clear what it means and how it is possible to be One being in a change of many states. Hence, in virtue of the fact that we appear to ourselves as unities, we are unities. (Lotze 1879a, 168–9 [185–6]; in part my translation)

This is a long and rich quote. But for my purposes, Lotze’s general message suffices: there is a unity x (and not just a manifold or succession of states that falls under a law or rule) if, and only if, x appears as a unity. The recognition or appearance of x as a unity is due to the experience of the activity of attention; it does not consist in a judgement to the effect that something falls under a sortal concept. Stout’s example of counting the stones illustrated this well. In a first-stab formulation, we can say that there is an appearance of (a) the persistence of active attention as (b) distinct from the changing objects on which it is directed. There is not only a series of appearances that falls under a law, but we experience the active attending as one process and not as many related events that are arranged according to a rule or law. The process appears as a unity and is therefore one. The unity of the attention is the unity of the interest, or more generally, the will that sustains the active attention.

10. From the Unity of the Attention Process to the Lotzean Soul So far, we have on the one hand the manifest unity of a mental process, active attention, and on the other hand its result: a unity of consciousness. If you have counted five stones, you unified the stones in your consciousness: you are aware of them together. But neither the process of attention nor the unity of consciousness is the soul. How do we get from the unity of consciousness to the soul? Lotze argued that the unity of consciousness is the same fact as the fact that there is a soul: The fact of the unity of consciousness is eo ipso at once the fact of the existence of a substance: we do not need by a process of reasoning to conclude from the former to the latter as the condition of its existence, a fallacious process of reasoning which seeks in an extraneous and superior substance supposed to be

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    known beforehand, the source from which the soul and each particular thing would acquire the capacity of figuring as the unity and centre of manifold of actions and affections. (Lotze 1879a, 427 [481–2])

This is very puzzling: there is the unity of the attention process and the jointly attended to objects, the unity of consciousness. But neither is a soul. So how can the fact of the unity of consciousness be the fact of the existence of a soul? This question arises if we think of the soul as an object that has an independent, prior existence to the unity of consciousness. The fact that Lotze rejects the question suggests that he does not have such a view of the soul. Indeed, he asked his readers to take his general view about substance on board: When from the given fact of the unity of consciousness I passed on to call the subject of this knowledge existence or substance, I could not possibly intend by doing so to draw a conclusion which should deduce from its premises something not contained in them but really new. For my only definition of the idea of substance was this,—that it signifies everything which possesses the power of producing and experiencing effects, in so far as it possesses that power. Accordingly this expression was simply a title given to a thing in virtue of an achievement [Leistung]; it was not and could not be meant to signify the ground, the means or the cause which would render that achievement [Leistung] intelligible. (Lotze 1879a, 426 [481])

I have translated Lotze’s ‘Leistung’ as ‘achievement’, not as ‘performance’, because ‘performance’ misses the intuitive point Lotze wants to make. We pick some things out because their activities result in achievements. You are a baker because you have a power whose exercise reliably results in an achievement: fresh bread. Lotze’s idea is that substances are things whose activities result in special achievements. The achievement of a soul is the unity of consciousness; the distinctive activity by means of which it brings this achievement about is active attending. Lotze makes clear that the step from the activity and the achievement to substance is not to be understood as an inference from observable phenomena to a ‘hidden’ object whose properties explain the phenomena. It is unfruitful to postulate an unobservable entity that is supposed to explain the change and structure of appearances that we observe. The laws that govern the appearances already do this. If there are things in addition to appearances, they must do more than explain the appearances. The conclusion of his argument, says Lotze, is supposed to add nothing new to the premises. I read this as saying that the introduction of the soul does not go beyond the activity of attending. Lotze does not posit the soul as a theoretical entity that explains observed mental phenomena.⁴⁹

⁴⁹ See also Lotze 1852, 137–8 on the concept of the soul as a ‘phenomenological’ concept.

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How is the step from the activity of attention to the soul then to be understood? Consider Lotze’s remark about the order of creation: God did not first create a simple being which he subsequently gave the power to be ‘the identical point of unification of a manifold of impression and to know itself as such a point’, but God acted in such a way ‘that his creation has this power and therefore is a soul and because it is this way, it is a unified being’ (Lotze 1879b, 430). The nature of the soul is exhaustively specified by saying what its fundamental activity and achievement is. Now if the soul is an object that has the ability to actively attend to elements of a manifold, the question arises in virtue of what it has this ability. This is a question Lotze takes to be unanswerable. If we identify the soul with the power to actively attend to elements of a manifold, the question is avoided. Just as physics acknowledges fundamental powers such as gravitation, so psychology acknowledges, Lotze argues, at least one fundamental power: the power to actively attend. The power itself is, in one sense of ‘unity’, a unity: the same power is exercised on different occasions on different things. If by ‘soul’ Lotze means the fundamental power to attend, his remarks that the fact of the unity of consciousness is eo ipso the fact of the existence of a substance are perfectly understandable. If there is a unity of consciousness comprising A, B, and C, the fundamental power of active attention is exercised with respect to A, B, and C and vice versa. The Lotzean soul is a fundamental power characterized by a distinctive actualization: the activity of attending to some elements. This activity is felt as persisting and ongoing activity and appears distinct from the elements on which it operates. The activity of attention yields knowledge of its unity: it is felt as persisting. If the activity persists, the fundamental power individuated in terms of the activity persists: it is continuously exercised and felt to be as one striving. This is all we need for it to count as the truest unity and thereby as a substance: That which is not only conceived by others as unity in multiplicity, but knows and makes itself good as such [sich gelten macht], is, simply on that account, the truest and most indivisible unity there can be. (Lotze 1879a, 430 [485])

Everything that the primitive power called ‘soul’ can unify is the subject of psychology. The soul, although not a simple substance, turns out to be the object that specifies the subject matter of psychology. Lotze has given an argument for the existence of a fundamental power. In doing so, he has built on the criticism of the soul-substance theory. Lotze’s argument for the soul is, according to William James, the ‘most beautiful criticism of this theory ever written’ (James 1890 I, 349 fn). There is nothing hidden about the soul: the soul is completely manifest in its distinctive activity.

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   

I think the potential and philosophical significance of Lotze’s work on the soul were not understood by his opponents. Santayana gives a partial explanation for this failure: [A]lthough [Lotze] retains the word substance he abandons the notion for which it commonly stands. (Santayana 1889, 153)

Lotze has provided an argument for the existence of a primitive power which he called ‘soul’. This posited power has little to do with Herbart’s Eleatic soul. In the next chapter we will therefore have to assess whether the arguments against the soul apply to both Herbart’s and Lotze’s views.

11. Looking Ahead: From the Unity of Consciousness to Cognition We have now reached a point from which we can give a preview of Part IV. The central figure of this part will be Moritz Schlick, who combined the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach with Neo-Kantian views. One fundamental theme of Schlick’s work is the metaphysics of cognition. Schlick’s views about it are rooted in a Lotzean account of the unity of consciousness. According to Lotze, the unity of consciousness requires the mental act of comparing and relating. Relating is not a propositional attitude, but a mental relation between several objects that unifies the mental acts in which these objects are given to one consciousness. Analytic philosophers will be reminded of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgement that conceives of judgements as multi-grade relations of variable adicity and not as two-place relations between a thinker and a propositional content. Russell arrived at his own multiple-relation theory of judgement after wrestling with the problem of false propositions. Propositions never had any theoretical appeal for Mach et al.; this spared them the detour Russell took. Lotze’s view assigns the mental act of relating a fundamental role: it is responsible for the unity of consciousness. Like Lotze, Schlick takes relating to compose mental acts to the unity of consciousness: The correlating is the most basic, all grounding function of the understanding [Verstand] on which all cognition depends in the last instance. All sensation and feelings of one consciousness are only sensations and feelings of one and the same consciousness because they are tied together to one unit, because they are correlated to each other by consciousness. (Schlick 1911/12, 577)

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In broad brushstrokes: without the unity of consciousness, no cognition is possible and without relating, no unity of consciousness is possible and relating suffices for the unity of consciousness. Hence, relating is the basis of all cognition.⁵⁰ If one has this view about the basis of cognition, it is tempting to go on and take cognition itself as a form of relating. And this is what Schlick does in his epistemology. A judgement is not conceived as a two-place relation between a thinker and a propositional content, but as a multiple relating of a particular and something universal. This view is the meeting point between Neo-Kantianism and Mach’s and Avenarius’ view that one copes with the world by discovering something familiar in the unfamiliar. More in Part IV.

⁵⁰ Schlick (1925a, 383 [352]) quotes with approval Dedekind (1888, iv), who holds that without ‘the ability of the mind to relate things to things’ thinking is not possible at all. Dedekind is the link between Schlick and Lotze. Dedekind studied with Lotze. On the influence of Lotze on Dedekind see, for instance, Schlimm (2017). On correlating as the most fundamental mental act, see Ryckman (1991).

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2 ‘Psychology without a Soul’ He who seeks the self must distinguish between the false and the true self. His ego and all his egotism are the false self. They are unreal illusions and perishable combinations. He who only identifies his self with the truth will attain Nirvâna [ . . . ] Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records (1895), 212. I certainly can’t make any claims of originality with respect to Buddhism. Ernst Mach, Letter to Mauthner, 22.10.1912.

1. Introduction: Hume and Lichtenberg: No Soul in Sight According to the metaphysical psychologists, the soul unifies our understanding of the mental: an event is a mental event if, and only if, it is an event in the life of a soul. In contrast, empirical psychologists aim to distinguish mental from physical events and states without appeal to the soul. Why? What are the problems with the assumption that there is a soul and that psychology is the science of the soul? In this chapter I will introduce the objections to metaphysical psychology that fuelled the ‘Psychology without a Soul’ movement in Austria and Germany. The ‘No Soul’ movement drew on Hume and Lichtenberg. Let’s start with them to get a sense of the issues that drive the movement. In a famous passage in the Treatise Hume wrote: There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure. To attempt a farther proof of this were to weaken its evidence; since no proof can be deriv’d from any fact, of which we are so intimately conscious; nor is there any thing, of which we can be certain, if we doubt of this. (Hume 1739/40, 251–2)

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Hume describes the Cartesian view, according to which we are thinking substances that directly know of their simplicity and persistence, and goes on to argue that we are precisely not intimately conscious of a self, a simple property-bearer, when we are conscious of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. Rather the opposite. In inner consciousness we are only aware of perceptions, mental acts and activities, but not a self that has them: All these [perceptions] are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately consider’d, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (Hume 1739/40, 252; my emphasis)

In consciousness we encounter only perceptions. These don’t depend for their existence on other things. For each perception we can imagine that it occurs without the perceptions that accompany it in actual fact. Hence, each perception qualifies as a substance: a perception can exist independently of anything else. But if everything is a substance, nothing is: the distinction between substance and dependent quality is no longer fruitful. Hume concludes that when we think using the first-person pronoun we don’t think about a simple substance, but about a ‘bundle’ of perceptions.¹ Hume inspired nineteenth-century critics of the mental substance or soul in particular and substance in general. If we want to pursue psychology as an empirical science, the unobservable soul has no place in it. For example, Lange and Brentano quoted Hume extensively.² Brentano used the Humean observation about the selflessness of introspection to criticize the conception of psychology as the science of the soul: If someone says that psychology is the science of the soul, and means by ‘soul’ the substantial bearer of mental states, then he is expressing his conviction that mental events are to be considered properties of a substance. But what entitles us to assume that there are such substances? It has been said that such substances are not objects of experience; neither sense perception nor inner experience reveal substances to us. (PES, 8 [I, 15])

¹ Strawson (2011, 40–5) argues that Hume does not deny that we are aware of a subject in introspection. Hume’s point is only that introspection neither gives us reasons for the persistence of this subject of experience nor reveals its nature. For discussion see Thiel (2011, 422). ² Lange (1873/5 II, 24–5). See PES, 12 [I, 22].

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   

Chapter 1 showed that the Humean observation can only be an opening move: the soul is supposed to be posited because the metaphysics of the soul complements the introspection, not because the soul itself is observed. More in due course. Hume is not only important for the critics of the mental substance. Schlick (1925b, 641) takes Hume to be the first philosopher who clearly articulated the view that, ‘states and processes need not be conceived as dependent properties of “objects”, but that rather every thing can be seen as a complex of processes and states’. The development of an ontology based on this idea will be the topic of Chapter 3. The German experimental physicist and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–89) is a further and at least equally important source of inspiration for the substance critics. Like Hume his criticism focuses on the soul. In his Waste Books, a collection of aphorisms and comments, Lichtenberg formulated a view that resonated with many nineteenth-century philosophers: We become conscious of certain representations that are not dependent upon us; others, at least we believe, are dependent upon us; where is the boundary? We know only the existence of our sensations, representations, and thoughts. It thinks, we should say, just as we say, it lightnings. To say cogito is already too much if we translate it as I think. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical necessity. (Lichtenberg 1994, 412 (K 76 [1793–6]))³

Lichtenberg takes introspection alone to deliver knowledge only of mental acts, broadly speaking of thinking, but not of a thing that thinks. Lichtenberg goes beyond Hume in three points. First, he gives his readers a positive way to think about mental activities if they are not activities of a substance. We say ‘I think of Rome’ and ‘I feel pain’. The word ‘I’ is here a singular term and the question arises as to what it refers. Even if there is good reason to reject the view that the referent is a mental substance, we will look for something which has mental properties and experiences. We will see in section 2.7 that Wundt was motivated by grammatical considerations to allow for a ‘logical subject’ of experience, but rejected the full-blown soul. Lichtenberg gave philosophers a model of a no-subject or no-ownership view of the mind. Reporting thinking in sentences with a subject term like ‘I’ goes beyond what is given in consciousness: If we utter sentences such as ‘I think, I feel, I will’, this ‘I’ involves, as the old physicist Lichtenberg remarked correctly, more than we properly perceive: it is connected with the thought of a subject that walked earth for a while and has many properties. (Stumpf 1939, 345) ³ I use the translation in Tester (2013).

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This subject may not be a substance—it is not simple and depends on other things for its existence—but even the belief that the referent of ‘I’ persists for a while goes beyond what is given in consciousness. A strict report that sticks to how things appear in consciousness needs to avoid the assumption that ‘I’ refers to propertybearer distinct from mental events and states. Even such a referent that has no temporal extension would not do. For empiricists the very idea of a propertybearer distinct from a complex of properties is suspect. We are not given any property-bearer in consciousness. We therefore face a choice: eliminate the firstperson from our language to respect the facts of consciousness or find a place for the subject of experience in consciousness. Lichtenberg gave a one-sentence outline of the first option. There are processes that don’t require a bearer; no object they are ‘in’ or ‘of ’. The lightning storm is not an activity of something or someone: it is subjectless. We report it accordingly: in ‘It lightnings’ (Es blitzt), the ‘it’ does not refer to someone or something: it is a mere grammatical filler. If we trust our awareness, subjectless processes are a model for our mental life. We should report it in the same way as we report subjectless processes. Instead of saying, ‘I am thinking about Rome’ we should say, ‘It is thinking about Rome’ or, ‘Thinking about Rome is happening now.’ Second, Lichtenberg combined his criticism of first-person language with a practical justification of the habit to think in first-person terms. We have the firmly entrenched belief that we are not just bundles of mental processes and events. We believe that we are subjects of mental experience and agency. This belief is not empirically justified. It goes beyond what is given in experience and, as we will see, it is not necessary to explain mental facts. However, there is a different ground for this belief. Our belief in a self is a practical necessity. ‘Practical necessity’ translates the German ‘Bedürfnis’ which, I think, is better rendered as ‘need’. We assume that there is a self and that we are one because it is practically indispensable to do so.⁴ Third, Descartes argued that we are aware that we think. This awareness is sceptic-proof knowledge. Even the demon cannot deceive us about this fact: when we are aware of thinking, we know that we think. According to Descartes, we can infer from this that we are. But if we are only aware that thinking is going on, this argument begs the question. Just as we cannot infer from the fact that it is lightning that there is something that lightnens (Zeus?), we cannot infer from the fact that it is thinking that there is something that thinks.⁵ Contra Descartes, awareness alone does not provide a response to the Cartesian sceptic. ⁴ There are passages in Kant’s discussion of the soul in which he suggests that there is no soul, but that we link mental activities together ‘as if ’ there was a simple soul that persisted over time. I follow Vaihinger (1922, 623–4) here. He refers to Kant (1781, A672/B699 and A682/B710). For Vaihinger Kant’s discussion of the soul provides a model case of the fictional treatment of entities that give rise to philosophical problems. ⁵ See also Russell (1912, 8).

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   

Lichtenberg is a major influence on Austrian Philosophy.⁶ He inspires philosophers to reject the soul and the positing of any subject in psychology. For example, Ernst Mach named him as a strong (potential) influence on his philosophy: I was not directly influenced by Hume whose works I did not know at all. In contrast, his younger contemporary Lichtenberg could have influenced me directly. At least I recall the strong influence his ‘It thinks’ has made on me. (Mach 1910, fn. 5)

I will give more details about this in section 2.8. After Mach, Schlick kept the Lichtenbergian orientation of Austrian Philosophy alive. In his General Theory of Knowledge he takes Lichtenberg’s ‘It thinks’ to point us to the supreme guiding principle of psychology: Lichtenberg’s very true observation that Descartes should have said ‘It thinks’ instead of ‘I think’, is not only an inspired remark but should really be made the supreme guiding principle of psychology. (Schlick 1925a, 161 [147–8])

Of course, ‘It thinks’ cannot be made the supreme guiding principle of psychology. It is not a principle, that is, a general statement, to begin with. The supreme guiding principle is rather: One ought: if one pursues empirical psychology, formulate observationstatements and laws in subjectless terminology.

Why? If psychology is an empirical science, it cannot go beyond what consciousness delivers. We use the first-person pronoun to report our thoughts and perceptions in ordinary life. Here ‘I’ refers to a person with a biography in a particular way. This is perfectly fine because these reports are not supposed to be the input to a psychological theory. But we should not rely on such reports in the science of psychology. For these reports suggest that there is a persisting object whose properties psychology explores. But there are only mental acts in various arrangements that follow up on each other. Schlick will maintain the Lichtenbergian view for the rest of his philosophical career, but formulate it differently.⁷

⁶ And on William James (1890 I, 224–5): ‘If we could say in English “it thinks”, as we say “it rains” or “it blows”, we should state the fact [from which psychology starts] most simply and with a minimum of assumption.’ ⁷ See Schlick (1936, 359).

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2. Lange: Psychology as a Subject without an Object In his Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung für die Gegenwart Friedrich Albert Lange articulated the Hume and Lichtenberg-inspired worry about the soul in a particularly influential form.⁸ Lange (1873/5, 122) mentioned Lichtenberg as having given the sharpest and shortest criticism of Descartes’ Cogito, Ergo Sum argument. In the latter part of the book, after reviewing the work of Herbart and his school, he finds no scientifically respectable reason for the soul. There is little argument or detailed assessment here, but Lange’s final pronouncement had a great impact. Here it is: ‘But does not psychology then mean the doctrine of the soul? How, then, is a science conceivable which leaves it doubtful whether it has any object at all?’ Well, here we have again a charming example of the confusion of name and thing! We have a traditional name for a considerable but by no means accurately defined group of phenomena. This name has come down from a time when the present requirements of strict science were unknown. Shall we reject the name because the object of science has been changed? That were unpractical pedantry. Calmly assume, then, a psychology without a soul! The name [‘psychology’] is still useful as long as there is something to do that is not covered fully by other sciences. (Lange 1873/5, 168 [474], emphasis in German text.)

There is no soul. Therefore ‘soul’ is a name without a reference and, strictly speaking, psychology a science without an object.⁹ Prima facie, psychology and witchology are in the same boat: we believed there is a science going by that name, but, well, there isn’t. These sciences have no object or subject-matter. Whereas this conclusion seems right for witchology, it strikes Lange as implausible for psychology. Rather, the soul is a personative fiction: there is a name in use that actually refers to a range of phenomena, but purports to refer to a single thing that has them. The term ‘the soul’ understood as a singular term is empty, but there is a range of phenomena covered by the name ‘soul’ and they are worth exploring. Lange is rather cavalier about these phenomena. Saying that psychology is the science that deals with phenomena not covered fully by other sciences is unsatisfactory. Is psychology supposed to feed off the scraps of other sciences? So conceived it will hardly be a unified science. Hence, Lange’s followers have the constructive task to give a positive characterization of the subject matter of psychology that does not tie psychology to an unscientific metaphysics. In Chapter 5 we will see how Brentano contributed to this task. ⁸ The first edition of Lange’s book is published in 1866, the second revised edition in 1873 (first volume) and 1875 (second volume). ⁹ See Gori (2015) for an overview of the development of the ‘Psychology without a Soul’ slogan.

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   

The two central figures of Austrian Philosophy, Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach, as well as the pioneer of empirical psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, either directly followed Lange or are sympathetic to the ‘Psychology without a Soul’ slogan.¹⁰ Brentano, Mach, and Wundt reject the soul and therefore they developed non-metaphysical conceptions of psychology. I will start with Brentano, then move on to Wundt and Mach.

3. Introducing Brentano Franz Brentano is one of the founders of Austrian Philosophy.¹¹ I will therefore introduce him in more detail in this section before returning to the main theme. In his philosophical career Brentano started out as a contributor to the ‘Back to Aristotle’ movement in Germany whose leader was Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72). Wundt held this movement in rather low esteem: As was to be expected at a time when original thinking had come to a stand-still, Trendelenburg and his followers occupied themselves chiefly with philological criticism of philosophical works. (Wundt 1877, 513)

Brentano’s PhD On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862)—dedicated to Trendelenburg—and his The Psychology of Aristotle (1867) are exegetical studies of key Aristotelian texts. But Brentano’s later work is a counterexample to Wundt’s disheartening judgement that ‘original thinking had come to a standstill’. Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874; PES) is not, as the title may suggest, a text-book of empirical psychology, but a treatment of the foundational problems of a ‘psychology without soul’: Brentano’s Psychology is the first systematic work of philosophy of psychology. Among other things, he addresses the question what the subject matter of psychology is and he proposes a solution to the Herbart/Comte problem about self-observation. As we will see in due course Brentano was inspired by Aristotle’s De Anima and Thomas Aquinas as well as Hamilton, Mill, and Lotze. In 1874 Brentano was appointed to a chair in philosophy in Vienna. During his time in Vienna (1874–95) Brentano laid out a research program that attracted a new generation of philosophers. In his Geschichte der Neueren Deutschen Philosophie (Siebert 1905, 463–5) Siebert could include Brentano among the ¹⁰ See Stumpf (1874) for a critical notice of both Brentano’s Psychologie and Wundt’s Physiologischer Psychologie. See Titchener (1921) on the relation between Wundt and Brentano. ¹¹ Smith (1994) gives an overview of the philosophical contributions of Brentano and his students. Kraus (1919) and Binder (2017) give overviews of Brentano’s life and work. Kriegel (2018) is an introduction to Brentano’s philosophical system that brings Brentano’s philosophy of mind into contact with his philosophy of value and ontology.

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philosophers who attempted to develop a new (that is, post-Hegelian) system. Siebert listed Meinong, Marty, Martinak, and von Ehrenfels as Brentano’s followers. Siebert’s list is incomplete. Brentano’s research programme is also pursued by his students Carl Stumpf and Kazimir Twardowski. As we will see in Part III, Brentanian themes figured importantly in the development of analytic philosophy.

4. What is Psychology a Science of? Brentano’s Answer Brentano’s Psychology starts with an attempt to define psychology. What is psychology the science of? It is not the science of the soul: Just as in sensation we encounter the phenomena of warmth, colour, and sound, we encounter in inner perception the phenomena of thinking, feeling, and willing. We don’t encounter an entity that has them as properties. It is a fiction, which has no reality at all or, if it existed, its existence could not be certified. Obviously, then, it is not an object of science. Hence natural science may not be defined as the science of bodies nor may psychology be defined as the science of the soul. Rather, the former should be thought of simply as the science of physical phenomena, and the latter, analogously, as the science of mental phenomena. There is no such thing as the soul, at least not as far as we are concerned, but psychology can and should exist nonetheless, although, to use Albert Lange’s paradoxical expression, it will be a psychology without a soul. (PES, 8 [I, 15–16]; my translation)

Brentano follows Hume and Lichtenberg: the primary objects of awareness are physical or, in the case of episodic memory, mental phenomena and the secondary object is the mental activity itself. But the soul is neither a primary nor a secondary object. Brentano’s remarks target the notion of a bearer of mental properties. We are not aware of such a bearer of the activity of hearing when we are aware of hearing. If we are not aware of something which hears or on which hearing depends we are a fortiori not aware of a substantial property-bearer, that is, a metaphysical simple. If we read Brentano as giving an argument for the conclusion that there is no soul, his argument is weak. The argument seems simply to be: We are not aware of a soul—a simple property-bearer—when we are aware of mental activities. Therefore: the soul is a fiction and not an object of scientific study.

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   

However, the Herbartian view is precisely that, while not given in awareness, the soul is an explanatory valuable posit. Brentano’s argument seems to miss its target. We get a better sense of Brentano’s reasoning if we bear in mind that he is not in the process of arguing for or against the existence of the soul. As an argument against the soul, Brentano’s argument is indeed weak.¹² But Brentano wants to argue that the soul does not help us to answer the question what psychology is the science of.¹³ The soul may be a valuable explanatory posit. But what are the observations that are explained by introducing the soul? We can only say that there is a mental substance or soul (in contrast to a substance of another kind) because such a thing pulls its weight in psychology. But we can’t say that psychology is the science that posits souls. Otherwise we would have to bet that we will need to posit a simple substance in psychological investigations before undertaking them. Roughly, if we want to understand what psychology is or is supposed to be, observations are epistemologically and conceptually prior to the theoretical posits that are introduced to explain them. The view that psychology is the science of the soul therefore puts the cart before the horse. We need to explain what psychology is with respect to the range of phenomena to be explained, and not the explanatory machinery to do so. Brentano will give an explanation of psychology that fits that bill. Brentano’s argument is successful against views that take the soul to be a theoretical posit of a science. It is less clear that Brentano’s argument shows Lotze’s idea of a science of the soul to be unfounded. Lotze’s soul is supposed to be part of our common-sense ontology: it is a primitive power of the mind that is known to us through its distinctive activity of distinguishing and comparing presentations (see section 1.10). It is not a theoretical posit and therefore Lotze can say that mental phenomena are those phenomena that ‘make up the life of a soul’. Brentano characterized mental phenomena independently of the soul as those phenomena that are directed onto an object or include an object: Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in

¹² Brentano also argued that Herbart cannot infer the existence of the soul from observations: ‘It [the soul] is supposed to be an absolutely simple being [völlig einfaches Wesen], which does not cause or suffer anything. It is, of course, completely incomprehensible how one could infer to it, given that it does not cause anything’ (Ä, 56. I owe the quotation and translation to Huemer and Landerer (2010, 81). I have changed the translation of ‘Wesen’, though). However, Herbart might simply assume that metaphysical facts about the soul are the grounds from which we can infer that certain causal processes must take place. The fact that the soul is simple grounds the laws of inhibition of ideas, although the soul itself does not cause anything. ¹³ See Witasek (1908, 13–14).

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judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves. (PES, 68 [I, 124–5])

I will discuss Brentano’s characterization of mental phenomena in detail in Chapter 5. But we can already see at this point that intentional inexistence cannot be a property introduced in psychology to give or simplify explanations. It must be a property that we know independently of and prior to psychological research. After Psychology Brentano changed his mind radically and reintroduced the soul.¹⁴ Brentano’s soul metaphysics is subject to all the problems he himself outlined and its motivation is controversial. I will therefore set it aside in this chapter. I am interested in the temporal part of Brentano that aimed to move psychology from the metaphysical to the positive phase. This Brentano will also be the main adversary of the Neutral Monists in Part III of the book.

5. Brentano on Observing Mental Phenomena We have seen in Chapter 1 that Comte argued that psychology is a sham science because there is no scientifically acceptable source of knowledge of its alleged subject matter. In contrast, Brentano is enthusiastic about psychology: it is supposed to be ‘the science of the future’ (PES, 19 [I, 36]).¹⁵ Philosophy may not coincide with the empirical science of psychology, but one makes progress in philosophy by making scientific progress in psychology.¹⁶ If we have a proper science of human thinking and feeling, we will be able to shape our society accordingly. This science will not need to be founded on metaphysics. In order to show that psychology is a proper empirical science, Brentano tackled Comte’s argument against introspection in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. The aim is to show that psychology has its own source of knowledge—Comte is wrong—that need not be complemented by metaphysics—Herbart is wrong. Brentano takes his inspiration from Aristotle. Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics 12.9: It seems that knowing, perceiving, believing and thinking are always of something else, but of themselves on the side [en parergo]. (My emphasis)¹⁷ ¹⁴ See Textor (2017b). ¹⁵ See also Stumpf (1874, 221). ¹⁶ PES, 15–16 [I, 30–2]. ¹⁷ This is a translation of Brentano’s translation. Barnes translates Aristotle’s ‘en parergo’ as ‘by the way’. Joachim Aufderheide proposes that ‘by-product’ might be a more literal translation.

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   

Brentano picks this idea up and runs with it. In a nutshell: Brentano agrees with Comte that we cannot observe our observing when we observe something. But we can be merely aware of (perceive) our observing when we observe. When we are merely aware of an observing, we are directed on it ‘en parergo’.¹⁸ Let us look closer at Brentano’s distinction between inner perception or mere awareness on the one side and observation on the other. Brentano agrees with Herbart and Comte that we cannot pay attention to our present mental life: It is a peculiar feature of inner perception that it can never become inner observation. Objects which one, as one puts it, perceives outwardly can be observed; one focuses one’s attention completely on them in order to apprehend them precisely [genau]. But with objects of inner perception this is absolutely impossible. [ . . . ] It is a universally valid psychological law that we can never focus our attention on the object of inner perception. [ . . . ] It is only while our attention is turned toward a different object that we are able to perceive, incidentally [nebenbei], the mental processes which are directed toward that object. Thus the observation of physical phenomena in external perception, while offering us a basis for knowledge of nature, can at the same time become a means of attaining knowledge of the mind. Indeed, turning one’s attention to physical phenomena in our imagination is, if not the only source of our knowledge of laws governing the mind, at least the immediate and principal source. (PES, 22 [I, 41])

We have considered in Chapter 1 arguments for the conclusion that we can’t observe ongoing mental phenomena. But why can’t inner perception become observation? Inner perception of a mental activity is constitutive of the so-perceived mental act. More precisely: there is one mental activity—consciously seeing a colour— that can be described partially as seeing a colour as well as consciousness of seeing a colour. Consciousness of seeing is not a second, distinct act on top of seeing of the colour. When we say we are conscious of seeing a colour, we just describe one mental activity in a new way. Because consciousness of seeing is not a second, distinct act it is not something that we can do or not do, or something that is subject to our desires. This is, in an important part, what is meant by saying that inner perception cannot become observation and that a mental act is directed on itself only ‘on the side’: We can say that the tone is the primary object of the act of hearing and that the act of hearing itself is the secondary object. [ . . . ] The act of hearing the tone is ¹⁸ For Brentano’s response to Comte see, for example, PES, 24 [I, 46]. See also James (1890 I, 188–90).

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turned to the tone in the most proper sense [im eigentlichsten Sinne zugewandt], and in being so turned it seems to grasp itself on the side [nebenbei] and as an added extra [Zugabe]. (PES, 98 [I, 180]; in part my translation)

When I hear the tone F, it is the primary object, the hearing of the tone the secondary object of my hearing. Brentano explains this distinction in terms of attention: when we hear the note F, we can only attend to the sound, but not our hearing of it. This thesis needs further explanation and motivation, but the basic idea should be clear enough for our discussion.¹⁹ Back to the Herbart/Comte problem about self-observation. Brentano agrees with them that we cannot observe ongoing mental phenomena, but we can be aware of them. But the psychologist needs to observe mental acts, not just be aware of them. Brentano’s distinction alone does not help to solve the Herbart/Comte problem. We need to add episodic memory. Mill (1865 64) required that the psychologist remember the mental event ‘the moment after’ it occurred. We can think of this ‘the moment after’ requirement as intended to ensure that the psychologist is still aware of the past mental fact. If you just heard the bell chime, you can remember your hearing the bell chime in detail and attend to it. In such cases we still have the past event ‘immediately before the mind’.²⁰ Brentano quoted Mill with approval and commented:²¹ We really can focus our attention on a past mental phenomenon just as we can upon a present physical phenomenon, and in this way we can, so to speak, observe it. (PES, 26 [I, 49])

The psychologist must preserve awareness of her mental life in episodic memory and then attend to what she can retrieve in episodic memory.²² Brentano argues that there is a distinct psychological faculty—episodic memory—that can support awareness so that the psychologist can do something approaching to observation: train his attention on a mental phenomenon as it appears in memory.²³ Therefore psychology can be—contra Comte—based on ‘observation’ without—contra Herbart—needing complementation by metaphysics. Is the Herbart/Comte problem solved? Wundt (1888, 299) argued that episodic memory even if it preserves the original experience is a source of error because the

¹⁹ See Textor (2017a, chapter 7). ²⁰ See Russell (1912, 66). ²¹ Stumpf (1939, 349) criticizes Brentano for allowing episodic memory of mental events that are further in the past. Brentano, however, seems not explicitly to deviate from Mill when it comes to the ‘just past’ requirement. ²² See PES, 99 [I, 181]. ²³ See Feest (2014, 699) who argues that for Brentano inner perception alone cannot be a method of the psychologist.

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episodic memory gives rise to associations that were not connected to the original perception. Brentano (PES, 27 [I, 51] is happy to concede that ‘retrospection’ is not infallible. Outer observation is not infallible and yet valuable for empirical science, why should retrospection be infallible? But if one cannot observe one’s thinking or perceiving when one thinks or perceives, can one observe it when one episodically remembers it? Consider the following example from Wundt (1888, 294). I see a flash of lightning for a second. I cannot train my attention on the flash; it passes too quickly for me to attend to it. Now I can retrieve my seeing the flash in episodic memory. I can, as Wundt says, reproduce a memory image of the flash: There is no doubt that here an analysis of the image can take place which is analogous to the one that happens in the planned observation of the objects with respect to the point that in the successive reproduction we attend once to this, then to that part of the picture. (Wundt 1888, 298–9)

You can episodically remember seeing the flash in order to pay attention to the flash you saw. You can pay attention to parts of the scene in which it appeared. But can you episodically remember the seeing of the flash in order to pay attention to your seeing of the flash? If you are like me, you can’t. You get more knowledge about the flash, but not about your seeing of it. You can discern parts in the flash, not in your seeing of the flash. The Herbart/Comte problem is not solved; it is transformed into the question: How can we intentionally attend to our own mental acts either in consciousness or in episodic memory? In both instances mental acts seem to elude our attention. This problem will later be discussed under the labels of ‘Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit’ (Meinong), ‘the impossibility of separating presentation from content or object’ (Lange, Natorp), or ‘diaphaneity’ (Moore, James, Russell). Diaphaneity poses a challenge for Brentano’s philosophy: Why should one assume that there are objects on the one hand and distinguishable mental activities directed on them on the other if one cannot selectively attend to the mental acts? I will come back to this important point in section 5.7 and especially in section 9.4.

6. Herbart’s (and Kant’s) ‘Great Error’ In Chapter 1 we saw that Herbart argued that because introspection cannot be used for scientific purposes metaphysical complementation of our introspective beliefs was needed so that psychological theorizing could get going. In the previous section we have seen that Brentano argued that such hypothetical complementation is not necessary. Instead of complementing introspection with metaphysical knowledge, the psychologist should retain awareness of mental

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activity in episodic memory and then train his attention on the mental phenomena when they are remembered. This move enables Brentano to give an empirically based argument against Herbart: [T]he unity of consciousness does not mean that consciousness, as it is in reality, excludes every plurality of parts of any kind. On the contrary, we have already seen that what inner perception reveals to us can be differentiated into a manifold of activities, and inner perception is infallible. Herbart, of course, was of the opinion that every thing must be simple. [ . . . ] Herbart’s great error, and Kant’s before him, was to affirm the phenomena of inner perception and to make them the basis for their investigations in just the same way that they did those phenomena toward which so-called external perception is directed, i.e. to view them as mere appearances which point to real beings and not as things which are themselves real. If Herbart had done so, the incompatibility of his metaphysical theory with the facts of inner perception would have called his attention here and elsewhere, to certain gaps and equivocations in his proofs and it would not have required someone else’s acumen to show that the contradictions he insisted on were merely apparent contradictions. (PES, 127–8 [I, 233–4]; I changed the translation.)²⁴

The fact of inner perception is that we are aware of many mental acts that stand in various relations and that, when we recall them, can be distinguished. Herbart gave a reason not to trust uncomplemented introspection and argued: (H1)

If x has a multiplicity of parts, x is a collection.

(H2)

Introspection shows me a multiplicity of mental phenomena.

Therefore: (HC1) Either I am a collection or introspection is flawed. (H3)

Introspection is flawed.

Therefore: (HC2) I am not a collection. (H3) is supposed to be plausible for independent reasons (see section 1.3). With the help of further assumptions Herbart went on to argue further that I am an Eleatic substance. Brentano denied (H3): Awareness or inner perception is infallible. Now, awareness or inner perception cannot become observation. But if we have no special reason to mistrust episodic recall of our perceptions of mental phenomena, we are in a position to have knowledge of them. Hence, psychology must take seriously ²⁴ The translation of ‘Herbart war der Meinung, dass jedes Ding einfact sein müsse’ as ‘a thing must be simple’ leaves out the quantifier ‘jedes’. I have corrected this.

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the introspectively based belief that mental life is complex. This belief is incompatible with Herbart’s Eleatic soul. We have therefore an empirical reason to reject it. Should empirical psychology then conceive of mental lives as collections? No, like Herbart, Brentano does not want to give up the belief that there are psychological unities. Brentano argued that there are independent reasons to deny (H1): Unity and simplicity [ . . . ] are concepts which are not interchangeable. Even if one real thing cannot be a multiplicity of real things, it can nevertheless contain a multiplicity of parts. (PES, 121 [I, 223])

One thing can have many parts if the parts are conceptual parts. Let’s take a simple example. Assume that you experience blue and the note F together. Prima facie, you have one experience with several objects. The colour blue and the note F are jointly presented and one can relate them further and one can selectively attend to one of them. If one does so, one can, for example, distinguish consciousness of blue—seeing blue—in one’s presentation. Seeing blue is an abstraction from the presentation that is directed on several things; it is not a separate mental act. We conceptually divide the mental activity into parts, but there are not different events with different causal powers that answer to the different concepts. We can make conceptual divisions because one mental activity is directed on different objects. Such a conception of complexity is suggested by Drobisch and Brentano and developed by Stumpf in more detail.²⁵ He wrote: One can present qualities, for instance, colours and sounds, of different senses together because one can recognize their difference. If each of them were presented in a distinct act of presentation, we could neither talk of difference nor sameness. (Stumpf 1873, 107)

Stumpf wants us to draw the conclusion that colour and sound are not presented in distinct, but in the same act of presentation. How can one act of presentation be directed on different objects? Take a leaf here from contemporary books on plurals. The plural demonstrative ‘these’ can refer to several things, although it does not contain several presentations that refer to one object each. With respect to each object we can distinguish, in the mental act, conceptual parts. To reiterate:

²⁵ See Drobisch (1842, 341–2) on ‘accidental parts’. In the unpublished ms. of the third book of Psychology Brentano comes close to the one-presentation view: ‘All our simultaneous mental activity and hence all our simultaneous presenting belongs to one and the same reality. Everything we present can therefore, in a sense, be designated as the content of one presentation which only contains a multitude of parts’ (PS 53, 015[1]).

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the parts are not mental acts, but concepts that can be applied to one act. In his final work Stumpf summed his view up as follows: Psychology talks of thinking, feeling and willing as states that are supposed to take place in us simultaneously. But it has also talked about the unity of consciousness that unifies the simultaneous states and is itself a fact of consciousness. Basically, there is only one state of consciousness at any time, and what we call thinking, feeling and willing are only results of theoretical considerations, although they are unavoidable in the interest of description and required by the nature of consciousness. I feel now hunger and the desire for a meal: therein lie sensations, presentations, feelings and many other things that the psychologist picks out. But in immediate experience it is a unity, only reflection divides it. Leibniz pointed out that in this unity of consciousness, in this distinctive feature of inner life, lies one prototype for the formation of the concept of substance. (Stumpf 1939, 24–5; my emphasis)

Brentano’s argument from the observed complexity of a mental life is incompatible with Herbart’s Eleatic soul. But the assumption of an unchanging simple soul is indeed extreme. Less extreme views of the soul—the soul is something which unifies mental acts, but is not one—are not ruled out yet. Rather the opposite. Lotze and others argued that the unity of consciousness is supposed to provide strong reasons for the belief in the soul.²⁶

7. Wundt: No Mental Substance, but a Logical Subject Wilhelm Wundt is widely seen as the founder of experimental philosophy. He published in both psychology and philosophy and founded the first institute of psychology in Leipzig in 1879.²⁷ In 1874 Wundt (1832–1920) published Grundzüge Der Physiologischen Psychologie whose ‘real significance lies in the fact that it is the wresting of the whole field of phenomenal psychology out of the hands of the trained metaphysicians’ (Sully 1876, 21). Wundt argued against metaphysical psychology and for empirical psychology: psychology is not the science of the soul. What is psychology then? Wundt gave different answers to

²⁶ The argument also bears on panpsychism; see Lotze (1852, 10). If the world were made only of ‘mind-stuff ’, there would be no unity of consciousness. Royce (1881) used Lotze’s argument to argue against Clifford’s panpsychism. ²⁷ According to Boring (1929, 318), James and Stumpf ran psychological laboratories prior to Wundt (and Wundt may have profited from Fechner’s spade work in Leipzig). Wundt’s achievement was to get a psychological laboratory to be recognized as an administrative unit, an institute, of the University of Leipzig.

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this question at different points of his career. Here I will be concerned with the answer he gave in his Grundzüge. Wundt started by giving a nuanced account of the role of the soul in setting the agenda for psychology. In general, sciences use concepts they find encoded in natural language: The human mind is so constituted that it cannot gather experiences without at the same time supplying an admixture of its own speculation. The first result of this naive reflection is the system of concepts which language embodies. Hence, in all departments of human experience, there are certain concepts that science finds ready made before it proceeds upon its own proper business; results of that primitive reflection which has left its permanent record in the concept-system of language. ‘Heat’ and ‘light’, e.g. are concepts from the world of external experience, which had their immediate origin in sense-perception. Modern physics subsumes them both under the general concept of motion. But it would not be able to do this, if the physicist had not been willing provisionally to accept the concepts of the common consciousness, and to begin his inquiries with their investigation. ‘Soul’ [Seele], ‘intellect’ [Geist], ‘reason’ [Vernunft], ‘understanding’ [Verstand] etc., are concepts of just the same kind, concepts that existed before the advent of any scientific psychology. The fact that the naive consciousness always and everywhere points to internal experience as a special source of knowledge, may, therefore, be accepted for the moment as sufficient testimony to the rights of psychology as science. And this acceptance implies the adoption of the concept of ‘soul’ to define [umgrenzen] the whole field of internal experience. (Wundt 1874, 16–17 [8–9])²⁸

Wundt uses the older science of physics as a model for the younger science of psychology. Physics finds the concepts of heat and light already in use. It can initially adopt them to start its inquiries. The fact that there are such concepts is a metaphysical presupposition of physics. Physics will need then to proceed by ‘purifying’ and generalizing these concepts. Purification is needed because the human mind is driven to speculate and its speculations shape the concepts it forms. In the case of light, the ‘explanation-seeking’ mind connects an observed phenomenon with rays sent out from a source (‘light radiates’). These speculations of the explanation-seeking mind may not withstand scientific scrutiny and may even hinder scientific progress. But science needs to start somewhere and it can revise its concepts as it progresses. This raises problems about theory change: if our concepts change, does the physicist still talk about heat and light? But any

²⁸ Titchener translated ‘Seele’ misleadingly with ‘mind’. I will change this translation where necessary.

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view of science needs an answer to this question and if a plausible one is to be had, Wundt can accept it for his purposes. What the concepts of heat and light are for physics, the concept of a soul is for psychology. As Lotze already pointed out, we find ourselves with a belief in a soul. But we can give an account of how this belief arose. We first have an epistemic fact—prior to any theorizing we take consciousness to be a distinct source of knowledge—and this suffices to justify the view that psychology is a distinctive science. If there is a distinctive source of knowledge, there must be a special object about which we gain knowledge in this way: the soul. The soul so conceived is a subject of judgement, or logical subject. According to common sense, the soul is a logical subject. Prima facie, speaking of an object as a logical subject seems confused. A logical subject, one will assume, is an expression or concept that occurs in a particular position in a sentence or judgement. But Wundt’s examples of logical subjects are objects like the soul or properties like wisdom. We get a clue how to resolve this exegetical problem by consulting the list of thinkers whose influence Wundt acknowledges in the preface of Principles: Darwin, Herbart, and Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant used the notion of a logical subject in his discussion of the first paralogism of pure reason (A350). This paralogism purports to be an inference from facts about judgement about ourselves to the conclusion that we are substances. A detailed discussion of Kant’s treatment of it is beyond the scope of this chapter. But the use he makes of ‘logical subject’ is instructive. Kant writes: Now in all our thinking the I is the subject, in which thoughts only inhere as determinations, and this cannot be used as a determination of another thing. Thus everyone must necessarily regard Himself as a substance, but regard his thinking only as accidents of his existence and determinations of his state. (Kant 1781/7, A349)

Like Wundt later, Kant seems to confuse use/mention. If we clear this up, we arrive at the view that a word like ‘I’ can only be used in singular term position, but not as a complete predicate.²⁹ It cannot be used to predicate something. Hence, we conceive of the referent of ‘I’ as something which is determined by properties and not itself something which determines an object. Everything Wundt says about the soul as a logical subject fits the Kantian notion: the soul is the referent of a term that can only be used as a singular term, never as a complete predicate. Therefore the soul is a logical subject in a derived sense: something that is determined in judgements that are based on consciousness, but not itself a determination.

²⁹ For this diagnosis see Proops (2010, 474–5).

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   

Unfortunately, the speculating mind goes beyond the epistemic and logical facts: [W]e are declining once and for all to read into the concept of soul a meaning that the naive linguistic consciousness always attaches to it. For this consciousness soul is not simply a subject in the logical sense, but a substance, a real being; and the various activities of mind as they are termed, are its modes of expression or action. (Wundt 1874, 17 [10]; I have modified the translation.)

The logical observation that ‘I’ and like terms are singular terms and cannot be complete predicates is explained in terms of the nature of their referents: the referent is a substance which has the processes and events observed in consciousness as properties. In setting up empirical psychology, we need to separate the wheat from the chaff in this package deal we find ourselves with. At the outset it is not clear whether the soul belongs to the wheat or chaff: [The metaphysical presupposition of a soul is something that] psychology may possibly be led to honour at the conclusion of her work, but which she [psychology] cannot on any account accept, untested, before she has entered upon it. Moreover, it is not true of this assumption as it was of the discrimination of internal experience at large, that it is necessary for the starting of the investigation. (Wundt 1874, 17 [9]; my emphasis.)

Wundt comes to the same conclusion as Brentano. One cannot define psychology as the science of the soul because one needs to pursue psychological research to test the view that there is a soul. Hence, we need to know what psychological research is before we can justifiably adopt the hypothesis that there is soul. What is psychology then? In contrast to Brentano, Wundt does not characterize mental phenomena by an intrinsic property—being directed on something—but by an epistemic property. Psychology studies those and only those phenomena that are given in inner experience. Now Wundt needs to say what inner experience is without appealing to mental phenomena in his explanation. In Grundzüge Wundt says rather little about the distinction between inner and outer experience. But there is a principled problem about this definition. Wundt (1874, 1 [1]) describes inner experience as a method of observation. We already know that ‘observation’ has to be taken with a grain of salt. But, in general, methods of observation change, at least if we have a fine-grained understanding of ‘method’. Why should what is now only an object of inner observation not become an object of outer observation? This question is pressing for Wundt because he (Wundt 1874, 1 [1]) argues that sensations and voluntary movement are open to inner as well as outer observation. Are there then phenomena that are both mental and

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physical? I will come back to this question in Chapter 4 when discussing Wundt’s second definition of psychology. According to Wundt, psychology can do without the soul. However, unlike Brentano and Lange, Wundt wants to provisionally retain the soul as a ‘logical subject’: We speak of virtue, honour, reason; but our thought does not translate any one of these concepts into a substance. They have ceased to be metaphysical substances, and have become logical subjects. In the same way, then, we shall consider for the time being, soul simply as the logical subject of internal experience. Such a view follows directly from the mode of concept-formation employed by language, except that it is freed of all those accretions of crude metaphysics which invariably attach to concepts in their making by the naive consciousness. (Wundt 1874, 18 [9])

Wundt recommends that we keep the singular terms like ‘I’ or general terms like ‘a self ’, but give up our conception of their referent or objects in their extension. When we say ‘I see blue’ or ‘I am in pain’ we seem to ascribe relational or nonrelational properties to something. Wundt finds this handy: ‘Why dispense with this way of talking?’ he asks (Wundt 1874, 18 [9]). We don’t need to rephrase our talk and our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to others and ourselves in the impersonal Lichtenberg style, but can even in empirical psychology use our ordinary way of talking. We only need to bear in mind that the referent of these terms is not a substance. What is it then? Soul will accordingly be the subject, to which we attribute all the separate facts of internal observation as predicates. The subject itself is determined wholly and exclusively by its predicates; and the reference of these to a common substrate must be taken as nothing more than an expression of their reciprocal connexion. (Wundt 1874, 17 [9]. Titchener put ‘soul’ into quotation marks, Wundt didn’t, I go with the later.)

If the nature of the soul is ‘wholly determined’ by the properties and relations a human being can be conscious of, the soul is not an independent existent that has further non-mental properties which then ground the possession of mental ones. Wundt rejects the mental substance, but keeps the owner or subject of experience. His reasons for this manoeuvre are weak: ‘Such a view follows directly from the mode of concept-formation employed by language’ (Wundt 1874, 18 [9]). It does, but why should we respect the mode of concept-formation employed by language? Carnap (1928, 105 [66]) quotes approvingly Nietzsche’s Will to Power § 370:

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    It is merely a formulation of our grammatical habit that there must always be a doer when there is a deed.

Why should the empirical psychologist follow this grammatical habit and not change to a new Lichtenbergian one? Ascribing mental properties to objects is something we do all the time in practical life, but there seems to be a good reason not to do it in psychology. If we go back to the quote from Brentano in this section, Brentano’s complaint against the assumption of a soul is not that awareness does not show us a simple and lasting object—what would it be to be aware of such an object?—but that it does not show us one thing that has properties. While we talk about self having properties and standing in relations, this way of talking jars with inner experience. So we should not employ it in psychology. Brentano rejected not only a mental substance; he also rejected a subject of experience. Psychology investigates the structure of mental phenomena that are not owned by or belong to a subject distinct from them. In the following we will see that the arguments for mental substances are often also arguments for subjects of experience.

8. Introducing Mach We encountered the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916) already in previous sections. Since he is one of the fathers of Austrian philosophy, it is worth introducing him in more detail. He held professorships first in mathematics (1864), then in physics (1866), in Graz. In 1867, he took up a chair in physics in Prague. In 1895, he was appointed in Vienna to the newly founded chair in philosophy with special attention to the history and theory of the inductive sciences and held it until 1901. His successor in this chair would be, in 1922, Moritz Schlick. Mach is a scientist with an impressive track record in physics and physiology. He discovered the optical illusion now called ‘Mach bands’, confirmed the Doppler effect, and made groundbreaking contributions to supersonic fluid mechanics. Mach’s Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung (Mach 1883a) contains a critical discussion of Newton’s arguments for absolute space that prepared the ground for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Mach is not only of interest for the history and philosophy of science. Hintikka answered his question: ‘Who, historically speaking, was the central figure in the genesis of twentieth-century philosophy?’ with: Ernst Mach. Why? [Mach] became [ . . . ] a highly influential exponent of ways of thinking that influenced not only the intellectual climate in turn-of-the-century Vienna but, more widely, twentieth-century philosophy in general. (Hintikka 2001, 82)

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In which way was Mach influential? We have seen in section 1.2 that Mach started out as a Herbartian. But he turned into the most influential opponent of a metaphysics of substances or things in themselves. After reading Kant the teenage Mach had a philosophical epiphany: On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view. I had still to struggle long and hard before I was able to retain the new conception in my special subject. (Mach 1914, 30 [24])

Herbart was right about the sensory Given, but wrong that ‘behind’ the Given are substances and the like. Mach gradually works out his philosophical vision in a naturalistic account of how beings like us arrived on the basis of the Given at a common-sense picture of the world that contains material objects and objects with a mental life. Simplifying somewhat, Mach provided an account of how sensory qualities are collected into complexes that common sense knows as material objects and philosophers misconceive as substances. This account is pragmatic: the complexes are useful for our survival. Mach’s (and Avenarius’) pragmatic construction of our common-sense world is the most important inspiration for Carnap’s Logical Construction of the World.³⁰ But whereas Carnap seeks to construct complexes by logical procedures from the Given, Mach sees objects as constructed by pragmatic principles. For example, we have natural drives that collect certain elements into bundles. There is nothing logical about the bundling. In general, the idea that an account of how our view of thinkers and things is arrived at from an epistemologically privileged basis—the Given—is an important philosophical project that is associated with Mach. Neither Mach nor Carnap thought that the Given contained a distinction between mental and physical things. Hence, both are Neutral Monists. More in Chapter 4. Mach also led by example. He became the intellectual role model for the philosophers who wrote the Vienna Circle Manifesto—Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath—and those that collaborated with them. The Verein Ernst Mach tries to spread habits of thinking and attitudes, not doctrines. Through the translations of his work, Mach also influenced American philosophers, especially William James. In his Analysis of Sensations (first edition 1886, translation 1914), Mach tried to show that the unity of consciousness is not a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of scientific theorizing in physics or biology. There is no need for a metaphysical simple (Herbart) or primitive power (Lotze) to explain the unity of consciousness. Let us see whether Mach is right. ³⁰ See Carnap (1928, § 3; 1963, 15).

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   

9. Mach I: The Ego Must Be Given up! In his Analysis of Sensations, Mach reinforced the ‘Psychology without Soul’ slogan. There is no simple soul-substance that serves to anchor a distinction between the mental and physical. Mach quoted Lichtenberg and took up Lichtenberg’s idea that we assume the self for practical reasons. There is a complex object, which Mach also called ‘ego’, but no metaphysical simple. The ego’s principle of unity is practical: if some things together play a causal role in the satisfaction of a need, they form a practical unity. This genealogy is the basis for an error theory, according to which the ego is a useful practical posit but not a real unity. I will now work through Mach’s account of the self as a complex. In order to explain Mach’s reasoning, we need first to introduce the basics of his ontology. Like Herbart, Mach assumed that we perceive complexes of qualities. Qualities or, as Mach will say, elements need no bearer. Qualities have causal powers: they are agreeable or disagreeable: [Sensations] are agreeable or disagreeable, that is to say our body reacts by means of more or less intense movements of approach or retreat, which in turn present themselves to introspection as complexes of sensations. (Mach 1976, 17 [21])

If we conceive of an element with respect to its power to cause movement of a body, we treat it as a sensation. Sensations tend to cause movements of either approach or retreat. These movements are themselves complexes of sensations. Hence, sensations have a particular kind of causal power. Sensations are always more or less active (Mach 1976, 17 [24]): they tend to cause movement-complexes. If a complex of elements contains sensations, it tends therefore to change in particular ways: new elements that make up movements will enter the complex. Now, there are some complexes that respond in a distinctive way to sensations. They try to maximize agreeable sensations and minimize disagreeable ones; they seek pleasure and flee pain. Such complexes are what Mach calls ‘mentaleconomic unities’: To bring together elements that are most intimately connected with pleasure and pain into one ideal mental-economical unity, the ego; this is a task of the highest importance for the intellect working in the service of the pain-avoiding, pleasureseeking will. The delimitation of the ego, therefore, is instinctively effected, is rendered familiar, and possibly becomes fixed through heredity. Owing to their high practical importance, not only for the individual, but for the entire species, the composites ‘ego’ and ‘body’ instinctively make good their claims, and assert themselves with elementary force. (Mach 1914, 22–3 [18])

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A key to understanding Mach’s idea is the fact that the first sentence of the quote (‘the intellect working in the service of the . . . will’) is a paraphrase of Schopenhauer: For the most part, cognition always remains subordinated to the service of the will, as it in fact developed in this service, and indeed sprang from the will as the head springs from the trunk of the body. (Schopenhauer 1844a, 200 [209])

The Will is not the will of a person: it is a general striving. For Mach, it is a striving to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. More about the Will in section 3.5. Egos, things with a mental life, are mental-economic units. They are complexes of elements that contain sensations and aim to maximize agreeable and minimize disagreeable elements. An ego is an economic unity in two senses.³¹ First, it is designed by nature for a purpose, namely to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Second, if we know that a complex is an ego, we can use knowledge about its striving to predict how it will change in the future. Therefore, egos allow other egos to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Psychologists can explore the ‘mechanics’ of egos precisely because they are not simples like the Herbartian substance. Bodies are also economic unities: they are stable complexes of elements that tend to cause other elements to occur. We can form expectations about the occurrence of the new elements and these expectations serve the Will.

10. Mach II: Practical Unity and the Picture Theory Why believe that egos are nothing but practical unities? Mach’s opponent is the metaphysical psychologist who holds that the soul is a real unity. The term ‘real unity’ occurs repeatedly in Herbart’s Psychologie.³² A real unity is a metaphysical simple. The soul is supposed to be the paradigmatic example of a real unity. Mach takes the opponent to face a dilemma: If we regard the ego as a real unity, we become involved in the following dilemma: either we must set over against the ego a world of unknowable entities (which would be quite idle and purposeless), or we must regard the whole world, the egos of other people included, as comprised in our own ego (a proposition to which it is difficult to yield serious assent). [I]f we take the ego simply as a practical [unit], put together for purposes of provisional survey, or as a more strongly cohering group of elements, less ³¹ Mach (1910, 226) defines ‘economic’ as ‘excluding purposelessness’. ³² See Herbart (1825, 117 (§ 119), 197 (§ 139), 230 (§ 145)).

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    strongly connected with other groups of this kind, questions like those above discussed will not arise, and research will have an unobstructed future. (Mach 1914, 28 [23])

In brief: If I am a soul and the soul is a real unity, then either: (i) there are objects other than myself, but I cannot have knowledge about them, or: (ii) there are no distinct objects from me and therefore knowing about myself is all there is to know. If the soul is a practical unity, the dilemma does not arise. Hence, we should accept the view that the soul is a practical unity. It is easy to agree with Mach that the second horn of the dilemma is beyond belief. But why should one endorse the first horn of the dilemma? Why can’t a real unity have knowledge of objects that are distinct from it? As we will see in Chapter 6, Mach will explain (or explain away) representation in terms of one complex ‘picturing’ another complex. The ego can only be or make itself a picture of a fact if it has parts that can be arranged like the parts of the facts. Hence, a simple soul cannot picture anything! Wundt arrived at a similar conclusion before Mach. Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology closed with the following thought: Not as a simple being, but as an ordered unity of many elements is the human soul what Leibniz called it: a mirror of the world. (Wundt 1874, 863; my translation)

It is not difficult to see Wundt as addressing Herbart’s Eleatic view of substance here. The soul can only be the mirror of the world if it is an ordered manifold of elements, not a simple One. If we need mental complexity, we should reject the Herbartian soul. The same argument reoccurs in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus.³³ Like Mach, Wittgenstein endorsed a picture theory of representation. If we take it that propositional attitude ascriptions such as ‘John believes that London is further south than Oxford’ inform us about how a subject, John, represents the world, we must take the subject to have a picture of the state of affairs that London is further south than Oxford. This picture consists in names related in a particular way and only a subject that has several parts can picture in this way. Wittgenstein concludes:

³³ See O’Brien (1996, 179–80).

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5.5421 This shows too that there is no such thing as the soul—subject etc.—as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day. Indeed a composite soul would no longer be a soul.

We will see that at the time Wittgenstein wrote this, Russell and Moore—both named in 5.5541—believed that there is a subject that is not a series of mental acts. This subject represents the world. If the subject is distinct from its mental acts, it seems to be simple. So how can the subject make itself pictures of facts? If it can picture facts, what distinguishes it from a complex of mental acts? The Cambridge psychology of his day is superficial in Wittgenstein’s eyes because it helps itself to the subject without taking seriously that the subject must be simple. Mach’s practical unity is indeed no longer a soul; that is the very point of Mach’s remarks. The practical unity that is my ego and the practical unity that is your ego can share parts and both can share parts with what we call ‘external reality’. There is no longer an antithesis of mind and world: ego and world literally overlap. How strong is this argument? Mach at least manages to put pressure on Herbart. A simple soul does not have parts but it can have accidents. How can the soul have accidents that represent a realm of objects that are distinct from it? It is no mystery, however, how Lotze’s unity of consciousness can picture a complex fact. It is itself complex that has a centre and elements that are ranked in salience. At best, Mach’s argument hits Herbart. Herbart takes it to be a primitive fact that the simple soul can represent its environment. In turn, Mach can give an explanation of what the opposition takes to be primitive by identifying egos and bodies with practical unities. However, Mach’s conclusion is compatible with Lotze’s soul theory. The unity of consciousness is a unity in which parts can be distinguished: such a unity can mirror the world. The soul is the unity of consciousness and itself a unity in virtue of having the power to unify mental elements.

11. Lotze Responds to the Empiricists: The Soul IS Observable We have seen that the Humean finding that no simple property-bearer is given in introspective awareness drives the empirical psychologists. In his review of Fechner’s book Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht (Fechner 1879) Lotze tried to turn the tables on them:³⁴

³⁴ The thesis is suggested before Lotze by Herbart: ‘The whole sum of my presentation, desires, and individual states would not constitute a personality if there were not the subject for whom these individual determinations served as an inner play [Schauspiele]’ (Herbart 1824, 270).

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    I know very well that many recommend as an unprejudiced empirical method first only to talk about the sensation and to disregard the dark soul to whom one wants to ascribe it. But I respond that with such a beginning one rather moves away completely from any empirical foundation. Even if we set aside what we call the unity of consciousness, every single sensation leads us back to this question [Who experiences?]: we don’t observe a process which is precisely and completely designated if we say: a sensation is or is sensed; what we observe is always only this: I sense. (Lotze 1879b, 427; my emphasis)

I read Lotze as endorsing a thesis that in contemporary philosophy has been discussed by Galen Strawson: Experience/Experiencer Thesis: It is impossible for there to be sensation without a ‘sensor’.³⁵

Strawson (1994, 129–33) called the thesis also ‘Frege’s Thesis’. The logician Gottlob Frege (1918, 305) indeed endorsed the thesis. But, given that Frege heard Lotze’s lectures when studying in Göttingen from 1871 to 1873, it is likely that Frege’s Thesis is really Lotze’s.³⁶ Lotze’s question ‘Who has the experience?’ (‘Who experiences?’) leaves room for experiencers of different ontological kinds. To see this let’s have a look at some contemporary answers that identify different kinds of experiencing subjects. P. F. Strawson (1959, 97) argues that mental states and experiences owe their identity to persons that undergo or have them. Strawsonian persons are relatively permanent particular objects that are supposed to have mental and physical properties in the same sense.³⁷ A goldfinch is a perfectly fine Strawsonian person; so Strawsonian persons are not what you and I think persons are: beings that can, for example, be held accountable for their actions.³⁸ But let’s set this aside. In our actual practice we ascribe mental states and experiences to persons like you and me and sentient animals: Who saw the new flower in the garden? Our neighbour Emily did. Who saw the new flower in the garden? The slugs must have seen it; the flower did not last long.

³⁵ I take the label from G. Strawson (2017, 253). He denies that the Experience/Experiencer Thesis can be used to argue for a subject that is distinct from the process of thought. See G. Strawson (1994, 131–3). ³⁶ Both G. Strawson (1994, 129) and Peacocke (2014, 41–3) find the thesis that experiences essentially depend on subjects in Frege. ³⁷ See P.F. Strawson (1959, 101–2). See there p. 95 for criticism of the view that experiences are individuated by the relation to an ego. ³⁸ See Frankfurt (1971, 5–6).

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Neither a Strawsonian nor a common-sense person is a subject of experience. For example, a subject of experience is not, or need not be, something to which physical features such as height and weight are ascribable. Now, Frege’s thesis (which should be Lotze’s Thesis) concerns subjects of experience. Subjects don’t figure in our practice of ascribing mental states and experiences, but reflection on our experiences is supposed to deliver the insight that there must be something x that experiences and that is not an experience. This x is the subject. Contemporary defenders of the subject are divided about its nature: Peacocke (2014, 43) has a thick notion of a persisting subject that may be disembodied; Galen Strawson (2003, 293) a thin notion of a subject whose existence depends on the existence of an experience, but who may or may not persist. The best chance for the Experience/Experiencer Thesis to be true is to take it to be about the ‘thin’ subject. I will therefore assess it with this in mind. How did Lotze intend to use the Experience/Experiencer Thesis to show that Hume and his followers are not true Empiricists? If the thesis implied that one cannot be aware of a sensation without being aware of a sensing subject, Hume et al. would leave an observable fact out. They would indeed, as Lotze claimed, move away from the empirical foundation of psychology. But it does not follow from the Experience/Experiencer Thesis alone that we are aware of a subject if we are aware of a sensation. Yes, there must be a subject of the experience, but we need a further assumption that it is necessarily observed when there is awareness of an experience. Compare: a created object cannot exist without an act of creation and the creator or act of creation may be part of the identity of some created objects. Yet, there is no temptation to hold that one cannot observe the creation without observing its creator. Can Lotze add plausible assumptions to the Experience/Experiencer Thesis to show that the empiricists go wrong in the rejection of the soul? In his Metaphysik he said more about the topic: It has been required of any theory which starts without presuppositions and from the basis of experience, that in the beginning it should speak only of sensations or ideas, without mentioning the soul to which, it is said, we hasten without justification to ascribe them. I should maintain, on the contrary, that such a mode of setting out involves a willful departure from that which is actually given. A mere sensation without a subject is nowhere to be met as a fact. It is impossible to speak of a bare movement without thinking of the mass whose movement it is; and it is just as impossible to conceive a sensation existing without the accompanying idea of that which has it [so wenig ist eine Empfindung denkbar als bestehend ohne die Mitvorstellung dessen, der sie hat],—or, rather, of that which feels it; for this also is included in the given fact of experience that the relation of the feeling subject to its feeling, whatever its other characteristics may be, is in

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    any case something different from the relation of the moved element to its movement. (Lotze 1879a, 423 [476–7])

Lotze starts from a conceptual truth (the Experience/Experiencer Thesis) and moves from there to a truth about thinking of sensations: A sensation cannot exist without a ‘sensor’. Therefore: in conceiving of a sensation one co-conceives or co-presents the sensor.

Lotze’s reasoning is based on an analogy. I cannot think that there is a movement without thinking that the movement is the movement of something. Similarly, I cannot think that there is a sensation without thinking that there is something which has the sensation. Lotze goes one step further: our idea or conception of the sensation includes as a part the idea or conception of the sensor. Lotze’s argument is problematic. But even if it went through, its conclusion does not show that the empirical psychologists got it wrong. Maybe we cannot but conceive or think that there is a sensation without a subject. But this is not what the Empiricists denied. Their thesis is that awareness or inner perceptions shows us only mental acts. Since awareness of a mental act and conceiving a mental act are distinct Lotze seems to miss his target. Sydney Shoemaker (1996, 10) uses structurally similar analogies to arrive at the conclusion that Lotze has in mind. There is no bending of a branch without a branch bending. Hence, one perceives a bending of a branch by observing a branch that bends. Shoemaker even takes the branch to be the primary object of perception. He argues further: it makes little sense to suppose that there might be a mode of perception that has as its object branch bendings but never branches. Since experiences cannot exist without experiencers, it equally makes ‘little sense to suppose that there might be a mode of perception that has as its objects experiences and not experiencers’ (Shoemaker 1996, 10). If convincing, this gets us closer to the conclusion Lotze wants to draw from the Experience/Experiencer Thesis, namely that awareness of a sensation is/includes also awareness of a ‘sensor’. However, the conclusion Shoemaker wants to draw does not follow because, roughly put, perception does not track, in general, ontological dependence. Consider two examples for illustration. First, it is impossible for there to be an eclipse of the sun that is not of the sun. No sun, no eclipse of it. But perceiving the eclipse of the sun is perceiving something that makes the sun itself impossible to perceive.³⁹

³⁹ Thanks to Tom McLelland for the example.

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       ? 73 Second, an essential part or feature of an object may be so fascinating that it completely absorbs one’s visual attention. One perceives only the feature or part; the object may not show up at all in one’s visual phenomenology. The feature ontologically depends on the object it is a feature of, yet one can perceive the feature without perceiving the object. In effect, one perception of the feature makes perception of the object difficult. Nothing so far said excludes that something like this is the case for introspection. Consider again Herbart’s remark: Do we ever find in self consciousness only Us ourselves and simply such a knowledge of ourselves? Not at all. Always some individual determination intrudes . . . (Herbart 1824, 267)

A feeling may be an individual determination of a feeler. But the feeling distracts or ‘covers’ the thing on which it depends. Maybe one can infer that there is something that has the experiences. But this is beside the point. For the perceivability of the self is at stake here. Empiricists such as Lichtenberg would also balk at the necessity claim. There are processes that have no subject: If there is a storm, there is nothing which ‘storms’. I can conceive of a tornado without conceiving of a subject that undergoes or performs it. When we are aware of our mental life, it is given to us in a subjectless process and the question of its subject does not arise. The appearance to the contrary is due to the language in which we report it. Empirical psychologists won’t be impressed by Lotze’s response. In the next section of this chapter I want to get a further argument against the soul in view that does not appeal to the fact that we have no immediate perceptual knowledge of a bearer of mental properties.

12. Can Sensations Be Prior to the Ego? Lotze versus Mach According to Mach (1914, 23 [19]), sensations are ontologically and conceptually prior to the practical unity of the ego. The ego is a complex of sensations that has a particular principle of unity. Its parts are supposed to be prior to and independent of it. Similarly Brentano holds that mental acts are conceptually and metaphysically independent of a subject or soul (more in section 5.4). On both views, the constituents of a mental life are conceptually or metaphysically independent from a distinct object that is supposed to ‘have’ them. This independence thesis is incompatible with Lotze’s Experience/Experiencer Thesis. In Lotze’s (1879b, 427) words, ‘every single sensation leads us back to this question [Who experiences?]’. For illustration compare:

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    1. There was a thunderstorm at 5 p.m. 2. There was an experience at 5 p.m.

The question ‘Who stormed?’ makes no sense in response to 1. But the question ‘Who underwent the experience at 5 p.m.?’ makes sense as a response to 2. and the question naturally arises. If we don’t know who had an experience at 5 p.m., we are not able to pick out an experience uniquely and think about it. One might then go on to infer from this observation that the fundamental grounds of difference of experiences etc. are things that have experiences. Just as a taste is essentially the taste of something, an experience is essentially the experience of an experiencer. This metaphysical thesis is different from the thesis that one can only observe a mental process if one observes something that undergoes it. If Lotze’s thesis about the metaphysics of sensation is right, the subject cannot be a complex or unity of elements that are metaphysically and conceptually prior to it. Mach is aware of this objection: It is often pointed out that a psychical experience which is not the experience of a determinate subject is unthinkable, and it is held that in this way the essential part played by the unity of consciousness has been demonstrated. (Mach 1914, 25–6 [20–1])

He has two responses to the objection.⁴⁰ Let’s start with Mach’s ‘bad habit’ response: If knowledge of the connexion of the elements (sensations) does not suffice us, and we ask, ‘Who possesses this connexion of sensations, Who experiences it?’ then we have succumbed to the old habit of subsuming every element (every sensation) under some unanalysed complex, and we are falling back imperceptibly upon an older, lower, and more limited point of view. (Mach 1914, 25–6 [20–1])

Instead of providing an account of the unity of consciousness, Mach argues that posing the Lotzean question Who experiences the sensation? is the product of an instinctive habit that we must overcome. If we have knowledge of the events that we are interested in and their relations to each other, we know all there is to know for psychology. What is the habit to which Lotze et al. succumb? We have ‘[t]he habit of treating the unanalysed ego complex as an indivisible [unteilbare] unity’ (Mach

⁴⁰ For arguments sympathetic to Mach see Parfit (1999, section IX).

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       ? 75 1914, 26 [21]).⁴¹ If this habit ‘kicks in’, the questions arise which ego—the subject that is distinct from the complex of sensations—undergoes an experience and how the experience is unified with others. Mach argues that this habit is a useful misrepresentation. Precisely because body and self are practical units, we represent them as indivisible things. This has to be explained in the context of Mach’s picture theory of cognition that I will discuss in detail in Chapter 6. Here, its core idea will suffice. We represent complexes of elements—‘facts’ in Mach’s terminology—by complexes of the same elements; the latter are pictures or models of the facts. If I want to cycle from London to Oxford, I need a map. This map needs to represent the things that are relevant for my journey, but not everything en route. Similarly, pictures of facts are simplifications for a purpose: When we imitate facts in thoughts, we never picture facts in thoughts tout court, but only under the aspect that is important for us; we have a goal which has mediately or immediately grown out of a practical interest. Our imitations are always abstractions. [ . . . ] The thing is an abstraction, the name is a symbol for a complex of elements whose changes we disregard. We designate the whole complex by one word, by one symbol, because we have the need to recall all impressions that belong together at once. (Mach 1883a, 454)

The goal determines which complexes are mimicked by other complexes and which complexes are mimicked by simples. Complexes of practical importance are not pictured but one of their elements stands in for the complex. The stand-in element is a memory address which allows us to retrieve immediately everything about the complex that is important for our purposes.⁴² We take the stand-in to represent the same complex, even if there are elements of the complex that have changed. Hence, we arrive at the belief that there is one object that can survive changes of elements and is not a collection of elements. This error theory applies to bodies and egos. Bodies are important for our actions. Permanent collections of elements will behave relevantly similarly in relevantly similar circumstances. We represent bodies, therefore, by simple symbols and this habit is successful. Mach does not explicitly apply this error theory to the ego-presentation. But what he says about the ego is parallel to what he says about bodies. Egos are complexes of sensations; they contain sensations, but for purposes of prediction we abstract from some changing sensations and treat the complex as if it were a simple. We introduce a simple mental symbol for the complex in order to assess a ⁴¹ In part my translation. The English translation contains a real howler: ‘unteilbare’ is translated as ‘indiscernable’ (unmerkbare). ⁴² See Mach (1914, 328–9 [268–9]).

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   

manifold of information about it at once. Hence, we have the useful habit of representing a complex as an indivisible unity.⁴³ The simple representation of the complex allows us to predict new sensations and behaviour and identify present ones by tracking a series of complexes whose changes we disregard for explanatory purposes. The habit gives rise, when uncritically reflected on, to the false, but compelling belief in a subject that is not a complex of sensations, but prior to sensations. Hence, our view that we are simple objects that have experiences is due to a useful misrepresentation that needs to be corrected in science. Egos are complexes of sensations; they contain sensations, but for purposes of fast prediction we abstract from some changes and treat the complex as if it were a simple. Mach’s error theory needs more support. But even if we can make the idea of the habit to represent complexes as simples plausible, it shows only belief in the ‘thick’ subject to be erroneous. For the reason the habit to represent a complex as a simple is due to our need to make efficient predictions about future sensations and behaviour. Hence, the simple subjects seem to persist for a time. Thin subjects may not persist and don’t support any such predictions. Let’s see whether Mach manages to argue against them with his second argument. The second response is the idealization response. Mach compared Lotze’s thesis that there is no experience without an experiencing subject to the thesis that there is no physical process without some environment in which it takes place: One might just as well say that a physical process which does not take place in some environment or other, or at least somewhere in the universe, is unthinkable. In both cases, in order to make a beginning with our investigation, we must be allowed to abstract from the environment, which, as regards its influence, may be very different in different cases, and in special cases may shrink to a minimum. (Mach 1914, 25–6 [20–1])

Put yourself in the shoes of a physicist who subscribes to the ‘no process without environment’ thesis. Does holding this thesis prevent you from investigating properties of physical processes independently of their environment? No, we can start to find out more about these processes and set aside questions about their environment and their relation. Does this require that it is metaphysically or even conceptually possible that there are physical processes that are not in an environment? No, for we can disregard the environment in our investigation. Compare: can there be objects that have only shape and mass? No, such objects are unthinkable. Yet, classical mechanical models of planetary motion take planets to have only shape and mass.⁴⁴ For the purposes of the model and the explanations

⁴³ See Mach (1914, 21 [26]). ⁴⁴ See Frigg and Hartmann (2020), section 1 on Aristotelian idealizations.

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       ? 77 sought, it is legitimate to abstract from all other properties. Similarly, Mach recommends the psychologist to abstract away from the subject, whether thin or thick, when empirically investigating sensations. Lotze’s thesis neither constrains nor guides empirical research in psychology. It may be a metaphysical truth, but if it is one, it can be disregarded in psychology.

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3 From Substance and Accident to Complex and Element To us investigators, the concept ‘soul’ is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter. Ernst Mach, Die Geschichte und Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit (1872)

1. Introduction Let’s start by rereading the passage from Brentano’s Psychology quoted in section 2.4: Just as in sensation we encounter the phenomena of warmth, colour, and sound, we encounter in inner perception the phenomena of thinking, feeling, and willing. We don’t encounter an entity that has them as properties. It is a fiction, which has no reality at all or, if it existed, its existence could not be certified. Obviously, then, it is not an object of science. Hence natural science may not be defined as the science of bodies nor may psychology be defined as the science of the soul. Rather, the former should be thought of simply as the science of physical phenomena, and the latter, analogously, as the science of mental phenomena. (PES, 8 [I, 15–16]; my translation)

Our awareness shows us only mental phenomena, but no bearer of these phenomena. Similarly, in hearing, touching, and smelling, we are aware of tones, pressures, and fragrances, but not of something that sounds a certain way, has a pressure, or has a fragrance. Hence, we need to reject the idea of a property-bearer in general. The philosophers that I will discuss in this chapter all endorse this conclusion.¹ If we survey the line of thought that leads to the rejection of substances as

¹ See Mulligan and Smith (1988, § 10) for an overview.

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property-bearers, we see that empirical psychology functioned as the engine of a conceptual change in which the concept of substance is abandoned. Schlick is my witness of the ‘lead’ function of empirical psychology: In modern science, indeed, the notion of substance has lost all ground. Psychology took the lead when it ceased to consider the data of consciousness as accidents of a substantial soul; by ‘soul’ it now understood only the complex of mental qualities, which come and go. Today natural science too has been compelled by certain empirical data to conceive of its substance, matter, as an association of qualities that change with law-like regularity. (Schlick 1925a, 377 [346])²

Now, if one gives up on substances in general, one must not only replace substances but also properties. For it seems to be part of our notion of a property that it is of something else, ultimately of something that is not itself a property.³ Mach tackled this task by introducing elements as the basic building blocks of reality. Elements don’t need other things as their bearers. The ontology of elements is the framework in which Mach’s Neutral Monism will be articulated in Chapter 4. Substances are a paradigm case of beings that are supposed to be ‘more real’ than others. There are changing appearances because there is an underlying substance. The picture of a deeper reality that manifests itself in different ways has captivated the imagination of philosophers since Plato. Mach tried to break this spell. There is no distinction between appearance and a more fundamental reality that appears. In this chapter I will introduce the main arguments of the pioneers of NoSubstance ontologies.

2. Lotze and Stumpf against Substance We have already seen in Chapter 1 that Lotze surprised his critics by denying that he mounted a defence of the soul, the mental substance. His critics should not have been surprised. In his first Metaphysik he had argued that the traditional notion of substance is incoherent. Lotze (1841, 86) targets the notion of matter out of which particulars are formed when the matter is ‘informed’ by properties. The problem is that matter is supposed to be property-less—it exists prior to being informed by properties—yet is of the same kind as things with properties. For otherwise how could it be the basis of the being of ordinary things with qualities?

² See also Schlick (1925b, 641–2) on Hume and the role of psychology in the development of a ‘substance-free’ understanding of nature. ³ For a contemporary criticism of the view that substances are ontologically basic see Simons (1998).

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   

Lotze’s original argument, I must confess, is hard to follow. But in his lectures on psychology he rehearses his argument and its main points become clearer. He assumes that substances are introduced to explain changes in appearances. But do changes in appearance require an unchanging bearer of appearances, ‘a rigid and indestructible substance’ (Lotze 1881, 113 [68])? No: It is not possible to show how such a substantial kernel could be connected with the manifold and variability of properties of which one asserts with a meaningless word that they ‘inhere’ in it. In sum: It is not through a substance that things have being, but they have being when they are able to produce the appearance of a substance present in them. (Lotze 1881, 113–4, [68])

Assume that the change of colour of this car is due to the fact that it contains a substance. But how does the substance ground the fact that the different properties ‘inhere’ in it at different times? It must have further properties that determine the changes. If these properties are changeable, we need further properties. If not, we need an explanation why these properties are not changeable. A fundamental worry is here that we don’t even know what it means for substance to ‘have’ or ‘bear’ a property. This point goes back to Herbart’s introduction of ‘inherence’ as part of a folk-metaphysics of properties and property-bearers in Chapter 1. The suspicion is that the verb ‘to inhere’ only labels the problem of the connection between the substance and the features we observe. Carl Stumpf elaborated the substance criticism of his teacher Lotze. Stumpf ’s main reason for rejecting substances as property-bearers is the same as Lotze’s. We are simply not able to acquire a conception of substance bearing a property from experience: No one, even Aristotle and Locke, would be able to teach us how that which they call substance bears the property. There is simply no intuitive example of it. But this does not show that the concept of substance is a priori, but only that the relation of substantial properties can only be thought of by analogy and in a figurative sense with the other properties. (Stumpf 1939, 19–20)

If the Given is a complex of qualities, the relation of inherence is not part of the Given. The relation of inherence can still be a theoretical primitive of a folk-theory of change and unity. For example, an object changes if different properties inhere in its substance. But, as we will see in the next sections, Herbart’s folk-ontology of substances is unmotivated. There is no need to postulate an unchanging substance to explain change.⁴ ⁴ Stumpf (1939, 15) also rejected Herbart’s idea that an object cannot have several properties so that we need substances with only one property.

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3. Avenarius and Mach against Substance We have seen that one aspect of the philosophical notion of substance is that of an unchanging subject of change. Ernst Mach discussed in his History and Root of the Principle of the Conversation of Energy (Mach 1872) the development of the socalled law of conservation of energy: the total energy of an isolated system is conserved over time. Does this imply that there is a substance or matter that persists over time? Mach (1872, 42–8 [20–5]) argues with a number of examples from physics that such an assumption is not scientifically acceptable. An explanatory hypothesis, says Mach (1872, 57 [33]), must be able to become a fact: that is, the posited objects must be observable. But indestructible matter is an unobservable. Mach drew on the history of science to argue that its laws don’t require the assumption of an unchanging something. But he did not put his criticism of the utility of the notion of substance on a philosophical foundation. Such a foundation would be provided four years later by Richard Avenarius in his still untranslated book Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes. Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Philosophy as Thinking of the World in accordance with the Principle of Least Effort. Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Experience) (1876). Avenarius studied in Berlin, Zurich, Munich, and Leipzig. In Leipzig he collaborated with Wundt and obtained his doctorate (1868). He is the founding editor of the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosphie (first issue 1877) that served as an outlet for, well, scientific philosophy. Frege, Riehl, Schlick, Wundt, etc. published their work in this journal. Avenarius’ Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes is a slim book, but it is packed with provocative ideas that influenced Moritz Schlick (see the Introduction to Part IV). Avenarius’ books Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Avenarius 1888/90) and Der Menschliche Weltbegriff (1891) as well as the series of articles ‘Bemerkungen zum Begriff der Psychologie I–IV’ (Avenarius 1894/5) developed the main themes of Avenarius’ thought further and were widely noticed. Avenarius was one of the driving forces in the development of Neutral Monism as well as the scientific world-view. Daniel Cory wrote in an open letter to Bertrand Russell: Although we all owe Mach a debt, I think that a somewhat neglected hero of these early tentative hours of our theory was a German contemporary of Mach— I mean Richard Avenarius. (Cory 1960, 579)

In the current literature Avenarius seems indeed neglected. In Chapter 4 I myself will neglect his contribution to the development of Neutral Monism. However,

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   

I will give his Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes some of the attention it deserves in this chapter. According to Mach: the affinity between them [Avenarius’ views] and my own is as great as can possibly be imagined where two writers have undergone a different process of development, work in different fields, and are completely independent of one another. (Mach 1914, 46–7 [38–9])

I think this is right and in the following I will go back and forth between Avenarius and Mach to see how they worked out different aspects of the same theme. According to Avenarius, the soul has a function, namely the preservation of the body. We will encounter a similar idea in Mach in Chapter 4. What the soul is, is left unexplained in the Prolegomena. In the later Critique of Pure Experience, the soul gives way to something like the central nervous system. I think we can read Avenarius’ hypothesis as the assumption that there is something that has powers and the function to enable a body to survive by adequately responding to what is going on in its environment. Since the soul has only finite power—what this power is remains unclear—it tries to expend as little as possible of its power on this task. One way to minimize expenditure is automatization, the forming of habits. The soul forms ‘effort-saving’ habits of thinking, that is, dispositions to respond to the same inputs in the same way without further cognition (Avenarius 1876, 8). What happens if there is a new perception or presentation for which the soul has no habit yet? It can try to forget the new presentation. The downside of this habit is that the soul needs to satisfy its needs, and perceptions can help with this. So a different technique is required: [T]he soul received the given presentation, but transforms what is unfamiliar in it into something familiar. In other words, it reduces by means of association the new to the old, the uncommon to the common, the unknown to the known, the ungrasped to what as something grasped is already owned to us intellectually. Now thinking a new presentation no longer requires significant expenditure of power because the soul thinks it by means of the familiar presentations [ . . . ]. (Avenarius 1876, 9–10)

The function of the activities of the soul is to transform the unfamiliar into the familiar in order to minimize effort (Avenarius 1876, 14). Avenarius calls this activity ‘Begreifen’. The term suggests that the transformation involves concepts (Begriffe): if I bring something under a concept I already possess, it becomes familiar to me. The concept of Begreifen plays the central role in Avenarius’ account of substance. More in due course.

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Avenarius (1876) contains a pregnant account of how we form the concept of substance, what gives this concept its economical character, and why it finally needs to be abandoned. In it he introduces several central philosophical themes that will shape Austrian philosophy. Let’s work through the main points. The notion of substance is characterized in two ways: Persistence:

substances are what remains the same in changes of monadic properties.

Grounding:

substances not only persist through change, but the observed change happens, in part, in virtue of their nature.

Persistence plays the key role in Avenarius’ story of how we acquire the concept of substance. The concept does not represent an object, but is an instrument, a Hilfsvorstellung, that enables us to perceive and conceive of changes. Hence, there is an initially useful, but empty, concept of substance. In Avenarius’ story of how we form the concept of substance as the subject of change, the availability of singular terms and predicates plays an enabling role. A thinker who does not master these kinds of expressions cannot conceive of a process as a change. Language makes it possible that ‘the thing is opposed to its properties’ (Avenarius 1876, 55) and if the thing is opposed to its properties then it can survive their change. How is language supposed to make this possible? Consider for illustration a child that is about to learn a language. According to Avenarius, the child starts out by perceiving complex unities: The original perceptions which are designated by language contain the object still as a complex unity which consists of different masses of sensations with the distinctions being sufficiently brought to consciousness. (Avenarius 1876, 52)

He rehearses here a theme we have already encountered in Herbart’s work on substance (section 1.4). There is the sensory Given: it is made up of aggregates or complexes of sensory features that are instinctively taken to be one object. The child sees, for example, a located shape filled by a colour. Here we have the first important theme: Constructive Theme: The primary objects of perception are ‘property’ complexes. Herbart moved from this thesis about the given to the view that what grounds the given is a plurality of simple substances that have each one property. Avenarius tries to show that we make such a move for practical reasons, but that there is no theoretical reason to introduce an ontology of substances and properties. Let’s follow his development of this line of thought.

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   

I see a complex that appears to me initially as an indivisible whole: there is a green-brown-shape. It captures my attention and I name it ‘General Sherman’. Later I manage to distinguish features in the whole. The introduction of a name for a whole for the purposes of communication and thought is of prime importance here: we form the notion of substance because we have such names.⁵ To illustrate this let’s spin this example out further. As time goes by I make a number of true assertions about General Sherman: General Sherman’s leaves are all green, General Sherman’s leaves are all yellow, General Sherman’s leaves are all brown. The same name seems to refer to one and the same thing to which different properties at different times can be ascribed. While the whole named by ‘General Sherman’ cannot survive change of its constituents, the repeated use of the name suggests that there is one thing that can change properties without ceasing to exist. This persistent object cannot be a whole of properties, but it must be something that is distinct from such a whole and yet stands in a distinctive relation to the properties that form the whole. We are taken in by the linguistic appearances, Avenarius argues, and form the notion of one thing that underlies changes: In virtue of the fact that, on the one hand, the thing becomes more and more independent of the presence of particular properties, and, on the other, more and more compatible with the presence of widely varied properties (the disparately simultaneous and the successively disjunctive properties) it evolves to the real or essential being that is the independent guide for the changing properties and the resting centre for their change. (Avenarius 1876, 54)

If we take this to the limit, we arrive at the concept of a substance: the substance remains the same even if all the properties that we initially observed change. Substance so conceived cannot be a complex of properties. Why do we use names in this way? Why don’t we think that in using them in this way we make a mistake that needs correction? Avenarius’ answer is that we want to acquire the notion of a complete property change. But why do we want to acquire such a notion? Why not simply give up the concept of change? There is one thing after another, but not one and the same thing that has different properties at different times. Avenarius does not answer this question explicitly. But an answer is close at hand: if there is one thing, the substance, which persists and brings about the changes we observe, we can explain and thereby grasp a multitude of unfamiliar changes in terms of one familiar thing and its powers. Hence, positing substances by introducing and reusing names ⁵ See Avenarius (1876, 55).

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reduces mental effort; it makes the unfamiliar familiar. Avenarius will give a version of this answer when discussing Grounding in more detail. Mach gave a similar account of how we form the notion of a persistent bearer of change: The useful habit of designating such relatively permanent compounds by single names, and of apprehending them by single thoughts, without going to the trouble each time of an analysis of their component parts, is apt to come into strange conflict with the tendency to isolate the component parts. The dark [dunkel] image of the permanent, which does not perceptibly change when one or another of the component parts is taken away, seems to be something which exists in itself. Inasmuch as it is possible to take away singly every constituent part without destroying the capacity of the image to stand for the totality and to be recognised again, it is imagined that it is possible to subtract all the parts and to have something still remaining. Thus naturally arises the philosophical notion, at first impressive, but subsequently recognized as monstrous, of a ‘thing-initself ’, different from its ‘appearance’, and unknowable. (Mach 1914, 6 [5]; I have modified the translation)

Here, the habit to use the same name for a complex is supposed to conflict with the disposition to analyse the complex named. Repeated uses of the same name with its meaning unchanged invoke a memory image of a complex of properties. The same memory image can change in some aspects without changing what it represents. Now Mach assumes that we slide from: Each part of memory image that represents a property of the remembered object is such that it can be taken away without changing what the image pictures. To: Every part of memory image that represents a property of the remembered object can be taken away without changing what the image pictures. Mach is correct in taking this inference to be a fallacy. But if the acquisition of the concept of substance rests on us committing this fallacy, why do we commit it systematically without correcting it?⁶

⁶ According to Strawson (2000, 274), Kant (B231) committed a fallacy very similar to the fallacy Mach takes to lead to the formation of the concept of substance as the one thing which underlies every change. But why should common sense systematically make this mistake?

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Let us then turn to Grounding. Language not only allows us to think that there are things that are constant in all changes, it also has the tendency to make us think that there is something that brings about the changes and states, but that itself is not perceived. Why? Because pre-scientific thought has it that one ‘cannot grasp the being outside us without this hidden substance’ (Avenarius 1876, 57). We assume the existence of substances because we need to grasp the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. Schlick, who himself repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Avenarius, captured this function of substances nicely: True reality is supposed to be based on something fixed, in order that the multiplicity of appearances may be thereby explained, the diversity be explained by what lies beneath it. (Schlick 1933/4, 19 [37]; my emphasis)

Our ideas of substances are primitive instruments of thought (Denkmittel) that are supposed to help to reduce the manifold of appearances: if I know which substances there are and how they interact, I can predict a manifold of appearances and thereby prevent surprise.⁷ Hence, forming and employing the notion of mental substances initially saves us mental effort. Because of this, the concept of substance gains authority. However, if we start to reflect on the nature of the substance, we encounter a number of questions that we can’t answer. If substances are distinct from all of their properties, are they bare particulars? If they are bare particulars, how do they ground the multitude of appearances? Grounding is a form of explanation and requires that the grounds are things with properties, or facts. If our basic needs are satisfied and we try to understand our own natural world-view in detail, it turns out that our belief in substances cannot be defended. It also costs more energy to defend it than the notion of substance saves us the progressive development of thought will—according to the principle of least effort—have gradually and more likely have to abandon this simplification [provided by substance] as the notion of substance creates so many difficulties, that its value for habit no longer outweighs its disadvantages. (Avenarius 1876, 57–8)

The advantages and disadvantages need to be balanced. The balance is tipped in favour of eliminating substances. Hence, we need to eliminate the notion of substance. Avenarius’ treatment of substance is a good illustration of what Schlick takes to be the source of philosophical problems. Such problems ‘arise out of the effort to overcome those contradictions which always become unbearably evident, the

⁷ See Schlick (1925b, 608).

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moment we try to think out to the very end some notion from our pre-philosophical views of the world’ (Schlick 1916, 190 [230]). The notion of substance is formed in order to reduce cognitive effort in coping with the environment. It seems to help with this task. But when we don’t just rely on them in the planning of actions, but want to extend our knowledge and come to know about substances themselves, we find that these create more problems than they solve. Hence, on balance we should give up the notion of substance. Avenarius’ discussion of substance suggests a piece of metaphilosophical advice: Metaphilosophical Recommendation: Concepts that are formed to save cognitive effort should not be included in scientific theories. Mach and Avenarius will follow this advice with respect to several other important concepts, among them the concepts of the mental and physical.

4. Persistence: Laws Squeeze out Substances According to Avenarius’ story, we form the idea of substances to explain the manifold of appearances and changes by means of some fixed things. Thereby we reduce complexity: we are not surprised by changes because we can predict them by appealing to the underlying substances. We know how substances will behave under a range of conditions. On further reflection this motive for positing substances turns out to be implausible. In order to make predictions about appearances we need to know laws or, at least, regularities. Fechner argued that if we need laws anyway, substances make no further contribution to foreknowledge and explanation. In the introduction to his Atomenlehre he makes a joke to illustrate his philosophical position: A noble Russian or Pole visited a big factory in Berlin that was powered by steam engines. He let himself be guided through the whole factory, inspected all parts in detail, observed how the machine parts interlinked, inquired into all possibilities, talked knowledgeably to the guide about the workings of the factory. In sum: he seems to have been fully oriented about the workings of the factory. But then he asked to the greatest astonishment of his guide: Why don’t you show me the cellar where the horses are [that draw the steam engines]. [ . . . ] I say in this chapter: There are no horses in the cellar. (Fechner 1855, vi)

Imagine we have all the laws that hold for a biological organism and identify the organism with a bundle of properties. If you know the laws that hold for the

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properties and their combination, you can predict how the organism will behave in the future—you know how the bundle will change—and how it would have behaved in different circumstances. Adding the metaphysical assumption that there is an object distinct from the properties that bears them does not help in this task. This thought has a straightforward application to the soul: The connection and succession of the self or soul appearances are governed by psychological laws. How can an obscure thing, the name ‘Monad’, simple real being, help in explaining the unity and laws of self appearance? (Fechner 1861, 208)

The ‘self appearances’ are not appearances of a self. They are just appearances that common sense ascribes to a self. We start with mental processes given in consciousness. We learn that these processes are governed by laws. If we have recognized the laws that hold for the mental processes, we know all there is to know about the mental. Adding that the mental processes are activities of a soul, does not improve our knowledge of the mind. For example, there is a unity in the mental life of a person: a series of mental processes is my past mental life. Positing a mental substance in which these processes inhere does not help to understand this unity. For we would need a further reason to think that a person cannot stand in successive relations to different substances.⁸ To sum up: Initially we form the concept of substance as a Denkmittel that is supposed to make changes easier to cope with. But after working through the problems with substances we see that substances are explanatorily idle. What really helps us to make the unfamiliar appearances familiar is knowledge of the laws that govern appearances of the kind we encounter. We need to know general facts about them and not facts about a different kind of thing: a substance. We will want to reduce the number of laws that we need in order to predict the future, but the more general laws will still be laws of appearances. Hence, substances simply drop out as redundant. The ‘job’ they were supposed to do is actually done by laws. Schlick (1925b, 636–42) outlines the history of the replacement of substance by natural law. According to him (641), relativity theory finally ‘destroys’ the notion of substance. Laws were also supposed to take over the role of objects that persist through changes. If one asks: ‘What collects some properties into one thing that persists for some time?’, the answer ‘the same substance’ is empty. In contrast, an answer that appeals to laws is helpful. Stumpf (1939, 32) finds the connection between law and permanence in Lotze who, according to Stumpf, replaced the soul-substance ⁸ See Stumpf (1939, 361). Stumpf (1939, § 19) gives a good overview of the problems of the soul substance view.

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with the meaningful and law-governed connection between mental states. Persistence consists in the properties or appearances that make up one complex at a time being connected by a law to properties or appearances that make up another complex at a different time. If there are many law-governed connections between elements, we count them as temporal parts of one persistent object.⁹ There is no need to introduce an unchanging substance; there are unchanging laws that collect properties/appearances into groups that common sense calls ‘objects’ or ‘particulars’. Mach rehearsed this idea in his Analysis of Sensations. If we are confronted with radical changes: [i]t then becomes more advantageous to regard the particular properties as belonging sometimes to one and sometimes to another complex, or body, and to substitute, for the bodies that are not constant, the law which is constant and which survives the change of the properties and of their connexions. (Mach 1914, 360 [294]; my emphasis)

In sum: we can give up on the notion of substances as persisting subjects of change if and when we know laws that govern the changes in the things that are given to us. Complexes of given elements and laws do what we initially thought substances would do.¹⁰

5. Mach against the Appearance/Reality Distinction Perceptual variation and illusions are another source of the view that there are ‘hidden’ substances. When we see one and the same house from different perspectives or under different conditions, there is one constant thing, the house, that has different appearances.¹¹ Appearances can also be deceptive: the stick appears bent when it is dipped into water etc. Like Avenarius, Mach takes the initially helpful distinction between appearance and reality to lead to philosophical confusion when we reflect on it further: The popular notion of an antithesis between appearance and reality has exercised a very powerful influence on scientific and philosophical thought. We see this, for example, in Plato’s pregnant and poetical fiction of the Cave, in which, with our backs turned towards the fire, we observe merely the shadows of what passes

⁹ See also Santayana (1971, 183). ¹⁰ See also Schlick (1925a, 377 [346]) who uses this argument to reject Kant’s view that substance is a category of transcendental philosophy. ¹¹ See Schlick (1918a, 273 [192]).

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    (Republic vii. i). But this conception was not thought out to its final consequences, with the result that it has had an unfortunate influence on our ideas about the universe. The universe, of which nevertheless we are a part, became completely separated from us, and was removed an infinite distance away. (Mach 1914, 12–13 [9])¹²

Plato’s allegory of the cave presses the intuitive distinction between appearance and reality into philosophical service. Let us remind ourselves of the main points of the allegory. In the allegory a number of people are imprisoned in a cave. They are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed and they can’t communicate with each other. Behind the prisoners is a fire and people carry objects along. The prisoners can see the shadows of the objects, but not the objects themselves. All that the prisoners see are shadows of what there really is: the forms. They need to free themselves from their shackles and leave the cave to gain knowledge of the forms and learn how things really are. In Plato’s allegory, one of the prisoners is freed and gradually manages to perceive the objects whose shadows he saw before. This brief description already gives us all we need to reconstruct the notion of metaphysics that is the target of Mach’s criticism. First, the shadows are the analogues of appearances. A shadow of an object exists in virtue of the existence of the object. If the object ceases to exist, so does its shadow. The properties of the shadow are likewise dependent on the properties of the object it is a shadow of. But the object and its properties are not dependent on its shadow. Hence, the shadow seems less fundamental than the object it is a shadow of. Second, we have only epistemic access to the shadows of things. If we had an idea that the things we see are shadows, we could venture educated guesses as to what they are shadows of. Third, in order to come to know the things whose shadow we see, we need to overcome an obstacle. We need to break free from our shackles. Different versions of this analogy have been developed in the history of philosophy. Schopenhauer’s pragmatic version is of direct importance to Mach because, as we will see later, both take cognition to be in the service of the Will: the drive to survive (Schopenhauer) or to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (Mach). Human animals like us are instinctively driven to survive and procreate. Our cognition is mostly ‘in the service of the will’ (Schopenhauer 1844a, 199) and our senses mostly pick up only what satisfies the Will. For example, I don’t perceive the nature of the ice cream, only its tasty creaminess: a relational property

¹² See also Mach (1976, 7 [10]). Schlick agreed with Mach’s historical observation. According to him, Plato pushed the distinction between appearance and essence ‘to its extreme and developed it most brilliantly’ (Schlick 1925a, 234 [215]).

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the ice cream bears to our Will. Hence, the Will prevents us from recognizing the nature of objects. Kant distinguished between appearances and things-in-themselves. The appearances are grounded in the things themselves and not vice versa. NeoKantians like Riehl followed Kant in this point: What we experience, is the effect of things on our consciousness. So necessarily we remain separated from the proper being of everything by the phenomenon or the idea. (Riehl 1924 (1887), 31 [30])

Appearances are knowable but are only signs of the proper beings, the things-inthemselves. There are three responses to Plato’s cave analogy, and its variants, that figure in the philosophical discussion to which Mach contributes: 1. The Resignative Response. Yes, we have only knowledge of appearances; that’s just how things are. We can have faith in, or hope for, the existence of things-in-themselves. But we can’t have knowledge of them. This response is given by Neo-Kantians like Alois Riehl. 2. The Constructive Response. There is a metaphysical asymmetry between platonic forms, substances, essences, things-in-themselves—that have a higher form of reality than others—and the things we know and with which we interact. The former exist in their own right and don’t depend for their existence on qualities of something else; the latter are dependent on the former. But it is possible for beings like us to have knowledge of the things that truly exist independently of knowledge of their appearances. Some of the prisoners in Plato’s cave analogy manage to escape the cave. Schopenhauer—more in chapter 13—argues that there is a form of perception that is not in the service of the Will and that yields knowledge of the essence of something. In general, this kind of knowledge is supposed to be intuitive and does not make use of concepts that are shaped by our interests.¹³ Hence, we are not in principle completely removed from reality. 3. The Revisionary Response. Both the intuitive distinction between appearance and reality and its philosophical development are misconceived. There are no hidden substances or essences whose appearances we perceive. I will engage with the Constructive Response in Chapter 13. Here I want to get clear about the Revisionary Response. It is given by Avenarius and Mach and developed later by Schlick. Mach in particular argues that there is no

¹³ See Förster (2012, chapter 11).

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pre-theoretical motivation for the distinction between an appearance and something that underlies it. In Analysis of Sensations he quoted from his early paper ‘Über die Abhängigkeit der Netzhautstellen von einander’ (1862): The expression ‘sense-illusion’ proves that we are not yet fully conscious, or at least have not yet deemed it necessary to incorporate the fact into our terminology [Terminologie], that the senses show [zeigen] things neither wrongly nor correctly. All that can be truly said of the sense-organs is, that, under different circumstances they produce different sensations and perceptions. As these ‘circumstances’, now, are extremely various in character, being partly external (inherent in the objects), partly internal (inherent in the sensory organs), and partly interior (having their activity in the central organs), it can sometimes appear, when we only notice the external circumstances, as if the organ acted differently under the same conditions. And it is customary to call the unusual effects, deceptions or illusions. (quoted in Mach 1914, 10 [8]; I have changed the translation)

A perceptual experience does not correctly or incorrectly represent an element or some elements. It does not represent anything at all. What we normally describe as ‘an experience of blue’ is just the element blue considered in its relations to other sensations. But there is no dichotomy between an experience on the one side, and its ‘target’ on the other. I will return to this topic in Chapter 6. The idea of a dichotomy between experience and experienced reality is motivated, in part, by the observation that the senses can ‘deceive’ us or that there are ‘appearances’ that don’t correspond to reality. If a sensory experience is identical with the sensed objects, the sensory experience can’t be deceptive. The experience shows us what it is: it is identical with what it shows us. All illusions and hallucinations are therefore due to incomplete knowledge of dependencies between elements. We have expectations about which elements will or should occur in connection with a sensation. But there are dependencies we don’t yet know about and therefore we expect an element to occur that does not occur. In perceptual illusions or delusions we are aware of elements, but, broadly speaking, ‘misconstrue’ what we are directly aware of: All such ‘delusions’ rest on the fact that we do not know or fail to observe the conditions under which the finding is made, or that we suppose them to be other than they are. Besides, the imagination rounds off incomplete findings in the way that is most familiar to it, thus occasionally falsifying them. What in ordinary thought leads to the opposition between illusion and reality, between appearance and object, is the confusion between findings under the most various conditions with findings under very definite and specific conditions. (Mach 1976, 7 [9–10])

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Perceptual illusions are supposed to be due to the perceiver being ignorant of or failing to pay attention to the conditions of perception and/or having visual anticipations/expectations that are not met. Hence, there is no distinction between appearance and reality. There is only incomplete knowledge of dependencies, and disappointed visual anticipations and expectations. In section 6.3 we will see how difficult it is for Mach to find a notion of expectation that supports this conception of experience. In Platonic metaphysics appearances have a representative function: they are signs of the objects they are shadows of. For Mach there are no appearances. There are sensations that are identical with elements. In an audacious move, Mach turns the direction of order around: sensations are not signs of objects and caused by them, but objects are thought-symbols: Sensations are not ‘symbols of objects’. Rather ‘the thing’ is a thought-symbol for a complex of sensations of relative stability. (Mach 1883a, 454; my translation)¹⁴

Things are ontologically secondary—they ontologically depend on parts being bonded in a particular way—but epistemologically primary. The illustration he gives in Analysis is helpful: We see an object having a point S. If we touch S, that is, bring it into connexion with our body, we receive a prick. We can see S, without feeling the prick. But as soon as we feel the prick we find S on the skin. The visible point, therefore, is a permanent nucleus, to which the prick is annexed, according to circumstances, as something accidental. From the frequency of analogous occurrences we ultimately accustom ourselves to regard all properties of bodies as ‘effects’ proceeding from permanent nuclei and conveyed to the ego through the medium of the body; which effects we call sensations. By this operation, however, these nuclei are deprived of their entire sensory content, and converted into mere mental symbols. (Mach 1914, 12 [9–10])

Some parts of a complex, the nuclei, have predictive power. After a training period, perceiving a nucleus makes one expect other sensations. Nuclei are therefore mental symbols that signify the future occurrence of elements that are temporal parts of the complex to which both the signifying nucleus and the future element belong.¹⁵

¹⁴ See also Mach (1882, 199–200 [229–30]). ¹⁵ Vaihinger took things to be fictional objects: ‘The concept of thing is nothing but a summative fiction and way of talking that a thing has this property and that property is based on the instrumental idea [Hilfsvorstellung] as if this together be something over and above the properties, just as the kind is

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What recommends the Revisionary Response? Mach has given us a suggestive new way to conceive of fundamental reality. But he has not shown that the Constructive Response is not viable. Schlick will attempt to complete Mach’s project by showing that there is no intuitive knowledge of things-in-themselves or other kinds of ‘truly real’ being. Hence, if we were in Plato’s cave, prospects would be bleak: there is no escape route. Progress can only be made by revising the ontology that led to the idea that there is a distinction between appearance and reality, and overcoming the distinction. I will fill out this outline in Chapters 13 and 14 with respect to Schlick.

6. Is Antimetaphysics Self-Undermining? Mach published the English translation of his ‘Antimetaphysical Remarks’ in the first issue of The Monist in 1890. In a note on this issue Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of Pragmatism, wrote: Professor Mach has an ‘anti-metaphysical’ article characteristic of the class of ingenuous psychologists, if not perhaps quite accurate thinkers, to which he belongs. (Peirce 1890, 42)

Now, Peirce’s ‘not quite accurate thinker’ does not sound like praise. Peirce is critical of Mach’s antimetaphysical stance: Mach belongs to that school of soi disant experiential philosophers whose aim it is to emancipate themselves from all metaphysics and go straight to the facts. This attempt would be highly laudable,—were it possible to carry it out. But experience shows that the experientialists are just as metaphysical as any other philosophers, with this difference, however, that their pre-conceived ideas not being recognized by them as such, are much more insidious and much more apt to fly in the face of all the facts of observation. (Peirce 1898, 292)

If we take metaphysics to be a view about the fundamental constituents of the universe, Peirce has a point. For is the view that there are only elements and relations of functional dependence between them not such a view? Mach did not engage this problem, but Banks (2013) has proposed an answer on Mach’s behalf. Banks argues that there is ‘good metaphysics’ which furthers unifying the sciences. In this sense Mach’s theory of elements is good metaphysics: the elements make up the ontology of the one science which studies functional

conceived as something over and above the individuals’ (Vaihinger 1922, 412). It certainly helps to facilitate communication, as well as remembering, to have a name for a complex.

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  - ? 95 relationships between the elements and has overcome classifications of elements into physical and mental. I think Banks’s view that Mach has room for (good) metaphysics is on the right track. But it leaves open many questions about ‘bad’ metaphysics. The metaphysics of substances is for Mach certainly an example of bad metaphysics. But the reason for this is not that substances don’t further scientific unification. If we look back at sections 3.2–3.4 we can sharpen up what antimetaphysics is supposed to be. Representations are economic instruments designed by nature for a purpose at a time or stage of cultural development.¹⁶ They help people at a particular stage of cultural development to achieve their purposes in a cost-efficient way, that is, with a minimum of expenditure of intellectual energy. In general, these purposes are the satisfaction of the drive to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. Initially, the satisfaction of the drive takes the form of the satisfaction of biological needs and is furthered by representations of bodies and causality. But at some stage of development the satisfaction of the general drive takes a different form because at least some people can devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge to gain pleasure in knowing. At this stage the initial cost/benefit balance of the representation changes. The representations were initially helpful, but now they create pseudoproblems. They raise questions that cannot be answered in scientific inquiry: they cause intellectual unease and waste intellectual energy. The notion of substance can serve as an illustrative example. Bad metaphysics are investigations into questions that have no scientific answer. antimetaphysics is the endeavour to identify the source of bad metaphysics by giving historical accounts of representations in philosophy and science and their usefulness. The ontology of elements and complexes has a good cost–benefit balance: it furthers scientific unification without raising pseudo-problems. If we understand what antimetaphysics is supposed to be, Peirce’s objection is misplaced. There is a follow-up problem. Mach takes concepts to be tools for the satisfaction of the Will. Mach’s antimetaphysics seems therefore to build on a Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the Will. The German philosopher of nature Erich Becher pointed out this problem: Mach [ . . . ] has introduced a metaphysical conception into his view of causality and of that which exists in itself. Beneath the movement of sensations and feelings that express themselves in individuals, we see a directing Will, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. (Becher 1905, 546)

The primary reality is the Will. Is this bad metaphysics?

¹⁶ For concepts as economic instruments see Mach (1914, 310 [252]).

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No, the Will has a good cost–benefit balance. Teleological explanations are fruitful in science as it is practised now: Schopenhauer’s conception of the relation between Will and Force, can quite well be adopted without seeing anything metaphysical in either. (Mach 1914, 82 fn. [67 fn.])

7. From Properties to Elements Die „Zustände“ oder „Vorgänge“ in der Natur sind eben etwas Selbständiges, nicht Zustände von etwas oder Vorgänge an etwas. Moritz Schlick, Naturphilosophie (1925) A further question looms large. If we go with ‘ordinary discourse’, there is an asymmetry between properties and property-bearers. We say that the tree is green or has greenness, but the tree is not had or predicated of other things. Armstrong comments on this asymmetry: Properties are properties of individuals. Relations are relations holding between individuals. But individuals are not individuals of their properties. Nor do individuals hold between the relations which relate them. So, at any rate, ordinary discourse assures us. It seems reasonable to take this asymmetry recognised by discourse as marking a rather fundamental asymmetry. (Armstrong 1989, 44)

Properties are of individuals/objects and individuals/objects have properties. Without individuals there are no properties and without properties there are no individuals. Herbart, Avenarius, and Mach take the Given to consist of complexes of ‘qualities’. These ‘qualities’ are not the properties Armstrong talks about and ordinary discourse leads us to posit. For the qualities come in groups, but there is no bearer of qualities. The notion of a property and property-bearer is a theoretical response to problems with the Given. Mach and Avenarius take the theoretical response to be unwarranted. There are no ultimate property-bearers: substances. For example, Avenarius concluded: Being was acknowledged to be substance with the ability to sense, the substance drops out, what remains is sensation [Empfindung]: what is will therefore have to be thought as sensation which is not grounded on something which is without sensation [empfindungslos]. (Avenarius 1876, 59)

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If there are no substances, there are no properties, qualities, modes, etc. There are only sensations. Yes, we say that the tree is green. But why should this way of talking mark a fundamental asymmetry? Now, the foes of substance Avenarius and Stumpf spend a lot of time arguing that there are no substances, but spend little to no time explaining the new notion of a ‘qualitative something’ that is independent of substance. In contrast, Mach saw clearly the need for a new notion of such a qualitative something. He called qualities ‘elements’ or ‘sensations’. Let’s now introduce elements here to complete our overview of the non-substance metaphysics. Elements are supposed be metaphysically primary: they exist independently of a bearer. But they are epistemologically secondary. For we are primarily perceptually aware of complexes: The tree with its hard tough grey trunk, its many branches swayed by the wind, its smooth, soft shining leaves appears to us at first a single indivisible whole. In like manner, we regard the sweet, round, yellow fruit, the warm, bright fire, with its manifold moving tongues, as a single thing. (Mach 1914, 102 [84])

Wholes or complexes have an appearance—a Gestalt—that cannot be reduced to the appearances of the properties that are its parts in isolation and this appearance is prior in perception.¹⁷ Although a complex initially appears indivisible, we find out that wholes share parts with other complexes when the Will is engaged. You may perceive a complex that has sweetness as a part. You like sweetness and when the complex loses the sweetness element you are driven to seek the element in other complexes: After a first survey has been obtained, by the formation of the substance-concepts ‘body’ and ‘ego’ (matter and soul), the will is impelled to a more exact examination of the changes that take place in these relatively permanent existences. The element of change in bodies and the ego, is in fact, exactly what moves the will to this examination. Here the component parts of the complex are first exhibited as its properties. A fruit is sweet; but it can also be bitter. Also, other fruits may be sweet. The red color we are seeking is found in many bodies. The neighborhood of some bodies is pleasant; that of others, unpleasant. Thus, gradually, different complexes are found to be made up of common elements. (Mach 1914, 5 [4])

Elements are discovered by the Will who seeks out commonalities between complexes.

¹⁷ Ehrenfels (1890) used the observation Mach makes in this passage as the starting point of his theory of Gestalt perception, see Mulligan and Smith (1988). Surprisingly Cassirer (1906, 118 [109]) takes Mach to oppose Gestaltpsychologie.

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The American philosopher Boyd Henry Bode argued that Mach ‘commits the unpardonable methodological sin’ of being a half-hearted empiricist by introducing elements.¹⁸ For only complexes, but not elements, are given in experience. Hence, experience is explained in terms of something ‘transcendental’. Mach has a good response to this objection. When we attend to the similarity between two different complexes, we focus our perception on an element they have in common. Hence, we can attend to elements in perception, although complexes come first in the order of perception. Mach did not commit the ‘unpardonable sin’. Mach’s paradigm examples of elements are colours, sounds, and spaces. The fruit is a complex of the elements sweet, red, etc. Elements are supposed to be like universals in that they can be parts of different complexes, yet they are unlike universals in that they don’t need a bearer to exist.¹⁹ In turn, ordinary objects are supposed to be bundles of elements. Mach is, in contemporary parlance, a ‘bundle theorist’. For example, a flame is a complex of elements that includes heat as one of its elements (Mach 1883a, 504). Mach called wholes of elements that are bonded by relations of dependence ‘facts’ (Tatsachen). Elements are neither mental nor physical. Nor are they properties—they don’t need a bearer—or property-bearers. There are no property-bearers in Mach’s ontology. The elements occur together in facts: a fact is a complex of some elements that stand in relations of dependence.²⁰ Some of Mach’s remarks about elements invite a misunderstanding. When teaching his readers his use of ‘element’, Mach frequently relies on our mastery of ‘sensation’: Not the things (bodies), but colours, tones, pressures, spaces, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world. (Mach 1883a, 454; my emphasis)

A sensation, most of us will say, is a sensory experience: for example, the buzzing in my ears when I hear the plane land. Hence, if one does not read Mach carefully, one will take him to claim that the world is a complex of sensations. An example of this misconstrual can be found in Schlick’s exposition of Mach’s ontology:²¹ Mach, for example, taught that the world consists of elements (his name for sensations). (Schlick 1933/4, 200 [250])

¹⁸ See Bode (1916, 286). ¹⁹ Banks (2014, 5) argues that Mach’s elements are events. However, a colour, one of Mach’s standard examples of an element, doesn’t seem to be an event. ²⁰ For more detail on Mach’s understanding of dependence see Mulligan and Smith (1988, §§ 8 and 11). ²¹ See also Hamilton (1990) who takes Mach to identify elements with sensations.

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But Mach’s idea is not and cannot be that ‘elements’ is just another name for what we call ‘sensations’. First, sensations are, in our common-sense view of the world, paradigmatic mental events. If the world is a complex of sensations, the world is a complex of mental events. But Mach is a Neutral Monist. He argues, as we will see, that fundamental reality is neither mental nor physical: it is neutral. Hence, Mach must reject any view that makes fundamental reality mental.²² Stumpf pointed this out when ‘protecting’ Mach from his exegetes Kleinpeter and Verworn: According to Mach, the mental as well as the physical consist of ‘indifferent’ elements. One can therefore not say that for him everything is mental. (Stumpf 1906, 46 fn.)

Second, sensations are sensations of someone or something. Hence, there could be no complexes of sensations without a sensing subject whose sensations they are. Now, if one reads Mach more carefully, it becomes clear that he does not commit himself to the view that reality is made of sensations. He tried to help his readers to latch on to the notion of an element by assuming that they already have first-person knowledge of sensations: It is only in their functional dependence that the elements are sensations. In another functional relation they are at the same time physical objects. We only use the additional term ‘sensations’ to describe the elements because most people are more familiar with the elements in question as sensations. (Mach 1914, 16 [13]; my emphasis)

So ‘element’ is not simply another name for sensation. Rather, ‘sensation’ refers to elements if they stand in a relation to thinkers, that is, other elements that are internal to a body. ‘Sensation’ stands to ‘element’ as, for example, ‘the colour of peas’ stands to ‘green’. If you know how to use ‘the colour of peas’ you can come to understand ‘green’ on the basis of this knowledge plus further instructions. With respect to ‘sensation’, Mach gives his reader further instructions. For example, Mach thinks that it is not right to ask about a sensation or experience: ‘Who has ²² Hence, Mach rejected panpsychism; the view that the fundamental constituents of the world are mental. Mach was aware of, and discussed with Adler, the panpsychism of the British mathematician William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79). Clifford argued that the fundamental constituents of the world are subjectless feelings. Clifford paraphrased Lichtenberg’s ‘It thinks’ (‘Cogitat’): ‘Sentitur is all that can be said’ (Clifford 1878, 65). Clifford is on the wrong track: ‘Many are the victims that fall a prey to panpsychism, in the desperate struggle between a monistic conception of the universe and instinctive dualistic prejudices’ (Mach 1914, 362 [295]). Panpsychists are right about monism—that there is only one fundamental kind of thing—but they are wrong that the fundamental kind is mental: feelings or ‘mind-stuff ’.

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the experience? Who senses?’²³ If one manages to see how these remarks could be true, one no longer takes one’s sensations to be non-relational mental events, but things that may or may not stand in relations to sensing subjects.

8. Can the Same Element Be Part of Different Complexes? How should we think of these qualitative somethings that are not ‘in’ or of a substance? One way is to take them as immanent universals. Immanent universals are repeatable/shareable properties that are in space and time. An object is a bundle of such immanent universals.²⁴ Since there are no property-bearers, sharing a property must be reconstructed as one and the same element being a part of different complexes or bundles. The immanent universals view seems to be what Mach has in mind when he described above how elements are first exhibited as properties. Different complexes can have common parts. Another way is to take qualities to be unrepeatable and unshareable tropes. Ordinary objects would then turn out to be bundles of tropes. Tropes have primitivist principles of individuation.²⁵ A trope A is identical with a trope B iff A = B. In other words, elements cannot be distinguished in terms of more fundamental properties or relations. A trope is a sensation/appearance when it is part of a bundle of tropes that constitute an ego. Banks (2014, 5) reads the following quote as Mach’s endorsement of a view according to which elements are non-repeatable events: In nature there is no cause and effect. Nature is there only once. (Mach 1883a 455)

This only follows if one takes all elements to be events. Banks seems to accept this premise: Realistic empiricists hold that the natural world is made up of individualized events embedded in real causal-functional relations to each other. These events and causal-functional relations are what really exists and the rest (objects, extended bodies, fields, space-time, brains, and minds) are construed out of them. These events are called ‘elements’ by Mach, ‘event particulars’ by Russell, and ‘pure experiences’ by James. (Banks 2014, 5)

²³ See Mach (1914, 25 [20–1]). ²⁴ See O’Leary-Hawthorne (1995, 191). ²⁵ For a statement and defense of individuation primitivism about tropes see Ehring (2011, 76–98).

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      ? 101 But events are property-bearers. The car crash may be awful, happen at midnight, etc. Even the events postulated in fundamental physics are property-bearers. Hence, even if we have events in our ontology, we will need qualities to determine them further. Moreover, Mach’s examples of elements—red, heat, etc.—don’t seem to be events. In sum, I think elements are not events. Banks seems in fact to agree. According to him (Banks 2011, 174), Mach advocated a power ontology: an element is ‘a way of affecting or being affected by something’. This strikes me as right. In section 2.9 we have already seen that sensations are elements with particular causal powers. Are elements, whether events or not, really unrepeatable? Mach continues the ‘Nature is there only once’ quote as follows: Repetition of similar cases, in which A is always connected with B, hence similar successes under similar circumstances, hence the essence of the connection between cause and effect, exist only in the abstraction which we make in order to model [Nachbildung] facts. (Mach 1883a, 455)

The causes or events Mach has in mind, say the explosion of the cylinder, may not be repeatable. But the events are complexes of elements that contain times, locations, etc. These complexes cannot be repeated. Yet, their constituents can; they can occur in other complexes. We have already seen that Mach himself suggests that different complexes share common elements.²⁶ Maybe there is still room here for reading Mach as holding that the elements are numerically different, but belong to the same kind. But I find the following passage hard to read in this way: From the standpoint which I here take up for purposes of general orientation, I no more draw an essential distinction between my sensations and the sensations of another person, than I regard red or green as belonging to an individual body. The same elements are connected at different points of attachment, namely the Ego’s. (Mach 1914, 361 [294]; emphasis Mach’s in the German text)

The different points of connection are different selves. Mach uses the German ‘Ich’ which has no plural. This problem is not captured by the translation. Mach’s message is: just as I can stand at the same time in many relations to different things, the same elements can bond with other elements to different complexes at the same time. If you and I both have a red sensation, the same element is part of the complex of elements that is you and the complex that is me.

²⁶ Also Avenarius (1905, § 161) explicitly states that the same elements are the components of the environment of different people. See reference in Schlick (1925a, 225 [207]).

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9. Objects Perceived by Different Individuals: Schlick against Mach The view that different complexes can share elements was targeted by Moritz Schlick. In his General Theory of Knowledge (Schlick 1925a, 196 [180]) Schlick called philosophers who reject the existence of things-in-themselves ‘advocates of the notion of immanence’.²⁷ A thing-in-itself is something that can exist without being perceived. Schlick raises a number of arguments against the immanentists. According to him, these philosophers need to take inspiration from Neo-Kantians and reintroduce things-in-themselves. Schlick asked whether different egos can really ‘contain’ the same element:²⁸ Were this view really tenable, then the world picture suggested here would in fact possess a seductive simplicity and a marvelous compactness. The interrelation of the I’s to one another and to the external world would seemingly have been brought under the dearest formulas with all difficulties disposed of. But unfortunately altogether insuperable difficulties do arise as soon as we seek to carry out the program in detail. Both physics and psychology teach us that it is impermissible to assume that two persons who simultaneously look at the lamp hanging there have exactly the same, much less identical, experiences. Since the two individuals cannot be at the same place at the same time, they must see the lamp from slightly different angles; and the distance from the eyes of the two individuals will not be exactly equal. Thus there is no doubt that the complex of elements each designates as ‘the lamp’ will differ. (Schlick 1925a, 225–6 [207])

The lamp is a complex of elements, and perception consists in ‘integrating’ some elements into a complex, an ego. Mach can indeed say that an ‘ego contains the world (as sensation and idea)’ (Mach 1976, 6). Now, you and I see the same lamp if the same elements are part of the complex that is you as well as the distinct complex that is me (you and I literally overlap). But the lamp looks different to me than it does to you. Hence, the same complex cannot be part of both me and you. This is the opening move in Schlick’s argument for the conclusion that we need objects that are not merely complexes of sensations. However, the difficulties for Mach are spurious. Yes, you and I are complexes that both contain the same lampcomplex, but in you this complex has different effects than in me. For in you it is combined with different complexes than in me. The same complex has different effects if connected to different complexes.²⁹ ²⁷ See Quinton (1985, 401). ²⁸ See Friedman (1999, 130) for a comparison between Mach and Carnap on the problem of objectivity. ²⁹ See Stoneham (2008, 320–1) for a similar response on behalf of what he calls the ‘purely relational view of perception’.

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Schlick posed a second challenge for Mach: [The elements] are still not identical, not ‘the same’. Anyone doubting this need only think of what happens when one of the two observers closes his eyes. As far as he is concerned, the lamp has vanished. But for the other person it is still there; yet the identical object cannot be there and not be there at the same time. (Schlick 1925a, 226 [208])

If I close my eyes, while you keep them open, the complex of elements which was bonded to the complex that I am, is no longer so bonded. Yet, it is still bonded to you. The same element has changed some of its relations, but not its intrinsic properties. Compare: when you become an uncle you have acquired a new relation, but not changed intrinsically. You are still ‘the same’. Nothing forces Mach to accept the paradoxical conclusion that one and the same complex does and does not exist.

10. Summary In Chapters 2 and 3 I have isolated some assumptions that are shared between the Neo-Kantians, Positivists, and Brentanians. Psychology, if there is such a science, is not the science of the soul. More generally, we should explore how elements of different kinds form complexes and which laws govern changes of complexes. In Chapters 4 and 5 I will discuss whether what is given can be divided into mental and physical phenomena or not. Mach et al. will argue that they can, but that this distinction is purpose-relative and should not be preserved in science. Brentano will argue that there is a more fundamental distinction on which psychology as a science in its own right can be based.

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PART II

MANAGING WITHOUT THE SOUL: INTENTIONALITY, DUALISM, A N D NE U T R A L M O N I S M

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4 The Mental and the Physical, Only a Matter of Perspective [T]he psychical and the physical are different only according to the way in which they are regarded. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations (1886)

1. Introduction Let’s recap Part I briefly. A Cartesian Substance Dualist assumes that souls and bodies are substances that have different natures. The nature or essence of something is what makes it the kind of thing it is. What makes something a soul is that it is thinking; what makes something a body is that it is extended. Because of their difference in nature, no soul can be identical with a body and vice versa. If the distinctive properties of souls can by their nature only inhere in them, and the distinctive properties of bodies can by their nature only inhere in them, no distinctive properties of souls and bodies are mutually exclusive. Here we have a distinction between substances and properties grounded in the nature of the former. In the second half of the nineteenth century mental substances are rejected by empirically minded philosophers. This move effects a change in how philosophers conceive of the distinction between the mental and the physical. Reininger highlights the change when he sums up the state of the debate about the psycho-physical problem: The recent versions of the [psycho-physical] problem—with only a few exceptions—drop the concept of the substantiality of the mental and the physical. Both are no longer conceived of as two kinds of substantial being existing side by side, but mostly as two different sides, modes of apprehension, correlations or components of one and the same given reality which is thereby taken to be both mental and physical at the same time. [ . . . ] One does no longer look for a distinguishing mark in a substantial difference in the nature of mental and physical being, but in characters or features of the uniformly given. (Reininger 1916, 13–4)

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Let’s expand on three changes highlighted by Reininger. First, ‘recent versions . . . drop the concept of . . . substantiality’. What is dropped is the assumption that there are substances at all and a fortiori that there are mental and physical substances. If there are neither mental nor physical substances, they cannot be used to divide the world into the mental and the physical. When the distinction between the mental and the physical was based on a distinction between mental and physical substances, it was conceived of as an essential difference between two kinds of things. In virtue of their respective essences no mental substance could be identical to a body and vice versa. If one rejects substances in general, it is no longer clear that the mental/physical distinction is exclusive and essential. Furthermore, a soul was supposed to be simple and therefore to be non-spatial. This made it hard to see how souls as well as their properties could interact with extended things. This problem no longer exists in No-Substance ontologies. Second, a coin has two sides; it has different appearances that depend on the light conditions etc. After the soul has ‘evaporated’, the difference between the mental and the physical is now supposed to be one between different sides or appearances and not between objects of different kinds that appear to us. In the next section I expand on the ‘different sides’ of the same thing conception of the mental/physical distinction. Third, one looks for the distinguishing mark between mental and physical in features of the given. The mark of the mental, if there is one, must specify a property of phenomena or appearances. On to the bone of contention between philosophers who reject substances: [Contemporary philosophers] are mainly divided over the question whether they take consciousness to be a real character of certain phenomena in contrast to others, or whether this distinguishing mark is only the product of a change of the natural or scientific point of view. In the first case the mental counts as a distinct way of appearance of the real in addition to the physical; in the second case the intrinsically homogenous total reality is only for a theoretical or practical purpose temporarily organized into different connections. (Reininger 1916, 14)

Among the philosophers who reject mental and physical substances are two groups. The Modern Dualists argue that even if there is no soul, there is a non-practical and non-conventional distinction of phenomena or appearances into physical and mental. The paradigm Modern Dualist is Brentano, who holds that mental and physical phenomena are different in nature. He and his students argue that, after clarification, the distinction between the mental and the physical turns out to be the distinction between directed and undirected phenomena. Psychology is a fundamental and independent science and Physicalism may be contingently true/false.

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The opponents of the Dualists argue that the distinction between the mental and physical is one of different perspectives or points of view on the same things. For example, if one changes the direction of one’s research, one moves from the mental to the physical. Hence, the distinction is provisional and in the service of practical interests or theoretical investigations. The labels ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ don’t mark a joint in nature. If the latter change, we can make do without the distinction. Hence, neither physicalism (the mental reduces to the more fundamental physical) nor panpsychism (the physical reduces to the more fundamental mental) are reasonable bets on future scientific results. The most important Anti-Dualists are Neutral Monists. Bertrand Russell coined the term ‘Neutral Monists’ for philosophers: . . . who deny that there is a character called ‘mental’ which is revealed in introspection. The men may be called ‘neutral monist’, because, while rejecting the division of the world into mind and matter, they do not say ‘all reality is mind’, nor yet all reality is matter. (Russell 1913a, 7)

By his own lights, Russell’s second sentence contains a misleading simplification. Neutral Monists don’t reject ‘the division of the world into mind and matter’. Rather, and less misleadingly put, they reject the view that the division between mind and matter is revealed in introspection and therefore a division by intrinsic properties. The ultimate constituents of the world are intrinsically neither mental nor physical. But they stand in different external relations to each other and thereby form complexes of different kinds. ‘Mental’ and ‘physical’ refer, Neutral Monists argue, to two particular kinds of such complexes. Russell stressed that Neutral Monism: . . . is by no means a new view; it is advocated not only by the American authors I mentioned [James and Dewey], but by Mach in his Analysis of Sensations, which was published in 1886. (Russell 1921, 144)

Mach is a pioneer of Neutral Monism, so is Avenarius. In fact, in the 1880s and 1890s Neutral Monism is a widespread view in Austro-German philosophy of mind and psychology. Among the Neutral Monists are the Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) (now mainly known for his work on empathy), Wundt, and the Austrian Neo-Kantian Alois Riehl.¹ Riehl called his view ‘Critical Monism’ and took Kant to be the first Neutral Monist. However, already in the 1850s Mach’s mentor provided the template for Neutral Monism by arguing that the difference between mental and physical appearances does not concern

¹ See also Cory (1960, 579).

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their intrinsic properties, but is constituted by a difference in relational properties. I will therefore start with Fechner’s groundbreaking work.

2. Fechner, the Pioneer of Neutral Monism 2.1 The Inner and the Outer Standpoint Reininger wrote that the mental and the physical are no longer ‘conceived of as two kinds of substantial being existing side by side, but mostly as two different sides’ of the same thing. The pioneer of this view is Fechner. He started out by taking the mental and the physical to be ‘two sides’ of the same thing. There is no longer a distinction in substance or properties, but only in appearances, and this is compatible with Monism. The appearances are initially distinguished in terms of ways or methods of perception.² It inspired Mach and other later Neutral Monists. Let’s get clear about the basic idea of Fechner’s new take on the mental and physical. Fechner was one of the thinkers who laid the foundations for empirical psychology.³ In his Elemente der Psychophysik (Fechner 1860) Fechner argued that the intensity of a sensation can be measured and correlated with the magnitude of the stimulus that brings it about. Whether Fechner really devised a method of measuring the intensity of a sensation is hotly debated.⁴ According to Fechner, the distinction between the mental and the physical is one between different standpoints. You are not a human being relative to one standpoint and a dog relative to another standpoint. But one and the same ‘stuff ’ can, argues Fechner, be mental from one standpoint and physical from another: Matter and mind or body and soul or material and ideal things or mental and physical (these opposites are used here as equivalents in the widest sense) are not fundamentally and in their nature, but only with respect to a standpoint of apprehension or consideration different. (Fechner 1851, 321)⁵

According to Fechner, there are independent examples of (i) ONE thing appearing differently from (ii) two or more different standpoints that (iii) cannot be occupied by one observer at the same time. Let’s therefore start by considering the examples he takes to be uncontroversial to get a grip on his general thesis: ² Brentano discussed Fechner’s view under the heading ‘correlativism’, see RP, 210. Stumpf refers to Fechner in his inaugural address in 1896 published in Stumpf (1903, 14). See also Kemp Smith (1906, 30). ³ See Külpe (1893, 28); my translation. ⁴ Brentano corresponded with Fechner about the question whether and how the intensity of mental acts can be measured. See Brentano (PES, 50ff [I, 96ff]) for his arguments against Fechner. See also Schlick (1910b, 32–6). ⁵ See Fechner (1860, 5).

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Example 1: You are inside a circle—standpoint 1—and cannot see its convex side, only the concave one. You are outside the circle—standpoint 2—and cannot see the concave side, but only the convex.

There is one object that has one property, being circular, but an object with this property appears different from different positions in space. It looks curved inwards from a position inside the circle and curved outwards from a position outside the circle. So the circle has two incompatible appearances between which obtains a necessary relation: if something appears to be convex from one standpoint, there is another standpoint from which it will appear concave. Each appearance is tied to one standpoint—here a spatial location—and there is no standpoint from which both incompatible appearances can be experienced at the same time.⁶ An observer who first perceives the circle from the inside, then from the outside, and has no further information about the correlation between appearances and standpoints can be excused for believing that the two appearances reveal two properties. Fechner’s second example fits the same description: Example 2: A is at the center of the solar system—standpoint 1—and looks out. From A’s standpoint the earth seems to go around the sun. B is on Earth— standpoint 2—and looks out to the solar system. From B’s standpoint the sun seems to go around the earth.

There is one movement that appears to have incompatible directions if observed from different locations. There is no location from which the same movement can have both appearances at the same time. A and B will disagree about the question whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth. If they can go only by visual appearances, they will not be able to resolve the question. On to the case that is of interest to us. According to Fechner, the distinction between the mental and the physical is just a distinction between appearances, as in the first two examples: What appears to you from the inner standpoint as your mind [Geist], who yourself are this mind, appears from the outer standpoint as the physical basis [Unterlage] of this mind. It is a difference whether one thinks with the brain or looks into it. (Fechner 1860, 4)

In order to apply the ‘different appearance because of different standpoints’ formula to the mental and physical, we need an independent motivation to

⁶ See Fechner (1860, 2).

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speak in such cases of different standpoints. The original notion of a standpoint is clear enough: in Fechner’s illustrative examples the standpoints are locations a perceiver occupies. Therefore, one and the same perceiver cannot occupy different standpoints at the same time and cannot have two different appearances of the same object at the same time, at least if no perceptual aids are used and the perceiver does not manage to spread himself out in space. But this spatial notion of a standpoint can obviously not fruitfully be applied to the mental and the physical. I am not appearing to myself as a physical object by changing my location. If the inner and outer standpoints are not locations, what are they? Fechner answered this question in the Zend-Avesta: In essence the same processes can be apprehended from one side as bodily organic, and, from the other side, as mental and spiritual. They present themselves as bodily processes to someone who stands outside these processes and looks at them or infers under the form of the external perceivable from what he has seen as the anatomist, physiologist or physicist do. One of these may do all he can do; he will not be able to directly perceive the least of the mental appearances in the other. In contrast, these processes present themselves again as mental, as common feelings, sensations, presentations, drives etc. if a self awareness [Selbstgewahrung] takes place in these processes. (Fechner 1851, 320–1. I owe the quote to Heidelberger 2004.)

Assume that there is one process. If you ‘stand in the process’, you can become aware of it. If you do so, you assume the inner standpoint with respect to the process and it appears to you as a mental process. If you don’t ‘stand in the process’, you can still perceive it or infer its existence and some of its properties. You occupy the external standpoint and the processes appear physical to you. Let us unpack Fechner’s remark further. He does not only propose: If someone has non-inferential awareness of a process, it is a mental process.

For this proposal is potentially too wide. For instance, a direct realist about perception argues that we are directly aware of some processes: say a colour change. These processes are hardly mental processes. Direct realism may be false, but it is coherent. Hence, for Fechner non-inferential awareness alone is insufficient to pick out the mental appearances. The example brings out that ‘standing in’ a process plays a crucial role for Fechner. To see this let us consider another remark about the inner standpoint in Zend-Avesta: The immediate mode of appearance of everything mental, psychic is only ONE because only ONE inner standpoint, that of the coincidence of the subject with the object of the apprehension, is possible [ . . . ] (Fechner 1851, 364)

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Necessarily, there is (exactly) one inner standpoint from which a process can appear, because occupying the inner standpoint with respect to a process requires that one is the subject of the process (that one stands ‘in the process’). If one occupies the inner standpoint with respect to a process, the process can be given to one immediately and, so given, the process or some of its properties appear to one to be mental. Hence, Fechner arrives at the conclusion that mental appearances are those appearances of a process y, given in direct awareness, that someone x can only have of y if and only if x undergoes y. All other appearances are physical. There are several problems with Fechner’s proposal. Here are two. First, the explanatory burden has now been shifted to the notion of undergoing a process or coinciding with the object of apprehension. Am I or am I not the subject of a process like moving my legs? If I am, do I have non-inferential knowledge of it? Yes, it seems prima facie plausible to say that I have noninferential knowledge of the movement of my limbs, but not of anyone else’s limbs. Roughly, if my proprioception works properly, I know whether and how my legs are moving without needing to look. No one else can occupy this standpoint with respect to my limb movement. But is the appearance of my leg movement mental? I find this question hard to decide and the fact that Fechner’s account implies a positive answer speaks against it. Second, Fechner’s standpoint theory assumes that there is a subject of processes that knows of these processes in a distinctive way. This subject seems very much like the soul, an object we have a good reason to be sceptical about. In sum, it seems fair to say that the application of the two-sides conception to the mental and the physical is implausible. There is no independent motivation for a notion of a standpoint that would allow us to say that I occupy a standpoint with respect to my mental life that only I can have.

2.2 Neutral Appearances in Fechner’s Atomenlehre In his Atomenlehre, published four years after Zend-Avesta, Fechner changed tack. The notion of an inner/outer standpoint is now explained in a new way. I will quote a very rich passage of Atomenlehre that introduces several important and influential ideas: [A] One could not speak of a world which neither appeared to oneself nor others at all; there would be no reason to assume its existence. Everything in the world can therefore be defined or conceived as a ratio, relation, connection, mode of determination, possibility of appearances with respect to the way in which it appears to itself or others, or under different conditions and connections possibly appears. For it is otherwise nothing. [ . . . ] [B] [What] we call the objective in the sensory appearances opposed to the subjective in perception is always nothing

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that exists apart from the appearances; but both the objective and the subjective are the same appearance grasped in different relations, or, if one likes this better, different relations of the same appearance. [C] The appearance of the lightning strike, which has the character of the objective natural phenomenon or of the objective natural process insofar as I conceive of it in connection with and relation to appearances of thunder, rain etc. in short as an element and determining moment of the world of all sensory appearances which can happen to me as to everyone other, [D] becomes immediately a subjective perception, an intuition of the lightning stroke, insofar as I conceive of it as determining moments of the unity of consciousness that connects and spans my sensory world together and thereby as intervening in a higher world, as starting points for memories, as basis for concepts, as providing material for thoughts; all of which has no direct relation to an objective lightning stroke, but only to its intuition, because the appearance in such a relation is only called intuition and not something objective. The objective is the side of a sensory appearance that is turned to the neighbor; the subjective is the side of the appearance that is turned into the mind. But both are only two sides, not two things. (Fechner 1855, 94–5)

In (A) Fechner outlines a general recipe for defining any kind of thing: it needs to be defined in terms of how it appears to us or others. (A) is motivated by this critique of the philosophical practice of his contemporaries: If concepts shall hover over the things, impregnated by them, before they [concepts] have been borne or carried to full term by these things, it is impossible not to confuse words with concepts because words indeed achieve in a certain sense what concepts are supposed to do: namely hover over the things and utter everything [von sich geben] what one wants prise out from those things. [ . . . ] If one does not always finally go back from mistakeable [wechselbar] words to unmistakeable [unwechselbare], that is identifiable things and relations between things, which are identifiable with and in them, and ask in every connection for this [tracing back words to identifiable things] again, the controversy about words won’t end and that it won’t end is a sign that one has not gone back to the things. (Fechner 1855, 85)

Philosophers don’t make progress because they don’t connect concepts with their words. In order to debate philosophical issues words need to be defined, ultimately, in terms of appearances. If there is a genuine question, the meaning of the words composing it must be definable on the basis of appearances. Only then do we no longer have debates about words. It is difficult not to hear an early formulation of verificationism in Fechner’s advice. (B), (C), and (D) realize the recipe introduced in (A). (B) outlines the general strategy to distinguish between the same ‘stuff ’ in terms of its relational

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properties. (C) and (D) implement this recipe by defining the mental and the physical in terms of relations between appearances. First, (C): I have an appearance as of a lightning strike, let’s call it appearance A1. I assume the external standpoint towards A1 if I am disposed to see A1 as determining other appearances Ai, Aii, etc. that can happen ‘to me as well as to others’, my neighbours. Since different people can’t have the same appearance, we need to read this as saying that I expect that my neighbours will have appearances relevantly similar to Ai, Aii if they are suitably placed. Then, (D): I assume the internal standpoint towards A1 if I conceive of A1 as determining further appearances AI, AII, etc. that are private; that is, I assume that my neighbours cannot have appearances relevantly similar to AI, AII if they are suitably placed and that the appearances are part of the unity of consciousness to which A1 belongs. Here the external/internal standpoint is no longer explained by means of a form of awareness that a subject can only have of processes ‘in which it stands’. The external/internal standpoint is best understood as a strategy for explaining the occurrence, and properties, of the appearance considered. You assume the external standpoint when you relate the appearance to other appearances and assume of these that others have similar appearances in similar situations. This is the reason that Fechner says that the appearance has a side that is turned to ‘the neighbor’. If you hear a loud bang and trust your senses, you will be disposed to expect that things like you in relevant respects, your ‘neighbors’, have relevantly similar experiences, given that they are placed relevantly like you.⁷ These dispositions to have expectations can be non-conceptual. They are dispositions to feel surprised if your neighbour does not respond as you do, to revise your beliefs and expectations accordingly, etc. If your expectations are disappointed, you will ‘think you are mad’, or better: take yourself to suffer from an illusion and change your classification of the things that seemed to appear to you. You did not hear a loud bang, you had an auditory ‘after-image’, but there was nothing that appeared to you. Fechner (1879, 226) uses such dispositions to explain the difference between a genuine perception and a hallucination. In contrast, if you aware of a pain in your stomach, you are not disposed to expect that someone relevantly similar to you, if they are placed in a relevantly similar position to you, is also aware of the pain. Quite the opposite. We would be deeply surprised, and in fact would not know what to say, if your neighbour had an awareness that was relevantly similar to yours.⁸

⁷ See also Russell (1919, 13). ⁸ According to Messer (1909, 121), something is conceived as physical if one takes ‘it to be graspable by a multitude of subjects’. Fechner spells out what this amounts to.

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If you consider an appearance as related to appearances of which you expect that others have relevantly similar appearances in similar situations, you take it to be physical: in our example, the appearance is a lightning strike. For example, if you consider an appearance as causing or being caused by such appearances, it is physical. If you disregard relations between an appearance and the relevant kind of appearance, the appearance is a mental phenomenon: it is not a lightning strike, but an intuition of a lightning strike. We have these dispositions because we are attuned to laws holding of appearances. We tacitly accept laws that connect things like us, appearances of particular kinds, and locations. For example, we accept the law that if there is an appearance as of a tree, there will be similar appearances in other things like us that can communicate their appearances to us.⁹ There are other appearance kinds that are not governed by such laws. The appearances that are governed by the first kind of law are appearances as of objective, outer, corporeal, or physical objects. The later ones are appearances of mental things. We assume the external standpoint with respect to an appearance if we subsume it under the first kind of law; we assume the internal standpoint with respect to an appearance if we subsume it under the second kind of law. On the next page of Atomenlehre Fechner will declare that there are only appearances: there is nothing which underlies or grounds appearances. Before, it seemed that there is one process that has distinct appearances in which the former appears to different thinkers. The example shows that this is not Fechner’s considered view. Viewed from the external standpoint the appearance is a lightning strike; viewed from the internal standpoint it is the intuition of a lightning strike. So the very same thing, an event in which something appears, is part of corporeal reality as well as a representation of corporeal reality. What it is depends on the standpoint you assume to it, and both the inner and outer standpoints are equally legitimate. On this reconstruction there is no longer a need for an experiencing subject to make a distinction between the mental and the physical. The distinction is grounded in laws that govern appearances and it is manifest to us in our dispositions to have certain expectations. But the notion of a ‘neighbour’ does a lot of work in Fechner’s explanation of the distinction. Can it be introduced on the basis of appearances alone? Yes, answered Fechner if we assume that we are ‘hardwired’ to make inferences by analogy (Fechner 1879, 227). Let us work through an example to see how this is supposed to work. Assume that a thinker T has not yet learned to distinguish between themselves and other things like themselves. Here is how T starts out:

⁹ See Fechner (1879, 226).

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1. T gets attuned to a reliable connection [‘solidary connection’] between appearances of different kinds: an appearance of food consumption and an appearance of being sated go together; an appearance of sound and sights and an appearance of pleasure go together; etc. 2. T experiences apparent exceptions to the reliable connection between different appearances: an appearance of a movement that is relevantly like the movement of food consumption without the feeling of satedness. 3. Inference by analogy: The solidary connection between appearances holds. Hence, there are appearances that are relevantly similar to the ones T had before, but T does not have them now. 4. If there are appearances like T’s, but T does not have them now, there is a something like T that has these appearances: the neighbour. 5. Inference by reverse analogy: T infers that T is like the neighbour: T also has appearances that are only given to T while the neighbour needs to infer them (This reconstruction follows mostly Heidelberger 1993, 116). Fechner takes steps 1–5 to be a reconstruction of how we form the ideas of another like us, the neighbour, and of ourselves; these ideas are the basis for dividing appearances into private and public and thereby distinguishing between the mental and physical. The inferences by analogy do not ‘enter consciousness’ in the developed form Fechner gives it, but in a more inchoate form. He leaves open how you and I actually made these inferences. But it is clear that he takes inference by analogy to be a good method of forming beliefs. Yes, induction and inference by analogy do not yield absolutely certain knowledge. However, we use induction and inference by analogy all the time. It is indispensable for survival and is fruitful. So why should it not be reasonable as a method of belief formation?¹⁰

3. Neutral Monism: Main Theme and Problems In Fechner’s Atomenlehre the difference between mental and physical things concerns the relations between appearances that we are interested in. The same appearance can stand in many relations. If, for a certain purpose, we ignore its relations to ‘public’ appearances, it is mental; if we ignore, for other purposes, its relations to ‘private’ things it is physical. In itself the appearance is neither mental nor physical: it is neutral. Heidelberger (1993, 121) argues that Fechner is ‘probably’ the first Neutral Monist. ‘Probably’, I take it, because there are traces of the same idea in Hume and Kant. Price (1940, 105–6) argued that Hume is a Neutral Monist: there is no

¹⁰ See Fechner (1879, 229).

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simple mental substance, only impressions and ideas that are neither mental nor physical. Matter as well as mind are constructed out of these neutral building blocks.¹¹ In his Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics (1887) Riehl (see section 4.7) took Kant to have resolved the ontological dualism of mind and matter. Later Natorp (1912, 148–9) agreed. Natorp (1912, 148–9) construed Kant’s notion of ‘form’ as ‘way of ordering’ and brings Kant very close to Mach et al.: the difference we label with ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ is one in different ways of ordering appearances. I will not try to adjudicate this historical issue here. However, it seems plausible that Fechner is the first to articulate in detail and argue for the thought that the difference between the mental and physical is constituted by a difference in relations. Fechner stressed that the distinction between the mental and physical is one between different relations in which the same things can stand to each other. This is a leitmotiv that reoccurs in the work of Neutral Monists. Let’s start with Mach: I say that A B C . . . , the same A B C . . . , play, according to circumstances now the role of physical elements, now the role of sensations. (Mach 1891, 395)

‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ refer to Machian elements like colours or pressures. The same element is a colour as well as a perception of a colour. Whether it is a colour or a perception depends on the circumstances and the circumstances will turn out to be those of its relations which we don’t ignore. In his Der Logische Aufbau der Welt Rudolf Carnap (1928, 258–9) gave a neat independent illustration of the basic thought of Neutral Monism.¹² He distinguished between two situations: A: You watch the starred sky and see stars that differ in colour, brightness and size. In this case there are distinctions among the stars that allow you to order the stars. (See Carnap 1928, 258) B: You watch the starred sky and all the stars are of the same colour, brightness and size. The stars don’t differ in their intrinsic properties: they are all intrinsic duplicates of each other. But although the stars are intrinsically alike, you still observe constellations of stars in the night sky. Situation B illustrates that things that share all their intrinsic properties can form different complexes in virtue of standing in relations to each other. These relations

¹¹ See Backhaus (1991) for discussion. In the light of exegetical difficulties about Hume’s claim to be the first Neutral Monist, Stubenberg (2016, section 4) proposes to start the genealogy of Neutral Monism with Mach. ¹² See also James (1904a, 481) for a good illustration.

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cannot be grounded in intrinsic properties of the relata. They will, for example, be spatial relations. Such external relations collect the intrinsically indistinguishable stars into complexes, Carnap’s ‘constellations’. The complexes, in turn, can differ in important properties. Neutral Monism applies this thought to the distinction between the mental and the physical. In Carnap’s words: the difference between the physical and the psychological merely indicate[s] different types of constellation (or their connection) which are due to different modes of organization. (Carnap 1928, 259)

The different modes of organization that make for the difference between the mental and the physical are due to brute relations. The core thesis of Neutral Monism is then the following one: CNM: The difference between the mental and physical consists only in a difference in (irreducible) relational properties.

CNM allows the same things to be mental as well as physical, or put differently, to be neither essentially mental nor essentially physical. In Fechner’s case, one and the same appearance can stand in law-governed relations to other appearances such that we expect that others have similar appearances in similar situations and can stand in such relations to appearances where we don’t have this expectation. The concepts of the mental and the physical are concepts that describe appearances in terms of this relational difference. Therefore the same appearance can fall under both. Neutral Monism implies that a perception or, more generally, consciousness of something is identical with that which it is supposed to be consciousness of. If Neutral Monism is true, there is no distinction between a mental act and its object. Brentano and Marty argue that the distinction between mental acts and what they are of or about can easily be uncovered by us when we pay attention to our mental life. Hence, Neutral Monism is false. More in Chapter 6. In turn, James defended and supported Neutral Monism. We have no empirical reason to accept a distinction between mental acts and what they are about. For inner consciousness shows us only objects, not acts directed on objects. Hence, Neutral Monism is in the clear: there is no intrinsic distinction between mental and non-mental phenomena. More in sections 9.4.1–3.

4. Mach: Dual Dependence and Neutrality In this section I will reconstruct Mach’s take on Neutral Monism. We know from Chapter 2 that Mach declared the Lotzean ego or subject, the simple object that

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unifies a mental life, to be unsaveable. The proper scientific starting point is our awareness of sensations. The subject is not primary, the sensations are: It is out of sensations that the subject is built up, and, once built up, no doubt the subject reacts in turn on the sensations. (Mach 1914, 26 [21])

Now, complexes of sensations stand in relations of influence and dependence to each other: which elements/sensations a complex contains at a time depends on other complexes and their elements: A white ball falls upon a bell; a sound is heard. The ball turns yellow before a sodium lamp, red before a lithium lamp. Here the elements (A B C . . . ) appear to be connected only with one another and to be independent of our body (K L M . . . ). But if we take santonine, the ball again turns yellow. If we press one eye to the side, we see two balls. If we close our eyes entirely, there is no ball there at all. If we sever the auditory nerve, no sound is heard. The elements A B C . . . , therefore, are not only connected with one another, but also with K L M. To this extent, and to this extent only do we call A B C, . . . , sensations and regard A B C as belonging to the ego. (Mach 1914, 16 [12–30])

The ball is a complex of the elements A, B, C. A distinct complex of elements—the lithium lamp—can effect changes in the ball. Hence, a first-stab observation is that there are relations of influence, or (as Mach more cautiously says) functional dependence, between complexes. Among the complexes of elements there is a special one: my body (K, L, M). It is special in that the having of sensations of movement leads, if not prevented, to the complex containing movements. It is nomologically necessary that each element that appears to me is dependent on my body as well as on the complexes that are distinct from my body. Imagine that I see a ball in daylight. I have taken no drugs and my senses are working as they should. If I had taken santonine (dependence on my body) and the light had stayed the same (dependence on other bodies), the ball would look different.¹³ If a different light source had been used (dependence on other bodies) and I had taken no santonine (dependence on my body), the ball would also have looked different. Mach takes the distinction between the mental and the physical to correspond to the double dependence of sensations: A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperatures, upon spaces,

¹³ Santonine is a drug that may cause disturbances of vision (yellow or green vision).

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and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina (the elements K L M . . . ), a sensation. Not the subject matter, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the two domains. (Mach 1914, 17–18, [14]; my emphasis)¹⁴

The element RED is mental if, and only if, we attend only to its relations of dependence on our body; it is physical if, and only if, we attend only to RED’s relations of dependence on bodies that are not ours. But since it is nomologically necessary that RED stands in both kinds of relations, RED itself is neither mental nor physical. It is neutral. The distinction between the mental and the physical is one of disregarding some dependence relations and focusing on others: it is a distinction in the direction of investigation or interest.¹⁵ For Mach, the essence of the mental is relational and interest-relative. Here is how Mach expressed this in Knowledge and Error: For me the physical and the mental are essentially identical, immediately familiar and given, and different only as to the mode of viewing. This mode and therefore the distinction can supervene only with higher mental development and ampler experience. Prior to this the physical and the mental are indistinguishable. (Mach 1976, 13 fn. [13 fn.])

No matter how attentively you considered a mental event in introspection, you would not be able to discover a feature that distinguishes it from physical events. Only when one has taken an interest in dependencies between what is given in experience can one work out the distinction between the mental and physical. This is a (the) fundamental point of disagreement between Mach on the one hand and Brentano and his followers on the other. To anticipate Chapter 5: Brentano wrote: [Inner perception] does not show us localized, spatially extended things, but mental processes [psychische Vorgänge], consciousness of something [Bewusstsein von etwas]—i.e. we perceive ourselves as having something as object. (FCA, 85 [136]; my translation and emphasis)

If this is right, there is an experiential distinction between the mental and the physical: sensations are mental and not neither mental nor physical because they are directed on something and are non-inferential given as such. One does not

¹⁴ Mach expressed this idea already in (Mach 1882, 209–10 [238–9]). ¹⁵ See his analogy with Marriote’s and Lussac’s gas laws for a further illustration (Mach 1914, 310–11 [253–4]).

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need to be conceptually sophisticated—there need to be no higher intellectual development—to make the distinction. Mach takes it to be a cardinal mistake to ascribe to sensations and mental events, and states in general, a distinct nature from physical events.¹⁶ Descartes, says Mach, committed this mistake when he distinguished between mental and physical substances that differ in their nature. If we distinguish between the mental and the physical, we make a particular kind of idealization that draws a distinction for explanatory purposes where there is no theory-independent distinction. There is no difference in kind or nature between the mental and the physical. Mach’s discussion of the distinction between the mental and the physical leaves an important question unanswered: Why does the attending to the dependence of an element on states or events that concern my body (while ignoring its simultaneous dependence on states or events that are states of, or changes to, other bodies) deserve the label ‘psychological research’? The first-stab answer is that Mach describes what experimental psychologists that are interested in the senses actually do. But why is this psychology and not mere physiology? Dependence on my body is dependence on a body that is related to one particular ego or self: Further, that complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body (the human body), which is called the “I” or “Ego,” manifests itself as relatively permanent. (Mach 1914, 3 [2])

Sensations are disagreeable or agreeable; they are pleasurable or painful. Memories, moods, and feelings are in turn supposed to be composed from sensations.¹⁷ An ego is a complex of sensations. Why do complexes of sensations count as having a mental life? Because ‘the orderly, continuous coherence of sensations and memories makes up consciousness’ (Mach 1913, 1).¹⁸ Complexes that contain sensations and memories can be described as streams of consciousness and thereby qualify as mental. Complexes that don’t have such constituents don’t qualify. Now, Mach says that RED is a sensation if, and only if, we describe or conceive of it in terms of a body that is connected with an ego. An ego is in turn a complex of sensations (more about egos in due course). This seems to be a tight circle. Is this a problem for Mach? No, one can break into the circle via Mach’s characterization of sensations:

¹⁶ See Mach (1914, 34 [29]). ¹⁷ See Mach (1914, 21 [17]). ¹⁸ See also Mach (1976, 31 [43–4]).

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[Sensations] are agreeable or disagreeable, that is to say our body reacts by means of more or less intense movements of approach or retreat, which in turn present themselves to introspection as complexes of sensations. (Mach 1976, 17 [21])

(Dis)agreeability is the causal power of some elements to affect the movement of a particular body: my body. I move because they are agreeable or disagreeable. The same elements also have the power to cause further changes in other bodies. If we only consider the power of some elements to affect movements of my body, they are conceived as sensations. If we only consider their powers to affect other bodies, the same elements are conceived as physical qualities. The distinction between sensation and physical quality is cast in terms of which causal powers of an element are taken into account and which are ignored. The ‘contexts’ that are supposed to distinguish between the mental and physical are determined by what we ignore and what we attend to in an investigation. Hence, the mental/ physical distinction concerns only ‘the direction of research’, not what we research.¹⁹

5. Wundt: Two Standpoints or Neutral Monism with a Subject In Chapter 1 we saw that Wundt defined psychology as the science of the phenomena given in inner experience. In 1897 he criticized this definition as inadequate: Because it may give rise to the misunderstanding that psychology has to do with objects totally different from those of the so-called ‘outer experience’. (Wundt 1897, 2)

But does the definition really give rise to this misunderstanding? In general, a difference in epistemic access does not make for a difference in object known. For example, I have two different methods to know about the position of my limbs: non-inferential proprioception and the combination of inference and outer observation (‘These are my limbs, they look straight’). The distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience neither grounds nor corresponds to a difference between two kinds of objects. Although the initial definition of psychology may not mislead us, Wundt’s new definition makes explicit what the old definition left implicit. There are no mental phenomena distinct from physical phenomena that are explored in different sciences:

¹⁹ For a more detailed discussion of Mach’s Neutral Monism see Textor (2021 a).

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There are no bodies and spirits or souls which, similar to plants and animals, are opposed to each other as different natures; and there is no “inner experience”, which ever can be observed independently from what one calls outer experience. The same tree that the botanist considers in respect to its morphological properties or its systematic place, the chemist with respect to the composition of its fabric and the physicist as a bearer of physical effects can as a spatial presentation to which qualitative sense contents and emotional excitations are tied be an object of a psychology. (Wundt 1903, 337; my emphasis)

There is one kind of fundamental object, phenomena or experience, and two different research strategies—Wundt’s term is ‘standpoint’ or ‘point of view’—to cope with the phenomena. One of the points of view is called ‘psychology’, the other ‘natural science’. The two points of view have a foundation in the phenomena: We are naturally led to these points of view, because every concrete experience immediately divides into two factors: into the content presented to us and our apprehension of this content. We call the first of these factors the objects of experience, the second the experiencing subject. From this arise two directions for the treatment of experience. One is natural science: it regards the objects of experience in their properties that are conceived of as independent from the subject. The other is psychology which investigates the total content of experience in its relations to a subject and in those properties which are immediately predicated to by the subject. (Wundt 1897, 2–3)

Every phenomenon can be split up into subject and object and this distinction grounds the distinction between psychology and natural science. Psychology is the science that investigates experience without abstracting from the subject and focuses on the properties of experience that depend on the subject. Natural science investigates the same experiences, but disregards the subject.²⁰ In sum: Wundt is a Neutral Monist: the phenomena are neither mental nor physical. But there is a distinction between psychology and physics: these sciences study the neutral experiences once focusing on, once abstracting from the subject. How and why can every neutral experience be articulated into subject and object? According to Wundt (1903, 339), one can have an experience without being given a subject and an object. In pure experience there is a subject and an object, but they are not yet distinguished. Making a subject/object distinction is the result of later reflection on experience. Wundt does not say how exactly a

²⁰ For criticism see Meumann (1903). Münsterberg (1900, 16–21) compares Wundt and Brentano.

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human being that has an experience works out the subject/object distinction. In the next section we will see that Lipps provided more detail. But why assume that pure experience has a subject/object structure in the first place? Wundt (1896, 15) endorsed Lotze’s thesis: no experience without a subject. But we have seen that Lotze’s thesis is difficult to defend. If experience does not split up into subject and object, Wundt has no basis for distinguishing psychology and physics. This is exactly the conclusion Mach wants to draw: the boundary-line between the physical and the psychical is solely practical and conventional. If, for the higher purposes of science, we erase this dividing-line, and consider all connexions as equivalent, new paths of investigation cannot fail to be opened up. (Mach 1914, 311 [254])

6. Lipps: Neutral Monism and the Will In 1887 the German psychologist Theodor Lipps reviewed Mach’s Analysis of Sensations. It will be helpful to see how Lipps expounded Neutral Monism in his review. Lipps (1887, 43) finds himself in complete agreement with Mach and refers his reader to Lipps (1886) in which he introduced the basic ideas of Neutral Monism in one paragraph: In virtue of experience and for causal thinking immediately obtains a double connection, the connection of the Ego and the connection of the world of things. The ray of light that I perceive is first simply given: it is—therein I comprehend everything that I originally know about it and that I am entitled to assert—simply present. Because I, then, experience that it disappears when I close my eye and returns when I open it, it appears to be dependent on me and my will. Maybe I already experienced previously that it [the ray of light] also disappears and reappears without my willing and the body that is ruled by my will having anything to do with it. In that respect the gleam of light seems independent of me. It is at the same time placed in a world that is relatively independent of me if experience guides me to take other data which I had to acknowledge as independent of me as conditions of its appearance and re-appearance. (Lipps 1886, 118)

Lipps gives us a stepwise account of how we are supposed to move from neutral experience to the distinction between subject and object: First, the given is subject- and object-less. It is made of elements that are simply present without being present to someone. Second, there are dependence relations between the elements.

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Third, these dependence relations are of two different kinds: elements depend on the will and elements depend on other elements that don’t depend on the will for their occurrence. Fourth, one can recognize that these two kinds of dependence relations obtain by observation. Fifth, the recognition of the obtaining of these dependence relations yields a distinction between mind and world, the mental and the physical. Lipps’s Neutral Monism dispenses with a primitive subject/object distinction. In primitive experience neither a subject nor an object is given. But the experience is the experience of a human being which has a will and this will controls basic actions like paying attention to something. Some aspects of the experience depend for their existence and persistence on the will of a human being, others don’t. This distinction is, argues Lipps, the basis for introducing the distinction between the subject and the world. In Lipps’s framework, the ‘essential’ task of epistemology is: . . . to show how the world of the subject on the one hand and the world beyond the subject on the other hand is built up without letting the objective arise out of the subjective after the fact. (Lipps 1886, 120)

The starting point of epistemology is neither subjective nor objective. Both the world and the subject are constructed simultaneously out of the neutral given.²¹ There is a distinction between the mental and the physical but it is not a fundamental joint in nature that needs to be preserved in scientific research. Lipps helps us to understand how we can make the subject/object distinction in response to neutral experiences. But in order to do so he seems to have appealed to a mental power: the will and its exercises. Exercises of the will fit all the main criteria of the mental (subjective). Hence, Lipps seems not to be able to let both the subjective and objective arise out of the neutral without presupposing either. The subjective is more fundamental than the objective: there are mental powers and events that are not ‘constructed’ from neutral elements. The problem is an indicator of the general problem that a Neutral Monist must find a way to distinguish between two different dependencies without presupposing a distinction between the mental and the physical.

²¹ See also Cornelius (1897, 114–7).

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7. Riehl: Neo-Kantian Neutral Monism Also in 1887, one year after Mach’s Analysis, Alois Riehl published the final volume Introduction to the Theory of Science and Metaphysics of his trilogy The Principles of the Critical Philosophy.²² In his book Riehl supported a perspectival view of the mental on the basis of an analysis of Kantian arguments, but his starting point is exactly the same as Mach’s: The scientist may abstract from consciousness in observing natural phenomena, but he cannot exclude consciousness from his observation of phenomena. In following the connection of external processes, as suggested by his objective conceptions of matter and motion, he never finds inner conscious states; and the reason is not that such states and activities are or could be absent in the observation of external processes, but only that he does not think of them, and does not need to think of them so long as his attention is turned exclusively to the physical side of phenomena. The distinction of physical and psychical, of outer and inner, is reached and determined only by abstraction. There are given psycho-physical phenomena, one side of which, the physical, points to a reality independent of us; while the other is the basis of self-knowledge. Neither inner experience, as many philosophers say, nor outer experience, as students of nature assert, is directly given, but only the consciousness which includes inner and outer experience in constant interdependence. (Riehl 1894, 172 [173])

Here we have Mach’s dual dependence again: what we are aware of at a time depends on how things are with us, broadly speaking, and how things are in our surroundings. Any scientist who studies natural phenomena ignores the dependence of their observations of these phenomena on their inner states and processes. The dogmatic scientist not only intentionally ignores the dependence of his observations on his inner states and events; he does not even realize that there is this dependence or fails in other ways to acknowledge it. The critical scientist is aware of the dual dependence and takes reality to be both mental and physical: the given is neither mental nor physical: it is psycho-physical. Neither the mental nor the physical are immediately given in experience, only the psycho-physical is. We will see in Chapter 5 that Brentano fundamentally disagrees with this view: introspective awareness is supposed to reveal the nature of the mental and physical to us. If we are critical scientists we are aware of the dual dependence and don’t mistake different kinds of concepts developed by abstraction for different kinds of objects that fall under these concepts. Riehl takes Kant to have already hit upon ²² I will quote from the 1894 translation. References in brackets are to the revised second German edition.

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this insight. Kant distinguished between things-in-themselves and appearances. The things-in-themselves are the grounds of appearances. But our inner and outer senses only give us knowledge of appearances. Kant’s criticism of substance dualism relies on this distinction. Substance Dualists make a fundamental mistake, argues Kant. They take the difference in the mode of representing objects, which are unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, for a difference in things themselves. I, represented through inner sense in time, and objects in space, outside me, are indeed specifically wholly distinct appearances, but they are not thereby thought of as different things. The transcendental object that grounds both outer appearances and inner intuition is neither matter nor a thinking being in itself, but rather an unknown ground of those appearances that supply us with our empirical concepts of the former as well as the latter. (Kant 1781/7, A379–80, referred to by Riehl 1894, 175 [176])

If one accepts, like Riehl, Kant’s claim that things-in-themselves are the unknown ground of appearances, one can extract from Kant the following argument for Neutral Monism:²³ (P1) We form by abstraction from what is given in consciousness the concepts of the mental and physical. (P2) The concepts so acquired can only apply to appearances (properly speaking, we acquire the concept of a mental and a physical appearance). (C1) Hence, the concepts of the mental and physical do not apply to thingsin-themselves. (C2)

Hence, the things-in-themselves are neither mental nor physical.

But is there not still a distinction between mental and physical appearances? Yes, but it is not an explanatorily important one. We can distinguish between mental and physical appearances, but they are of the same fundamental kind: they are both appearances, or phenomena. Therefore Riehl says: Material things and processes are not different in kind from psychic phenomena. They are both phenomena in consciousness, and moreover, phenomena which determine each other reciprocally. The distinction, or antithesis, if this word is better, consists only in the fact that the former class may be objectified, the latter not. Only the former points—namely immediately in sensation—to an external reality independent of us. (Riehl 1894, 179–80 [180]; in part my translation)

²³ See also Genova (1970, 475) who argues for similar reasons: ‘there is no traditional mind-body problem in Kant’s doctrine.’

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Riehl supposes to have solved the psycho-physical problem with Kant’s help. There is no problem of how the mental and physical can interact. Things-inthemselves are neither mental nor physical: there is nothing that prevents them from interacting. Now, in the last quote Riehl suggests a way to distinguish mental and physical phenomena. Mental phenomena point to external phenomena whereas the external phenomena don’t ‘point’ to anything. Let us have a closer look at how Riehl developed this suggestion. In the first edition of Der Philosophische Kritizismus he characterized sensation [Empfindung] as limited by something that is not sensation: We feel every sensation to be limited and determined by something that is itself not felt [empfunden] but comes to the fore [sich Geltung verschaffen] through the consciousness of this limitation. [ . . . ] Sensual Idealism misjudges or ignores this character of sensing. (Riehl 1879, 42)

In the second edition he made an interesting change: Hume and Mach’s Positivism ignore this character of sensing. The scholastics called this relation [original localization], which erroneously they attributed only to presentation, the intentional inexistence of the object. For by ‘intentional’ they understood the relation of a presentation to the object outside the presentation. (Riehl 1925, 55)

Idealists as well as Positivists misconstrue the nature of sensation. A sensation is directed on something distinct from itself. Moore (1903a) (see Chapter 9) and Brentano will explore this line of argument further. But it is worth stopping for a moment to consider Riehl’s particular take on the main intuition that drives the argument. One feels a sensation to be limited by something distinct from it and thereby comes to be aware of the limiting object. For example, the sensation of touch is one in which we feel our activity to be checked by an obstacle.²⁴ I feel that my striving is stopped and my feeling a limit to my striving is the appearance of the thing that limits my striving. This thought seems too narrow to understand intentionality in general, but it gives one a good model to get an intuitive grip on the act/object distinction. In order to meet Riehl’s objection Mach needs to explain away the felt limitation of sensation. If an element is a (tactual) sensation if considered in relations to pain and pleasure, why does the sensation include feelings of limitation? There is nothing that could limit it in Mach’s system. If he accepts such a feeling of limitation, it must be brute or misleading. And it goes against our first-person knowledge of what sensation is like.

²⁴ See Smith (2002, 153).

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Riehl took the distinction between phenomena that point to something else (are limited by it) to be of little interest. For this distinction does not pertain to thingsin-themselves. However, if we dispense with things-in-themselves, as other Neutral Monists as well as Brentano will do, the distinction outlined by Riehl will gain theoretical value. This is exactly Brentano’s point: there is a fundamental distinction between mental and physical phenomena.

8. Preview The starting point of Neutral Monism is a claim about the given that is similar in spirit to Hume and Lichtenberg. We are not aware of a subject distinct from sensation. The best way to report a sensation is in an impersonal way: There is a white gleam.

If one holds, in contrast, like Herbart and Lotze that a mental event is an event that stands in a particular relation to a soul—it is an event in the life of the soul— sensations are given to us as mental. Brentano and his school will agree that no self is given in awareness. But they emphatically reject Neutral Monism. Why? Because Brentano proposed a mark of the mental that distinguishes between the mental and the physical independently of whether there is a soul and that is introspectively accessible without theorizing and concept formation. This mark of the mental is intentionality or directedness. Let’s go back to one of Lipps’s examples. A gleam of light is simply present now, it is not present to something as Lotze etc. would say. But there is something that is present; the presence is determined as the presence of a gleam of light. Because it is so determined it stands in further dependence relations to other sensations. This is the way in for Brentano, Riehl, and later Moore to analyse sensation as intentional: it is the presence of something in consciousness that is distinct from consciousness. In Chapter 5 I will expound and assess this response to Neutral Monism. In this chapter a serious threat to Brentano’s intentionality will emerge that does not figure in Neutral Monists like Mach and Lipps: diaphaneity. Lange and later James argued that awareness shows us neither a subject nor events/processes that are directed onto something. The only thing we can introspectively attend to is supposed to be the object. Diaphaneity will, for example, persuade Russell that there is no original distinction between the mental and the physical. I will address the challenge posed by diaphaneity in Chapters 7 and 9.

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5 The Mental and the Physical, an Intrinsic Distinction Nothing distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena more than the fact that something is immanent as an object in them. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874)

1. Introduction The Neutral Monists argue that there is no intrinsic property that distinguishes within the Given—the appearances or elements—the mental and the physical. Brentano disagreed. Among appearances or phenomena there are those that are directed on something and those that are not. If something is directed (or undirected), it is essentially so. Nothing can be both directed as well as undirected, or change from being directed to being undirected. The intrinsic difference between the mental and the physical is available for everyone who is able to pay attention to his mental life. It is a difference that we experience and can notice: we don’t need to perform inferences to make the distinction. The distinction between the mental and the physical is not interest-relative or conventional, but rather intrinsic and non-relative. Even if Brentano’s distinction does not exactly correspond with the mental/ physical distinction, it makes plausible that we should treat the directed phenomena differently from the non-directed ones. Hence, there should be a distinct science of directed phenomena; if we stick with the traditional label we can call it ‘psychology’. Husserl wrote in a letter to Marvin Farber in 1937 that for Brentano, ‘psychology is nothing less than a science of intentionality’.¹ Maybe ‘psychology’ should be replaced with the label ‘the science of intentionality’. But for Brentano it is clear that the phenomena come in two fundamental kinds, each of which deserves scientific study. Psychology, while still in its infancy, is an independent empirical science because it deals with a fundamental kind of phenomenon. For Brentano’s student Stumpf, psychology is the science of the basic mental

¹ The letter is reprinted in Cho (1990, 37).

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phenomena. Other Geisteswissenschaften like sociology, political science, art studies are concerned with complex mental phenomena.² In this chapter I will introduce the basics of Brentano’s ‘science of intentionality’. I will clarify the philosophical assumptions behind Brentano’s characterization of intentionality as the most distinctive mark of the mental, introduce the act/ object/content distinction, and outline how the main objection to Brentano’s approach—the distinction between act, object, and/or content—as its being empirically untraceable was framed in the direct responses to Brentano.

2. Another Way down: Brentano’s Concept-Empiricism In section 3.3 we have seen that part of Mach’s research program is historicalcritical. Concepts are tools in the service of biological needs. If one can give an account of how a concept was developed to serve a biological need, we have a reason to reject the assumption that the concept latches onto a fundamental property that figures in the laws of the unified science. Brentano is, like Mach, concerned to trace concepts back to their origin. But in Brentano this is part of his empiricist methodology and does not have primarily critical or antimetaphysical import. Unlike Mach, Brentano does not consider the practical value of a concept—how it serves the Will—when he traces it back to its origin. In the final instance, concepts are abstracted from inner perceptions, but Brentano does not give the Will a role in the process of abstraction. It is helpful to compare Brentano’s methodology to that of analytic philosophers. They aim to give analytic definitions, that is, they aim to decompose a given concept into its marks or characteristics. The marks of a concept are further, distinct concepts such that, necessarily, if an object x falls under all of them, x falls under the defined concept (and vice versa). Brentano concluded his lecture ‘On the Concept of Truth’ with a methodological sermon that is addressed to philosophers who focus on analytic definitions to the exclusion of other ways to clarify or otherwise illuminate concepts: We have been concerned with a definition, i.e. with the elucidation of a concept connected with a name. Many believe such elucidation always requires some general determination, and they forget that the ultimate and most effective means of elucidation must always consist in an appeal to the individual’s intuition, from which all our general characteristics [Merkmale] are derived. What would be the use of trying to elucidate the concepts red or blue if I could not present one with something red or with something blue? All this has been disregarded by

² See Stumpf (1907, 21).

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those who were concerned with the nominal definition of truth, whose history we have pursued. If, as I hope, we have succeeded in clarifying this cloudy [getrübte] concept, we have done so only by focusing primarily on examples of true judgements. [ . . . ] Even now, after the elimination of confusions and misunderstandings, our definition would convey nothing to one who lacked the necessary intuition. (OCT, 17 [29]; my emphasis; I have changed the translation.)

Brentano reminds us that conceptual elucidation cannot always consist in defining a concept by decomposing it into its marks. Ultimately analytic definitions will come to an end: there are basic concepts that cannot be defined by decomposing them into marks. Our grasp of the defined concepts is only as good as our grasp of these ‘building blocks’. If we assume that only analytic definitions will yield insight into the nature of concepts, we deprive ourselves of an understanding of the indefinable concepts. If conceptual elucidation is to be possible for definable concepts as well as for indefinable ones, a broader approach to conceptual elucidation is needed. What can this approach be? Brentano’s answer is implicit in his discussion of the concept good in his lecture On the Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (OKRW): In order to answer these questions [What is the nature of good?] in a satisfactory way we have first and foremost to find the origin of the concept of good which, like the origin of all our concepts, lies in certain concrete intuitive presentations. (OKRW, 8 [16])³

Now the maxim ‘Find the origin of a concept’ needs further explanation. How does one follow it? What is the source or origin of a concept? Fortunately, Brentano’s student Stumpf helps us to answer these questions.⁴ His 1873 book Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (The Psychological Origin of the Presentation of Space) was written under the influence of Brentano and contains an explanation of the Brentanian methodology employed: By [‘]seeking out the psychological origin of a presentation [Vorstellung][’] we mean the seeking out of the presentations from which it arose, and the manner in which it arose. First one will think of the analysis of presentation into simpler and simplest. Then we have to deal with the question whether only real presentations occur in the combination or whether it also contains phantasy presentations. (Stumpf 1873, 4; my translation)

³ In part my translation. Chisholm and Schneewind do not translate ‘in befriedigender Weise’ and ‘vor allem’. ⁴ See also Stumpf (1939, 9).

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We seek out the origin of a presentation by asking ourselves from which other presentations and in which manner it arose. There are two general kinds of origin of a presentation. (A) If we find concepts that are marks of the presentation, we have found its origin in other presentations and, at the same time, we have given an analysis of the presentation into its component marks. Answering the question as to the origin of the presentation is, in this case, analysing it. (B) If we can’t give an analytic definition of a presentation, but find perceptions from which it can be abstracted, we have found the origin of the presentation without giving an analysis. One elucidates such a presentation by reversing the process of acquisition: one searches for the perceptions that gave rise to the concept and either episodically imagines having them or recalls them, in order to focus one’s attention on them. An important role in (B) is played by the notions of intuition and abstraction. ‘Intuition’ is in Brentano’s terminology just another word for ‘perception’, the non-inferential acknowledgement of one or some things. Awareness is construed as a form of perception, inner perception.⁵ Brentano’s views on abstraction change over time, but what remains constant is the claim that abstraction starts from a multitude of objects of which we are simultaneously aware.⁶ We are first aware of a multitude of spatiotemporal things—particularized colours, shapes, smells—simultaneously. Through contrasts, we notice reoccurring features in the manifold and think of them in isolation. When we can attend to such features in isolation and recall them, we have formed a general concept by abstraction. In both (A) and (B) we have specified in which manner and from which source the presentation arose. Hence, inquiring after the origin of a concept is a unified method that applies to definable, as well as to indefinable, concepts. We must be able to acquire some concepts by abstraction from perceptions in order to prevent an infinite regress or vicious circle. In this sense, possession of any concept requires that one has had perceptions. In subsequent work Brentano aimed to show that his thirteen’s Habilitations thesis is true that every concept we possess is either acquired by abstraction from perception or composed of concepts that are acquired in this way.

3. Clarifying ‘Mental Phenomenon’ and ‘Physical Phenomenon’ After this scene setting, on to the main question. Is there an intrinsic distinction between mental and physical phenomena? This question is bound up with the ⁵ See PES, 70 [I, 128].

⁶ For the following see LRU, 50 and SNB, 96.

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status of empirical science as a science that has its own, distinctive subject matter. We have seen in Chapter 1 that the question whether psychology is such a science is a matter of debate at Brentano’s time. He wants to show that psychology is an independent science. Physiology is not more fundamental than psychology and psychology can make progress ‘under its own steam’. Psychology has its own subject matter. It studies a particular kind of phenomena that are distinct from physical phenomena. How does Brentano make a case for this claim? He needs first to say what the mental and the physical are in order to make clear that, and how, they are distinct: The explanation we are seeking is not a definition according to the traditional rules of logic. These rules have recently been the object of impartial criticism, and much could be added to what has already been said. Our aim is to clarify the meaning of the two terms ‘physical phenomenon’ and ‘mental phenomenon’ removing all misunderstanding and confusion concerning them. And it does not matter to us what means we use, as long as they really serve to clarify these terms. (PES, 60 [I, 110–11])

As expected he does not aim to define the words ‘mental phenomenon’ and ‘physical phenomenon’. He applies the methodology outlined in the previous sections to the concepts of mental phenomenon and physical phenomenon. One takes the empirical standpoint in psychology if one relies on consciousness or inner perception as an empirical source of knowledge about mental events and processes. Consider again a quote from Brentano’s work on ethics that outlines the general method: The task of determining a concept is very closely connected to the question as to the source from which we attain it. The explanation of a term is in the last analysis a reference to certain phenomena. Thus Hume was quite right when, in his famous investigation into the concept of causality, he introduced the question as to the origin of the concept. (FCA, 84–5 [135]; my emphasis; I have changed the translation of ‘bestimmen’.)

Understanding what causality is requires that one has been aware of the mental ‘force’ of one idea determining another idea. Similarly, Brentano holds that one can clarify the expression ‘mental phenomenon’ when one has been aware of a feature of one’s mental life that he describes as directedness. He makes this clear in a later manuscript: The general character of everything, as it falls in our experience, is the having of objects. What is said thereby cannot be made distinct without recourse to

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   

experience: just as it would be impossible to make clear to a blind man the concept of red, it is impossible to make clear to someone who has never loved and hated, the concept of love and hate, and, to someone who has never apprehended himself as a thinker, the concept of thinking in general in its most general sense as it was used by Descartes. One could not show such a person what one means when one says no thinking thing without an object of thought, no mental subject without an object. (O, 339; my translation and emphasis)

There is a mental ur-phenomenon—the having of an object—that we must experience and attend to in order to acquire and, if necessary, clarify the concept of the mental. Brentano’s famous quote concerning intentionality in Psychology must be read with this in mind:⁷ Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not with wholly unambiguous terminology, relation to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as a reality), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves. (PES, 68 [I, 124–5])

What Brentano calls a ‘definition’ is not, as we will see, the articulation of a complex concept into independently available building blocks. It would be surprising if he were to define the concept of a mental phenomenon when he announced that he wanted to instead clarify it. We have clarified ‘mental phenomenon’ when we have found the source of the conception that guides our application of this expression. And we have found this source when we have managed to selectively attend to a feature of our mental life that one can label initially by saying that mental phenomena have, or are directed on, objects. Brentano’s clarification of the concept of the mental proceeds in two steps. Step 1: Awareness of one’s mental life. If you are aware of your mental life at a time, what is simply given to you? Brentano answered this question as follows: ⁷ The exegetical and systematic literature on Brentano’s intentionality quote is hard to overview. But Chisholm (1967), Crane (1998), and Moran (1996) are good starting points. See also Chrudzimski (2001).

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[Inner perception] does not show us localized, spatially extended things, but mental processes [psychische Vorgänge], consciousness of something [Bewusstsein von etwas]—i.e. we perceive ourselves as having something as an object. (FCA, 85 [136]; my translation and emphasis)

Although Brentano gets his main point across, his description of inner and outer perception is more controversial than is necessary. One can understand Brentano’s expression ‘perceive ourselves as having something as an object’ in a way such that the content of one’s inner perception is that oneself is directed on something. This sounds as if intentionality is a property of thinkers. This reading of Brentano’s description is incompatible with his view that what is given in inner perception is subjectless. There is an awareness of an act and an object related to it, but not an awareness of a subject relating to an object in a particular way. The less demanding description suffices for Brentano’s purposes. Step 2: Attending to one’s mental life in retrospect. One can be aware of something, yet not notice it. If we want to clarify the mental/physical distinction, we must bring it about that we notice the distinctive feature of mental phenomena. We can retain awareness of mental activities in episodic memory. Now we can overview and attend to them. If we do so, it turns out that all mental phenomena ‘have an object’.⁸ But the gloss ‘having an object’ or ‘directed upon an object’ is only meant as a hint that shall guide our attention to the right property of mental acts when one episodically recalls them. If you don’t know what you are looking for, you won’t be able to find and isolate it in consciousness. Again, Brentano is clearer about this in later work: [We have given a positive determination of the mental] when we said that we have the mental as well as the physical ‘as an object’ [zum Gegenstande haben]. This having something as an object is the common feature of the mental which we perceive. Seeing is having a coloured thing as an object, believing is believing in something [Glauben an etwas], loving is loving something. Just as with any other elementary concept, this concept cannot be clarified other than by appeal to such examples. Nonetheless one had tried, by means of giving pictures and comparisons, to further the noticing of the distinctive feature. One talked about the indwelling of the seen in the seeing, the object of thought in the thinking. Others thought to speak more clearly when they said that a sort of relation is involved, and

⁸ Reid can be read as suggesting that ‘having an object’ is a mark of the mental. See Reid (1785, 26). David (1985/6, 587) takes Reid to have anticipated Brentano. But there are important differences between Brentano and Reid, see Textor (2017a, 54–7). In Psychology, Brentano references Bergmann’s (1870) work on consciousness. For Bergmann, consciousness covers varieties in which a subject is directed on objects. Brentano dispensed with the subject.

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called this relation, in contrast to a relation of comparison, the consciousness relation or the intentional relation. Such paraphrases may be helpful to make the apperception of the elementary feature easier, but of course they cannot replace it. (RP, 190–1; my translation and emphasis)

Brentano is not trying to provide a non-circular necessary and sufficient condition for something being a mental act or state.⁹ There is no prior and conceptually independent notion of ‘having an object’ that turns Brentano’s thesis into a conceptual truth about the mental. With an intuitive notion of aboutness or being directed in mind, philosophers have proposed counterexamples of prima facie non-intentional mental states. If the magnet is disposed to attract iron, isn’t the magnet or its disposition about the iron?¹⁰ But such counterexamples only illustrate Brentano’s insistence that having an object or intentional inexistence is a basic concept that can only be learned from one’s own experience. Terms like ‘directedness’ are, as Brentano himself repeatedly points out, metaphorical. As attempts to designate a property of mental acts, Brentano’s characterizations of intentionality as: ‘directedness on an object’ ‘indwelling of an object’ ‘non-comparative relation’ are all problematic. Take two examples: 1. Only mental phenomena ‘contain an object’. But what if the act misfires? In such cases there is an object and it is really immanent in the act.¹¹ But how is the immanent object related to the object of the act that does not misfire? 2. The mental act is a ‘relation’ to an object. But what if the act misfires? Well, the mental act is a special kind of relation that only needs one relatum.¹² But in which sense is such a thing a relation? Maybe it is only similar to a relation in relevant respects.¹³ But how does the notion of relationality then shed light on intentionality? If ‘contain an object’ and ‘relation to an object’ are not meant to accurately describe a fundamental property, these problems don’t arise. The descriptions Brentano provided are metaphors that shall make a property salient to us; they ⁹ As many assume; see, for example, Dennett and Haugeland (1987). ¹⁰ See Molnar (2003, 61–6). ¹¹ See Husserl (1913a II/1, 424) and, for example, Chisholm (1967, 201). ¹² See PES, 211–4 [II, 133–8]. See Taieb (2018, chapter 3.3) for an overview of the history of the notion of a one-relatum ‘relation’. ¹³ See PES, 212 [II, 134]. On this characterization see Kriegel (2018, 56–7) and Moran (1996, 11).

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help us to attend to it so that it can guide our thinking. We have to discern it from other properties of the mental which are also given in awareness. An analogy may help to make Brentano’s point. A wine taster may be aware of a distinctive property of the Sylvaner. Not only is he aware of it, he can discern and reidentify it. However, although the wine taster is aware of it, how can he bring it about that you are also aware of it? Only bringing a bottle of Sylvaner along and letting you taste it will not suffice if the property does not naturally stand out. What he needs to do is to give you advice on how to discern the property when you taste the wine. He will say ‘Do you get hay in the nose?’ and hope that you are able to attend to a property you are aware of that resembles hay. Brentano proceeds similarly. He aims to train your attention on a property you are aware of with instructive metaphors. But the crucial work is done by your own awareness of your mental life. So how does one bring to mind the feature of the mental which merits the label ‘directedness’? Imagine that you listen to a note and you want to attend to your listening. You cannot attend to your listening and discern its properties without attending also to the note you listen to. Just try to attend only to your listening and you will see that you fail. You need also to attend to the note you listen to. The same goes if your mental activity is not veridical.¹⁴ If you are undergoing an auditory hallucination, you can attend to your ‘seeming listening’ only if you also attend to what you listen to. This cries out for further clarification: how can one attend to something that does not exist? I will return to this problem later. With these caveats in mind we can say that, according to Brentano, the distinction between mental and physical phenomena is given in awareness. If we are aware of some phenomenon and are thereby seemingly aware of a further object, the intentional correlate, the phenomenon is mental. If we are aware of some phenomenon and are thereby aware of a location, but not an intentional object, it is a physical object. There is a striking similarity between Brentano’s Intentionality Thesis and Riehl’s characterization of mental phenomena as pointing to an external reality (see section 4.7). Maybe the reality mental phenomena ‘point to’ is not always external, but what is distinctive of them is that they do point. This conception of the distinctive feature of the mental can be found in Natorp (1888, 18ff); its historical background in medieval philosophy is expounded by Brentano’s student Stumpf (1919, section 2). It is made vivid by the Graz philosopher Stephan Witasek (1870–1915): My presenting, my thinking, my feeling and my willing is always ‘directed’ upon something in a peculiar way [ . . . ]. It is a relation which would be mysterious, even inconceivable if we did not know it so well from inner experience. But it is

¹⁴ See Soteriou (2013, 196).

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exclusive to the mental. If one musters the physical, the world of material things, strenuously, one cannot find a trace of it: there is a spatial juxtaposition and overlap. There is movement towards each other, there are many relations, but there is no place for inner relationality, directedness, reference to something else. (Witasek 1908, 3–4)

Intentionality is not mysterious for we all have experiential knowledge of it. If we want to answer questions pertaining to the distinction between the mental and the physical, we need to go back to our awareness of mental acts in which they appear as having an object. However, although this feature is given in awareness, we may fail to notice it. But we can train ourselves to do so. Brentano instructed us to search in the right place.

4. The Basics of the Aristotelian-Scholastic View of the Mind It will be helpful to have an overview of the core ideas of Brentano’s philosophy of mind. Brentano’s student Stumpf already provided such an overview of the Aristotelian-Scholastic view of the mind that Brentano works out. The fundamental distinction of the A-S view of the mind is the distinction between thinking—the mental act—and what is thought in it—the content. I will say more about this distinction in sections 5.6–5.8. The distinction between act and content is the conceptual basis for the whole theory of mind because of the following law that Stumpf (1919, 9, 18) calls the ‘principle of parallelism’: Principle of Parallelism: Every distinction between act contents is at the same time a distinction between mental acts. (Stumpf 1919, 11)

The Principle of Parallelism puts intentional objects or contents first in the order of explanation. The starting point of the Aristotelian-Scholastic psychologist is that she can selectively attend to a number of things: she is aware of different objects. This gives her a hold on distinction between different mental acts. Take the intentional objects red and tone F. The objects are different. This difference between them suffices to distinguish in an initially unified consciousness the mental acts of seeing and hearing. Whether this is a ‘real’ distinction between different mental acts, mental events with causal powers, or a conceptual distinction can be left open here. Stumpf himself proposed, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the view that we deal here with conceptual parts, that is, different concepts of the same object. Second, when I have a visual experience of a coloured surface, the space I perceive can be more or less densely filled with colour. The distinction between

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different densities of colours in the space I seem to see is eo ipso a distinction between the intensities of my visual experience.¹⁵ Stumpf finds this principle endorsed by Brentanians as well as by Natorp who wrote: In the basic phenomenon of consciousness there is no manifold and distinction; it is simple and poor in information. All richness; all manifold of consciousness lies exclusively in its content. (Natorp 1888, 19)

As we will see in Chapter 9 Moore and Russell also accepted versions of it. The Principle of Parallelism gives us distinctions between different acts. If we have this distinction, we can distinguish between different mental powers, often misleadingly called ‘faculties of the soul’ (Seelenvermögen). A soul faculty is, in first approximation, a disposition to a particular kind of mental acts.¹⁶ Sight, for example, is the ability to undergo mental acts whose contents are visibilia. Other mental powers are multitrack dispositions: the power to feel is the disposition to love or hate etc. Since the same object may be loved or hated, we need to bring in a distinction in the ways in which the same content can be entertained. We need to speak of psychological force or mode. In the next step we can introduce parts of the soul by grouping mental powers that one can only have if one has a body and those that don’t require a body. We distinguish between the intelligible and the sensitive soul parts. What about subjects in the sense of mental lives or thinkers? Stumpf does not mention them in detail in his historical overview. Neither does Brentano in his Psychology go beyond the unity of consciousness at one time. But Stumpf is in other writings more forthcoming: [A] self, or a mental substance, a soul is a whole of interrelated conscious states and the unconscious dispositions that correspond to them. (Stumpf 1939, 364)

This soul is of course no soul in the sense of Herbart or Lotze. Stumpf proposes to reduce the soul to a complex of mental acts. Whether this reduction is successful is a question for another occasion. Here I only want to give an outline of the order of explanation that is distinctive of the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy. Stumpf (1919, 13) sums this order up as follows: 1. Subjects 2. Faculties 3. Acts ¹⁵ See LH, 155 [161–2], US, 134–5. ¹⁶ See Stumpf (1919, 12). Brentano (Ä, 55) tries to explain abilities in terms of laws.

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4. Contents = mental objects 5. Real Objects 6. God’s Ideas For our purposes 5. and 6. are not important and I will set them aside. In this list we descend from the derived to the fundamental and the fundamental distinctions are drawn by the ‘parallelism’ between acts and contents. The Aristotelian-Scholastic order of explanation is opposed to Lotze’s and Herbart’s philosophy of mind. The subject or soul is not among the primitives of the Aristotelian-Scholastic approach. Consider the following commentary in one of the first reviews of Brentano’s Psychology by Ulrici: Are phenomena [Erscheinungen] conceivable without something (object) that appears in them and without something (subject) to whom they appear? The author [Brentano] denies the first question when he explicitly declares mental phenomena to be presentations and distinguishes in them the content, the presented object, without which they would not be presentations (because they would not present anything). The second question he has to answer affirmatively if he accepts the current explanation of the concept of psychology [as a science without the soul]. For someone who denies the soul as the substantial bearer of presentations or mental phenomena thereby affirms that there are phenomena without a subject to whom they appear; without a presenter which presents objects to itself and which, having acquired consciousness about itself, refers to itself as I. (Ulrici 1875, 291–2; my emphasis)

The comment is spot on. Brentano’s mark of the mental divides phenomena into mental and physical, independently of whether there are substances in which these phenomena inhere or subjects to which things are presented. According to Ulrici, this is a cost, not a benefit of the proposal: ‘One cannot do without a subject of phenomena’ (Ulrici 1875, 292). Why? Brentano holds that every mental act has a content—roughly, a mode of presentation that purports to be of something— and some mental acts have objects. The identity of a mental act is determined by its content and the force or psychological mode in which the content is apprehended. The contents of mental acts, introspection and memory tell us, present objects, but not subjects or objects in relations to subjects, to us (see section 2.1). We do ascribe mental acts to sentient being, but this is a sociological fact. The facts of interest for psychology are intrinsic facts about act content and mode that can be stated without appeal to a subject. Or so Brentano argued.

5. The Fundamentality of Intentionality Intentionality is not only a property that all and only mental phenomena have. It is the most fundamental mark of the mental:

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Nothing distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena more than the fact that something is immanent as an object in them. For this reason it is easy to understand that the most fundamental differences [die am tiefsten greifenden Unterschiede] in the way in which something exists in them as an object constitute the principal class differences among mental phenomena. (PES, 152 [II, 32]; in part my translation)¹⁷

One way to spell out ‘most fundamental’ is to say that the assumption that mental phenomena are intentional has greater explanatory power than other characterizations of the mental. I think that Brentano sees intentionality as fundamental in this way. Intentionality yields, for example, a fruitful way to divide mental phenomena into kinds.¹⁸ For example, if we want to find the ground of the difference between judgement and presentation, we must find a difference in the way they have an object. Intentionality is not just a criterion of the mental. It also provides a guideline for research in the philosophy of mind that is followed by many of Brentano’s students.¹⁹ The Brentanian distinction between the mental and the physical is drawn in terms of an intrinsic property. Awareness makes us notice an intrinsic property— one which we can label metaphorically ‘directedness’, ‘quasi-relationality’, or ‘having an intentional object’. These attention-guiding descriptors point us to an intrinsic property of some things that are given to us in consciousness. Imagine an extreme case: suppose that my mental life consists only of a hallucination of an ice cube. The hallucination qualifies as a mental phenomenon because it has an intentional object. It need not stand in a relation to anything else that is not a part of it to qualify as mental. Contrast Brentano’s distinction with Mach’s and Wundt’s conceptions of the mental in sections 4.4 and 4.5. First Mach: For Mach, the mental is relational and interest-relative. One needs to form different relational concepts to draw the distinction. According to Brentano, no ‘higher mental development and richer experience’ are necessary to distinguish between the mental and the physical: they appear as distinct in our awareness. Then Wundt. Initially Wundt distinguished psychology from the natural sciences by its distinctive method. Wundt’s first distinction leaves open the question whether psychology and natural science explore the same phenomena, his second distinction—psychology and natural science are two different standpoints on experience—asserts that they do and depends on the existence of a subject. In contrast to Wundt, Brentano distinguishes psychology from other sciences by the range of phenomena it investigates without any appeal to the subject.

¹⁷ See also PES, 75 [I, 137]. ¹⁸ See also Kriegel (2017, 99). ¹⁹ Dewalque (2017, 237) rightly points out that not all students of Brentano follow this research program to study the mental by investigating varieties of intentionality. Husserl, for example, argues that there are non-intentional mental events: sensations. More about this in section 6.2.2.

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Intentionality is also more fundamental than the distinction between myself and others like me. Mach argued that there is a conception of the mental that is part of the natural world-view of people of our cultural development: When I observe the behaviour of other human bodies, not only practical needs but also a close analogy force me, even against my will, to hold that memories, hopes, fears, motives, wishes, and will similar to those associated with my body are bound up with other human and animal bodies. The behaviour of other people further compels me to assume that my body and other objects exist as immediately for them as their bodies and other objects do for me; whereas my memories, desires and the like are for them the result of the same sort of irresistible analogical inference as theirs for me. The totality of what is immediately given in space for all may be called the physical, whereas what is immediately given only to one while others must infer it by analogy may provisionally be called the mental. The totality that is given immediately only to one we shall call also his ego, in the restricted sense. (Mach 1976, 5 [6])²⁰

Consider an example for illustration. A human being, A, is initially simply aware of perceptions of things going on, without ascribing them to themselves. But when A encounters other things like themselves, B and C, A is compelled to infer by analogy that in similar situations B and C will have perceptions similar to the ones that A has in these situations, although A does not have these perceptions. A will make similar inferences by analogy with respect to behaviour that B and C show. A will also infer that B and C make similar inferences by analogy about A. A comes to see himself as a thing that has a body perceivable by others, and perceptions that are only inferable by others. The distinction between ‘directly perceivable by all’ and ‘only perceivable by one subject’ is then taken to be a first-pass distinction between the mental and the physical. Without the exercise of inferential propensities, there is no mental/physical distinction. In contrast, Brentano holds that the distinction between the mental and the physical is experiential and not due to the exercise of drives or belief-forming dispositions. It is present as soon as there is conscious mental life. If there are conscious mental acts, there is self-directedness and if the self-presentation is preserved in memory the distinction between act and content can be known and articulated. Beings that don’t make inferences by analogy can still arrive at a distinction between the mental and the physical by attending to their mental acts. A thinker who can’t fathom other minds, or a solipsist who dogmatically believes that she is all there is, can arrive at a distinction between the mental and the physical. They

²⁰ See also Mach (1910, 235).

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only need to attend to what is given in their consciousness without taking others into account. Our dispositions to make inferences by analogy may be conceptually prior to forming a notion of others and ourselves, but such inferences require as input mental states that represent something. Hence, the directedness of such mental states is prior to the notions of self and other. With it, the distinction between the mental and the physical seems already to be in place. The distinction between the mental and the physical is not founded on a distinction between subject or ego and what is distinct and given to it. The ego might indeed be a practical unity as Mach argued. But the distinction between the mental and the physical is independent of, and prior to, the distinction between the ego and what the ego is aware of.²¹ Mach draws an interest-relative distinction between the mental and the physical: an element is mental if we describe it in terms of dependence on a body that is connected to an ego. But the body is a practical unit and therefore the distinction between the mental and the physical will not enter the final, unified science. For Brentano the distinction between the mental and the physical has neither to do with practical unities nor with bodies. In a possible world without bodies, there are no Machian sensations. But in such a world there can still be Brentanian mental phenomena. Streams of mental phenomena that are not tied to bodies are perfectly plausible for Brentano. Since mental acts in the stream will self-represent there is awareness of intentionality. Disembodied thinkers can arrive at the mental/physical distinction. To conclude: if Brentano is right, we are given the distinction between the mental and the physical in introspection and need only attend to the right features of our mental life to make it explicit. The distinction between the mental and the physical is not developed to satisfy the will or due to inference by analogy. It is there independently of the will or our inferential dispositions. For this reason, followers of Mach deny either that there is intentionality or that we are immediately aware of an act/object distinction. More about this in Chapter 6.

6. Akt/Inhalt/Object: The Tripartite Distinction Intentionality is supposed to carve nature at its joints: it draws an interest-free and supposedly fundamental distinction in the realm of phenomena. But how can there, then, be mental acts that are directed on, yet lack an object? This question shows that the notion of an object of a mental act needs to be sharpened. Yes, sometimes there is no external object, but every mental act has an immanent

²¹ See Mach’s letter to Adler 23.1.1910 in Haller and Stadler (1988, 297).

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object that, in part, individuates the act. The immanent object is not a colour, tone, or other physical quality. Brentano himself argued for this distinction. According to him, we are aware of the mental act and its object as well as their difference: [I]nner perception shows us with immediate evidence that hearing has a content different from itself, and which, in contradistinction to hearing, shares none of the characteristics of mental phenomena. This is why nobody understands the term ‘sound’ to mean another act of hearing discoverable outside of us which, by means of its action on the ear, produces our hearing as a copy of itself. Likewise, no one understands it to mean a force, incapable of being present to our minds, which produces hearing, or else we would not speak of sounds which appear in imagination. On the contrary, this term refers to the phenomenon which constitutes the immanent object of our hearing, an object different from the act of hearing. And depending on whether or not we believe that it has a corresponding cause outside of us, we believe that a sound does or does not exist in the external world as well. (PES, 95 [I, 172–3]; my emphasis)

If we identify in this quote the content of hearing with the tone heard, we run into difficulties. Implausibly introspection would turn out to enable us to acquire knowledge of physical properties. Brentano (ibid.) takes this view to be the source of a particular form of phenomenalism. The phenomenalist, says Brentano, argues that they know that hearing has an object by introspection. If the object of the act were a mind-independent physical object, its existence and properties could not be recognized with immediate evidence. Hence, the object of the hearing is identified with the mental act or a feature of it. Brentano wants to avoid phenomenalism and suggests, instead of identifying the object of the act with a feature of it, distinguishing between: • the mental act • the correlate or intentional object of the act • the external object: the cause that corresponds to the intentional correlate.²² Brentano claims that when I am aware of hearing a note, I thereby know that the hearing and note heard are distinct and that the heard note is not a mental phenomenon. I think this needs to be weakened. I may simply be aware of my hearing the note F, without having any propositional knowledge that something is the case. A plausible weakening is that awareness of hearing F puts one in the ²² The introduction of the tripartite distinction between act, content, and object is often credited to Höfler and Meinong (1890) or Twardowski (1894) who followed them. In contrast, Rollinger (2009, 5–6) argues that the distinction is not explicitly made in Brentano’s Psychology, but can be found in the unpublished part of Psychology on presentations. I agree that Brentano made the distinction before his pupils. It even can be found in the published parts of Psychology.

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position to acquire the knowledge that hearing F and the correlate F are distinct. We can realize that hearing F has directedness—F ‘enters its being’—while hearing does not enter the being of its correlate merely by reflecting on how things seem to us in awareness. Brentano argues that awareness of hearing F also puts us into a position to come to know that the note heard is not the external object of hearing: a cause of the hearing that ‘corresponds’ to the immanent object. Consciousness is supposed to put one in a position to know that (a) act and content as well as (b) content and object are different. Brentano argues above that the content is neither physical nor mental.²³ Hence, the mental/physical distinction is not exhaustive. In view of the fact that there are abstract objects this seems independently plausible. More controversial is the implication that consciousness ‘shows’ us a real mental act, an event or process, as well as a non-real, abstract immanent object.²⁴ Does introspection put us in contact with non-real objects? Weakening Brentano’s conception to ‘awareness of hearing F puts one in the position to come to know a non-real object’ will make this implication more palatable. With this in mind one can sharpen Brentano’s Thesis to: Every mental act has essentially and intrinsically an immanent object aka content.

What is the content of a mental act if it is distinct from its external object as well as the act itself? Brentano says rather little about content. In his unpublished logic lectures he suggested that language expresses the contents of our mental acts. He says about names in particular: 13.018[1] The name refers in a certain sense to the content of a presentation as such, the immanent object. 13.018[2] In a certain sense the name refers to that which is presented by the content of the presentation. 13.018[3]

The first is the meaning of the name.

13.018[4] The second is that what the name refers [nennt] to. Of it we say that the name applies to it. It is the object which, if it exists, is the external object of the presentation. 13.018[5]

One refers mediated by the meaning.

Here we get a functional characterization of content: the content of a mental act mediates the relation of the act to what it presents: the external object. The ²³ Meinong and Witasek argued that it is a part of a mental phenomenon and, hence, itself mental. ²⁴ See DP, 138 [131]. For discussion see Sauer (2006, 5).

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minimal notion of mediation is that acts with the same content are directed on the same external object, if any. Brentano’s students Alois Höfler and Alexius Meinong helped to spread Brentano’s philosophy by writing a textbook, Philosophische Propädeutik (Höfler and Meinong 1890), for secondary schools. In this book they construe the distinction between act content and external object in a particular way that became influential. Höfler and Meinong start by drawing the students’ attention to the distinction between mental and physical phenomena by means of examples. In § 3 they press on to explain Brentano’s thesis: Insofar as the mental phenomena represent themselves in inner perception with indubitable determination as something real as well as something distinct from the objects of outer perception, the physical phenomena, the existence of such a distinct class of facts demands that our thinking occupies itself with them scientifically. The science whose objects are mental phenomena is psychology. In order to make the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer perception’ and the distinction between physical and mental phenomena that are given in these perceptions it is indispensable—and suffices for the beginning—to bring to mind, what is meant, when one says that one rejoices at this or that, is sad about, decided to, in doubt about, now imagines something that is so and so. (Höfler and Meinong 1890, 1–2; my translation and emphasis)

Höfler and Meinong get Brentano exactly right. They first introduce the general distinction between the mental and the physical and then guide their reader to grasp the distinguishing feature by means of their understanding of grammatical constructions that involve accusative objects. Because it is indispensable to bring the distinctive feature of the mental to one’s own mind, detailed engagement with Brentano’s intentionality mark is only open to the cooperative reader. Höfler and Meinong press on to address the problem with Brentano’s notion of an object that we noted before. We are aware of a distinction between act and object and everyone should accept the distinction. But there are problems if one tries to preserve and generalize the intuitive datum: The object of a mental act should be given in consciousness and be intrinsic as well as essential to the act, but if the object is, say, a colour trope it might not exist. If the object of a mental act might not exist, how can it be essential and intrinsic to the act? Höfler and Meinong answer: The word ‘thing’ and ‘object’ are used in two senses: on the one hand for that which obtains in itself, ‘thing in itself ’, real, [ . . . ] whereupon our thinking and judging is as it were directed; on the other hand for that ‘in’ us existing mental ‘picture’ that more or less approximates this real thing. This quasi-picture (more correctly: sign) is identical with the ‘content’ mentioned in 1. In order to

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distinguish it from the object or thing which is taken to be independent of thought one calls the content of thinking and judging (similarly: feeling and willing) also ‘the immanent or intentional object’. (Höfler and Meinong 1890, 7)

In the construction ‘A is an object of a mental act’ the expression ‘object’ has two senses. In one sense it means ‘content’: the content of a mental act is similar to a picture of a real object. The content in this sense is also called ‘immanent object or intentional object’. In another sense ‘object’ means external object: the external object is the object pictured by the content. Höfler and Meinong put scare-quotes around ‘picture’ and say that it is a ‘quasi-picture’ or sign. Their aim is mainly to distinguish content from external object and not to give an explanation of the notion of content. Brentano’s student Kasimir Twardowski (1866–1938) relied on Höfler and Meinong’s disambiguation of ‘object of a mental act’ when formulating Brentano’s thesis.²⁵ He writes: It is one of the best known and indeed undisputed sentences of psychology that every mental phenomenon is directed on an immanent object. The existence of such a relation is a characteristic mark of mental phenomena that are thereby distinguished from physical phenomena. (Twardowski 1894, 1)

Twardowski took Höfler’s and Meinong’s talk of content as a quasi-picture further. He combined primitivism about content–object relation with a picture-theory. In the case of an object that is presented as simple, the relation between content and object is primitive.²⁶ But the content is a mental image or picture of its object if the object is presented as a complex one. There is a mapping between parts of the mental act and parts of the object. Hickerson (2005, 469 fn. 24) holds that all contents are pictures because, strictly speaking, there are no simple objects. ‘Strictly speaking’, because Twardowski (1894, 70 [74]) is happy to count the relations of a ‘simple’ object as its parts. However, even if there are no simple objects, they can be presented as simple objects and in this case the relation between content and object is not pictorial. As we will see in Chapter 6 Twardowski is an important influence on Stout who, in turn, influenced Russell and Moore. When Stout (1911, § 3) talked of contents as images, he had Twardowski in mind.

²⁵ On Twardowski and Brentano see Hickerson (2005, 462–4) and Betti (2017). She (308) takes Brentano to hold that a mental act is directed towards its content. This seems not to be Brentano’s considered view; see the previous remarks on the topic. ²⁶ See Twardowski (1894, 64 [68]).

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The act/content distinction is accepted by Meinong and his students. A clear example is Meinong’s student Stephan Witasek (1870–1915) who distinguishes in his Grundlinien der Psychologie (Witasek 1908, 73–4) between an act, its content—an abstract part of the act—and the object. Witasek wrote: [I look up and see the moon above me.] In the so described experience two things are given: the tidings of a physical thing (the moon) and a mental thing (my sensory presentation or my thought) and I easily recognize that these are indeed two different things: my thought of the moon is something different from the moon itself. Initially it does not matter at all whether the physical object of the presentation is indeed so as it appears to be in the presentation; in fact, whether it really exists. To investigate this is the task of another science: epistemology. It remains—an easily recognizable fact of the most immediate experience that no sophistry can explain away—that our thinking is directed upon something, every presentation, for instance, is directed upon something that is not again this very presentation and that [thinking] thereby brings us tidings from this something. (Witasek 1908, 5, my emphasis.)

Since the distinction Witasek is concerned with obtains whether a mental act ‘hits’ an object or not, it must be the act/content distinction. The fact that act and content are distinct is supposed to be an ‘easily recognizable fact of the most immediate experience that no sophistry can explain away’. The recognition of the distinction may not be immediately evident, but it is still easily recognized by attending to one’s awareness of one’s mental life. The first-stab response of Brentano was to deny that one can distinguish in consciousness of a mental act between a mental activity and what the activity is directed towards. Let’s have a look at the emergence of this response.

7. Diaphaneity AKA Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit in Austro-German Philosophy To my knowledge the first response to Brentano’s Psychology can be found in the second edition of Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism. In the second edition Lange added a long footnote that contains a concise summary of the second book of Psychology. In it he highlights that Brentano gives the distinction between the mental and the physical a new basis, only to go on to argue that this new basis is flawed: The objects of ‘internal perception’ in opposition to external are, according to Brentano, the ‘psychical phenomena’, and they are to be distinguished from the physical phenomena by the criterion of ‘intentional inexistence’, i.e. of the

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reference to something as object [ . . . ]. Accordingly Brentano reckons among physical phenomena not merely the phenomena which the senses give us, but also the pictures of imagination; psychical, on the other hand, is the idea as act of presentation [Vorstellung] [ . . . ]. He thus, indeed, gains, like Descartes (comp. the previous note), a sure distinction between the physical and the psychical, but with the danger of making a mere illusion the foundation of his whole system. The impossibility of separating the act of [presentation] from its content we have shown in the previous note. (Lange 1873/5 III, 175 fn. 44 [II, 553]; my emphasis; I have changed the translation of ‘Vorstellung’.)

Lange acknowledges that Brentano put the distinction between the mental and physical on a new footing: all and only mental phenomena have directedness. But Brentano’s way of drawing the distinction is supposed to introduce a new problem. One cannot separate the act from its object (Lange uses ‘content’ above, but we will see in due course that this is supposed to be the object of the act). Now, this might not look like much of a problem at first sight: the act of presentation may be inseparable from its content and yet distinct.²⁷ But I think that Lange has homed in on a problem for Brentano that will drive James and Russell to reject Brentano’s philosophy and the view that there is an intrinsic distinction between the mental and physical with it (see Chapter 9). So let’s see in more detail what the problem is. Lange says that he already gave his argument in a previous footnote. Here is the footnote: According to Descartes, the senses deliver only purely corporeal copies of things in the brain, which are perceived by the soul. This incredibly naive anthropomorphism, which simply puts a man into a man, is connected with just as naive an abstraction that the corporeal pictures of things in the brain are extended; but their perception by the soul is an act of ‘thought’ (cogitare) in the wider sense, i.e. an extensionless act of an extensionless being. Thus the object of presentation [Vorstellung], which it is, properly speaking, that which fills [erfüllt] our consciousness, is arbitrarily and paradoxically sundered [widersinnig losgerissen] from the act of presentation. But in this way the absolutely non-sensuous and non-spatial thinking which runs through all modern philosophy (the sharpest opposition to this phantom is found in Berkeley) is first made possible, and ideas of the soul are spoken of quite unconcernedly, as though in them the content— and this the only essential thing—was also thought; but as soon as it is a question

²⁷ In his lectures on descriptive psychology Brentano’s student Marty (2011, 10) responded briefly to Lange. Marty rejected separability of act and presentation as too strong a requirement. However, if we are really dealing with the external object of an act here, one hopes that it—for example, the green colour that I like—exists independently of the mental act.

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of maintaining the non-spatiality of the soul, the idea is again conceived as a mere act of presentation, i.e. as something that when separated from the object of the presentation is a pure nonentity. (Lange 1873/5 III, 170 fn. 43 [II, 550]; in part my translation)

The footnote is primarily an attack on Descartes. The acts of an extensionless Cartesian substance cannot be extended. If an extensionless soul perceives something extended, a patch of colour, the perceiving must be ‘separable’ from its extended object. Otherwise the perceiving itself would be extended and the question would arise how an extensionless substance could perform extended mental acts. But such a separation between mental act and object is supposed to be paradoxical. A presentation separated from its object is supposed to be a pure nonentity. According to Lange, this is the beginning of an objection to Descartes. But, more importantly for our purposes, it is also the beginning of an influential objection to Brentano’s view that psychology is the study of mental acts. The objection does not concern the inseparability of mental act and its object, but the basis for drawing this distinction in the first place. The attempt to drive a wedge between perceiving and object is arbitrary and unmotivated. Why? In perception the object of consciousness, say a coloured patch, ‘fills our consciousness’, that is, it commands our attention. When one is conscious of perceiving an object one cannot selectively attend to the presentation (mental act) on the one hand and its object on the other. Therefore inner consciousness does not, as Brentano has it, show us mental acts as directed on the one hand and their objects as undirected on the other. Inner consciousness does not allow us to make such a distinction. Paul Natorp (1854–1924), like Lange a Marburg Neo-Kantian, firmed this up further by asking himself to try to distinguish between object and presentation: I can consider the tone for itself or in relation to other contents of consciousness without taking into account its being for an ego, but I cannot consider myself and my hearing in isolation without thinking of the tone. Rather, when I try to do so I find that nothing remains that can be considered, investigated or about which a statement can be made. (Natorp 1888, 18; my emphasis)

Imagine you listen to a melody. Now try to attend to your hearing alone and concentrate on it apart from the melody. You can’t; you find that you will only attend to the tone. Natorp drew important conclusions from his observation that he cannot attend to his hearing in isolation from the tone. First, the Lange conclusion. If one cannot attend to the hearing in isolation from the tone heard, there is no distinction between the mental act and its object given in consciousness. If inner perception does not ‘show us’ or suggest the

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distinction between act and object or content, it has no place in empirical psychology. Brentano’s student Husserl will respond to this point in his Logical Investigations. I will come back to it in section 7.2.1 Second, there are no different kinds of mental acts: mental events and processes that are intrinsically distinguished independently of their contents.²⁸ There is one conceptually and metaphysically primitive relation that holds between a subject and an object; being conscious-of. There are different instances of this relation that are distinguished from each other in terms of their relata. Where Brentanians posit mental acts that are intrinsically different, Natorp sees only different instances of the same relation distinguished by their relata. There are instances of the ‘conscious-of ’ relation that can only be attended to by attending to one of their relata. Natorp comes very close to the position that is defended later by Moore and Russell. More in Chapter 9. In his review Ulrici worked the objection slightly differently from Lange and Natorp: It is an undeniable fact that the presented object appears first and immediately, while the act of presenting only mediately appears in consciousness with the help of the presented object and seen from it. The difference between what Brentano calls mental phenomena and the physical phenomena consists only in that we project the physical one (colours, tones etc) into what is outside us, while we localize the mental phenomena inside us. (Ulrici 1875, 294)²⁹

Lange, Natorp, and Ulrici anticipated what Moore (1903a) would later call ‘diaphaneity’: one cannot make one’s mental activity—seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.—the object of one’s attention when one is in an optimal position to attend to it, namely when one sees, hears, tastes. If when, for example, seeing a colour, one tries to attend to the seeing, one only succeeds in attending to the colour. In effect, this is a rerun of Comte’s problem about self-observation from Chapter 1. Brentano’s opponents want to draw from this the conclusion that just as the soul or subject, mental acts and their features such as directedness are not empirically discoverable in introspection. Russell, for example, wrote much later: I am at a loss to discover any actual phenomenon which could be called an ‘act’ and could be regarded as a constituent of a presentation. (Russell 1919, 25)

Consequently, empirical psychology can be the study neither of the soul nor of acts of consciousness. There is only the study of such things as sounds, colours,

²⁸ See Natorp (1888, 19).

²⁹ See also Flint (1876, 120).

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etc. and their relations to each other. The distinction between mental acts on the one hand and physical phenomena is lost. Diaphaneity is a well-known topic in the Austro-German philosophical literature between 1874 and 1900. In fact, Meinong (1899, § 19) coined a better term than Moore’s ‘diaphaneity’ for the phenomenon under consideration. Meinong called it ‘Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit’ (‘perceptual elusiveness’): when you try to attend to your mental activity and its features in introspection, it is not as if you have to see through it (‘diaphaneity’/‘transparency’); rather it eludes you. Russell commented: As regards internal perception, it must be admitted that, in its pure form, it is exceedingly difficult: contents, as Meinong himself confesses, are ‘wahrnehmungsflüchtig’. Thus when we mean to think only of what is psychical, we are almost inevitably led to think instead of the cognitive complex, consisting of the knowledge together with what is known; hence what is known (the proposition) comes to be viewed as also psychical, in spite of the highly inconvenient consequence that two people, in that case, cannot know the same proposition. (Russell 1904b, 215)

In Meinong ‘Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit’ explains why some philosophers are Idealists: when we try to attend to the mental alone we cannot do it. We can only attend to mental/physical complexes and therefore take the external world to be partly mental. I will come back in Chapter 9 to Moore’s attempt to defend the Brentanian view while acknowledging diaphaneity. At this point it will be helpful to say something about the metaphysics of mental acts that is suggested by diaphaneity. Consider an independent example. We distinguish between the statue and the portion of matter it is made from. But when confronted with the statue we cannot attend to the matter alone.³⁰ The matter is given to us only formed as a statue. Moreover, the matter never occurs without form. A lump of clay is still formed in some way. So it is not possible for us to attend to an unformed piece of clay. At this point the parallel with a mental act and its object/content should be obvious. The mental activity is like the matter: just as there is no unformed matter, there is no mental act without either content (Brentano) or object (Moore). Just as we cannot attend to matter in isolation from form, we cannot attend to consciousness in isolation from its content or object. The hylomorphic metaphysics of mental acts according to which they are constituted by objects or contents is explicitly formulated by Natorp:

³⁰ James (1904a, 479) will use a similar model for illustration. Consciousness is like the colourless pure menstrum that needs to be mixed with pigment to become paint. The pure menstrum is our matter, the pigment the form.

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In the basic phenomenon of consciousness there is no manifold and distinction; it is simple and poor in information. All richness; all manifold of consciousness lies exclusively in its content. (Natorp 1888, 19)

Stumpf (1919, 18) sees Brentano and Natorp as endorsing the principle that acts are specified by objects (and only objects). This metaphysics of acts goes hand in hand with diaphaneity: if acts are individuated in terms of contents or objects only, there is nothing to an act that could make it an object of attention independently of its real object or the object it seems to have in virtue of having a content.

8. Diaphaneity and the Spectre of Neutral Monism We have seen that the very first critical responses to Brentano invoke what is now known as diaphaneity. The pressing question is whether one can distinguish in awareness act and content or act and object. This question is the background for Russell’s introduction of the term ‘Neutral Monism’ (see section 4.1). Neutral Monists and what Russell called Dualists are divided over the question whether there is an introspectible character of the mental. Dualists argue that there is, and, unlike Idealistic Monists, they take only some, but not all real things to have it. Brentano and Witasek are Dualists: the distinctive feature of the mental— directedness—is given in every mental act and it can ‘easily be recognized’ by attending to the mental act in episodic memory. As we will see in Chapter 9, Moore argued that one can selectively attend to awareness-of when one has, for instance, a sensation of blue. Russell himself for a period of time and G.E. Moore for all his life are Dualists inspired by Brentano. James is a Neutral Monist. There is no introspectible character of the mental. He inferred from this that the distinction between the mental and physical is, to use contemporary terminology, one between different causal roles and not an intrinsic difference that partitions the universe into two disjunct fundamental kinds. In Chapter 9 I will use the opposition between Dualism and Neutral Monism to shed light on the Austrian origins of analytic philosophy.

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6 The Intentionality Challenge 1. Introduction According to Brentano, there are directed and undirected phenomena. The first are mental, the second physical phenomena. They have different natures, are given to us in different ways, and it is likely that they are subject to different laws. All this is incompatible with Mach’s Neutral Monism according to which the fundamental building blocks of reality are neutral elements. Hence, one should expect that Mach and Brentano engage each other’s arguments. In 1893/4 Brentano indeed ran a seminar in Vienna in which he responded to Mach’s attempts to overcome the distinction between the mental and the physical. In 1896 Brentano’s student Anton Marty wrote a letter to Mach in which he explained Brentano’s objections in detail. Unfortunately there seems to be no reply from Mach. Later Brentano wrote a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Mach’s Knowledge and Error. Brentano’s students Husserl and Stumpf will also respond to Mach in their writings. The Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote his PhD on Mach’s philosophy of science under Stumpf ’s supervision. Meinong’s student Witasek developed arguments against Mach’s Neutral Monism.¹ Mach was fully aware of Brentano’s competing research program and the objections to his own which arise from it.² It is therefore striking how little he engaged with these objections. Blackmore notes: In spite of the fact that the lives of the two men [Brentano and Mach] were to cross more than once, that they corresponded with each other in later years, and that the philosophical followers and disciples of both men were in frequent conflict with each other, there is no evidence that Mach ever read any of Brentano’s psychology or philosophy prior to 1907. Admittedly, the books were not particularly easy reading, but Mach unnecessarily handicapped himself by not reading them. (Blackmore 1972, 61)

In this chapter I will expound Brentano’s and Marty’s arguments against Mach and assess whether the Machians have good responses to them.

¹ See, for example, Stumpf (1939, 587); Witasek (1908, 7–12). For an overview of the reception of Mach in the Brentano school see Fisette (2018b). ² See Banks (2014, 70).

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In the first part I will introduce Brentano’s and Marty’s objections to the view that sensation is non-intentional and then assess responses on behalf of Neutral Monism. In the second part I will be concerned with thinking ‘in absence’. Human beings need not only to be able to perceive bits of their environment, but they also need to be able to anticipate the future on the basis of past experiences. Can one understand this ability without assuming that it involves the possession of intentional mental states? On the basis of his picture theory of ‘representation’ Mach answered YES. In the second part of the chapter I will first expound Mach’s picture theory of thinking and then go on to reconstruct Brentano’s argument against it.

2. The Intentionality of Sensation 2.1 Against Mach’s Identity Thesis We have seen at the end of section 4.3 that Neutral Monists argued that perceiving and the perceived object are identical, a complex of neutral elements, under different descriptions. Consider again Mach’s dictum: [I] say that A B C . . . , the same A B C . . . , play, according to circumstances now the role of physical elements, now the role of sensations. (Mach 1891, 397)

If we make a distinction between hearing a tone and the tone, we consider the same element in two different series of dependence relations: once in relations to the elements that make up a body, once in relations to ‘body-alien’ elements. There is no mental event or process of perceiving that is directed upon something distinct from itself. Hence, there is no room for the distinction between how something seems to us and how it is. Our perceptual experiences are identical with neutral elements that make up reality. What common sense describes as illusion and hallucination is awareness of some neutral elements that gives rise to expectations that are to the perceiver’s surprise not fulfilled. The surprise is due to incomplete knowledge of the totality of dependence relations that obtain and impact on how things seem to us.³ In Chapter 4, we have seen that Riehl used the intentionality of sensation to argue against Mach’s Neutral Monism. Sensation is also at the centre of Brentano’s lectures on Mach’s Positivism in 1894/5. Brentano starts with an outline of Mach’s view and then states his objection. I will give the full quote since the text is unpublished so far:

³ See Mach (1976, § 8 and chapter 3.5).

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   

Mach declares it [green in the proper sense] to be the same phenomenon as seeing green that is both mental and physical. This is clearly false. If anything is a fact in psychology, then this: that there are two classes of phenomena of which one has been labelled ‘physical’ the other ‘mental’. Examples:

They are different in the most essential relations: a) In particular mental phenomena have in common that they appear spatially located. Mental phenomena lack this peculiarity. In contrast mental phenomena have in common that in them a so-called intentional relation is given of subject: object. This is completely missing in physical phenomena. b) Of our the mental phenomena we recognise with immediate evidence that they are (evidence of inner perception); we don’t so recognize the existence for the physical phenomena (therefore the so-called outer perception should not be so named). The difference is so vast, and the delimitation so precise, that once one is acquainted with these kinds doubts, to which kind a phenomenon belongs are almost impossible. And hence it is immediately clear that what we call green in the proper sense is a physical phenomenon and that what we call seeing green belongs to the other class. Seeing green is not = green, but directed on green as immanent object. If one wanted to identify seeing with the object, this would be no less a mistake than to identify desiring an object (for example, wealth, honour) with the object. (LS20, 29437–9.)

Brentano argues that Mach’s identification of sensation and sensed object is due to his confusion of immanent object or act content and external object. Every mental act must have an immanent object in virtue of which it is directed upon something. But the immanent object is not what the act is directed on. The object the act is directed towards might not exist. This may sound paradoxical, but if one takes the act content to be a way of thinking that purports to be about something, the paradox may be resolved. Hence, if one distinguishes between act content and external object, Mach’s identity thesis turns out to be false. The mental act can exist without an external object. One can extract from Brentano’s lecture notes two arguments for the conclusion that a mental act and its external object are distinct. The first argument starts from the observation that we cannot be aware of a physical object without being aware of the space it occupies, whereas mental phenomena don’t appear to be located: Argument 1 (P1.1) When we are aware of our seeing a colour, we are not aware of it as occupying a location.

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When we are aware of the colour seen, we are aware of it as occupying a location. Therefore: (C1) Seeing a colour ≠ the colour seen

Neutral Monists have a good response to this argument. The seeing may not appear to be located in space, but actually have a location that can be the same as the one of the coloured expanse seen. Just as outer perception does not reveal all properties of a physical object to us, awareness might not reveal a mental act’s location to us.⁴ Brentano himself concedes therefore that mental acts can be located; they only appear to us unlocated. Hence, the alleged difference between seeing and its object is only a distinction in the modes of presentation under which one thing is given to us. The second argument exploits Brentano’s intentionality thesis: Argument 2 (P2.1)

Seeing a colour is directed on an object.

(P2.2)

The colour seen is not directed on an object. Therefore: (C2) Seeing a colour ≠ the colour seen

We have introspective knowledge of the premises and know that they state something that is essentially the case: it is part of what it is to be a mental act to be directed on an object. Does Argument 2 refute Mach’s identity thesis? Mach can still reply that we conceive the same thing in different ways: once as directed and once as undirected. Let’s see whether we can close this loophole in the argument. Two years after Brentano’s seminar his Swiss student Anton Marty (1847–1917) wrote a letter to Mach. In it Marty runs through the points Brentano made in his seminar: The reason why you take the assumption of a real external world to be intrinsically impossible, for being analogous to √ 1 and similar things, seems to be that according to you the seeing of the colour and the hearing of the tone are identical with the tone. I say that A B C . . . , the same A B C . . . , play, according to circumstances now the role of physical elements, now the role of sensations. [Quote from Mach 1891, 395] But I cannot accept identity in this case. The differences seem indisputable. Colour is given in a location; the seeing isn’t. Seeing is consciousness of something, the colour isn’t. That I see is certain with immediate evidence, that colours

⁴ See RP, 223.

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exist isn’t. In sum: I think seeing is not colour, but a consciousness that has colour as its object, and the distinction between them seems as obvious as the distinction between wish and what is wished for and expecting and what is expected. As little as these pairs are identical—for if they were something real must be identical with something nonreal, even impossible; I can wish something impossible—as little is colour sensation and colour identical. (Marty 1896, 593–4)

Does Mach really argue that the assumption of a real external world is necessarily false? He certainly thinks that the alleged opposition between a world independent of our senses on the one hand and our representations that answer to this world on the other hand is a product of misguided theorizing: the apparent antithesis between the real world and the world given through the senses lies entirely in our mode of view, and no actual gulf exists between them [ . . . ]. (Mach 1914, 28 [22])

Our representation of the world and the represented world are the same elements considered in different relations and brought under different concepts. The thought that there is a real distinction is illusory. Marty’s argument for the conclusion that there is a real distinction starts from observations about the attitudes of desire and expectation. They cannot be identical with their objects. For example, people sometimes wish for something impossible. For centuries mathematicians wished to square the circle and some of them expected to do it: (P3.1)

NN wishes to square the circle.

(P3.2)

It is impossible to square the circle.

Therefore: (C3.1) NN’s wish to square the circle exists, but it is impossible that its object exists. Therefore: (C3.2) NN’s wish to square the circle ≠ the object NN wishes for. If it is impossible that the object wished for exists, the distinction between wishing to square the circle and the object wished for cannot merely be one of two distinct modes of presentation of the same object. An object is not actual and therefore possible under one mode of presentation and impossible under another. There is, then, on the one hand NN’s wish, a mental act that happens at a certain time, and its content or immanent object, the mode of presentation in virtue of which the mental act has a direction. But there is no external object it is directed on. The mental act and its content are actual and therefore possible, but the external object is not.

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Does Marty help us to close the gap in Brentano’s Argument 2? Marty goes on to use the distinctness of the attitudes of desire and expectation as reasons for the distinction of perceptions from the objects of perception. Just as the former are distinct, the latter are distinct. But this step in Marty’s argument is problematic. One can wish for something impossible, but can one have a visual presentation of something impossible? Consider the waterfall illusion.⁵ In this illusion one and the same object seems to be moving and stand still at the same time. But it is impossible to move and not move at the same time. Hence, what I seem to experience can’t be real and therefore my experience is distinct from how things perceptually seem to me. However, there seems to be mental activity that is directed on something, namely a process that can’t exist. Hence, the mental activity is distinct from the object on which it is directed. Can Mach answer this argument? We have seen in section 3.5 that Mach takes perception to be neither correct nor incorrect: perception is uptake of a complex of elements. In a perceptual illusion the uptake of the complex gives rise to an expectation about the occurrence of future elements that is not fulfilled. In section 6.3 we will see how problematic the notion of expectation is for Mach. But a more direct point of criticism is that not all perceptual illusions are cognitive illusions due to mistaken expectations.⁶ For example, the waterfall illusion does not ‘resolve’ even when you inform me about the objects of my visual experience. Things seem to me, whatever I believe or expect, as they cannot be. Such illusions are non-cognitive and Mach’s non-intentional account does not fit them. If Mach wants to argue that one’s mind is a complex of neutral elements in this case, the complex must be inconsistent. But although reality seems to be inconsistent in the case under discussion, we certainly don’t want to say that it actually is inconsistent. Hence, we need a distinction between experiences that have immanent objects or contents and the things the experiences are directed on. The appearance of a moving and unmoving waterfall is not identical with the external object it is directed on. On balance, Brentano and Marty seem to make a good case against Mach. It is unknown whether Mach answered Marty’s letter. Banks tried to answer the challenge on Mach’s behalf: Mach’s answer to Marty, if he gave one, is not known to me, but I suspect that he could have pointed to his own use of function in the explanation of psychical life. The function a tone enters into is not the tone, but a complex of it with others elements, such as memories and imaginings. A function being an external

⁵ See Crane (1988, 142).

⁶ See Smith (2010, 392).

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connection between elements is already a complex; and thus, if only certain parts of the complex are presented as sensations, the rest may well be imagined as annexed to it and an intentional object may be just one of these parts pieced out in the functional complex. [ . . . ] Since every element both belongs to a complex both in psychical life and physical compounds there is no need to attribute this fact to a special power belonging only to the psychical realm. (Banks 2003, 159)

A tone stands in functional relations to other elements: it partially determines the occurrence of a complex of other elements. Now, the tone might determine the occurrence of memories and imaginations. But for these further events that are ‘downstream’ from the sensation the same problem will arise. They may exist while what they represent doesn’t. You can imagine something impossible. So what is imagined is not real, but the imagining or believing is. We have shifted, but not solved, the problem. Banks’s response to Marty is also unsatisfactory for modal reasons. It is a contingent matter that a ‘sensation’ belongs to a complex at all. The world may stop right after the occurrence of the sensation. For example, the element that actually gave rise to memories and imaginings may have not done so. Hence, the neutral element may or may not have an object and qualify as a sensation. In contrast, Brentano and Marty hold that mental phenomena are essentially directed on something: The fact that there is no consciousness without any intentional relation at all is as certain as the fact that, apart from the object upon which it is primarily directed, consciousness has, on the side, itself as an object. This is, in an essential way, part of the nature of every psychical act. (DP, 26 [24]; my emphasis)

If we want to define what seeing etc. is, we need to say that it is awareness directed on something. Here we aim to define a kind of thing, not analyse a concept under which it and only it falls. Mach himself did not answer these objections. But James and later Russell defended Neutral Monism. They don’t dispute that intentionality and directedness is an important mark of the mental. But they recruit diaphaneity to argue that intentionality is not a non-relational (intrinsic), essential, and fundamental property of mental acts. Diaphaneity is supposed to show that intentionality is not given in consciousness, it is in fact ‘constructed’ from considering processes in which neutral experiences follow other neutral experiences. If one takes intentionality to be a property that an element has only in relation to others, it does not apply to elements considered ‘in isolation’ and these are neither mental nor physical. In Chapter 9 I will see how this response took shape in James’s response to Moore.

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2.2 Perceptual Constancies: Husserl against Mach Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a student of both Stumpf and Brentano. Husserl is the most influential of Brentano’s students. He founded the phenomenological movement and his work is a major influence on Heidegger and Sartre. Husserl’s Logical Investigations (first edition 1900, second 1913) is an interconnected group of studies on topics that occupied Brentano’s students. The fifth logical investigation is devoted to intentionality. In this part of the book Husserl enriches and changes Brentanian philosophy of mind in several ways. One of his innovations is that he takes perceptual constancy seriously. When I approach someone playing the violin while continuously listening to the tone she plays, the tone seems differently without appearing to be different. Similarly, the size of an object seems constant, although when we get closer to it the object’s size appears differently. When the object comes nearer, it does not look like the object ‘grows’, but its size looks the same. Brentano discusses perceptual constancies in his logic lectures published as Lehre vom Richtigen Urteil (LRU, 145–6) and classifies them as a kind of illusion. The object cannot be unchanged and be small and large. Hence, one of our perceptions must be illusory. I think this misdescription of perceptual constancy prevents Brentano from fully developing the theory of intentionality. In section 7.2.1 we will see that Stout and later Husserl appeal to perceptual constancies to answer the challenge diaphaneity poses for the theory of intentionality. In his Logical Investigations Husserl also uses perceptual constancies to argue against Mach’s identification of sensation with what is sensed. In the following quote Husserl engages with Mach without naming him: It is not uncommon that one blends both—sensation of colour and objective colour of an object—together. In our days a conception is popular which speaks as if the one [sensation of colour] and the other [sensed colour] were the same, only viewed from ‘different points of view or interests’, psychologically or subjectively considered, it is called sensation, physically or objectively viewed, a feature of the external object. Here it suffice to refer to the easily graspable distinction between the objectively seen as uniform red of this globe and the indubitable and even necessary adumbrations of the subjective colour sensation . . . [.] (Husserl 1913a II/1, 349; my translation)

The ‘popular conception’ Husserl criticizes is no doubt Mach’s view that the distinction between sensation and sensed, mental and physical, is one ‘of different points of view’ of the same neutral elements. Husserl takes himself to have an argument that shows Mach’s point-of-view idea to be wrong. What is it?

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When you look at the red globe it seems uniformly red to you although, in part, it does not look uniformly red under different light conditions etc. The colour of the globe looks to us unchanged precisely because it looks differently under different conditions. This fact underlies the distinction between colour and colour sensation. But it is not a fact about different points of view or interests. Whatever your interest in the colour of the globe is, the facts of perceptual constancies are not interest- or point of view-relative.

3. The Intentionality of Thought 3.1 Mach’s Picture Theory of Judgement and Cognition The view Neutral Monists’s of perception has some independent plausibility. Naïve realists about perception take perceptions to be constituted by the objects of perception. Mach and James pushed this one step further: the perception does not only depend on its object for its existence and identity; the perception is identical with its object. However, when it comes to thinking in general things look very different. It seems essential that we can represent what is not yet, but might be the case; that we are able to learn now from what has been the case; and so on. How can there be such abilities if there are no mental states that are directed upon something different from themselves? By mimicking or picturing facts, answers Mach. The notion of picturing is important for Mach’s purposes. In ‘On Mental Adaption’ he describes the pitiful situation of a ‘child of the forest’ when it is suddenly placed in our culture. In contrast to us, it is in a constant state of surprise, incomprehension, and agitation by what it perceives. What distinguishes the child of the forest from you? The train of thought habitually employed by the first one does not correspond to the facts that he sees. He is surprised and nonplussed at every step. But the thoughts of the second man follow and anticipate events, his thoughts have become adapted or accommodated to the larger field of observation and activity in which he is located; he conceives things as they are. The Indian’s sphere of experience, however, is quite different; his bodily organs of sense are in constant activity; he is ever intensely alert and on the watch for his foes; or, his entire attention and energy are engaged in procuring sustenance. (Mach 1882, 219–20 [248–9])

In order not to be constantly surprised by events and to avoid a state of perpetual alert in which one wastes energy, one must reliably anticipate what will happen in one’s surroundings. One must possess an effective and suitable set of expectations for one’s environment in order to survive and thrive.

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What does it take to have an effective set of expectations? One can understand the spirit of Mach’s view by considering the answer a contemporary analytic philosopher of mind and language would give. An expectation is a propositional attitude that relates a thinker to a proposition. A proposition is a truth-evaluable representation. It is either a complex of objects and properties or a complex of concepts of objects and properties. In the case of an expectation the proposition will be future-directed: it will represent things to be a certain way in the future. Now imagine someone shouts ‘A tiger is about to attack you!’ and I form the future-directed belief that a tiger is about to attack me. I certainly have an expectation, but it is not very effective to guide my actions. Where is the tiger coming from to attack me? How big is the tiger? How fast is it approaching me? All these are important issues for my evasive action, but they are left open by my expectation. Only coming to know that a tiger will appear in due course does not allow one to act swiftly and successfully. What would enable effective action planning is a substitute or simulation of the expected event: Our knowledge of a natural phenomenon, say of – an earthquake, is as complete as possible when our thoughts so marshal before the eye of the mind all the relevant sense given facts of the case that they may be regarded almost as a substitute for the phenomenon itself, and the facts appear to us as old familiar figures, having no power to occasion surprise. (Mach 1914, 315 [257])

Mach called such substitutes or simulations ‘pictures’ of facts. Possessing pictures of facts prevents surprise and allows action planning. Nature has therefore, argues Mach, endowed us with the instinctive habit of mimicking and forecasting facts in thought: Man acquires his first knowledge of nature half-consciously and automatically, from an instinctive habit of mimicking and forecasting facts in thought, of supplementing sluggish experience with the swift wings of thought, at first only for his material welfare. When he hears a noise in the underbrush he constructs there, just as the animal does, the enemy which he fears; when he sees a certain rind he forms mentally the image of the fruit which he is in search of; just as we mentally associate a certain kind of matter with a certain line in the spectrum or an electric spark with the friction of a piece of glass. (Mach 1882, 188–9 [218–19]; my emphasis)

The instinctive habit of mimicking facts—complexes of elements—in thought is in the service of practical purposes. If the mimicking does not serve the practical purpose, the results of the mimicking facts—pictures of facts—are changed. If you want to walk from your home to the new café, you will need a map by which you

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steer. For you to arrive safely and reliably at your destination, the map need not show all parts of the terrain. In fact, showing all parts of the terrain would make the map unusable for your purpose. The map needs to represent those parts of the terrain that are relevant to your journey, but not every stone and tree. Hence, the map is literally an abstraction: it leaves out some parts of what is to be mapped: When we imitate facts in thoughts, we never picture facts in thoughts tout court, but only under the aspect that is important for us; we have a goal which has mediately or immediately grown out of a practical interest. Our imitations are always abstractions. (Mach 1883, 454)

Which parts are mapped or imitated and which are not depends on the purpose for which the map is made (see section 2.10). In science we harness the mimicking instinct for purposes we have consciously chosen: It is the object of science to replace, or save, experiences by the reproduction and anticipation of facts in thought which are as copies easier to hand than experience itself and can stand in for it in many respects. (Mach 1897, 471; my translation)

Science retains the picture character of thoughts: the theories science develops are pictures or copies of facts, not mere propositions. If we have copies of facts, we can try out in thought how the future might be and plan what to do. The thought is a simplified proxy for the real thing that prevents us from being surprised and thereby provides orientation. If we are not surprised, we are no longer constantly agitated, save energy, and avoid unwanted pain. Mach calls such pictures ‘thoughts’. According to Mach’s Neutral Monism, every object that is not itself a neutral element is a complex of some neutral elements. Hence, thoughts are complexes of elements. These complexes are constituents of a self and picture other complexes of neutral elements.⁷ Mach uses capital Roman letters—‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’—to denote elements when we are focusing on their dependence on bodies other than our own and small Greek letters—‘α’, ‘β’, ‘χ’—to denote elements when focusing on their dependence on our own body. The elements so labelled can be the same. This is the very point of Neutral Monism. That a thought mimics a fact means then that one complex of elements mimics another complex. If elements are the fundamental building blocks of reality, a scientist itself is a fact that mimics other facts:

⁷ See Mach (1914, 314 [256]).

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The investigator and all his thought are a fragment only of nature, like everything else. There is no real chasm between him and the other fragments. All elements are equivalent. (Mach 1914, 325 [265–6])

A fact is a complex of elements bonded by dependence relations.⁸ The scientist is a fact whose elements are bonded by dependence relations that are analogous to the dependence relations that hold between the elements of the fact she pictures.⁹ We gain knowledge by a process of adaptation: the pictures adapt to the facts and each other: Thoughts gradually adapt to facts by picturing them with sufficient accuracy to meet biological needs. (Mach 1976, 117 [164]. I have changed the translation.)

Adaption of thoughts to facts is ‘observation’ and the mutual adaption of thoughts ‘theory’.¹⁰ These processes are initially instinctive and unconscious, but turn into science when done intentionally. So far, so good. One can ascribe to the view that the basic form of orientation in one’s environment requires picturing and hold that thoughts are distinct from what they picture. For example, the physicist Hertz and the philosopher Wittgenstein will propose picture theories of thought. But for them the picture is a distinct existent from what is pictured. In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, to take the better-known example, pictures are models of reality (TLP 2.12), the picture is a fact (TLP 2.141), but its elements are representatives of the elements of states of affairs (TLP 2.131). Such pictures can represent states of affairs that may or may not exist and the same state of affairs may be pictured in distinct pictures.¹¹ This shows that the picture theory and intentionality are compatible: a picture is a particular form of being directed on something that may or may not be. But if Mach’s picture theory shall be consistent with and support his Neutral Monism, pictures must be non-intentional. Otherwise thoughts were intentional and thereby intrinsically and not merely for practical purposes distinct from other kinds of objects and there would be a non-pragmatic distinction between the mental and the physical. Given Mach’s overall project, a thought and what it pictures cannot be distinct. This seems rather puzzling. Let’s work though an example of instinctive mimicking of facts to see that Mach’s thoughts indeed are non-intentional: • The dog observes repeatedly the elements bright light, crackling sounds— let’s label these ‘A’ and ‘B’—together and then feels heat (‘C’). ⁸ See Mach (1897, 473) and (1883, 476). ⁹ See Mach (1914, 314 [256]). ¹⁰ See Mach (1976, 120 [164–5]). ¹¹ See Hertz (1899, 1). Visser (1999) gives an overview of the development of picture theories in physics and philosophy.

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• The dog associates A and B with C: if it observes A and B together, it forms a mental image of C. • The complex or fact that the co-occurrence of A and B is associated with C is, if things go well, a picture of the fact that together A and B stand in a relation, regular connection or causation, to C. The constituents of the picture and the fact are both neutral elements. A picture of a fact and the fact pictured contain neutral elements but these elements are bonded by different relations. For example, in the picture the elements are bonded by association, whereas in the fact they are bonded by causation. The regular connection between elements is mimicked in thought by the movement of the mind from one complex of elements to another. So what seemed to be a metaphorical way of speaking—thoughts mimic or picture facts—can be taken literally. Picture and pictured facts are supposed to have the same elements as constituents, but the elements are bonded by different relations. A picture of the fact that fire causes smoke, is not of or about fire and smoke, it literally contains the neutral elements that constitute the fact to picture it. Compare: Stephen Hawking appears as himself in an episode of The Big Bang Theory; he is not played by an actor, but Stephen Hawking plays himself on TV. Similarly, neutral elements are supposed to appear as themselves in pictures of complexes that contain them. It is helpful to compare Mach’s pictures with the propositions of one temporal part of Russell. In 1904 Russell takes propositions to be complexes of objects and properties: I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high’. We don’t assert the thought, for this is a private psychological matter: we assert the object of thought (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont Blanc itself is a component part. (Russell to Frege 12.12; Russell 1904a, 169 [251])

In order to make an assertion about Mont Blanc one must assert a complex that contains Mont Blanc. There is no content that may or may not represent correctly: the things one asserts are (or are at least composed of) the things one makes an assertion about. If one adds further natural assumptions, one arrives at the consequence that there are no false propositions. A false proposition about A and B standing in a relation R, must contain A and B and the relation, yet A and B are not related by R. But if A and B are not related by R, how can there be a complex that contains A and B and R?¹² Russell’s multiple relation theory of

¹² See, for example, Russell (1913a, 109–10).

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judgement is supposed to answer this problem. In the next section we will see that Mach faced a similar problem. Mach’s picture theory preserves the most important feature of a nonrepresentational view of experience: what represents and what is represented are numerically the same.¹³ There is no distinction between thought and its object; they are numerically the same thing considered in different relations. There is no need to ascribe thinking the property of having an object distinct from itself. From Mach’s perspective this is as it should be. The picture theory supports also a reduction of what initially seems to be a propositional attitude like expectation to sensations. Expectations, beliefs, etc. are pictures and pictures are complexes of elements: Thus, perceptions, presentations, volitions, and emotions, in short the whole inner and outer world, are put together, in combinations of varying evanescence and permanence, out of a small number of homogeneous elements. Usually, these elements are called sensations. (Mach 1914, 22 [17])

Mach’s claim is then that one possesses the right set of efficient expectations if one has a number of thoughts that picture facts that are important for one’s needs before these facts obtain. The thought forecasts the future because association of elements can ‘overtake’ causation. The neutral element C can be in my mind before the real event happens. If the neutral element C is in my mind, but not in a fact external to my body, the expectation is not fulfilled. The picture will need to adapt then to the facts. Or so Mach argues and needs to argue if we can picture facts without being ‘directed’ on them or the elements that compose them. We will see now that this is problematic. To anticipate: in his description of how a picture forecasts an event Mach helped himself to the notion of a mental image that completes the picture. Is forming a mental image not an intentional mental event?

3.2 Brentano’s Self-Fulfilling Expectation Argument Mach’s Knowledge and Error, published in 1905, revisits themes from his Analysis of Sensations and integrates them into a ‘psychology of science’. In his commentary of Knowledge and Error Brentano raises three questions for Mach’s picture theory: Mach says that the presentations adapt so to the facts that they are pictures [Abbild] of them. Is this from Mach’s point of view not completely unintelligible?

¹³ See James (1904a, 485).

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Is he, who does not distinguish between presentation and what is presented, seeing and what is seen, remembering and what is remembered, not committed to take the existence of what is presented with the presentation? [A] How can there be, according to him, false presentations? [B] Can there be a contradiction between facts and facts. Is presenting not itself a fact? Mach must mean by adaption of the presentation to a fact different from itself that they persist when they have taken on a particular similarity that is not so complete that there are no longer individual differences. Otherwise there would be no two [facts]. [C] Why does he call one of the two facts that are similar to each other the picture? Here, it seems to me, is the greatest unclarity. (OM, 68; my translation)

I will take Brentano’s questions in reverse order because [A] seems the most fundamental. Question C: x pictures y is symmetric: if the thought pictures the fact, the fact pictures the thought. If the thought is a complex composed out of the same elements as the pictured facts held together by similar relations, the pictured fact is also composed out of the same elements as the picture held together by similar relations. So how can one say that one is the picture and the other the pictured facts? Can Mach answer this question? According to Mach, pictures are abstractions. They leave out what is not of importance for the purpose for which the picture is made. The picture does not contain all elements that compose the pictured fact. The pictured fact is not an abstraction. Hence, we have a difference between picture and what is pictured without invoking an unexplained notion of intentionality. However, this response on Mach’s behalf is too narrow. Imagine a case in which you can only achieve your goal if you picture the relation between two elements A and B. The thought that pictures this fact should not be an abstraction from the pictured facts. Hence, the abstraction answer does not work in general: picturing thought and pictured fact contain the same elements. But is there not a difference in relation? The elements that make up the thought are tied together by the association relation, the elements that make up the pictured fact are tied together by the relation of causation. But we are also able to picture mental facts. I can picture that you associate A with B. If I do so, the picturing fact and the pictured fact contain the same elements and the same relation between them. Mach can distinguish the picturing fact from the pictured fact in many important cases, but he has no general answer to Brentano’s question. Mach’s view that thoughts are abstractions is also incomplete in an important respect: we abstract thoughts from facts for a purpose or need. Hence, we need to know what combination of elements constitutes a practical need or purpose and distinguishes needs from different kinds of pictures.

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Question B: Propositions are things for which the question of truth and falsity arises. They can contradict each other: two propositions P and Q contradict each other if, and only if, P is false if, and only if, Q is true. But facts are neither true nor false; they exist. So what can ‘contradiction’ mean here? We can find Mach’s answer to this question in Knowledge and Error. The notion of contradiction is not semantic. Pictures contradict each other or conflict: ‘they partly agree and urge towards action in one direction and partly disagree and paralyse each other. This would be the case of a fox seeing a wriggling prey but scenting that a hunter is near by or suspecting signs of a trap reminiscent of painful experiences’ (Mach 1976, 121 [166]). The paralysis consists in the fact that the actions cannot both be carried out. Hence, there is genuine pressure for changing one of the pictures. Question A: How can a picture be false? Brentano answered that Mach’s picture theory has no room for false pictures. If Brentano is right in this, he has certainly raised a serious objection to Mach and shown that the notion of intentionality is needed. Is Brentano right? Let’s start answering this question by setting a problem for Brentano’s formulation of the argument aside. Brentano frames the argument in terms of truth and falsity. But in his writings Mach carefully avoids using the notion of truth and falsity. Truth and falsity seem not to be important dimensions of evaluations of pictures. Banks (2014, 122) ascribes to Mach and James a view of false belief according to which a complex of elements is false if it fails to connect up in the way the believer expected with other elements. Mach describes in this way hallucinations and illusions (see Mach 1976, 7 [9–10]). But it seems doubtful that every false belief can be so analysed. More importantly, such a conception of falsity and truth presupposes an independent account of meeting an expectation that is closely akin to truth and falsity. I will therefore stick to Mach’s own notion of meeting an expectation. So we need to ask: How can a thought be an expectation that is either met or not met? Does Mach’s picture theory allow an expectation to be met or be disappointed? Only if these two outcomes are available and sometimes one, sometimes the other is the case, is there a need for adaption of thought to the facts. Brentano homed in on Mach’s notion of meeting an expectation when he answered question (A) as follows: It can certainly be that something that is expected does not occur. But according to Mach, this is precisely not the case. For, according to him, the expecting is the expected [das Erwarten ist das Erwartete] and if the expecting occurs the expected occurs and so on. For him, who writes about ‘Knowledge and Error’, an error is utterly impossible. (OM, 68; my translation)

If the expectation of future C is the present occurrence of C, the expectation is met now because C occurs now.

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A move from ‘representation’ by identity to ‘representation’ by resemblance will not help Mach. Assume that an expectation of C consists in my mind containing a neutral element that resembles C such that the present element can be a substitute for the future element. This requires the present element to share those properties with C that are of importance for the success of my future actions. If I expect that there will be HEAT in due course, the present element should itself be of the HEAT kind. Having such an element in mind, that is it is connected to other elements that make up the bundle of elements that is my ego, allows me now to simulate in thought what to do. Hence, the present neutral element C₁ is itself a particular heat. This point brings us to Brentano’s conclusion: if I expect future HEAT, HEAT already occurs and my expectation is met. My expectation is constituted by a HEAT trope or element standing in dependence relations to elements that make up my self. Hence, one cannot have an expectation that is not met. Of course one wants to say that C does not occur outside my mind at the time when I expect it. Can one say that I expect a complex in which C is combined with a spatial and a temporal element and that this complex is not ‘in my mind’? Mach usually lists among the elements times and locations and in the Analysis of Sensations he assumes that we perceive times.¹⁴ But the appeal to times aggravates the problem. If my present expectation pictures now a complex of a future time and C, the future is now. This paradoxical consequence explains one of Brentano’s remarks about Mach: Interesting are also the embarrassments in which Mach is caught when he considers mental phenomena which are not sensations, for example agreement, remorse, expectation, hope, fear, indeed already imagination and general concepts. In this case past things [das Vergangene] (respectively future things) had to be identical with presently existing things. This is obviously impossible. (LS20, 29440; my emphasis)

Brentano is right: if times are among the elements, the existence of expectations will lead to a collapse of the distinction between the past, present, and future. This consequence seems even worse than the result that the existence of an expectation guarantees that it is met. The same problem occurs for other mental acts. If you hope that a HEAT element occurs, a HEAT element must already occur and your hope is fulfilled. Even if we had space and time available as building blocks of facts, there would still be self-fulfilling hopes. I can certainly hope that a HEAT element occurs right now somewhere. When I hope so, my hope is fulfilled: a HEAT element occurs in my mind right now: it is a constituent of the picture I have of what I hope for. The

¹⁴ See Mach (1914, chapter 12).

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same goes for fearing that a HEAT element will occur right now. Another aspect of the same problem is that there can be no true counterfactual suppositions. If you suppose that that a HEAT element would occur right now somewhere if things were different, a HEAT element will in fact occur right now. Importantly, in Mach’s ontology there is only a practical distinction between me and other facts. Hence, we can view a fact as ‘in me’ for some purposes, yet fundamentally the fact just is part of the furniture of the universe. So if I expect a fact it exists. The expecting is the expected. Does the problem also arise for thought experiments as Brentano claims? In a thought experiment one combines neutral elements into facts in such a way that no fact is pictured. How? If the elements C and D are combined in his imagination, C and D must exist. But they don’t need to be bonded by a nonassociative relation. Hence, one can make some pictures that picture no fact. However, the main problem remains: making a picture is bringing about the pictured fact. Mach gives an account of error that does not involve picturing a fact. He writes: A judgement, our own or conveyed to us, that we find appropriate to the physical or mental finding to which it relates we call correct and see cognition [Erkenntnis] in it, especially if it is new and important. Cognition is invariably a mental experience directly or indirectly beneficial [biologisch fördernd] to us. If, however, the judgement does not stand up, we call it an error; or, if we have been deliberately misled, a lie. The same mental organization that is thus beneficial, and, for example, causes us quickly to recognize a wasp, may at other times cause us to mistake a beetle for a wasp (mimicry). [ . . . ] Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources, only success can tell the one from the other. A clearly recognized error, by way of corrective, can benefit knowledge just as a positive piece of knowledge can. (Mach 1976, 84 [115])

This suggests that an expectation is not met if, and only if, it is not furthering the well-being of someone making it. An expectation might be a picture of a fact and yet not further our well-being because it does not picture the fact well enough etc. However, there will be plenty of cases in which one wants to say that the expectation was not beneficial because it was not met. I expected to find warmth in the cave, but I suffered because the cave was not warm. Any theory of adaptive success should be able to capture this connection. Mach’s can’t. In sum, Brentano’s third question shows that Mach faces a dilemma. First horn: If expectations are relations to neutral elements, there is no directedness of something that may or may not exist. For this reason there is no intentionality and no reason to distinguish between the mental and the physical. But every expectation is met. Hence, there is adaptation of thoughts is not necessary: there is no learning by failure and no falsification of theory.

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Second horn: If expectations are intentional mental events or states, it is possible some expectations are not met: there is no learning by failure and no falsification of theory. But if expectations are intentional, they are mental. In view of this dilemma Brentano takes Mach to be committed to an inconsistent triad: 1. The picture theory of thought and knowledge 2. Mental adaption: pictures adapt to facts 3. Thoughts are not directed on something. If one wants to hold 1. and 2., one must allow for intentionality. But the truth of Neutral Monism is incompatible with the existence of primitive intentionality: [Mach’s theory of adaptation] seem to be based on the idea that, at least with respect to presentations, one has to distinguish between it and something on which it is directed, which may not exist, yet is represented. With this [distinction] the basis of Mach’s whole view has been given up. In this relation between the mental to the objects consist its difference from the physical. Mach completely misunderstands it. (OM, 69)

In turn, if one wants to be a Neutral Monist, one must find a non-intentional replacement of expectation. It is a formidable question for a Neutral Monist what this replacement might be.

3.3 Intellectual Unease Brentano raises a further problem for Mach’s picture theory. It targets the motivation for changing your total picture of the facts. Imagine that your picture contains the partial pictures that 2 + 3 = 5 and that 2 + 3 = 6. If so, your total picture needs revision, even if the contradiction may not affect your biological fitness/pleasure-pain ratio. Mach agrees: in such a situation we feel intellectual unease and pain; we strive to be in an easy and relaxed mental state and therefore revise our picture. But why are you tormented by contradictions/do you feel intellectual pressure? Why do we demand such adaptions? Only because we don’t like a contradiction with a fact that has been recognized by us or because we demand truth with which then not only the contradiction with a fact known by us but with all facts not known by us becomes an impossibility? (OM, 70)

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We don’t have a brute dislike for contradictions. We feel pained by them because we value truth: our response to contradictions is a manifestation of our attitude to truth and falsity that is independent of the survival value of pictures. If we feel driven to revise pictures because we want to have true pictures, we need to find room for false pictures and this lets intentionality back in. A contingently false picture represents something that might be, but is not the case.

4. Preview If there is irreducible and intrinsic intentionality, Neutral Monism is false. But is there such a thing as intentionality? Does our awareness of our mental life ‘show’ us an intrinsic property of being directed on something? Maybe we believe that there is such a property, but diaphaneity suggests that it is not non-inferentially given in awareness. Hence, Neutral Monists tried to find a replacement for intentionality that is compatible with our intuitions about intentionality. The next chapters will discuss how these themes and issues influenced early analytic philosophy and played out there.

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PART III

FROM PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT A SOUL TO PSYCHOLOGY WITH A S E L F A N D BE Y O N D : T H E A N G L O A U S T R O - G E R M A N A X I S 1 8 8 6– 1 9 1 8 Introduction to Part III: ‘Shocked and Disappointed’ Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical tradition in the Englishspeaking world. According to a prominent narrative, it started with G. E. Moore’s and Bertrand Russell’s ‘revolt against idealism’ in 1898. For example, Griffin writes: Despite notable antecedents, as early as Bolzano, analytic philosophy emerged as a movement at the very end of the nineteenth century when Russell and Moore launched an attack on the neo-Hegelian philosophy that was then dominant in Britain. (Griffin 2013, 383)

Griffin’s remarks concern the initiation of analytic philosophy as a movement, that is, the subsequent impact of Moore’s and Russell’s arguments against British idealism. Moore and Russell introduced concepts—acquaintance, description, sense data, etc.—and methodological attitudes—Russell’s robust sense of reality, the striving to approach philosophical problems through analysis of concepts and logic—that caught on and were employed, modified, or critically discussed by contemporaries and/or later generations of philosophers. Whereas Bolzano may only be a notable antecedent of analytic philosophy, things are different for the German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Brentano.¹ Their work prepared the way for the inception of ¹ Dummett (1973) is a groundbreaking study of Frege that established him as a founding father of analytic philosophy. Dummett (1993, chapter 2) argues that it is definitional of analytic philosophy that it gives methodological priority to the analysis of language. By this standard, neither Moore nor Russell qualify as analytic philosophers . . .

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analytic philosophy. Here I will focus on Brentano’s influence on analytic philosophy in England. Brentano’s theory of intentionality helped to shape the arguments that Moore and Russell used in their revolt. In 1903 Moore wrote a detailed critical notice of Brentano’s The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong and, although Moore’s important paper ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ does not name-check Brentano, it relies, as we will see, on Brentano’s mark of the mental. Russell portrayed his early self as a reformed Brentanian: I had originally accepted Brentano’s view that in sensation there are three elements: act, content, and object. I had come to think that the distinction of content and object is unnecessary, but I still thought that sensation is a fundamentally relational occurrence in which a subject is ‘aware’ of an object. I had used the concept of ‘awareness’ or ‘acquaintance’ to express this relation of subject and object and had regarded it as fundamental in the theory of knowledge [ . . . ]. (Russell 1959, 100)

Russell and Moore both argue that the Brentanian tripartite act/content/object distinction needs to be replaced, either completely or in part, by the dual act/object distinction. I will explore their arguments in Chapter 9. In 1904 Russell published a series of in-depth studies of Meinong in Mind. Russell’s groundbreaking paper ‘On Denoting’ (Russell 1905) is motivated by a criticism of Meinong’s theory of objects as well as a criticism of Frege’s theory of sense and reference. The influence of the Brentano school on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory of Russell and Moore has been pointed out in the literature and different views of the importance of this influence have been proposed. Simons argued that for a period between 1899 and 1914: the best philosophy coming out of England and the best philosophy coming out of the German-speaking world were running more or less parallel. Since most of this good German philosophy was coming out of or had some very tangible connection with Austria, it is appropriate to speak of an Anglo-Austrian Axis of philosophy. (Simons 1986, 144)²

As we will see this has a plausible core. But a problem is the unclarity of ‘Austrian philosophy’ in Simons’ historical thesis. What is a ‘very tangible connection with Austria’? As we will see, among the influences on Cambridge philosophy during

² For critical discussion of Simons see Glock (2008, 73–80). Simons’ thesis does not exclude philosophers working in Germany between 1899 and 1914 from being ‘Austrian Philosophers’ as Glock (76) suggests. It is, however, unclear which such philosophers are included and which are excluded.

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this time are Herbart, Lipps, Lotze, and Wundt. What is their ‘very tangible connection with Austria’? Maybe an ad hoc connection can be forged, but why not simply say that there was also an influence of German psychology on early analytic philosophy? In the following I will argue that the answer to this question should be Yes.³ Dummett (1993, xii) went as far as to claim that Moore and Russell played no role in the origin of analytic philosophy.⁴ I think this is too strong. Brentano’s and Meinong’s theories are a starting point for Moore and Russell, but they did not simply take these theories for granted; they made their own contributions to them. Bell (1999, 208) has a more nuanced take on the Anglo-Austrian connection. Analytic philosophy emerged in the context of the debate about the development of the science of psychology in Germany and Austria: Moore [ . . . ] is best seen as the major, though by no means the first, British participant in an existing debate whose other participants included Ward, Stout, Russell, Meinong, Stumpf, Husserl, Twardowski and Brentano. Many of the terms and goals of this debate originated in Germany, during the 1870s, in the attempts by philosophers, physiologists, theologians and others to come to terms with, and contribute to, the emergence of psychology as a discipline in its own right. Russell, too, during the period between 1899 and 1903 is best seen as engaging with issues and innovations associated, on the one hand, with the logico-mathematical works of Dedekind, Schroder, Cantor, Klein, Riemann, Helmholtz, Bolzano, Peano, and Frege, amongst others, and on the other hand, with the contributions to psychology and philosophy made by Brentano, Meinong, Ward, Stout, Fechner, Helmholtz and, of course, Moore.

The focus on psychology strikes me as spot-on, but Bell leaves important things out.⁵ In order to understand the arguments of Moore and Russell, we need to go beyond the Brentano school (Meinong, Stumpf, Husserl, Twardowski, and Brentano). Moore and Russell were introduced to Brentano’s philosophy by Stout, but both were also students of James Ward, who was deeply influenced by Lotze (see section 1.5).⁶ Ward followed Lotze in letting psychology start with ³ Simons (1986, 153) himself mentions in this connection Lotze, but does not say what makes Lotze an Austrian philosopher. ⁴ Originally published in German in 1988. ⁵ Preti (2008) traces the influence on Austrian philosophy on Moore in detail; van der Schaar (2016, 2017) does the same for George Frederick Stout (1866–1944), one of Moore’s teachers in Cambridge, who was central to the reception of Brentanian thought in Cambridge. See also Griffin (2013, 388). Mulligan (2018) gives a broader picture of the influence of the Brentano school on Russell and Moore, highlighting the importance of Husserl. Nasim 2008, 89, see also 23, 26) writes of a ‘distinctly British Brentanian tradition’ at whose centre were Stout and George Dawes Hicks (1862–1941). Dawes Hicks wrote his PhD on Kant in Leipzig under the supervision of Wundt. In 1904 he became the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at University College London. ⁶ See Russell (1959, 38).

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the subject, a replacement of the soul, and holding that psychology studies relations between the subject and objects.⁷ We have seen in Parts I and II that Austro-German philosophers fought intensely over the soul and its role in empirical psychology and that the ‘Psychology without a Soul’ group seemed to gain the upper hand. Ward took the idea of ‘Psychology without a Soul’ as his cue: Psychology without a soul—as the ‘rational psychologists’ described the soul—is quite possible, but not psychology without a self, a being that in its acquaintance and intercourse with objects—that is, directly or indirectly, with other selves—feels and acts. Let the substantiality of this being be interpreted how it may be, the actuality of it is past question and therefore never questioned. (Ward 1919, 381)

The self or ego or subject is supposed to be a ‘metaphysically lightweight’ successor of the soul. Psychology is the study of the subject’s ‘acquaintance and intercourse with objects’. Given the long debate about the soul in Austro-German philosophy the ease with which the subject is welcomed back into philosophy by Ward and his students is surprising. This surprise is felt by Moore’s contemporaries. From 1911 onwards Moore lectured on psychology. By Moore’s own admission his lectures were not on psychology, but on philosophy of mind and revolved around the topics James, Stout, and Ward had dealt with before.⁸ Moore’s student John Wisdom (1904–93) wrote about these lectures: And how delighted I was with Moore’s lectures. But here I must confess—what I did not at the time own to myself—I was shocked and disappointed when Moore began his lectures on the Soul by saying that he agreed with Ward that the existence of the Soul or Self is an ‘inexpungeable assumption’. (Wisdom 1942, 421)

In his commentary on Moore (1910a) Dawes Hicks sees Moore as proposing Lotze’s view of the subject: The mind, [Moore] holds, may be an entity distinct from every one of its mental acts and from all of them put together; it may, in other words, be mental in a sense different from that in which they are mental. I gather, from what is said, that the theory intended is practically that advanced, in recent times, by Lotze. ‘We come to understand the connexion of our inner life,’ says Lotze, ‘only by ⁷ Ward’s conception of the subject/ego is much discussed in the literature of his time. See Bain (1886, 457–60), Bradley (1893), Dawes Hicks (1925, 283ff), and Laird (1926). ⁸ See Moore (1942, 29).

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referring all its events to one ego, lying unchanged alike beneath its simultaneous variety and its temporal succession.’ (Dawes Hicks 1910, 236–7)⁹

Moore certainly has sympathies with Lotze. But Moore continued to go back and forth about the question whether there is a subject or not.¹⁰ In 1898 Russell attended John McTaggart lectures on Lotze and took detailed notes. Russell found much to criticise in Lotze and used Lotze’s metaphysics of relations later as a paradigm of a misguided denial of the reality of relations.¹¹ But in his lecture notes Russell (1898, 68) took Lotze’s arguments for the existence of the soul to be valid. In his work up to 1919 Russell will follow Lotze and Ward in holding that there is a subject that is distinct from a bundle of presentations. Russell clearly and Moore tentatively believed in the subject and this belief informs their philosophical views. They are Lotzeans as well as Brentanians.¹² Both followed Ward and argued that intentionality should be understood as a relation between a subject and an object. The Lotzean strand in early analytic philosophy—the centrality of the self in the philosophy of mind of Ward and early Russell and Moore—has been missed out even by proponents of the ‘Anglo-Austrian’ conception of analytic philosophy. If we ignore that in early analytic philosophy the subject of experience is theoretically central, we will not get a proper sense of the particular problems and solutions discussed.¹³ In this part I will assess the views of Ward et al. by giving special attention to the role of the subject in them. I will organize the next two chapters around questions related to the subject. In Chapter 7 I will introduce the views of Moore’s and Russell’s teachers James Ward and George Frederick Stout. Ward introduced the Lotze-inspired view that psychology deals with states in which something is presented to a subject. Stout started out as a Herbart expert, but gradually came round to Brentano’s subjectless view of psychology. In doing so Stout advanced our understanding of the act/content/ object distinction. Russell went beyond Ward in developing a response to the main criticisms of the subject. I will assess it in Chapter 8.

⁹ The quote is from Lotze (1856 [1864], 154 [168]). ¹⁰ See Baldwin (1990, 41–2) for an overview of Moore’s views about the subject. ¹¹ See Russell 1903, § 425. ¹² Russell read Lotze and responded to him in his early work. See Milkov (2008). Here I am primarily interested in the Lotzean influence on Russell’s philosophy of mind mediated by Ward. See Preti (2008, section 5) for an overview of Moore’s undergraduate work under Stout and Ward focusing on Lotze. Preti (2008, section 6) outlines the philosophical positions of Stout and Ward, but not their view about the subject. ¹³ These views about the subject are in the background of Wittgenstein’s complaint in the Tractatus that there is no subject as assumed in the ‘superficial psychology’ of his time.

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7 Cambridge Psychology between Lotze and Brentano 1. Ward: Psychology with a Subject, but without an Object/Content Distinction It is this final aggrandisement of the Subject which staggers me. Alexander Bain, Mr. Ward’s ‘Psychology’ (1886)

1.1 The Metaphysically Neutral Subject Moore and Russell started out in Cambridge in the 1890s. At this time James Ward promoted the study of psychology in Cambridge. When Ward started his studies in Cambridge in the 1860s psychology was not yet offered. In 1869 he went therefore to Germany to study psychology, first in Berlin (he attended lectures by Donner and Trendelenburg), then in Göttingen with Lotze. On his return to England he first worked as a minister, but resigned his post and continued his studies in Cambridge. In 1875 he became a fellow of Trinity College and in 1897 he was elected to the newly instituted Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic in Cambridge. Lotze’s philosophy had a major impact on Ward. Moore’s report about his studies under Ward confirms this: [Ward] had a high opinion of Lotze, whose lectures he had attended in Germany and he set me to read pieces of Lotze’s Metaphysics and to write essays on those pieces, which essays he then discussed privately with me. (Moore 1942, 17)

In his main work Psychological Principles Ward listed his influences: Psychology was not taught in Cambridge in my days, and what I owe to others I owe entirely to previous writers and to my pupils. Among the former, besides our English psychologists, I may mention Herbart, and some Herbartians, Lotze, Wundt, Brentano and his Austrian connexions. (Ward 1919, viii)

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This is a surprising list. In Chapter 1 we have seen that Herbart and Lotze advocate a science of the soul whereas Brentano and his ‘Austrian Connexions’ promote a ‘Psychology without a Soul’. Ward indeed aims to combine Brentano’s science of intentionality and Lotze’s science of the soul. Let me explain this in more detail now. In his article on ‘Psychology’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica Ward gave a characterization of psychology in terms of the facts with which it deals: all [the psychologist’s] facts are facts of presentation, are ideas in Locke’s sense, or objects which imply a subject. (Ward 1886, 38)

What does it means that an object implies a subject? Let’s go back to Ward’s ‘master’ Lotze to answer this question. According to Lotze, (i) every mental event/state is an event/state of something and (ii) a complete and precise description of such a state must mention this thing (see section 1.3.7). Unlike our impersonal weather-reports (‘It will be stormy on the coast’), reports of mental states identify something that believes, feels, or perceives: we ascribe thoughts to something. For instance, we don’t say: ‘It judged that the weather will be bad,’ but: ‘Tony, the guy next door, judged that the weather will be bad.’ If we take the way we talk about the mental at face value, it is people and animals that undergo experiences etc. What is at issue between Lotze and, as we will see, Ward on the one side, and Mach et al. on the other is the importance of the fact that we ascribe mental events and processes to something. Lichtenberg followers like Mach argue that the common-sense practice to ascribe experiences to things of a particular kind is useful. It helps us to predict the behaviour of some things. If Tony, the guy next door, experiences rage, we had better avoid him etc. Mach argued that the fact that we ascribe mental states and events to something can be set aside in psychological investigations (see section 2.12). Compare: it is metaphysically impossible that there is a thinker with a limitless memory capacity. Yet, cognitive scientists and linguists are happy to proceed in many investigations by supposing that our minds have limitless memory capacities. This idealization is justified because it yields new explanations. Similarly, it may be that every experience is the experience of something and yet this fact can be disregarded in psychological investigations. For example, it does not tell us anything about the laws that hold for experiences etc. Both Brentano and Mach will argue that an empirical theory needs to disregard the dependence of the experience on a bearer. For only the experience is given in awareness even if it is metaphysically or conceptually necessary that it is the experience of a something. In contrast to Mach et al. Ward (1919, 28) defined psychology as the science of ‘individual experience’. In order for something to have psychological import it must ‘be regarded as having a place in, or as being a constituent of someone’s

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experience’ (1919, 27). There are states or facts of two kinds: some are facts about someone’s experiences, others aren’t. The former can be given a more fine-grained description: there are facts in which something is presented to a subject: In every concrete ‘state of mind’ (accepting this term for the present without question) there is the presentation of an object, or complex of objects, to a subject. (Ward 1882, 368)

If we understand ‘state’ in ‘state of mind’ in a loose sense such that events and processes are included, these states turn out to be the holding of relations: (WardP) x is a state of mind if, and only if, x is the obtaining of the relation of presentation between a subject and an object/objects.

According to Ward, the subject-matter of psychology can only be identified by employing the notion of a subject of experience. The subject cannot be ‘idealized’ away without turning a psychological investigation into an investigation of a different kind. The concept that wears the trousers in (WardP) is the concept of presentation which, in turn, is explained as the indispensable condition of attention.¹ Ward (1893, 65) symbolized states of mind as ‘S(ubject) O(bject)’, ‘the hyphen serving to indicate that each [subject as well as object] is relative to each other’. The subject of a presentation P is that to which something is presented in P, the object of P is what is presented in P. Surprisingly, the presentation-relation does not figure in Ward’s 1893 symbolism. But then years earlier he declared that mental states are symbolized by ‘S(ubject) Perceiving O(bject)’ or ‘O(bject) P(erceived by) S (ubject)’ (Ward 1883, 468).² According to Ward, the subject and object of presentation are supposed to be relative to each other, and both are relative to presentation.³ The subject and the object of a presentation are like P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional characters Jeeves and Wooster. Just as it is essential to Jeeves to be the servant of Wooster and Wooster to be the hapless employer of Jeeves, it is essential to subject and object that the latter is presented to the former and that the former is to be presented with the latter.⁴ Hence, there is no subject without an object and vice versa. Let us highlight an important feature of Ward’s Lotze-inspired conception of the psychological subject. According to Ward, the psychological subject is that to which an object is presented. The relation of being presented to is one of which we

¹ ² ³ ⁴

See Ward (1882, 375). Thanks to Jeremy Dunham for pointing me to this paper. See also Ward (1919, 371). See Natorp (1912, chapter 6) on the correlativity of subject and object. I borrow the example from Fine (1995, 283).

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are aware and which we can take for granted in psychological enquiries. Conceiving of the psychological subject in this way makes a major difference to psychology. Consider William Hamilton’s explanation of the earlier use of ‘subject’ in philosophy:⁵ Subject [ . . . ] is a term for that in which the phaenomena revealed to our observation, inhere—what the schoolmen have designated the materia in qua. (Hamilton 1887 I, 159)

If the subject is the thing in which mental phenomena inhere (the bearer of mental states and events), all the problems discussed in Part I arise. The thing in which mental phenomena inhere is not given in consciousness and a property-bearer/ property ontology is for independent reasons problematic. So psychology becomes hostage to a particular metaphysics. In contrast, Ward’s psychological subject is supposed to be metaphysically neutral: [The] psychological conception of a self or subject, then, is after all by no means identical with the metaphysical conceptions of a soul or mind-atom, or of mindstuff not atomic; it may be kept as free from metaphysical implications as the conception of the biological individual or organism with which it is so intimately related. (Ward 1886, 39)

In order to posit a psychological subject it suffices that every presentation presents an object to something. Whether presentations have a bearer at all and a fortiori whether this bearer is simple are questions that don’t arise on this conception of a subject. Psychology can set metaphysical questions about inherence, substances, etc. aside. However, there are different questions that Ward needs to answer. One can see how fictional characters can be relative to each other. But how can there be particular objects that are relative to each other? Bradley, in his response to Ward’s essay ‘ “Modern” Psychology: A Reflexion’, posed this and further questions: We have an object, a something given, and it is given to the subject. Is the subject given? No, for, if so, it would itself be an object. We seem, then, to have one term and a relation without a second term. But can there be a relation with one term? No; this appears to be self-contradictory, and, if we assert it, we must justify and defend our paradox. But, again, can a term be known only as a term of a relation or relations, while it is not, in any aspect, known otherwise? No, once more; this

⁵ Thanks to Rory Madden for the pointer to Hamilton.

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is impossible, and in the end unmeaning. Terms are never constituted entirely by a relation or relations. There is a quality always which is more than the relation, though it may not be independent of it. We may, of course, for certain purposes abstract and use working fictions, as we do, for instance, in the case of atoms and ether. But, outside natural science, it is a serious error to mistake these useful fictions for realities. And anything like a point without a quality in the end seems to be unreal, and ‘constitution by relations’ a misleading phrase. But, once more, can we have a relation, one term of which is contained in the experienced and the other not? No; for a term, which is not in some sense experienced, seems nothing at all. If in itself it falls outside the experienced, then it appears to be unmeaning, and it cannot therefore consistently be said to exist. (Bradley 1893, 211; my emphasis)

Bradley starts by raising the Hume/Lichtenberg objection: the subject is not given in awareness of a sensation or feeling. So how can one hold that all states of mind are relations between a subject and an object? So far, so well known. I will return to this objection in Chapter 8. The more interesting point for the purposes of this chapter is Bradley’s argument that an object cannot be entirely constituted by relations. An object, a genuine term or particular, that stands in a number of relations must have further non-relational properties in virtue of which it can enter these relations. This is not to deny that there are external relations, only that a particular or term can be entirely constituted by such relations. Hence, there are facts about a particular/ term that can be known independently of the relations into which it enters. But the Wardian subject of a presentation seems to be nothing but the thing to which the object of the presentation is presented. Either there is more to the subject and Bradley has misconstrued the subject or the subject is ‘unreal’ or a mere useful fiction.⁶ Because of these two critical points Bradley moved to a nonrelational view of sensation: experience is not a relation between a subject and an object.⁷ Bradley’s objection puts pressure on Ward’s notion of the subject. Answering it will help us to understand Ward’s view better. In Ward’s view ‘the (psychological) subject’ seems to work like ‘the president of the USA’: it refers to a property or role

⁶ Please note that Bradley follows in Brentano’s footsteps by taking the subject to be a useful fiction. As natural scientists we introduce fictions to simplify our theories, but the philosopher needs to avoid them. While suggestive this needs elaboration. I take it that Bradley thinks that we tend to be confused by useful fictions if we encounter them outside a scientific theory. If we consciously pretend that there is a subject to simplify our theory, we are not inclined to pursue such questions as, ‘Where is the subject?’ and, ‘Can it be perceived or not?’ However, outside methodologically controlled theorizing such questions may arise and lead us astray. ⁷ In his article ‘Bradley or Bergson?’ James praised Bradley for this idea. Bradley (1914, 152) responded to James by referring him back to Hegel whom Bradley took to be the original source of the non-relational view.

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that can be filled by different objects at different times. The subject is the functional role of being presented with an object in a state of mind. Ward (1919, 23, 29) indeed speaks of the role of the subject and different things filling it. I will illustrate this further in the next section. If ‘the subject’ names a role, it can be exhausted by relational properties. By saying that the subject is relative to the object, Ward picks out the defining relation of the role. Each state of mind has a subject role and there is an occupant of this subject role. For example, Ward writes: It is not enough to talk of feelings or volitions: what we mean is that some individual, man or worm, feels, wills, acts—thus or thus. (Ward 1886, 39; my emphasis)

A man and a worm can be the subject of presentation, that is, the worm occupies the role of the subject in a state of mind. In more detail: Take a particular pain P₁. It is a state of mind that has a subject and an object. The subject is the thing to which something feels painful in P₁ and this thing is the worm in my garden. The worm fills the subject role, but there is not a further thing distinct from the worm, the subject of experience. We can sharpen this by answering an objection against the view that we need both subject and object to identify mental acts. Here is the objection: Does every mental act involve an object presenting in a certain way to a subject? Try as I might, I just do not find the third term of my mental acts. I do find objects presenting in this or that way, and in the perceptual case these manners or modes of presentation have an interesting property: they are perspectival. That is, they disclose how objects appear from a particular point in space. From here, I am able to access how my laptop looks from here, how the keys feel to a touch like mine, and how this body now feels against the chair. These modes of presentation converge on the position occupied by the human being with whom I am so terribly familiar. I find him, that is Johnston, here at this position, but I do not find a self or a subject of experience, here. (Johnston 2007, 257)

Johnston takes the subject of experience to be an object distinct from, for example, the human being Mark Johnston. Since he does not find something distinct from the human being Mark Johnston in the perspectival visual presentation of his computer, there is no subject. Hence, a visual presentation does not present an object to a subject. This argument does not refute Ward’s view. The subject of experience is the role of the x to which an object is presented, not a thing of a ‘funky’ kind. In the example described the human person Mark Johnston is the actual occupant of the role being the subject of an experience of a laptop.

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The psychological subject is not a kind of particular with mental powers at all; the occupier of the subject role is such a particular. One can hold that every presentation presents something to a subject without identifying the subject with a special kind of particular. Now, Ward himself will bring in such a particular. But his argument for this conclusion needs further premises. Let’s take stock. By arguing that a mental fact either is or presupposes the presentation of an object to a subject, Ward combined the main ideas of Lotze and Brentano. The Brentanian element in (WardP) is that a mental state contains a presentation of an object or complex of objects (see Chapter 4). Intentionality is the mark of the mental and guides research in psychology. However, please note that Ward only speaks of the object of the presentation. He is not sensitive to the concerns that led Brentanians to distinguish between the content and the object of an act. This will have a negative impact on the work of Russell and Moore. The Lotzean element is that the presentation presents an object or complex of objects to a subject. A state is a state of mind if, and only if, it contains a presentation of an object to a subject. Neither Brentano nor Lotze would be happy with Ward’s explanation of what a state of mind is. According to Lotze, it would suffice to say that the state is the state in the life of a soul. More precisely, that the state is or can be unified to a unity of consciousness. Lotze has therefore room for non-intentional mental states and would take the ‘presentation of an object’ part to be controversial. Brentano introduced intentionality, at least in part, to say what the subject matter of a ‘psychology without a soul’ is supposed to be without appealing to a subject. Introspection gives us direct access to mental states and events and these are ‘consciousnesses’ of something, but they don’t appear to us to be relations between a subject and an object. Hence, there is no reason even to introduce a lightweight subject when developing psychological theories. The grammatical fact that one can ask ‘Who has it?’ with respect to any experience, feeling, etc. does not tell us anything of psychological interest.

1.2 The Biological Dog, the Individual Mind, and the Psychological Subject Why does Ward (1886, 39) nonetheless take the existence of the subject to be an ‘inexpungeable assumption’? We can explain Ward’s reason by comparing biology and psychology.⁸ Take a biological individual, the dog Fido. Physiology or biology identifies Fido with

⁸ See Ward (1919, 36–7).

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a series of phenomena governed by biological laws. The biologist does not need a further entity in addition to the series. Things are different in psychology, argues Ward. There are individual minds that can be identified with series of mental phenomena governed by psychological laws. But, Ward argues, a series of mental phenomena that forms an individual mind can only exist if there is an object x that is distinct from the series and each of its members. In short: psychology needs minds and subjects. Why? Let’s call Fido’s Mind ‘FM’ and assume for ease of exposition that it is a series of two mental states identified by their subject (Sub), a mental relation, and an object (Ob). Is FM the series: FM1 = or the series: FM2 = ? In FM1 the subject-role is filled by the mental series itself. There is nothing but the series of mental phenomena. Hence, the series must be its own subject. In FM2 there is more than the mental phenomena. The subject-role is filled by an Ego: an active thinker distinct from the series and its elements. This Ego is supposed to provide an explanation for the unity and continuity of individual minds.⁹ All presentations that have the same Ego in subject-position are one individual mind. According to Ward, Fido’s mind must be FM2. Why? Let’s start by noting that FM1 is a peculiar series. In each member of FM1 the subject role is played by FM1 itself. On a reductive account of relations which identifies instances of relations with ordered pairs, FM is a set of ordered pairs whose members contain FM: FM1 = {{FM1, Red}, {FM1, Green}} Such a set is not well-founded. If we ‘unfold’ FM1, we get an infinite tree of sets.¹⁰ However, without further investigation it is not clear that this fact is paradoxical or even problematic. We can model a mental series as a set, but that does not mean that the series is one. Even if we identify the series with a set, and the set is not well-founded, we might simply now want non-well-founded set theory to describe individual minds.¹¹ Ward himself did not use the set-theoretic difficulty to argue that Fido’s mind must be FM2. An ‘individual mind’ is supposed to be conscious of itself. If the individual mind is a series of mental states, self-consciousness requires there to

⁹ See Ward (1919, 36).

¹⁰ See Aczel (1988, 6–8).

¹¹ See Williford (2006, 129–31).

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be a state in which the subject- and the object-role are both filled by series of mental states: (Ref.) [FM]Sub–Awareness–[FM]Ob Ward takes (Ref.) to depict an impossibility: agent and object never are the same in the same act [ . . . ]. (Ward 1886, 39; 1919, 38)

Why is this? It is as impossible to express ‘being aware of ’ by one term as it is to express an equation or any other relation by one term; what knows can no more be identical with what is known than a weight with what it weighs. If a series of ‘feelings’ is what is known, what the series is presented to cannot be itself that series of feelings [ . . . ] (Ward 1886, 39; 1919, 37)

Hence, we need something X which is distinct from FM and to which FM is given. If there are individual minds that have self-consciousness, there are also subjects that are not individual minds. This conclusion is compatible with holding that the subject is not the complete series of mental states of the dog, but only some of them. Some parts of the series are aware of other parts of it. On this view, there is not one subject, but different parts of the series play the subject role at different times or there could be one continuing mental state that plays the subject role. Ward (1919, 38; 1886, 39) declared this move to be ‘beside the mark’. The part of the series that is aware of the other parts is itself a presentation and every presentation has a subject. So we need the subject again. Ward’s response brings us back to the question whether the subject- and the object-role in a mental state can be filled by the same object. For if they can, the mental state under consideration could have a subject, namely itself, and no Ego distinct from the series or members of the series would be required.

1.3 The Personification of Consciousness and the ‘Ghost of the Subject’ Ward’s main premise is that it is ‘incomprehensible’ that the same object fills the subject- and the object-role in the same presentation. He takes reflexive relations in general to be incomprehensible. For example, he responded as follows to James’s saying that the thought is the thinker:

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If I were to say to a child: It is the spoon that eats the porridge, and the fork that eats the meat, he would be puzzled; and still more puzzled if I were to add: But, of course, it’s you that eat the breakfast. If any one were to say: The poems themselves are the poet, or the laws themselves are the legislators, we should confidently declare such statements nonsensical. In what respect is this ‘final word: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers’ formally different? (Ward 1892, 537)

The view that there can be no reflexive mental acts is a widespread view at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.¹² James himself traced it back to Comte: Comte is quite right in laying stress on the fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must be already past. No subjective state, whilst present, is its own object; its object is always something else. (James 1884, 2; my emphasis)

Natorp (1912, 31) argues that it is conceptually impossible to see oneself in the mirror. Yes, we talk as if we do. But, strictly speaking, we see only our reflection in the mirror.¹³ I think this is a fundamental point of disagreement between Ward and the Brentanians. Ward assumes that the object of a mental act cannot be the act itself. Therefore knowledge and what is known cannot be the same. In contrast, Brentano argued that one mental activity can have several objects, among them itself (see sections 2.5 and 5.4). Yes, a mental act cannot be its own primary object. But it can be among the objects the act is about. For instance, an utterance of ‘these’ can refer to a number of things, among them itself. Similarly, Brentano gives us reasons to hold that a mental act represents, among other things, itself. It is therefore, among other things, consciousness of itself. Hence, there is no need for the object that plays the role of the subject to be distinct from the act. In fact, Brentano can agree with Ward. Yes, in every ‘state of mind’ we can conceptually distinguish between a subject and an object, yet the roles are filled, in part, by the same thing. Ward himself gave an illuminating description of positions such as Brentano’s: Having eliminated the subject of experience along with the substance, some psychologists proceeded to hypostatize or personify consciousness, and assign it the rôle of the subject [ . . . ] (Ward 1919, 23)

¹² See also James (1884, 2) and especially Natorp (1912, § 4, 30–1). Bain (1886, 458) is a notable exception holding that self-representation is neither ‘paradox nor self-contradictory’. James (1890 I, 162 fn.) discusses Bain’s response to Ward, but takes Ward, mistakenly I think, to argue against the ‘mind-stuff ’ theory. ¹³ This view also helps to explain Ward’s Kant-inspired view that the subject cannot become an ‘object’ (Ward 1886, 39). The subject of a mental act M₁ cannot be the object of M₁. But it may be the object of mental acts distinct from M₁.

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Russell put this more vividly when he wrote about mental acts: Meinong’s ‘act’ is the ghost of the subject or what once was the full-bodied soul. (Russell 1921, 18)

Ward takes the ‘personification of consciousness’ to be wrong. The disagreement between Ward and Brentano et al. does then not concern the claim that there is a subject of a mental act, but that the subject is distinct from the mental act.¹⁴ According to Brentano et al., such a subject is not given in awareness and if self-representation is possible there is no theoretical reason for a subject distinct from the mental act itself.

1.4 On the Wrong Track In sum: Ward’s position seems to have the vices of both empirical and metaphysical psychology without exhibiting the virtues of either. He set Moore and Russell on the wrong course in the philosophy of mind for two reasons. First, the object of the presentation. Brentano and his students disambiguated talk of the object of a presentation by distinguishing between content and object. Ward did not make this distinction and both Russell and Moore will actively try to eradicate it. I will explore the problems that result from this manoeuvre in Chapter 9. Second, the subject of experience. On Ward’s conception, psychology stands and falls with a subject distinct from the mental act. At some point of his intellectual development, Ward’s student Russell could not find the subject anymore. Since the distinction between the mental and the physical was tied to the existence of a subject, it and with it psychology as an independent science had to go. If one does not buy into Ward’s inexpungeable assumption, neither consequence follows even if there is no subject.

2. Stout: Psychology without a Subject, but with an Act/Content/Object Distinction 2.1 The Brentanian Tripartite Distinction and Perceptual Constancy Ward is one philosopher who inspired Moore’s and Russell’s revolt against idealism; the other is Ward’s student George Frederick Stout (1866–1944). In ¹⁴ Ward has James (1890 I, 339) in mind who argued that the only verifiable thinker is the thought. Compare also Strawson (2003, 307–8).

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contrast to Ward, Stout started out as a believer in the subject, but ended up denying its existence. Stout started as a Herbart scholar. In 1892 he reviewed anonymously Twardowski’s book on Descartes for Mind, followed in 1894 by an anonymous review of Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen in the same journal. Twardowski’s books were Stout’s gateway drug to Brentano’s philosophy.¹⁵ In 1896/7 he published the two-volume work Analytic Psychology.¹⁶ Bell says about Stout’s book that: it was the most accurate and detailed presentation in English of Brentano’s contributions to psychology. [ . . . ] Although there are a number of specific points on which Stout takes issue with Brentano, regarded as a whole, Analytical Psychology is essentially a presentation, for an English audience, of the doctrines which had appeared some 22 years earlier in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. (Bell 1999, 201)

Stout, for example, tells his readers that a mind is a unity of successive and simultaneous ‘modes of consciousness’ (Stout 1896, 1). If a mind is a unity of modes of consciousness, what is a mode of consciousness? Here Stout appeals to Brentano as ‘the only modern writer who appears to have realized the importance of this inquiry’. He (Stout 1896, 40) goes on to adopt Brentano’s answer that modes of consciousness are ways in which an object appears in awareness.¹⁷ The distinction between object and modes of consciousness is the distinction between the modes or forces in/with which the same content can be thought. For example, I might love cheese or hate it. Here we have one object—cheese—of which I am conscious in different modes: once I love it, once I hate it. Stout himself described Analytic Psychology retrospectively as follows: I there connect my own position with that of Brentano, accepting his distinction between objects of consciousness and the modes in which consciousness refers to its object, but criticising his failure to distinguish between ‘Objekt’ and ‘Inhalt’. (Stout 1911, 355)

The main topic for Stout is the distinction between content (Inhalt) and object. We have seen in section 5.6 that Brentano in fact did not fail to distinguish content and object. However, this point is not important for the purposes of our chapter. What is important is that Stout reads Brentano with Twardowski’s notion of a ‘quasi-picture’ in mind. Any mental act requires a vehicle which Stout calls ¹⁵ On Stout and Twardowski see van der Schaar (1996) who (p. 298) identifies Stout as the anonymous reviewer. ¹⁶ Stout’s work is reviewed by German psychologists; see Lipps (1898) and Pfänder (1900). ¹⁷ See Nasim (2008, 23–30) on Brentano and Stout and van der Schaar (2017) on Stout’s and Moore’s relation to Russell.

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‘image’. This image is ‘in our heads’: it is a modification of the thinker’s present experience ‘which determines the direction of his thought to this or that special object’ (Stout 1911, 356). ‘Image’ or ‘mental image’ is Stout’s term for Brentano’s content. I will not go into the problems of the particular mental image view that Stout proposed. For two further of Stout’s contributions to analytic psychology are more important for the purposes of this chapter. We have already seen that diaphaneity poses a challenge for Brentano’s act psychology. Brentano and Witasek hold that the distinctions between act, content, and object can easily be known by introspection: if one, for example, hears a note, one thereby is in a position to know of the mental act and its immanent object as well as that these objects are distinct. If the immanent object has an external object, this further distinction is also easily recognizable. To jog your memory, here is a telling quote from Witasek again: [I look up and see the moon above me.] In the so described experience two things are given: the tidings of a physical thing (the moon) and a mental thing (my sensory presentation or my thought) and I easily recognize that these are indeed two different things: my thought of the moon is something different from the moon itself. (Witasek 1908, 5; my emphasis and translation)

We have seen that it is controversial that one can easily distinguish between act, content, and object when one attends to one’s thinking. Lange etc. made a convincing case that especially in perception there is no easily recognizable duality of act—‘tidings’ of something—and object. In his extensive review of Stout’s Analytic Psychology Lipps criticized Stout for not getting clear about diaphaneity: Given in consciousness are the contents of consciousness and only the contents of consciousness. This is a simple tautology. [ . . . ] Immediately given to me, when I perceive or think of a house is that house, but not my perceiving or thinking of it. Given to me is the conscious result of the mental act, but not the mental act itself. (Lipps 1898, 401)

Stout indeed agreed with this observation, yet he maintains the act/content/object distinction in psychology. How can he motivate and expound the distinction if it is not given in consciousness? It is important that Stout (1896, 43) motivated the act/content/object distinction by drawing on one of the first philosophers who engaged with diaphaneity: the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96).¹⁸ Stout quoted with approval a long passage from Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man:

¹⁸ Reid’s views on diaphaneity are discussed in van Cleve (2015a, 22–5) and (2015b). See also Strawson (2015, 239–41).

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Pressing my hand with force against the table, I feel pain, and I feel the table to be hard. The pain is a sensation (experience) of the mind, and there is nothing that resembles it in the table. The hardness is in the table, and there is nothing resembling it in the mind. . . . I touch the table gently with my hand, and I feel it to be smooth, hard, and cold. These are qualities of the table perceived by touch; but I perceive them by means of a sensation which indicates them. This sensation not being painful, I commonly give no attention to it. It carries my thought immediately to the thing signified by it, and is itself forgot as if it had never been. But by repeating it, and turning my attention to it, and abstracting my thought from the thing signified by it, I find it to be merely a sensation, and that it has no similitude to the hardness, smoothness, or coldness of the table which are signified by it. (Reid 1785, 195–6; my emphasis)

Reid makes clear that a special case of the act/object distinction—the distinction between sensation and sensed object—is not easily recognized as Brentano and Witasek argued. Quite the opposite: it takes hard work to make it. Let’s expand on Reid’s thought here. He construed, simplifying somewhat, perception as property-detection. The senses detect properties by means of natural signs: sensations. The event of smoke rising is a natural sign of fire: the rising of smoke is causally correlated with another event/property—a fire’s burning—and indicates the latter. A sensation is a natural sign of a property being instantiated: it is causally correlated with the instantiation of a particular property and, in turn, causes a belief in the instantiation of the property on which the believer can act. Sensations as natural signs have the same feature as their linguistic signs. Just as the native speaker hears the meaning in the spoken words without the spoken words themselves becoming objects of attention, the mind passes from sign to signified without ‘stopping’ at the natural sign. We have acquired a ‘confirmed and inveterate habit’ of not paying attention to the signs of properties, sensations, and paying attention only to the signified properties.¹⁹ The habit of inattention to sensations is confirmed because it allows us to efficiently act on the basis of perception. But the habit makes theorizing about sensations difficult. The sensations ‘don’t leave any footsteps of themselves, either in memory or imagination’.²⁰ But if they don’t, how do we know that they exist in the first place and that we must distinguish between the sensation, a mental event or process that signifies, and what it signifies? Reid has a practical answer: we don’t distinguish between sensations and what they signify because we are in the grip of a habit that is confirmed by practical results. We can only make the distinction if we shake this habit and acquire by

¹⁹ See Reid (1764, 82).

²⁰ Reid (1764, 82).

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‘pains and practice’ a different one.²¹ Why should one ever go through this unlearning of a habit? Reid’s answer points his reader to the art of painting.²² If you want to become a good painter, you need to be aware of the distinction between a thing looking differently and this thing looking to be different. The man who approaches you from afar looks to have the same size; although his size looks differently at different points of its approach. A good painter can retain how the man’s size looks differently at different points in episodic memory and set aside that the size of the man seems unchanged. If the painter were to depict the approach of the man in a series of paintings and paint the size as unchanged, the paintings would look unrealistic. Painters also know that they can only capture how one and the same colour looks differently from different perspectives and in relation to different light sources by applying different colours to the canvas to represent this sameness.²³ Now, appearances are tied to sensations, not to the objects sensed. If the colour appears differently under different light conditions, my perceptions of it are different, but it is also perceptually manifest that I perceive the same object. In this situation, we distinguish between different perceptions of the same object and tie the difference between the perceptions to the difference in how the object appears. Here we have the source of a distinction between a mental act—seeing— and an intrinsic feature of it—what Reid called ‘appearance’—on the one hand and the object on the other. Now, the development of painting, especially the use of perspective, is a significant cultural achievement that took time to develop. The distinction between, broadly speaking, consciousness of something and the object of the consciousness is not easily arrived at by merely changing the direction of one’s attention. Quite the opposite. Because sensations are natural signs of properties, the distinction between sensations and what they signify is hidden from us. It takes work to make it. Perceptual constancies are, according to Reid, the key to motivate and understand the act/object distinction. Stout (1896, 43–4) followed Reid in this point. Stout worked through an example of perceptual constancy to make the distinction between act, content, and object visible. Imagine that you approach a tree while you continue looking at it. The height of the tree appears differently to you as you come nearer without the height appearing to be different. We can use Twardowski’s talk of act content as a mental image as a tool to expound Stout’s idea: we have different mental images of the height while we are aware that the different images are images of the same object. The course of your visual

²¹ Reid (1764, 82–3). ²² See Stout (1903, 39) on the artist ‘educating’ herself to make the act/object distinction. See also Russell (1912, 2). ²³ See Reid (1764, 83).

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experience presents you with different signs such that the sameness of the signified object is obvious. This puts you into a position to arrive at the distinction between act, content, and object by exercising episodic memory and abstraction. Stout (1903, 3) directly starts from temporally extended mental processes to introduce the distinction we are concerned with. The process of raising, inquiring, and then answering the question whether p consists in having different attitudes to one and the same content that determines the same object, here a state of affairs. Following Reid, Stout makes progress with the act/content/object distinction by drawing our attention to mental processes and away from events like judging that p. In order to distinguish, for example, the mental process of inquiring whether p or tracking an object from its content and its object, we need to go beyond what is given in an introspective snapshot. Stout gives a neat description of the problem of introspection: If I observe the process of seeing, I must attend at once to what is seen, and to the seeing of it. [ . . . ] Thus if the introspective effort is sustained and strenuous, it is apt to destroy the very object which it is examining. For by concentrating attention on the mental process, we withdraw it from the object of that process, and so arrest the process itself. Thus, introspection, when it is directly concerned with a mental operation that is in itself more or less absorbing, can only proceed by taking a series of transient side-glimpses. (Stout 1899, 19)

If we follow Brentano’s argument, even ‘transient side-glimpses’ are not possible if one is immersed in a mental process. However, Stout proposes to solve the problem in the same ways as Brentano in section 2.5: we need to exercise attention retrospectively: By calling up a process in memory immediately after it is over we are often able to notice much that escaped us when it was actually going on. In like manner the astronomer can call up in memory the image of a star which has just passed before his vision and can then notice details which had escaped him at the moment of its actual appearance. (Stout 1899, 19)

How does this help with the diaphaneity of the mental? In Chapter 1 we have seen that merely appealing to episodic memory does not solve the problem that our mental acts, if any, seem to escape us. In episodic memory I can attend to the objects of perception, but not my perceivings. I think a charitable reading of Stout’s message is that we need to retrieve the whole process in which an object appears differently to become aware of the act/content/object distinction. If we do so, we are forced to distinguish between a change in content—the object appears differently in different phases of the remembered process of perceiving it—and the object that is constantly perceived. Retrieving such processes in episodic

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memory puts the distinction between the content and object of a perception into place and starts building a theory of perception around it. It is worth noting that five years after Stout’s Analytic Psychology was published Brentano’s student Edmund Husserl would go down the same path to answer the challenge posed by diaphaneity. He addressed the particular form of the challenge formulated by Natorp (see section 5.7). Natorp denied that mental acts are given in consciousness; only an ego and an object are. Husserl defended the act/content/object distinction against Natorp. Yes, merely attending to your current hearing of a tone does not allow you also to attend to a mental activity and to distinguish it from the tone heard. But things change when we consider examples of perceptual constancy: ‘We hear the same tone once spatially near and once far away’ (Husserl 1913a II/1, 381; my translation). Imagine that you approach a violinist who plays one tone for a while. The tone appears to be the same as you approach because it sounds first spatially far away, then near. In your auditory hearing you can distinguish different phases that are directed on the same object in different ways. The felt sameness in difference recommends the act/content/object distinction. After his conversion to Neutral Monism Russell (1913a, 43) responded briefly to this defence of the act/content/object distinction. Perceptual constancies are variations in the visual data combined with the belief that the physical object is unchanged. Although I cannot discuss the point in detail, I don’t think Russell’s response is satisfactory. The colour is experienced as unchanging, whatever we believe at the time. Perceptual constancies are not a matter of believing in an unchanged object as Russell has it.²⁴

2.2 Expunging the Subject Stout’s views about the subject develop over time. He started out as an unreconstructed Lotzean. In a contribution to a symposium about knowledge of the subject he wrote: The Ego is always a unity, but it is a unity essentially related to and qualified by a multiplicity which it unifies. (Stout 1890/1, 39)

²⁴ One of the most intriguing discussions of intentionality at the beginning of the twentieth century is by one of the pioneers of research in perceptual constancies, Egon Brunswik. Brunswik (1937) argues that Brentano’s Intentionality mark is on the right track, but that it needs to be reshaped, informed by current empirical research. Empirical research in perceptual constancies takes mental processes to track objects through changes of conditions of perception. Psychologists should replace Brentano’s immanent objects with the objects our senses track.

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Thirteen years later he (Stout 1903, 5–6) has become an agnostic about the subject. Yes, attending to x implies something y that attends etc.²⁵ But is the subject a totality of mental acts or ‘a principle of unity’ of such a totality? Officially, Stout sits on the fence on the subject/no-subject question: psychologists can carry on their work without needing to decide it. Psychologists study mental acts and the unity or continuity of a conscious life. If there is a distinct subject whose conscious life this is, we have no independent access to it. The assumption of a subject does not matter to psychological investigations. If this is right, the subject is redundant. What makes for the unity of a conscious life or a phase of it? In Groundwork he puts his main idea as follows: In general, psychical process is one and continuous only in virtue of the recognized identity of its object. I am one insofar as my world is one. (Stout 1903, 6–7)

Not the subject, but the object is the unifying principle of a conscious life. Stout (1911, 358) takes this to its logical conclusion: there is no subject; only an integrated conscious life: The role which they [those that believe in the subject] ascribe to the subject of consciousness ought rather to be ascribed to its object. The general principle is that the changing complex of individual experience has the unity and identity uniquely distinctive of what we call a single self or ego only in so far as objects are apprehended as one and the same in different acts or in different stages and phases of the same act. In other words, the unity of the self is essentially a unity of intentional experience and essentially conditioned by unity of the object as meant or intended. (Stout 1911, 359)

In the previous section we have seen that perceptual constancies are the key to understanding the act/content/object distinction. There are perceptual processes (a) in which we experience something as unchanged through experienced changes of conditions of perceivability—perceptual constancy—and (b) in which we experience something as continuing to exist through changes beyond a limit of perceivability: mind-independence. In experiences of the second kind something, an object or process, seems to persist, while our perceiving reaches a limit. Such experiences are the basis for our understanding of mind-independence. If there is a perceptual process in which the same object appears differently without appearing to be a different object, the phases of the perceptual process belong to one

²⁵ Stout (1903, 5).

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‘perceiver’. But the perceiver is not a simple unifier of the phases. It is just the phases that are unified by belonging to ONE extended perceptual process that is experienced as gradually revealing ONE object. In this sense sameness of the experienced object constitutes the unity of a perceptual process. Stout (1911, 360) takes attention to provide a model for his account. If you take an interest in something, you pay attention to it. Attention is a process. You cannot attend to a flash of lightning that suddenly appears because you cannot engage with it over a period of time. If you have captured a trace of it, you can attend to the flash: you have an interest in its exact nature and this interest drives you to explore it for a time: the features one comes up with ‘are implicitly apprehended as being partial features of the same complex unity’ (Stout 1911, 360). Again it is experienced sameness of the object attended to that unifies the process. So much for an outline of the principle of unity of perception. In which sense, for instance, is unity of the object the principle of unity for thought? Consider a situation in which the question whether p is pressing. You conduct an argument and arrive at the view that p. In this case, Stout (1911) argues, the subject that asks the question and decides it is the same. Stout points us to a new way of thinking about the dia- and synchronic unity of consciousness. But he does not develop it in sufficient detail. For example, the unity of thought seems not to be the unity of an object that is experienced as the same. A general account of mental unity over and/or at a time has not yet been provided. Stout did not answer every important question. But he pointed us in the direction where new answers can be found.

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8 The Rise and Fall of the Subject: A Case Study 1. Introduction: The Fundamental Role of the Subject Ward’s introduction of the subject shapes the philosophy of mind that underlies Moore’s and Russell’s revolt against idealism. In his retrospective remarks Russell brings out the fundamental role of the subject in his philosophy: So long as the ‘subject’ was retained, there was a mental entity to which there was nothing analogous in the material world, but, if sensations are occurrences which are not essentially relational, there is not the same need to regard mental and physical occurrences as fundamentally different. (Russell 1959, 139)

In 1911 Russell argued that sensations or experiences are relational occurrences or complexes or facts: an experience is the fact that a subject stands in the acquaintance relation to an object.¹ He gave the following pointers to help us to get a grip on acquaintance: I say that I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e. when I am directly aware of the object itself. When I speak of a cognitive relation here, I do not mean the sort of relation which constitutes judgment, but the sort which constitutes presentation. (Russell 1911, 108)

Russell glossed ‘acquaintance with x’ as ‘direct awareness of x’. I think this gloss helpfully links the semi-technical term ‘acquaintance’ to our ordinary pretheoretical understanding of ‘awareness’. If there is a subject, acquaintance can be a dual (external) relation between a subject and an object, for instance, a complex sense-datum. Russell defined mental fact in terms of acquaintance:

¹ Schlick was a fan of Russell’s theory of acquaintance if it is properly understood. But like any other Austrian Philosopher he cannot get on board with the ego: ‘If we insist in using a verb which takes “content” as its object and the “ego”, or “mind” as its subject, the word “enjoying” presents itself ’ (Schlick 1932, 191). The implication is here that we should not insist on using a verb that requires such a subject.

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A fact will be called ‘mental’ if it either contains acquaintance or some relation presupposing acquaintance as a component. (Russell 1913a, 35)

Let’s consider an example of a fact that is mental because it contains a relation presupposing acquaintance. A judgement or a supposition, Russell argued in his Problems of Philosophy (Russell 1912), is a relation between a mind and some particulars or universals. These particulars and universals are terms in the judgement relation. Something can only be a term in such a multigrade relation if the judging mind is acquainted with it: otherwise we would not know what we were judging.² Hence, judging that a is F presupposes acquaintance with a and acquaintance with F and qualifies thereby as a mental fact. In sum: If there is a subject, basic mental facts differs from basic physical facts intrinsically by their first relatum, the subject, and the relating relation: acquaintance or awareness-of. Hence, mental and physical facts are ‘fundamentally different’. Before he discarded the subject Russell was a Dualist: he agreed with Brentano and his school that there is an intrinsic and introspectible distinction between the mental and the physical. But, unlike Brentano and his school, Russell tied the fundamental distinction between the mental and the physical to the existence of the subject. Hence, if there is no subject, there is no intentionality and no fundamental distinction between the mental and the physical. If one holds like Russell (1912, chapter 12) further that judgements are (i) the primary truthbearers and (ii) multigrade relations between a subject and some particulars and universals, there will be no truths either.³ Now there are well-known objections to the inexpungeable assumption of the subject. In the following sections I will use the development of Russell’s views about the subject as a case study of the problems of Ward’s inexpungeable assumption. In the end Russell concedes defeat: he gives up the subject and becomes a Neutral Monist. But Russell’s move to Neutral Monism is too hasty: if one draws the distinction between the mental and the physical without the help of the subject, there is no need to abandon the view that this distinction is fundamental and intrinsic even if there is no subject.

2. Russell 1911–13: Saving the Subject from the Neutral Monists A believer in the subject needs to address the Hume/Lichtenberg objection that drives the ‘Psychology without a Soul’ movement. Let’s see if Russell has a good answer.

² See Russell (1911, 118).

³ Thanks to Sam Lebens for making me aware of this consequence.

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Russell (1911, 1912) tentatively denied that we lack acquaintance with the subject.⁴ Yes, Russell agrees in part with Hume that: it is hard to discover any state of mind in which I am aware of myself alone, as opposed to a complex of which I am a constituent. (Russell 1911, 110)

But he does not infer like Hume that we are only acquainted with such complexes. Quite the opposite: because we are acquainted with complexes of which we are constituents we have reason to believe that we are acquainted with ourselves. Let’s clarify the reasoning that is supposed to support this conclusion. When you are aware of or acquainted with hearing a sound, you are aware of a complex that contains the acquaintance relation holding between different things: We are acquainted with acquaintance, and we know that it is a relation. Also we are acquainted with a complex in which we perceive that acquaintance is the relating relation. Hence we know that this complex must have a constituent which is that which is acquainted, i.e. must have a subject-term as well as an object-term. (Russell 1911, 110)

Let’s go through Russell’s assumptions: 1. 2.

We are acquainted with acquaintance and know that it is a dyadic relation. We have acquaintance with a complex in which acquaintance is the relating relation.

From 1. and 2. Russell wants to conclude: 3.

The complex has one term which is that which is acquainted and one term which is the object of acquaintance.

However, 1. and 2. don’t suffice to arrive at Russell’s 3. We also need: 1a. We know that acquaintance is an asymmetric dyadic relation.⁵

If we add 1a, Russell can infer 3. So we know that there is something that is acquainted with an object in acquaintance complexes. But this knowledge is not sufficient to refer to the subject term of a particular acquaintance complex. We cannot define the subject part of an acquaintance complex I am aware of as: ⁴ See Bostock (2012, chapter 10.1) and Wishon (2018, section 5) for an overview of Russell’s views on the topic. ⁵ Thanks to Nils Kürbis for suggesting the addition of 1a.

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(Russell 1911, 110)

The obvious circularity makes this not a ‘happy effort’ (Russell 1911, 110). It is not easy to escape the definitional circle: different people are (a) acquainted with different things and (b) acquainted with their acquaintances with these things. The concept [the subject-term in an acquaintance relation] is empty because, if there is a subject at all, it fails to be unique; adding [the subject-term in an acquaintance relation with which I am acquainted] makes it unique, but also circular. In 1911 Russell is happy to treat ‘I’ as a proper name of the subject without providing any further assurance that we have acquaintance with it (Russell 1911, 110). The subject each of us is acquainted with seems to be a person, that is, things that have mental and physical properties and persist over time. For example, Russell (1912, 30) argues that Otto von Bismarck is acquainted with himself, that is, the person that goes by this name.⁶ However: It does not seem necessary to suppose that we are acquainted with a more or less permanent person, the same today as yesterday, but it does seem as though we must be acquainted with that thing, whatever its nature, which sees the sun and has acquaintance with sense-data. Thus, in some sense it would seem we must be acquainted with our Selves as opposed to our particular experiences. (Russell 1912, 28)

It is not necessary, says Russell, to suppose that the subjects we are acquainted with are persons. Why not? Is there not awareness of temporally extended perceptions—tracking the movement of an object—that at least prima facie requires us to think of the subject of experience as temporally extended? In 1913 he (Russell 1913a, 35) expands on this point by arguing that we have no evidence that the subject persists over time because we have no evidence that the subject of one experience is the same as the subject of another. This argument overlooks the possibility that an experience may be temporally extended. There are also echoes of Ward’s metaphysical neutral subject here. We don’t know or need to know the nature of the thing we are acquainted with when we are acquainted with our self. In 1913 Russell connected the Hume/Lichtenberg problem for his view of experience as a relation between a subject and a sense-datum to Neutral Monism:

⁶ Duncan (2014) defends the view that there is acquaintance with persons. His argument uses the idea that if one cannot doubt that x exists, one is acquainted with x. I doubt that the person that I am passes the test. However, a momentary phase of a person might have better chances of passing.

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The strongest objection which can be urged against the above analysis of experience into a dual relation of subject and object is derived from the elusiveness of the subject in introspection. We can easily become aware of our own experiences, but we seem never to become aware of the subject itself. This argument tends of course to support neutral monism. It is a serious argument, and deserves serious consideration. (Russell 1913a, 36)

Now Russell endorses like Hume before him not only: We are never aware of the self alone.

But also: We are never aware of the self at all. We are only aware of experiences, not subjects of experiences, that is, subjects that stand in the acquaintance relation. So how can one take the experience to be a relation between a subject and an object? Russell (1913a, 36–7) answered: Yes, we are not aware of a subject in introspective thought. Even if ‘a rare person’ by ‘great exertion’ managed an occasional ‘glimpse’ of a subject, this would not enable her to use ‘I’ reliably over time to refer to it. While we have no acquaintance with the subject, we can and do know it by description. One knows an object a by description if, and only if, one knows a truth that can be stated by means of definite description. If one knows that the F, for instance, the smallest prime, exists (that there is one and only one F) and in fact a is the F, one knows a by description. One can know an object by description without being able to demonstratively refer to it in thought. All it takes is to know a proposition of the kind described that is made true by the object. Hence, we can take an experience to be a relation between a subject and an object and reject the non-relational construal of experience offered by Neutral Monists. The descriptive view holds that partial knowledge of the relation of acquaintance suffices to distinguish between the mental and the physical. The mental in the most fundamental sense is, as Moore (1903a) had argued (see Chapter 9), exhausted by acts of consciousness and acts implied by these. Such acts are relations that hold between a subject and an object. Nothing in this account seems to require that we are acquainted with both relata of the acquaintance relation. Experience is a relation between a subject and an object; its relata are both known, but one of them only descriptively. So far the outline of Russell’s 1913 response to the Neutral Monists. In order to fill it out, he needs to provide a definite description that describes a subject uniquely. Which definite description will do the job? In 1913 Russell offered a fix for the circularity problem for the descriptive account.⁷ We need to add to 1.–3. a further thesis about attention. We have ⁷ Madden (2015) is a very detailed analysis of Russell’s descriptive view of the first-person pronoun.

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already seen in Chapter 2 that attention played a foundational role in Lotze’s philosophy of mind and was frequently discussed in contributions to Mind in the 1880s. Lotze takes attention to be an activity that, if applied to contents of consciousness, orders them and thereby creates new relations between them. Therefore our consciousness of the world is not a mere mirror: Not merely like a mirror does consciousness render back the shape of the external; bringing single parts together into smaller wholes, and shutting them off by boundary lines from their environment, it introduces lines that are not in the picture as given, but start from the assumption of an unequal internal coherence that sometimes binds together the comparatively remote more closely than the adjacent. (Lotze 1856 [1864], 231–2 [252])

Attending to a spatially distant object makes it in an important sense near and immediate. Attention endows objects with new properties that seem to be independent of their physical properties. Russell’s (1913a, 40f) remarks about attention seem indebted to Lotze’s description of attention as a creative power of the mind. Consider an example for illustration. Imagine you face three red balls that look exactly alike. The balls constantly move around. Because of this you cannot reliably distinguish them by their spatio-temporal position. Yet, you can focus on one of them and make it the object of your thought. One of the three balls becomes ‘intimate and near and immediate’ (Russell 1913a, 40) to you at the time although it shares all its qualitative properties with the other balls. This leads to Russell asking: In a world where there were no specifically mental facts, is it not plain that there would be a complete impartiality, an evenly diffused light, not the central illumination fading away into outer darkness, which is characteristic of objects in relation to a mind? (Russell 1913a, 40)

If you answer YES, you take ‘the spotlight’ of attention to be what sets a world with mental facts apart from a world without such facts. A world with mental facts is one in which there are distinctions between qualitative duplicates that are not grounded in their qualitative properties. These distinctions are due to the attention of thinkers. A non-mental world lacks such distinctions. While suggestive, I will not follow Russell’s line of thought here.⁸ Let’s assume with Russell that a human being’s attention ‘illuminates’ at any time only one object x: 4. At any time there is at most one object to which a subject attends.

⁸ Russell’s use of the notion attention is an under-researched topic. An exception is Amijee (2013).

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4. is a simplification. Russell (1913a, 39) concedes that there may be a small number of objects which are attended to at the same time. In virtue of the fact that x is attended to x can be named by ‘this’ when one attends to it. If there are some objects that are attended to, they could be named by ‘these’. Now Russell goes on to use ‘this’ to give a non-circular definition of ‘I’ by employing both the notion of a subject and the fact that there is an object of attention: I = df. the subject attending to this. (Russell 1913a, 40)

Hence, the descriptive account can be fixed. Because we are not acquainted with the subject, we cannot name it; but because we are acquainted with acquaintance and can attend to particulars distinct from the subject, we can describe it uniquely.

3. Russell 1913: Making the Subject Intelligible and the Unity of Experience Has Russell really answered the Neutral Monists and philosophers like Hume? Bostock (2012, 72) raises the right question here. We may be acquainted with instances of acquaintance. But: What ground does one have for supposing that acquaintance is a two-term relation, if one of its two terms is never experienced?

The problem is not so much that acquaintance is supposed to be a two-term relation. For it might be a relation between an object and something distinct from a subject. The problem is to find a reason for holding that acquaintance is a dyadic relation between an object and a subject—the object is presented to the subject— while conceding that the subject is never experienced. This objection is pressing and I read Russell as proposing an ingenious response.⁹ In order to understand it we need first the notion of experiencing together. Russell (1913a, 8) observed that there is a unity in his experience: most of the time we experience several things together. Consider an example: You see and hear an explosion. You see a bright yellow flash and hear a loud boom together.¹⁰ You are aware of them together and this awareness puts you in a

⁹ But not in the way Wishon (2018, 279) supposes: ‘Russell’s response at the time would be that subjects can be introspectively acquainted with their psychological acts, and thereby be in a position to know their relational character, even if they lack self-acquaintance.’ This seems to me merely to reformulate the problem. ¹⁰ I borrow the example from Tye (2007, 289).

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position to distinguish and attend to either or both if you wanted to do so. The sound and the yellow flash are unified in your present experience.¹¹ Russell goes on to use an example of experiencing together to motivate the assumption that there is a subject of experience distinct from the experiencing of things together: When two objects O and O’ are given as parts of one experience, we perceive the fact ‘something is acquainted with both O and O’.’ Thus two instances of acquaintance can be given as having a common subject, even when the subject is not given. It is in this way, I think, that ‘I’ comes to be popularly intelligible. (Russell 1913a, 37)

Now, Russell’s argument is rather condensed. Let us consider an example to explain the argument. Imagine that you experience a sound and a colour together. He claims that this awareness of experiencing different things together is an awareness of two different ‘instances of acquaintance’: you are acquainted with the complex of subject S being acquainted with a sound and the complex of S being acquainted with a colour. Furthermore you are supposed to be acquainted with the fact that one and the same thing x is acquainted both with the sound and with the colour, without being acquainted with x. Knowledge of this fact is supposed to give you a reason to believe in a subject distinct from the experience and the sense-datum, although the subject itself is not an object of acquaintance. The ‘common subject’ is involved in different experiences with different objects. So it can’t be identical with either. A way to get at the plausible core of Russell’s argument is to see him as building on an intuition about experiencing things together that Brentano formulated before him:¹² We do compare colors which we see with sounds which we hear; indeed, this happens every time we recognize that they are different phenomena. How would this presentation of their difference be possible if the presentations of color and sound belonged to different things? (PES, 123 [I, 226])

In short: an experience of colour and sound together requires one and the same thing being conscious of colour and sound. This thing cannot be composed of components that are ontologically prior to it. To see this, assume that the object ¹¹ I think it is very likely that Russell’s ‘experiencing things together’ is inspired by James’s (1895, 106) ‘knowing things together’. On Russell’s ‘experiencing things together’ see also Wishon (2018, 262–3). See also Parfit (1984, 250–1) on an extension of this thought to memory. You have a single memory that is of several experiences together: you remember seeing as well as hearing the explosion. ¹² Farrell Smith (1988, 192–3) compares Brentano’s remarks on the unity of consciousness and Russell’s on the unity of experience and speculates about a possible influence of Brentano on Russell.

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under consideration has an auditory and a visual system. Under this assumption, one system could be aware of the sound and the other aware of the colour so that the colour and sound were not experienced together. Hence, this thing, the common subject, cannot be composed of different components. Some things are experienced together at a time only if they are both presented to the same subject at the same time. So there must be a common subject even if we are not acquainted with it. We can represent the intuition under consideration as a primitively compelling inference: Colour and sound are experienced together at time t. Hence: There is one thing x such that x is conscious of colour and x is conscious of sound at t.

Because this is an inference, we cannot say with Russell that we perceive the fact that there is one thing x such that x is conscious of colour and x is conscious of sound at t. But Russell only wants to make ‘I’ popularly intelligible, that is, show how users of the English first-person could use it to refer to a subject although they are not acquainted with the subject. If we are able to experience our experiencing some things together, we will find the inference to the existence of a common subject compelling and thereby be in a position to refer to it as the thing which experiences these things and attends to this one. ‘I’ in the mouth of a speaker of English is a shorthand for such a description. So far, so good. I think the inference is indeed primitively compelling. There is one thing to which both colour and sound are given. But we have no reason yet to think that this thing is distinct from an act of consciousness. For why should my awareness of experiencing things together not be awareness of one instance of acquaintance that has several objects instead of different instances of awareness with a common relatum? If there is no reason to prefer the second option, there is no need to think that there is a common subject. We can give this more substance by considering a position that endorses the first option. Stumpf wrote: One can present qualities, for instance, colours and sounds, of different senses together because one can recognize their difference. If each of them were presented in a distinct act of presentation, we could neither talk of difference nor sameness. (Stumpf 1873, 107)

Stumpf wants us to draw the conclusion that colour and sound are not presented in distinct acts, but in the same act of presentation. How can one act of presentation be directed on different objects? Take a leaf here from contemporary discussions of plurals. The plural demonstrative ‘these’ can refer to several things,

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although it does not contain several parts that refer to one object each. Why should not the same go for mental reference? Stumpf takes the unity of consciousness to consist in one presentation having several objects at the same time. This response to Russell assumes that acquaintance is a polyadic relation: experience of A and B together is acquaintance with A and B. Russell’s attempt to make ‘I’ popularly intelligible relies on the premise that acquaintance is a dyadic relation. This premise is not explicitly introduced in his papers on Neutral Monism, but he endorsed it in a paper also published in 1913: There seem to be two main cognitive relations with which a theory of knowledge has to deal namely presentation (which is the same as what I call acquaintance), and judgment. These I regard as radically distinguished by the fact that presentation (or acquaintance) is a two-term relation of a subject, or better an act, to a single (simple or complex) object, while judgment is a multiple relation of a subject or act to the several objects concerned in the judgement. [ . . . ] The difference, in this respect, between judgment and presentation is due to the fact that judgment is a multiple relation, not a two-term relation. (Russell 1913b, 76)

In fact we must strengthen the premise to rule out that experiencing together is construed as acquaintance with a complex of sense-data that ‘belong’ to different sense modalities. Plausibly, the additional assumption is that sense-data belonging to different sensory modalities don’t combine into complexes of sense-data. If acquaintance is a two-place relation, the primitively compelling inference takes us from the polyadic experiencing together to several instances of the dyadic acquaintance relation: Colour and sound are experienced together at time t. Hence: There is one thing x such that x is acquainted with a colour at t & x is acquainted with a sound at t.

Russell can rely on the inference as a rule to explain away the polyadic experienced together in terms of the dyadic is acquainted with. Now the crucial premise of Russell’s argument that acquaintance is dyadic is controversial. Why should acquaintance be only a two- and not, say, a three- or fourplace relation? If acquaintance can be a multigrade relation, there is no need to introduce a subject as something contained in several ‘instances’ of acquaintance. I cannot argue the case here in detail, but I think it is fair to say that the burden of proof lies with Russell.¹³ If the subject has not been made ‘popularly intelligible’,

¹³ I argue that acquaintance is a polyadic relation in Textor 2021b.

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the unbiased thinker can introduce a definite description like ‘the thing which experiences these particulars together’. However, the denotation of the definite description will be either a mental act—the presentation that presents these particulars—or the complex of mental acts to which mental acts belongs. Observations about experiencing things together alone do not show that there is a subject distinct from the mental act.

4. Russell 1918: Persistent Persons and Momentary Subjects In 1913 Russell mounted an ingenious defence of the subject. As we have seen, it suffers from a serious flaw. In 1918 Russell no longer defends the subject, but seeks to eliminate it from the scientific world-view. His starting point is that in our common-sense psychology the subject or ego plays no role: What is it that makes you say when you meet your friend Jones, ‘Why, this is Jones’? It is clearly not the persistence of a metaphysical entity inside Jones somewhere, because even if there be such an entity, it certainly is not what you see when you see Jones coming along the street; it certainly is something that you are not acquainted with, not an empirical datum. Therefore plainly there is something in the empirical appearances which he presents to you, something in their relations one to another, which enables you to collect all these together and say, ‘These are what I call the appearances of one person’, and that something that makes you collect them together is not the persistence of a metaphysical subject, because that, whether there be such a persistent subject or not, is certainly not a datum, and that which makes you say ‘Why, it is Jones’ is a datum. (Russell 1918c, 118)

Russell argues that the ego is not required to explain our practice of identifying and re-identifying persons. Compare: You ask someone: ‘When is the word A a translation of the word B?’ and she answers: ‘Easy, A is a translation of B if, and only if, A and B have the same meaning.’ This answer is easy, but empty. It does not give you independent criteria that enable you to decide whether A translates B or not. Answering ‘When is Jim Jones the same person as that man?’ by saying ‘Jim Jones is the same person as that person if, and only if, they have (are) the same ego’ is similarly empty. We can reliably distinguish between different persons and re-identify one person at different times. We do this on the basis of appearances, perceived complexes of sense-data. There must be a relation between sense-data that collects them into the appearances of one person. Russell then goes further to argue that the collection of appearances that we think of as belonging to one person is this person. If such sets of

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appearance prove their worth in psychological research, the ego ‘cannot be a thing that comes into science in any way’.¹⁴ Please note that the conclusion that the ego (subject) has no place in science is weaker than saying that there is no such thing.¹⁵ While the ego has no place in science, you can have faith in it. The thesis that the subject is not a posit of science has bite. For instance, Russell’s teacher Ward took the existence of the subject to be an inexpungeable assumption of psychology, that is, psychology deals with those facts that imply a subject (see section 7.1) . If there is no such subject, this conception of psychology needs to be revised. If the subject is not an acceptable posit of science, the distinction between facts that involve (mental facts) and those that do not involve the subject (physical facts) is not a distinction that should be preserved in science. This move prepares the ground for Neutral Monism. If one conceives of psychology as the study of states of mind that include a subject and an object, Russell’s argument for the conclusion that the subject has no place in science makes Neutral Monism plausible.¹⁶ Now, Russell’s line of argument seems to miss its target. For Ward and Russell in 1912/13 did not claim that there was a persistent subject. Quite the opposite: the subject was momentary. Successive presentations might all have a subject, but whether they have the same subject or not is not verifiable, but also not theoretically important. Persisting people are not the concern of the theory of acquaintance and they are not involved in distinguishing mental from non-mental facts. Diaphaneity is a threat to the momentary subject, concerns about personal identity are irrelevant. But even if we have reasons to reject the momentary subject, after Chapter 5 it should be clear that this rejection does not take us to Neutral Monism. For Brentano’s Psychologie has no place for a subject or ego to which something is given (see section 5.4). There are only mental acts directed on (external) objects and, in addition, on themselves en parergo. No subject is needed for consciousness because mental acts self-represent.¹⁷ There is a constructed ‘subject’ as Russell requires: all mental acts that are co-conscious form a unity of consciousness. Hence, the distinction between sensation and its object as a paradigm case of the mental/physical distinction is independent of the existence of a subject of experience. Russell gives a good argument against the subject, but one can reject the subject without thereby becoming a Neutral Monist.

¹⁴ See Russell (1918c, 120). ¹⁵ See Wishon (2018, 273) for discussion. ¹⁶ Russell (1913a) not only tried to make the subject acceptable, but also presented two arguments against Neutral Monism. In his lectures published as Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918c) he finds some of his arguments wanting, but he still upholds the arguments based on the nature of attention (see Russell 1918c, 54). See Pincock (2018) for a plausible reconstruction of Russell’s conversion to Neutral Monism. See also Tully (1993). ¹⁷ See Binet (1907, 98–106) for a similar position.

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In order to refute Brentano’s position, one must show that the distinction between a mental act and what it is directed on (or seems to be directed on) is not given in consciousness. This takes us back to the diaphaneity objection first voiced by Lange in his ‘longer footnote’ and Brentano’s distinction between the primary and secondary object of a mental act (see section 5.6). This topic plays out in Moore’s arguments against idealism and James’s response to Moore in which James declared consciousness not to exist. In the next chapter I will turn to this topic and see whether Moore and Russell add something to Brentano’s and Lange’s thoughts on the matter.

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9 Act/Content/Object, Act/Object, or Just Object? The terms ‘Akt’, ‘Inhalt’, and ‘Gegenstand’ are the keywords of a certain theory of knowledge which constitutes, in my opinion, the most important recent development of philosophical thought in Germany. Among its leading representatives I may refer to Meinong, Husserl and Lipps, Külpe and Messer. George Frederick Stout (1911, 353)

1. Introduction: Four Positions The act/content/object distinction is a pillar of Brentanian psychology. Russell used it to map out four important positions in the philosophy of mind of his time: Many analytic psychologists—Meinong, for example—distinguish three elements in a presentation, namely, the act (or subject), the content, and the object. Realists such as Dr. Moore and myself have been in the habit of rejecting the content, while retaining the act and the object. American realists, on the other hand, have rejected both the act and the content, and have kept only the object; while idealists, in effect if not in words have rejected the object and kept the content. (Russell 1919, 25)

It is worth noting that Russell here and in other writings goes back and forth between act and subject. In 1919 both act and subject are for the same reasons deemed to be convenient fictions. Let’s go through the positions outlined by Russell to get a sense of what is at issue here. 1. Brentano’s followers, Analytic Psychologists in Russell’s terminology, accepted the tripartite distinction between act, content, and object for all mental phenomena. Take expecting a thunderstorm as a representative example. The expectation is a mental act with causal powers. The expectation may or may not be met. In case it is met, it has an object: a particular thunderstorm. Since the expectation can fail to be met, the mental act is ontologically independent of its object. It is, however,

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essential to the mental act that it may or may not be met in a particular way. There is an intrinsic feature of the mental act in virtue of which it is directed on something: the act content. This content contributes to the individuation of the mental act. If mental act M₁ differs in content from mental act M₂, M₁ is numerically distinct from M₂. Stout and George Dawes Hicks are the British champions of the tripartite distinction. In her obituary of Dawes Hicks, Susan Stebbing highlighted that he: insisted upon a threefold distinction between the activity of apprehension, the content apprehended, and the apprehended object. He strove again and again to make clear that by ‘the content apprehended’ we were not to suppose he meant any tertium quid standing between the mind and its object. (Stebbing 1914, 333)

I will come back to Dawes Hicks later. 2. Cambridge Realists such as Moore and Russell until 1918 reject the distinction between content and object, but argue that the distinction between act and object can be discovered in introspection. Moore and Russell argued that contents are redundant and mental acts are external relations between a subject and an object. Brentano’s tripartite act/content/object distinction is therefore simplified and reconceived as a relation between the Wardian subject and an object. The new name for this relation is ‘acquaintance’ and it is located in the theory of knowledge. Both Analytic Psychologists and Moore are Dualists. They hold that one can discover introspectively the distinction between the mental and physical. Dualists disagree among themselves about the metaphysics of the distinction: does the existence of the distinction imply that there is an object of which one is conscious? (Moore says YES.) Or does the existence of the distinction only imply that there is a mental act on the one hand and a content of the act on the other such that the content makes it appear that the act has an object? (Brentano says YES.) The minimal Dualist view is that it is an intrinsic feature of some phenomena that in introspection one can distinguish between a mental activity and what it seems to be directed on. Physical phenomena don’t seem to be directed. Because the mental has such an inner duplicity it should be distinguished from the physical. 3. Neutral Monists such as Mach and Riehl followed later by American Realists such as James (and Russell himself after 1918) reject the distinction between act and object as a fundamental distinction given in consciousness. They propose a ‘non-relational conception of experience’. This goes hand in hand with the Neutral Monist view that the distinction between the mental and the physical is one of attending to different relations that hold between neutral elements (see section 5.7).

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4. British Idealists agree with Neutral Monists that experience is non-relational. But whereas Neutral Monists take experience to be neither mental nor physical, Idealists take it to be mental. In this chapter I will assess Russell’s (up to 1918) and Moore’s arguments for their Dualism. They propose to reduce the act/content/object distinction to a dual act/object distinction, defend this dual distinction against the diaphaneity objection, and take the dual distinction to ground a fundamental distinction between the mental and the physical. In section 9.3 I will assess whether Moore and Russell are right in their criticism of the act/content/object distinction. Moore’s ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ reintroduced the diaphaneity objection (see sections 5.6 and 5.7). section 9.4 discusses whether the diaphaneity objection gives one a good reason to endorse Neutral Monism. I will start by outlining how Moore introduced the act/object distinction in his argument against idealism. This will sharpen our understanding of the distinction as well as our understanding of the fundamental role of intentionality in our conception of the mental.

2. Background: Idealism and Intentionality 2.1 ‘Getting Outside the Circle of Our Own Ideas’ Moore’s view of the act/object distinction plays the central role in his argument against (British) idealism in his seminal paper ‘The Refutation of idealism’. Now, there are many different forms of idealism, for example, Kant’s transcendental idealism or Lotze’s theistic idealism. What is distinctive of the idealism Moore attacked? In the words of one British Idealist, A.E. Taylor, idealism is ‘the creed that all reality is mental’ (Taylor 1903, 55). Already from this initial characterization it is clear that the notion of the mental will be important in assessing Moore’s and Russell’s engagement with idealism. Moore made clear that ‘The Refutation of idealism’ is a misleading title for his paper: Upon the important question whether Reality is or is not spiritual my argument will not have the remotest bearing. (Moore 1903a, 435)

Moore does not want to show that reality is not spiritual; he only wants to undermine arguments for the conclusion that reality is spiritual. To do so he argues (i) that all arguments for the conclusion that reality is spiritual are based on the premise that esse is percipi and (ii) that this premise is false. Moore’s (i) strikes me as false. For example, Clifford (1878, 64) argues that reality is sentient on the basis of assumptions about vagueness and the doctrine of evolution. But I am not

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interested to assess whether Moore manages to undermine every argument for idealism, but in what we can learn from his reasoning about the concept of the mental. Let us therefore look at Moore’s argument in more detail now. Moore’s target is the proposition that esse is percipi. What is the precise meaning of this slogan? Moore (1903a, 438), following Taylor, renders the slogan as follows: EP:

x is real if, and only if, x is an inseparable aspect of an experience.

According to EP, x can only be real, if there is an experience of which x is an inseparable part. Hence, reality is exhausted by experiences and aspects of experiences. Why do Idealists assume EP? Because, says Moore, they fail to see that an experience and what is experienced are distinct. More about this in section 9.3.1. Moore is right to stress that refuting EP does not refute idealism. Even if you can distinguish in an experience the experiencing and the experienced and the latter is separable from the former, the experienced might itself be mental. For example, it might be an idea in another mind. Refuting arguments for idealism, is not refuting idealism. Moore attacks EP by first analysing sensation into two factors. If you have a sensation of blue, you can, Moore tells us, distinguish in it on the one hand your awareness of something and on the other hand what this awareness is of: blue. Awareness-of and what one is aware of are distinct. Awareness-of is a reoccurring relation: it is a factor in my sensation of blue, my sensation of red, etc. In Brentanian terms: Moore distinguishes between act and object in introspective awareness. Now he proceeds by bringing his first-person knowledge of awareness-of to bear. Negatively, he claims that the awareness-of relation is distinct from the substance/property or part/organic whole relation.¹ Positively, Moore assumes that we have knowledge of important properties of the awareness-of relation. He lists two insights about awareness-of which we can arrive at by comparing and considering cases of it: If [ . . . ] we clearly recognise the nature of that peculiar relation which I have called ‘awareness of anything’; if we see that this is involved equally in the analysis of every experience—from the merest sensation to the most developed perception or reflexion, and that this is in fact the only essential element in an experience—the only thing that is both common and peculiar to all

¹ See Moore (1903a, 449). Baldwin (1990, 17–18) focuses on the negative parts of Moore’s argument and takes Moore to infer the view that we are directly aware of material objects from the negative part. Because blue is not a property or dependent part of the sensation, we can be aware of material objects. In contrast, I see the positive part of Moore’s argument as independent of the negative part.

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experiences—the only thing which gives us reason to call any fact mental; if, further, we recognise that this awareness is and must be in all cases of such a nature that its object, when we are aware of it, is precisely what it would be, if we were not aware: then it becomes plain that the existence of a table in space is related to my experience of it in precisely the same way as the existence of my own experience is related to my experience of that. Of both we are merely aware: if we are aware that the one exists, we are aware in precisely the same sense that the other exists; and, if it is true that my experience can exist, even when I do not happen to be aware of its existence, we have exactly the same reason for supposing that the table can do so also.

(Moore 1903a, 452–3; my emphasis in boldface) The two propositions about awareness-of that we can know by attending to a range of cases of awareness-of are: (Moore1) A fact is mental if, and only if, it consists in the awareness-of relation relating a subject and an object. (Moore2) The nature of the awareness-of relation is such that if it relates a subject to an object both can exist independently of the obtaining of the relation.

From (Moore1) and (Moore2) one can infer: Any mental fact is a relation to an object that can exist independently of it.

This conclusion is incompatible with IP. Experiences are mental facts. Hence, they are relations to objects that can exist independently of them. (Moore1) is formulated in terms of mental facts, yet Moore did not explicitly introduce the notion of a fact. I take a fact simply to be the obtaining of a relation between some things. Mental facts are those facts that are constituted by the holding of the awareness-relation between two or more things. (Moore2) is crucial for the refutation of EP. It amounts to saying that the object of an experience is separable from it: the object of an experience does not depend on it for its existence. How do we recognize that this is so? By coming to know part of the nature of the awareness-of relation. Compare: if you know what kind of relation the is-to-the-left-of relation is, you know that the things that stand in this relation do not depend for their existence on the obtaining of the relation between them. Similarly, if you know what kind of relation the awareness-of relation is, you know that the things that stand in this relation can exist whether the relation holds between them or not. How do you know this? If you can distinguish between awareness-of and what it is awareness-of, you are able to identify the relation in a number of experiences. In some of these

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experiences, the awareness-of relation will hold between a subject and independent real things like tables. If in such a case the awareness-of relation does not require its relata to depend on its obtaining, why should it require this in the case of the sensation of blue? The awareness which I have maintained to be included in sensation is the very same unique fact which constitutes every kind of knowledge: ‘blue’ is as much an object, and as little a mere content, of my experience, when I experience it, as the most exalted and independent real thing of which I am ever aware. There is, therefore, no question of how we are to ‘get outside the circle of our own ideas and sensations’. Merely to have a sensation is already to be outside that circle. (Moore 1903a, 451)

The premise that our awareness of a table in space and our awareness of our awareness of a table in space contain exactly the same relation of awareness will hardly be accepted by an Idealist.² But in this chapter I am not interested to assess the force of Moore’s argument against EP, but in what his argument tells us about intentionality. Hence, I will focus on (Moore1) and come back to it in section 9.2.3 after I have had a brief look at a similar, but bolder argument in Russell.

2.2 Russell’s ‘Exceedingly Simple Argument’ against idealism While Moore had the modest aim to show that a central premise in arguments for idealism is false, Russell was more ambitious. He indeed argued that idealism is false. His ‘exceedingly simple’ argument is an argument against idealism as well as an argument for Brentano’s view of the mental: The kind of argument which formerly made me accept Brentano’s view [that all and only those phenomena are mental that intentionally contain an object] in this case was exceedingly simple. When I see a patch of colour, it seemed to me that the colour is not psychical, but physical, while my seeing is not physical, but psychical. Hence, I concluded that the colour is something other than my seeing of the colour. This argument, to me historically, was directed against idealism: the emphatic part of it was the assertion that the colour is physical, not psychical. (Russell 1921, 142–3)

In 1921 Russell no longer endorsed the argument. More about this later. Let us first get clear about the argument. For Russell’s argument is not ‘exceedingly

² See, for instance, Baldwin (1990, 19).

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simple’, but rather enthymematic. Let’s first present the argument as an argument for Brentano’s mark of the mental. It seems to Russell that his seeing a patch of blue is psychical, but not physical, whereas the patch of blue seen is physical, but not psychical. What explains this intuitive judgement? Brentano’s mark of the mental that something is mental if, and only if, it is directed on something. The seeing seems introspectively directed on something, the patch of colour doesn’t. Hence, our intuitive judgement that the seeing of the patch of colour is, whereas the patch of colour isn’t, mental can be explained by appeal to Brentano’s mark. Brentano’s mark of the mental is supported by this explanation. Now we also have an argument against idealism. When I see a patch of blue, the patch of blue is not mental. Hence, there is at least one non-mental thing. Idealism is false and Dualism true.

2.3 The Fundamental Distinction between Mind and Matter The previous two sections have shown how closely intertwined Moore’s and Russell’s criticism of idealism and Brentano’s theory of intentionality is. I will now focus on what we can learn from these criticisms about intentionality and the mental/physical distinction. Let’s go back to (Moore1). It gives us the mark of the mental. To repeat: [Awareness of blue] has to blue the simple and unique relation the existence of which alone justifies us in distinguishing knowledge of a thing from the thing known, and indeed in distinguishing mind from matter. (Moore 1903a, 451)

There is a (conceptually) simple and unique relation that holds between a subject and an object—awareness-of—and only the obtaining of this relation distinguishes ‘mind from matter’. (Moore1) formulates this in terms of mental facts. (Moore1) is a reformulation of Brentano’s mark of the mental. Brentano himself sometimes framed his mark of the mental in terms of consciousness-of: The common characteristic of everything mental consists in what one often has called with an unfortunately very misinterpretative expression consciousness, that is, by a subjectivistic comportment [subjektivistisches Verhalten], in an, as one designated it, intentional relation to something, that may perhaps not be real, but is nonetheless inwardly given as an object. (OKRW, 8–9 [16]; my translation)

But Brentano proposed further marks possession of which gives us a reason to call something ‘mental’, such as:

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x is mental if, and only if, x is given in consciousness.

For Brentano (PES, 75 [I, 137]), intentionality is the most distinctive mark of the mental, but not the only one. Moore goes beyond Brentano by claiming that this directedness is the only reason why we call some events and processes ‘mental’. Is this a plausible claim? In Moore (1910a) he went on to provide arguments for the view about intentionality he relied on in his argument against idealism. First, we distinguish between the mental and the non-mental because we notice the distinction between directed and undirected phenomena: This sense in which to be a mental entity is to be an act of consciousness is, I think, the most fundamental sense of the word ‘mental’: it is the one from which all others are derived. Had we not noticed the difference between acts of consciousness and entities which either are not or do not seem to be such, no one would ever have thought of dividing entities into mental or non-mental, or of speaking of ‘mind’ at all. (Moore 1910a, 40)

Why do we distinguish between the mental and the non-mental in the first place? Because we notice that there are directed and undirected things and we can notice this by paying attention to our own mental life. Compare this to the Neutral Monist’s view of the genesis and nature of the distinction between the mental and physical. The distinction between the mental and the physical is the result of abstraction and conceptualization: one takes an interest in different dependencies of one element on others and describes it in terms of these dependencies (see section 4.2). In addition we have instinctive dispositions to make inferences by analogy (see section 5.4). We understand the behaviour of some other bodies by analogy with ourselves. These lead us to distinguish between facts that are non-inferentially known only by some—the private or mental—and facts that can be inferentially known by all—the public or physical. According to Moore, neither concept formation nor exercise of inferential dispositions is required to hit upon the distinction between the mental and the physical. We need only to attend to a sensation to come up with the distinction between (a) awareness-of and (b) what we are aware of. Second, Moore backtracks from the claim that being intentional is the only reason to call something ‘mental’. He (Moore 1910a, 40–5) proposes now that ‘mental’ is polysemous: ‘mental’ and related words have a number of interrelated meanings. But to learn these further meanings we need in the first to pay attention to our mental acts. The distinction between the mental and the non-mental that Brentano uncovered is therefore conceptually fundamental. The claim that directedness is conceptually basic needs defence. I can’t belabour this point here in detail, but let us consider two examples that illustrate Moore’s view.

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First, we say that people think about something. Tony might think about Rome, imagine a round square, etc. Are people therefore things that are directed on something? No, Moore (1910b, 400) proposes that people think about something in virtue of ‘performing’ mental acts that are directed on to something. Mental acts are the primary bearer of intentionality and therefore in the primary sense ‘mental’. Second, Moore (1910a, 43–5) considers a mark of the mental many will find plausible: x is mental if, and only if, x can be directly known only by one person.

Now only I can know the position of my limbs directly by proprioception. Everyone else needs to make inferences from observations about my posture. Is the position of my limbs then a mental entity? Moore (1910a, 44) sees a further problem with this definition of ‘mental’. Our knowledge of thoughts, feelings, and so on gives us reason to think that they are in fact only known to one person directly, but not that it is impossible that they are known to other persons directly. Moore thinks that experiments about telepathy in fact give us evidence that distinct people may have direct knowledge of their mental events and processes. In any case, the discussion of such proposed definitions of the mental draws on an independent and less controversial mark of the mental. Intentionality is this mark. This is, I submit, a good way to fill out the idea that intentionality is the ‘most fundamental’ mark of the mental. The intentionality mark anchors our investigations into the nature of the mental.

3. Against the Content/Object Distinction 3.1 Is Intentionality an Internal Relation? Moore and Russell (up to 1918) agree with Brentano that intentionality is the mark of the mental. But they take the content/object distinction as deeply problematic. For example, Russell fears that accepting anything that can serve as an intermediary between a thinker and the object they think about can lead to a veil of perception and, hence, a form of scepticism.³ Here I will focus on the arguments against contents in the theory of intentionality. By dispensing with the content/ object distinction, Moore and Russell want to turn mental acts into external relations between a subject and an object.

³ See, for example, Russell to Frege 12.12 (Russell 1904a, 169 [251]).

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What is the problem with the content/object distinction in the theory of intentionality? Russell has a specific and a general complaint: At first sight, it seems obvious that my mind is in different ‘states’ when I am thinking of one thing and when I am thinking of another. But in fact the difference of object supplies all the difference required. There seems to be, in the hypothesis of ‘states’ of mind, an operation (generally unconscious) of the ‘internal’ theory of relations: it is thought that some intrinsic difference in the subject must correspond to the difference in the objects to which it has the relation of presentations. (Russell 1913a, 43)

The specific complaint is that contents are superfluous in the theory of intentionality. The general complaint is that it is objectionable to even unconsciously hold or be guided by the internal view of relations. In the following I will focus on Russell’s and Moore’s attempts to make the specific complaint plausible. But the general complaint certainly motivated Russell in looking for more specific reasons against contents. So let’s start by discussing the general complaint. What is the internal theory of relations? Russell (1907) is a good source for answering this question. According to Russell, the axiom of internal relations is: Every relation is grounded in the (non-relational) nature of the related terms. Let us ignore for ease of exposition that the axiom is supposed to concern the nature of the relata of a relation and consider an example for illustration. If the relation taller-than obtains between Jim and John in that order, the fact that it holds is fully grounded in the non-relational fact that Jim is 180 cm tall and the non-relational fact that John is 170 cm tall. Russell argued that the: axiom of internal relations is equivalent to the assumption of ontological monism and to the denial that there are any relations. (Russell 1907, 39)

So if one wants to be an ontological pluralist and allow for several objects that are related, one had better reject the axiom of internal relations. Hence, there are relations that are external. This conclusion is independently plausible. If the relation being-to-the-left-of holds between a and b, it does not hold in virtue of non-relational properties of a and b. What is the significance of this finding for the content/object distinction? Brentano and Meinong suggest that the relation that obtains between a successful act and its object is intrinsic. If the relation obtains, it obtains in virtue of the act having an intrinsic feature, a particular content, and the object being a particular way:

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The relational fact that the mental act M is about external object x is grounded in the non-relational fact that M has content C and the non-relational fact that object x has property F.

Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that the relation between a mental act and its external object is indeed an internal relation if there are act contents. Is this a reason to reject the Brentano/Meinong view? No, for the premise that led to ontological monism was not: There are internal relations, but the stronger assumption: Every relation is internal. Hence, one needs further argument to show that the relation between a mental act and its external object cannot be internal. At the same time the idea that this relation is an external relation is novel and needs assessment. So we had better look at the specific arguments to the effect that contents are an idle wheel in the theory of intentionality: the work that contents were supposed to do is actually done by objects, in particular by sense-data and universals.

3.2 Are Contents Superfluous? Moore (1910b, 403–4) articulated two arguments against the content/object distinction. Moore used August Messer’s (1908, 50–3) exposition of the distinction as his target. Messer distinguished between act, content, and object, but he followed Husserl in calling content ‘matter’ (Materie). Every act has a matter, but not all acts have an object. Messer explained this further by means of examples:⁴ By ‘matter’ we understand not simply the intention towards an object, but the particular sense, in which it is meant. As an example of the difference I will refer the reader to our intention when using proper names. If we speak of Napoleon or Berlin, we normally simply intend these objects; we can also intend these objects in a more specific way, that is, with respect to specific marks, for example, Napoleon as the conqueror of the revolution, as great commander, as victor of Jena, Berlin as capital of Prussia, as the largest German city, as city of the intelligentsia etc. (Messer 1908, 50–1) ⁴ Messer’s examples are, in part, taken from Husserl (1913a, I § 12). For the Husserlian background of the discussion between Moore and Messer see Künne (1990).

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The idea that one can ‘simply intend’ an object deserves further discussion. But let us focus here on the content/object distinction. Imagine you judge that the capital of Prussia in 1910 is nice and judge that the largest city in Germany in 1910 is nice. Prima facie, there are two different judgements here, but they are both made true by how things are with Berlin. For Berlin is the largest city in Germany in 1910 and the capital of Prussia in 1910. Brentanians conclude therefore that we have two acts that differ in content or matter, but not object. We need both content and object. Moore’s first argument seeks to undermine this rationale for the content/object distinction. He (Moore 1910b, 404–5) denied that the judgement that the capital of Prussia in 1910 is nice and the judgement that the largest city in Germany in 1910 is nice have the same object. His main premise is that in making the judgements one thinks directly of different complex universals: one of them is composed of the universals Uniqueness, Being a Capital of Prussia, whereas the other is composed of Being a City, Being the Largest, etc. Your judgements are different because they are about these universals: you judge that whatever instantiates the universal under consideration also instantiates Being Nice. You also think about Berlin, the object that instantiates these properties, but not directly. The judgements differ in their direct objects and agree in their indirect object. Hence, we have no need to introduce act content or matter in addition to direct and indirect objects. Why are the acts directly about universals? Imagine you judge that the golden mountain does not exist and you judge that the flying horse does not exist. There is no object that satisfies the denoting phrases ‘the golden mountain’ and ‘the flying horse’. Hence, your judgement cannot be about such an object. Yet, you make a judgement that is about something. According to Moore, your judgements have indeed objects: each is directed on a different complex universal. One thought is directed on the property of Being the Unique Golden Mountain, the other on the property of Being a Unique Flying Horse. In sum: no thought without an object or objects which this thought is directly about. If the existence of a thought is independent of the existence of an object, the thought cannot be directly about the object. Moore’s response to the Brentanians is based on Russell’s (1905) analysis of what is said by a sentence containing a ‘definite description’, that is an expression like ‘the King of France’. Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions is immensely influential and fruitful, but also controversial. Already Husserl’s Logical Investigations (first edition in 1900), an important source of inspiration for Messer, contained a view of definite descriptions that differed in important respects from Russell’s.⁵ Husserl listed expressions formed by means of

⁵ On Husserl on definite descriptions see Mulligan (2018, 17–8).

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concatenating a predicate with the definite or indefinite article as names, while Moore and Russell take them to be quantifiers.⁶ Husserl takes expressions of the forms ‘the F’ and ‘an F’ to be meaningful in isolation: they are vehicles of the nonpropositional mental act of referring (nennen). In many cases this nonpropositional act will be what Husserl called ‘thetic’.⁷ One entertains the mode of presentation expressed by ‘the victor of Austerlitz’ in such a way that one is committed to there being such a thing and then goes on to say something of it. If it turns out that there is no victor of Austerlitz, both the referring and the utterances that are based on it misfire. In this respect Husserl is close to Russell’s critic Strawson (1950). The question whether sentences with definite descriptions are always used to make statements about universals has been controversially discussed for over 100 years.⁸ I will not enter the debate about definite descriptions and the mental acts that are expressed by uttering them or the sentences that contain them. The mere fact that Moore’s argument rests on a decision of such a vexing question shows that it is too controversial to be persuasive. Moore’s second argument concerns perception. One can perceive the same object in different ways. Do we need to posit a difference in content to explain this? No, says Moore: When, for instance, I compare my direct consciousness of a particular blue colour, with my direct consciousness of a particular red colour, or with my direct consciousness of a particular musical note, I am unable to detect by observation that these three Acts have any difference at all except that which consists in the fact that they have different objects. (Moore 1910b, 404)

The only difference detectable by introspection between the acts under consideration, Moore argues, is that they have different objects. Since undetectable differences are not differences at all, and the differences in object suffice to distinguish the acts, we should not posit further differences between the acts. Contents are not needed. Imagine that it seems to you that you see red, but there is no red surface that you see. You suffer from an illusion. Your experience as of red is still directed on something, but there is no external object it is of. Don’t we need content in such cases to distinguish an experience as of green from an experience as of red? Moore (1910b, 402) appeals here to the notion of sense-data. External perception is always awareness of sense-data. But it is not exhausted by the awareness of sense-data: it involves (inferential) knowledge of things that are not sense-data.⁹ Your illusory experience as of red is still awareness of a sense-datum. It therefore ⁶ See Husserl (1913a, 463). ⁷ See Husserl (1913a, 464–5). ⁸ For an overview see Neale (2005). ⁹ See, for example, Moore (1953, 65–6).

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has an object and can be distinguished from other mental acts by its object. But, unlike seeing red, an illusory experience as of red does not involve knowledge of a surface colour. In Moore’s picture, sense-data are distinct from awareness-of: they are what a case of awareness-of is directed on. We have seen in section 9.2.1 that Moore argued that blue etc. are supposed to exist independently of mental acts of awareness. This gives rise to a number of difficult questions. If there is no red surface seen in the illusory case, where is the sense-datum of which I am aware when I have an experience as of red? It seems to be nowhere as a red object is nowhere to be found. But it can’t be non-spatial for to be red it must be extended in space. These problems make act contents look attractive again. Moore’s contemporary Dawes Hicks argued that objects like sense-data are only misconceived contents: Once conceive of the content as a separate entity, and the step is inevitable to regarding it as an immediate object of apprehension. The content is, however, a ‘what’ that is inseparable from its ‘that’. (Dawes Hicks 1916/17, 327)

If one takes the content of a mental act as separate or separable from the mental act, one tends to conceive it as the object the mental act is directed on. But this is wrong. The content is not separable from the mental act and the mental act is not directed on and does not apprehend it. How is the content/object distinction, then, properly understood? This is a difficult question. Some Brentanians think of the immanent object as ontologically dependent on the mental act.¹⁰ This points us at least in the direction of an answer. I find Dawes Hicks’s own take on content attractive: [T]he content is not rightly treated as an object. In strict accuracy, it is not that of which we are aware; what we are aware of is the real object. The content is rather the way in which there is awareness of the object, the way in which the object is known. (Dawes Hicks 1910, 261–2)

There is a problem with Dawes Hicks’s characterization of content as the way in which there is awareness of the object. For an act is supposed to have content independently of whether there is an object or not. Let’s take a leaf from Quine’s Word and Object. He (Quine 1960, 87) carefully described singular terms as terms that purport to refer to one object; although all singular terms purport to refer to an object, only some actually do so. Similarly, there are ways of being aware of something which purport to be ways in which one is conscious of an object,

¹⁰ See, for example, Witasek (1908, 73–6).

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although there is no such object. Introspection gives us knowledge of the way in which our mental act purports to be about an object, but not knowledge about the object. Dawes Hicks spells out his understanding of act content further. Here I am satisfied to have provided a prima facie plausible notion of act content that does the work Moore supposes sense-data to do. Russell (1913a, 42–3) considered further motives for distinguishing between contents and objects. Can the same object not be given in different perceptions yet appear differently? If so, we need act contents to explain the difference between these acts. No, says Russell (1913a, 43), the objects of these perceptions are sensedata and the different perceptions are relations to different sense-data. Whether Russell’s object-centred solution can be generalized is a different question that I will have to set aside for the purposes of this chapter.

4. The Debate about the Act/Object Distinction 4.1 Diaphaneity, or Has Moore Shot Himself in the Foot? Moore’s ‘Refutation’, on the one hand, contains the main idea of his Brentanoinspired view of the mental and, on the other hand, it revived and made popular the diaphaneity objection against this very view that was originally posed by Lange and Natorp (see sections 5.7 and 5.8). Moore’s exposition of the objection sounds very much like Natorp’s: When we refer to introspection and try to discover what the sensation of blue is, it is very easy to suppose that we have before us only a single term. The term ‘blue’ is easy enough to distinguish, but the other element which I have called ‘consciousness’—that which sensation of blue has in common with sensation of green—is extremely difficult to fix. [ . . . ] In general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue [ . . . ]. (Moore 1903a, 446)

When we try to distinguish clearly between on the one hand the mental act, awareness-of, and on the other hand what we are aware of by attending to a sensation, we find that we can’t do it: When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous. (Moore 1903a, 450)

For this reason philosophers are drawn to idealism: they cannot distinguish between act and object in consciousness.

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Moore sees the diaphaneity objection as a threat to the act/object distinction, but it hits the act/content distinction as well. Consider the following case described by Siewert: Suppose A looks bigger to you than B, but really isn’t—as for example, in the famous Titchener illusion. In that case, what you attend to is not: A’s being bigger than B. For that fact is simply not there to be attended to. Are you then somehow barred from attending to the size A and B appear to you to have, relative to one another, whenever A inaccurately looks bigger to you than B? Surely not. So how should we conceive of what you attend to in this circumstance? (Siewert 2004, 20)

In the situation described you are aware of your perceptual experience as of A’s being bigger than B and of what the experience is directed towards: A’s being bigger than B. But there is no object or fact ‘in reality’ that is experienced: A is not bigger than B. Yet, when you try to introspect the awareness-of involved you won’t be able to do it. On the one hand Moore wants to use diaphaneity to explain why Idealists fail to make the distinction between act and what the act is of and arrive at an erroneous view.¹¹ Act and what the act is of are introspectively indistinguishable. On the other hand he wants to use the thesis that act (awareness-of) and object can be introspectively distinguished to refute EP. Moore assures us that he managed to introspectively distinguish between act and object: [Consciousness] can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know that there is something to look for. My main object in this paragraph has been to try to make the reader see it: but I fear I shall have succeeded very ill. (Moore 1903a, 450)

But why do Idealists and Neutral Monists, then, persistently fail to distinguish between consciousness and what it is directed on? Does being an Idealist/Monist weaken one’s powers of introspection? How do we know that there is something to look for in the first place? Introspection, like all perception, is informed by background beliefs and anticipations.¹² Did Moore find awareness-of in

¹¹ Van Cleve (2015b, 214) surprisingly credits Moore with a radical transparency view that denies that experiences have intrinsic features. Baldwin (1990, 52) suggests that Moore uses diaphaneity to make plausible the view that ‘there is nothing more to an act of consciousness than the presentation of an object’, but also points out that Moore ascribes intrinsic properties to consciousness. In contrast to many contemporary philosophers of mind such as Harman (1990, 39), Moore does not use diaphaneity to make a positive view of consciousness plausible. See Hellie (2007, 334). ¹² See Stout (1903, 14).

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introspection because he anticipated finding it there, while his opponents don’t believe in consciousness in the first place and are therefore not able to introspect it?

4.2 James’s Response to Moore In his article ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’, written partly in response to Moore and Natorp, William James invited us to take diaphaneity seriously.¹³ Idealists and Monists are not mistaken, Moore is: sensations cannot be factored into the diaphanous awareness-of and what it is awareness of precisely because we cannot distinguish these factors in consciousness. Diaphaneity breathes new life into Neutral Monism. We cannot distinguish between awareness that is directed towards something and what it is directed towards when we are seeing, hearing, etc. If there are no intrinsically directed events, the distinction between the mental and physical is not fundamental. Mind and world are made from the same neutral ‘stuff ’: I therefore conclude that—although there be a practical dualism—inasmuch as representations are distinguished from objects, stand in their stead and lead us to them, there is no ground to attribute to them an essential difference of nature. Thought and actuality are made of only one and the same stuff, which is the stuff of experience in general. (James 1905a, 58)

There is a distinction between thoughts and things for practical purposes, but this distinction has no importance for science. Let’s go back to Mach to see where James is coming from. Mach argued that the same elements are mental and physical in accordance with different circumstances: [I] say that A B C . . . , the same A B C . . . , play, according to circumstances now the role of physical elements, now the role of sensations. (Mach 1891, 397)

For James, Mach’s ‘different circumstances’ have turned into different contexts. The act/object distinction is, says James, not intrinsic, but due to the fact that the same simple experience can be considered in two different contexts.¹⁴ He illustrates his re-description of the act/object distinction with an analogy with paint:

¹³ On Moore and James see Williford (2004). ¹⁴ The closely related distinction between the mental and physical is also supposed to be grounded in relations between neutral elements. An element counts as mental if, and only if, it is subject to laws that allow for exceptions; otherwise it is physical, see James (1904a, 489). Russell (1919, 18) followed James and argued that physics and psychology are the study of different kinds of laws.

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In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other paints, it [paint] serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective ‘content’. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. (James 1904a, 480)

Take a portion of red paint contained in a pot. The same portion has, James argues, two different ‘functions’ in different contexts. In the context of the paintshop the pot with the portion of red paint is flanked by other paint pots. In this context the portion of red paint is saleable matter and has no ‘spiritual’ function. The other context is the portion of red applied to a canvas surrounded by other paints. On the canvas the drop of red paint represents regal status, adds vibrancy to the painting by its contrast with other paints, etc. James’s example suggests two points. First, what may at first sight seem to be a context-independent property of an object may turn out to be a context-dependent one if we consider the right contexts. Second, a thing occurs in a context if it stands in relations to things of a particular kind. The portion of paint occurs in the paint shop if it is exhibited next to other paint cans on a shelf. The portion of paint occurs on canvas in a painting if it is applied on canvas with other paints around it. James’s guiding idea is that attention to different relations in which an object stands to other things can make us conceive of it in two radically different ways. He applies this idea to experience: [The distinction between act and object] is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined. (James 1904a, 480)

According to James, an idea or sensation, considered independently of further ideas caused by it, is about nothing. The initially neutral sensation becomes directed upon something because it initiates a series of further sensations and actions that match or corroborate it.¹⁵ The unfolding of the series of corroborating events is felt by the ‘thinker’ and this experienced unfolding of the series or at least the

¹⁵ See James (1904c, 539).

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feeling of the potential is the misleading appearance of directedness.¹⁶ The act/ object distinction ‘falls outside’, not ‘inside’ the experience because it depends on events that are distinct from the experience. Compare: I put a lot of salt in your soup at noon. You die of salt poisoning in the evening. My putting salt in your soup is a killing because it causes an event, your death. The event that makes my act a killing ‘falls outside’ my act. The property of ‘being a killing’ does not describe an intrinsic and/or essential property of my act. The putting salt in your soup is, considered independently of its relation to future events, neither a killing nor not a killing. Similarly, an element, considered independently of its relation to future events, is neutral or pure: it is not directed on anything. Let’s recap James’s argument against philosophers who think that the act/object distinction is an intrinsic distinction: (J1) The distinction between act and object is not given in consciousness of the act in question (Diaphaneity). (J2) Therefore: The act/object distinction is not a distinction that pertains to the act itself. (J3) Therefore: The act/object distinction is a distinction between relations of different kinds in which an experience can stand to other things. We have already seen in section 7.2.1 that sophisticated proponents of the act/ object and/or act/content/object distinctions like Stout and Husserl do not accept (J1). One cannot merely by attending to a sensation of blue distinguish consciousness-of and what it is consciousness-of. We need to episodically remember a process in which we are aware of the same object changing its appearance. But let’s set this point of criticism aside for the moment. For the move from (J1) to (J2) seems, in general, not valid.¹⁷ An object can have intrinsic properties that can only be recognized by considering relations between it and other objects. Take a paradigm case of an intrinsic property: the mass (amount of matter) of a physical body. While intrinsic, one must observe a series of events—the oscillation frequency on an inertial balance—to determine the mass of an object. The mass example is analogous to the act/object distinction. It is intrinsic to an experience, but can only be ascertained in a perceptual process that reveals different ‘sides’ of an object that is experienced as the same. In sum: One can hold that the act/object distinction is not given in consciousness of a mental act and yet that it is an intrinsic distinction. Why does James not consider this possibility? My educated guess is that he assumes that the act/object distinction is only worth making if it is verifiable. He says his account makes the previously ‘mysterious and elusive’ act/object ¹⁶ See Bode (1905, 131) on James’s feelings of relations.

¹⁷ See Dawes Hicks (1910, 274).

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distinction ‘verifiable and concrete’ (James 1904a, 480). If aboutness consists in standing in relations, James argues, the fact that an element is a mental act can be verified by observing its effects. But the same seems to be true if the aboutness does not consist in such relations, but is an intrinsic property of a mental act: we cannot verify that there is aboutness by observing thinking and acting on objects because there could be aboutness that does not manifest itself at a certain time. Now equating what it takes to verify the existence of X with the nature of X has, in general, implausible consequences. The methods of verifying X’s existence can be improved, the nature of X can’t. The general problems of verificationism reflect badly on James’s application of it to intentionality. Hence, Brentanians won’t be impressed by his argument.

4.3 James on Mental Pointing James’s argument that experience has no ‘inner duplicity’ can be disarmed. The case against James can be strengthened by considering his account of the relations that are supposed to make a neutral element about something. Already in 1895 he had given a comprehensive outline of the relations with respect to which one can count a neutral sensation as of or about something. Our thoughts and sensations indeed are about something—they are knowledge of or point to something—but this is not an intrinsic property of them: But now what do we mean by pointing, in such a case as this? What is the pointing known-as, here? To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer—one that traverses the prepossessions not only of common sense and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don’t contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one physical fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace physical relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and

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the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields. (James 1895, 107–8)

There is no mysterious intentional inexistence or presence in absence, just physical relations between a mental event and others. One and the same event or element can point to something as well as being a physical object by standing in different relations to other events. We take a sensation as a physical object if we ignore those relations in virtue of which it ‘points to something’. There are many problems with James’s attempt to replace intrinsic intentionality with relations, the main of which have been pointed out with admirable clarity by Bradley.¹⁸ Let me briefly rehearse the most important ones. First, James describes the effects of a thought that make it point to tigers partly in terms of dispositions to assent to representations, propositions, being true or false of tigers or not contradicting such propositions. A proposition that is true of a tiger is about a tiger. If this is one of the endpoints of the reduction, there is a property very much like intentionality, namely the aboutness of representations. If you found it problematic that a mental state can transcend itself, it is no less problematic that a proposition etc. can transcend itself. Second, in order to avoid the relying on representations about something James must put special weight on dispositions to act in response to tigers. If a thought causes us to track down tigers and our actions terminate in ‘intuited tigers’, the thought points to or is about tigers. But if I wish that there was a frictionless surface, my wish may cause further mental states and acts that purport to be about frictionless surfaces, but there can’t be such surfaces. So the train of mental events if followed out can’t lead to an ideal context/the presence of frictionless surfaces. I can’t track down frictionless surfaces or unicorns. Third, according to James, one can only say retrospectively that an idea referred to something if there are later ideas and percepts that match or corroborate it. But if a pure experience does not represent anything and has no veridicality conditions, what do ‘matching’ and ‘corroborating’ come to? What distinguishes a corroboration of my pure experience from the process of association simply petering out? If the initial sensation can be corroborated at all, it must determine what its corroboration consists in. And then we are back to the original problem: If the starting-place really leads, it is because that place points, and, if it really points, then, at once and now, it refers beyond itself. From the very first it plainly is self-transcendent and qualifies an object beyond itself, and it needs no process of waiting for something else to happen to it in the future. (Bradley 1914, 154)

¹⁸ See Bradley (1914, 153–6). For discussion see Sprigge (1997, 138–40).

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My desire for coffee brings about that I go out and buy coffee. It is not that my desire starts a process that for some unknown reason comes to a halt when I have acquired coffee and I then say, ‘Aha, I had a desire, and now it turns out to be a desire for coffee!’ Hence, we should side with Brentano and take ‘having an immanent object’ to be a property of an event that is not determined by its future causal effects. In his earlier ‘The Function of Cognition’ James outlined a less radical and more plausible account of intentionality. He explained ‘knowing’ in terms of the combination of ‘operating on’ and ‘resembling’: The feeling of q knows whatever reality it resembles, and either directly or indirectly operates on. If it resemble without operating, it is a dream; if it operate without resembling, it is an error. (James 1885, 38)

James does not say much about resemblance. A feeling has an intrinsic quality that resembles or corresponds to a reality or not.¹⁹ There are degrees of resemblance: the resemblance can be more or less perfect. Now a feeling has many intrinsic qualities: for example, it has an intensity and a particular feel. But these are not the qualities that allow it to be about something distinct from itself. The intrinsic qualities of my red percept do not resemble the colour we take it to point to. Only if we endorse already a form of Neutral Monism can we say that the percept, an element related to other elements that make up my mind, resembles another element. But this theory cannot be presupposed when offering a response to an objection against it. In turn, if resemblance refers to a relation that obtains between a property instantiated in reality and a represented property, James can explain how a precept can point to a real property, but we have let an unanalysed notion of intentionality in. Now, if my thought or feeling merely resembles something without operating on it, it is a dream. But a ‘dream’ is still a dream of something. In the Sahara I may dream of a cold beer. The dream is a dream, in part, because I cannot operate on the beer. But the dream still has a topic; it is directed on something. What it is directed on does not exist, so James’s resemblance cannot be a relation. James’s ‘resemblance’ seems just to be Brentano’s ‘intentional inexistence’ or ‘quasirelationality’ under a different name. James has not explained intentionality away. He has simply added to it an account of what thinking of something real amounts to.

¹⁹ James (1885, 29).

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4.4 Moore’s Search for the Act/Object Distinction from 1903 to 1910 Whereas Russell and James were impressed by diaphaneity and tried to reconstruct the act/object distinction in terms of causal effects, Moore never doubted that there is an intrinsic act/object distinction. In his work after 1903 he repeatedly tries to disarm the diaphaneity objection: ‘[I] wish to make as plain as I can,’ writes Moore, ‘that my perception of the movement of a coloured patch can at least be distinguished from that movement itself ’ (Moore 1906, 70). It is surprising that Moore does not take the ideas of Stout into account in his campaign for the view that the act/object distinction is intrinsic to sensation. In Moore (1906, 70–1) he appeals to the fact that the objects of perception seem to be spatially distant from the perceiving. In 1910 he compares different sensations with each other to find the common factor (awareness-of): ‘Consciousness’, then, for all I know, may be a name for several very different kinds of entities. But in all the cases I have named there is, I think, one thing clear about it: namely, that in every case there is always a distinction between that of which we are conscious and our consciousness of it. I do not mean to say that the two are always ‘separable’; nor yet do I mean to say anything with regard to the relation in which they stand to one another; I only mean to say that they are always distinct entities: and that they are so seems to me to be certain for the following reason. Let us consider one of the mental acts I have named, seeing, for example. There is nothing more certain to me than that I do constantly see one colour at one time, and a different colour at a different time, and that, though the colours are different, I am conscious of them both in exactly the same sense. It follows, then, that since the colours are different in the two cases, whereas what I mean by my consciousness of them is in both cases the same, my consciousness of a colour must be something different from any of the colours of which I am conscious. (Moore 1910a, 38–9)

The temporal dimension is important here. Imagine that you look at a white wall over an interval while different colours are projected on it. First the wall looks red to you and then yellow and so on. There is nothing more certain to Moore than that his consciousness of the different colours is the same. Hence, he concludes that the experiences have something in common while they differ in their objects. The shared element is consciousness-of. James’s criticism of Moore is motivated, in part, by his denial that consciousness is an element that endures over time or that can reoccur in different sensations. Klein (2020, 313–5) points out that James makes a good case that anger and awareness of anger don’t share anger as an element. For awareness of

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anger is supposed to change the anger. So the anger one initially feels is not an element of the awareness of anger. However, Moore is not committed to elementarism about consciousness. Maybe the consciousness-of that constitutes the sensation of red is different from the consciousness of yellow a second later. What is important is that both consciousnesses-of are instances of the type consciousness-of something. As long as Moore can be justifiably certain that this is the case, he can draw the distinction between act and content in the way he envisages. Let’s spin this out further. We have seen that Reid argued that the act/object distinction takes time to work out. Moore seems to heed Reid’s advice. When we are seeing blue at a time we cannot attend to our awareness-of. But we are supposed to come to notice the differences between mental acts and objects as well as the commonalities between mental acts when we either vary the object, while the activity remains constant in all other features, or attend to different acts of seeing over time. The primary thing here is an activity and we arrive at the mental and the non-mental by paying attention to it. The notion of the mental that grounds further ways of applying ‘mental’ is introduced because we have noticed the distinction between act and object: variation over time makes us distinguish consciousness-of as an invariant factor in different ‘consciousnesses’. Moore’s most promising way to make the act/object distinction plain can be found in lectures he gave in 1910 (that were published only in 1953): [I]t is, I think, quite conceivable (I do not say it is actually true) but conceivable that the patch of colour which I saw may have continued to exist after I saw it: whereas, of course, when I ceased to see it, my seeing of it ceased to exist. (Moore 1953, 45)

This quote suggests a way to get a theoretical grip on the act/object distinction. Let’s go back to the matter-form analogy from section 5.6 to get a handle on it. The distinction between matter and form is a modal distinction. The clay the statue is made of can survive the destruction of the statue. The same portion of clay can assume a different form. The portion of clay the statue is made of can cease to exist by being zapped out of existence, while the form persists. The same form can ‘shape’ different matter. Moore’s attempts to distinguish between act and object have the same modal character as the distinction between form and matter. Consciousness is the analogue to matter that can be informed by different objects. This is in effect how Aristotle originally conceived of mind or thought: [M]ind as we have described it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another Mind which is what it is by virtue of making all things be present: this is a sort of positive state like light [ . . . ] (De Anima 3.5)

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What is distinctive about consciousness is its potential: in order to distinguish consciousness from, say, physical force we need to mention that it can become all things. What does that mean? Consciousness has the modal property of being able to become different things; that is, to be directed on different objects. This potential is actualized when one sees, hears, or thinks about something. But these acts still need to be understood as actualizations of one potential. Moore (1910a) (see previous quote) used the sameness of the activity of being conscious while the objects are different to argue that the activity is distinct from its objects. If the distinction between act and object is a modal distinction that concerns, among other things, conditions of persistence, it is unsurprising that the distinction is not detectable when we are conscious of something. Just as I cannot attend to matter only or in opposition to the form when considering a statue, I cannot attend to my seeing only when I see blue. The modal distinction becomes obvious only when we consider how things might/could change or develop. Are we aware of such potential for changes? Moore does not answer this question in detail. But he can enlist phenomenologists to help. Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) asked his readers to consider perceiving a red ball: The ball has—if it exists at all—its own being [Eigensein], and it is for the ball completely accidental that it is perceived by someone. It suffers no changes in virtue of the fact that it is perceived and it is given as such an object that continues to exist in space after we have closed our eyes and no longer perceive it. (Ingarden 1930, 272–3; my translation and emphasis)

The ball does not only exist without being perceived, says Ingarden, it is given to the perceiver as something that would persist in space if it were not (no longer) perceived. We experience the ball as something that is disposed to go on existing independently of our experience of it. How is this possible? You can experience a fading either as a change in an intervening factor—a change in the relation to the object is experienced, while the object does not seem to change—or as a change in the object—a gradual ceasing to be, while the intervening factors seem not to change. If one is able to have experiences of the former kind, one will be able to experience the mind-independence of an object. We experience the object as constant through experienced changes of conditions of perceivability—perceptual constancy—and we experience the object as constant through changes beyond a limit of perceivability: mind-independence. In experiences of the second kind something, an object or process, seems to persist, while our perceiving reaches a limit. Such experiences are the basis for our understanding of the act/object distinction. We have an experience of limitations and something that is independent of these limitations. The limited activity is one thing, the object another. And so it seems to us. There is an act/object distinction; we must only understand it properly.

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4.5 Russell Changes Tack: A Non-Introspective Act/Object Distinction Brentano, Witasek, and Moore took the distinction between a mental act and what it is directed towards to be given in consciousness: one can make it by paying attention to one’s mental acts. Diaphaneity shows this to be false. Rather the opposite is true. We cannot simply shift our attention from object perceived to perception etc. In the light of this criticism the idea that we make the distinction between the mental and physical because we notice that there are directed and undirected phenomena becomes hard to sustain. In section 7.2.1 we have seen that Stout and Husserl argued that perceptual constancies suggest drawing the distinction between act, content, and object. According to them, the distinction is suggested by us if we pay attention to temporally extended perceptual processes. In 1913 Russell also gave up on the idea that the act/object distinction is introspectively available. He takes the act/object distinction to illustrate the thesis that we can be acquainted with a complex without being acquainted with all its parts: We decided that experiencing a given object is a complex, not because introspection reveals any complexity, but because experiencing has properties which we did not see how to account for by any other hypothesis. But although we found no difficulty in being acquainted with an experience, the most attentive introspection failed to reveal any constituent of any experience except the object. (Russell 1913a, 121)

Experience is a dyadic relation, but we cannot be acquainted with and pay attention to its relata, although we can pay attention to the complex that is the relation obtaining between the relata. This, in effect, is the translation of the diaphaneity observation into Russell’s jargon. In 1918 he wrote: [I] formerly believed that my own inspection showed me the distinction between a noise and my hearing of a noise, and I am now convinced that it shows me no such thing, and never did. (Russell 1918a, 255)

It is unclear to me when Russell believed introspection to reveal the act/object distinction, but by 1913 he certainly had changed his view. We have no experience of the act/object distinction, but there are theoretical reasons for the conclusion that an experience is a dyadic relation between a subject and an object. Because these reasons are theoretical, Russell is not a Dualist like Moore who takes the act/ object distinction to be discoverable by introspection.

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What are the properties that give us a reason to think that an experience is a relation to an object? Russell draws on the following assumptions about experience:²⁰ (E1)

There are objects that can be experienced by different minds.

(E2)

An experience can only be experienced by one mind.

Russell (1913a, 34) uses ‘experience’ as a ‘non-committal word’: it is supposed to be an open question whether experiencing is a relation and Russell sets out to decide this question with an argument. The premise (E1) is discussed and argued for in James’s paper with the telling title: ‘How two minds can know one thing’. James’s answer outlined how one neutral experience can be part of two streams of consciousness. For James it is important that numerically the same experiences can ‘enter’ different mental lives. Russell, in contrast, takes the objects that can be experienced by different minds at the same time to be universals and ‘abstracts’. He (Russell 1913a, 34) considers shared ‘objects of sense’, that is sense-data, only to be a theoretical possibility. More about this below. Let’s consider an example to see how Russell’s argument is supposed to work. When the minds A and B predicate of primeness that it is a property, they experience the same universal: primeness. (E2) suffices to show that A’s experience of primeness is numerically distinct from B’s experience of primeness. In more detail: A’s experience of primeness can only be experienced by A and not by B, whereas B’s experience of primeness can be experienced only by B and not by A. If we apply Leibniz’s Law, we can infer that A’s and B’s experiences are distinct. Russell goes on to draw further conclusions: From these characteristics of experience, it seems an unavoidable inference that A’s experiencing of O is different from O, and is in fact a complex, of which A himself, or some simpler entity bound up with A, is a constituent as well as O. (Russell 1913a, 35)

Let us give this more detail: (P1)

The object of A’s experience of O = the object of B’s experience of O.

(P2)

A’s experience of O ≠ B’s experience of O.

Hence, (C) A’s experience of O ≠ the object of A’s experience.

²⁰ See Sainsbury (1979, 267–8). He takes Russell’s argument to be an argument against Neutral Monism; I take it to be an argument for the act/object distinction.

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I think Russell’s way of framing the argument is not ideal. For it seems to assume that experience is a relation to an object. After all, Russell starts out with assumptions about the object of experience. However, the argument can be rejigged as a reductio ad absurdum of the thesis that experience is non-relational. Assume for reductio that the object of A’s experience is identical with A’s experience and the object of B’s experience is identical with B’s experience. Under this assumption, the further prima facie plausible assumption that the same object can be experienced by different minds leads to the conclusion that A’s experience and B’s experience are numerically identical. But we know that this cannot be the case. For only A’s experience can be experienced by A etc. Hence, we need to backtrack: A’s experience is distinct from B’s experience and, since they are distinct, they must also be distinct from their object. Hence, an experience is distinct from its object. I think this is a strong, but limited argument for the act/object distinction. For (E1) is, as Russell himself conceded, not plausibly generalizable to objects of sense. When I see something, I am supposed to be acquainted with a complex of sense-data. Can another mind be acquainted with numerically the same complex of sense-data? Russell says that he thinks that it is theoretically possible. But we need more than a theoretical possibility to run the argument to show that the act/object distinction applies to sensations. We are not able to know whether different people are or can be acquainted with the same sense-data. Hence, we cannot assert a premise that is needed to generalize the argument. There is an echo of this problem in Russell’s philosophy after 1913. Russell gradually came round to Neutral Monism, but never completely. He turned into a selective Neutral Monist (or a selective Brentanist), or, to put a negative spin on it, a ‘Demi-Monist’ (Tully 1993, 34). Consider: There is a form of duality which is essential in any form of knowledge except that which is shown in mere bodily behavior. We are aware of something, we have a recollection of something, and, generally, knowing is distinct from that which is known. This duality, after it has been banished from sensation, has to be somehow re-introduced. (Russell 1959, 139; my emphasis)

Sensation has no inner duality, but episodes of thought have it. This is as one should expect: Russell has an argument for an act/object distinction for thought, but none for sensation. His view is therefore selective: (a) There is no act/object distinction in perceptual consciousness: the sensation of blue is numerically identical with the blue sensed. (b) The full tripartite analysis applies to memory, expectation, and belief.

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Given the problems for Mach’s view of thoughts that dispenses with the act/ content/object distinction unearthed in section 6.3, (b) is a wise move. So far we have no argument against (a), but also no argument in its favour. In the next section I will look at Russell’s argument for (a).

4.6 Russell’s Argument for the Neutrality of Sensation Russell’s argument for (a) gives the diaphaneity challenge a linguistic twist. He asks us to use the sentence ‘There is a visual black dot’ such that utterances of it cannot be false if there is no black dot in reality. It is true if there is a black dot either before you or in your visual field. Now he asks his reader to put themselves in the position of someone who seems to see a black dot. If they have done so, he puts the following question to them: Is there still a distinction, within what is immediate and intrinsic, between the occurrence of a visual datum and the cognition of it? Can we say, on the basis of immediate experience, not only ‘a visual black dot occurs’, but also ‘a visual black dot is cognized’? My feeling is that we cannot. When we say that it is cognized, we seem to me to mean that it is part of an experience. That is to say, that it can be remembered, or can modify our habits, or, generally, can have what are called ‘mnemic’ effects. All this takes us beyond the immediate experience into the realm of its causal relations. I see no reason to think that there is any duality of subject and object in the occurrence itself, or that it can properly be described as a case of ‘knowledge’. It gives rise to knowledge, through memory, and through conscious or unconscious inferences to the common correlates of such data. But in itself it is not knowledge and has no duality. The datum is a datum equally for physics and for psychology; it is a meeting-point of the two. It is neither mental nor physical, just as a single name is neither in alphabetical order nor in order of precedence; but it is part of the raw material of both the mental and the physical worlds. This is the theory which is called ‘neutral monism’, and is the one that I believe to be true. (Russell 1926, 81–2)

An utterance of (R1) ‘A visual black dot occurs’ is supposed to be a report made solely on the basis of immediate experience. It reports the occurrence of a visual datum only, but not the cognition of it. In making it we cannot go wrong. In contrast, the report (R2) ‘A visual black dot is cognized’ tells us something about a visual datum as well as the cognition of it. If reports like (R2) can be made solely on the basis of immediate experience, immediate experience would need to be articulated into act—here cognition-of—and object. Why can’t one make (R2) solely on the basis of immediate experience? Because an immediate experience only merits the title ‘cognition’ if it has produced

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knowledge by inference and memory. Russell follows James in arguing that an experience considered independently of its effects/relations is not knowledge of anything. An immediate ‘experience’ can be said to be of a dot or be cognition when it has had ‘mnemic effects’. The ‘downstream’ mnemic effects allow us to redescribe the neutral element as having an object. What is mnemic causation and why is it important here? Russell discovered mnemic causation for his purposes in The Analysis of Mind. He was influenced by Richard Semon’s psychological investigations about memory.²¹ Mnemic causation is supposed to be distinct from physical causation.²² Physical causation is just the common-sense notion of causation: fire causes smoke etc. In mnemic causation a past event stored in memory and a present stimulus jointly cause the effect. This causation obeys the principle that reoccurrence of a part of the total stimulus that originally caused a set of reactions now suffices to cause the total set of reactions.²³ Roughly, in mnemic causation past experiences and present stimuli cause together behaviour. Mnemic causation is supposed to turn neutral elements into experiences and to group them into one mind. Consider an example: one way of grouping neutral elements results in ‘biographies’: series of elements that stand in time-relations to each other. Now mnemic causation enters the picture: It is not only by time-relations that the parts of one biography are collected together in the case of living beings. In this case there are the mnemic phenomena which constitute the unity of ‘one experience’ and transform mere occurrences into ‘experiences’. [ . . . ] [T]hey [mnemic] phenomena are what transforms a biography (in our technical sense) into a life. It is they that give the continuity of a ‘person’ or a ‘mind’. (Russell 1921, 129)

If a past element E₁ together with a present element E₂ cause a complex of elements, these elements are experiences in one mind. If mnemic causation transforms ‘occurrences’ into experiences, the occurrence itself can be neutral and have no inner duplicity. Russell’s argument against the thesis that the act/object distinction is intrinsic to an act can be attacked on different fronts. First, there is an intuition that the immediate experience that entitles me to report ‘A visual black dot occurs’ qualifies as knowledge of something independently of its mnemic effects. Russell’s 1913 time-slice appealed to this intuition: [I]t seems plain that, without reference to any other content of my experience, at the moment when I see the red I am acquainted with it in some way in which I was not acquainted with it before I saw it [ . . . ]. (Russell 1913a, 23; my emphasis) ²¹ See Pincock (2006). ²² See, for example Russell (1921, 127–31). ²³ See Russell (1921, 83–4).

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My awareness might not give rise to further knowledge, nor to changes in behaviour: it may not be useful for my future self. But why should one deny therefore that there was any awareness as of a black dot? Russell has a positive conception of knowledge that suggests an answer to this question. A mental event can only be knowledge-of if it produces memories and modifies habits (which habits?). Why modification of habits? In The Analysis of Mind Russell attempted to analyse knowledge in terms of appropriate behaviour, that is, behaviour that is suitable to realize the purpose of the agent.²⁴ The carrier pigeon knows the way home because it responds to different stimuli such that it always reaches its home. It changes its habits so that the exercises of its habits are appropriate to achieve its goals. For Russell, an animal has knowledge if it reliably realizes its purposes. But, as Russell (1940, 50) realizes, ‘appropriate’ can only be defined by appeal to the desires of the animal that behaves. But desires seem intentional and, hence, the question whether they admit of an act/object distinction needs to be answered. Russell’s guiding idea about knowledge also only fits some kinds of knowledge. My knowledge of where home is may be manifest in my behaviour. But what about knowledge of things that Russell discussed under the title ‘acquaintance’? Does knowledge of things have a conceptual connection to appropriate behaviour? Knowledge, in general, has to do with safely being right. If my experience as of a dot is the upshot of a reliable dot-detecting ability, there is a dot, and my ability worked within its margin of error, my experience is of the dot and may be knowledge of it. Whether the experience gives rise to appropriate behaviour is at best secondary. I may have no purposes that involve the dot. Yet, I can know of it. Second, do mnemic effects really distinguish between a mere occurrence and an experience? I think we can conceive a being that has a momentary glimpse of its surroundings, but no memory. Such a being will not be able to survive and learn. But why should one deny that it has mental states? The world seems to it a certain way; it has a fleeting perception of it; etc. Third, Brentano proposed that ‘having an object’ in a distinctive way or being conscious of an object is the mark of the mental. Every mental act is awareness of an object, where ‘awareness’ means only that the object appears in consciousness.²⁵ Prima facie, Brentano’s Thesis is not the one that Russell attacks, namely that every mental act is knowledge of an object. In The Analysis of Mind Russell wrote about the Brentano school: These men are interested in the mind because of its relation to the world, because knowledge, if it is a fact, is a very mysterious one. Their interest in psychology is naturally centered in the relation of consciousness to its objects, a problem which, properly, belongs rather to the theory of knowledge. (Russell 1921, 14)

²⁴ See Russell (1921, 260–1). For discussion see Landini (2011, 321–3). ²⁵ See PES, 62 [I, 114].

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If Russell takes ‘knowledge’ to be an epistemic state, his characterization of Brentano stacks the decks against Brentano: Russell ‘epistemologizes’ Brentano and then goes on to argue that epistemologized Brentano is wrong. Brentano is interested in the mind whether there is an extra-mental world or not. Even if we are completely deceived, there will be mental acts and processes and these ‘have objects’. An object may appear in consciousness and yet one does not have knowledge of it. Unlike Russell Brentano did not argue that every mental act is or implies knowledge of an object. In Russell’s example I am—in a relaxed sense of ‘conscious’—conscious of something. There is a mental act that has a content, whether there is a real object or not. For this reason Russell’s argument misses its target.

4.7 Russell’s Defence of the Tripartite Distinction for Thought On to thought. In The Analysis of Mind Russell singled out belief, expectation, and memory for special treatment: In Lecture I we criticized the analysis of a presentation into act, content and object. But our analysis of belief contains three very similar elements, namely the believing, what is believed, and the objective. The objections to the act (in the case of presentations) are not valid against the believing in the case of beliefs, because the believing is an actual experienced feeling, not something postulated, like the act. (Russell 1921, 233; my emphasis)

Now, belief seems to be a dispositional state and not an experienced feeling. A charitable reading takes Russell therefore to use ‘belief ’ for ‘judgement’, a mental episode. A judgement has a content—what is believed—and this content is itself a mental event.²⁶ The event is the tokening of an image, word, or combination of word and image that are related to the objective, a state of affairs. In violation of ordinary grammar Russell says that this event is believed. The event is accompanied by a feeling that this is, will be, or was the case (the feeling of assent). Both content and the feeling sustained by it are events and introspectible. Russell’s contents are what he and others called ‘propositions’. Initially propositions were conceived as abstract objects that are either true or false. Now propositions turn out to be ‘present occurrences in the believer’ (Russell 1921, 233). Stevens (2006) has called Russell’s move aptly ‘repsychologising the proposition’. Stevens (2006, 112–8) argues that the psychologizing of propositions

²⁶ See Russell (1921, 234) on contents as events.

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is motivated by Russell’s desire to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition. But this problem is not mentioned when Russell introduces the new conception of propositions. Russell’s language of act and content in The Analysis of Mind is telling: he tries to overcome the diaphaneity challenge for the act/content distinction. The content has been turned into an actual constituent of a mental episode and is therefore supposed to be introspectible. Judgements, Russell argues, really are articulated into content and act. Russell seems to me to be overoptimistic here. Even if we have turned act and content into ‘present occurrences in the believer’ (Russell 1921, 233), it is an open question whether both occurrences are introspectively available for the believer. The content is a mental symbol standing in for the objective and as we generally ‘see through’ such stand-ins we seem to do so also in the case of the mental symbol. I made several judgements today without ever becoming aware of mental images etc. Russell’s theory of belief tries to preserve the basic distinctions of Brentano’s act psychology and make them accessible. He sees this theory of belief, or more generally attitudes that can be true or false, as replacing Brentano’s and Meinong’s idea that thoughts have an object: The reference of thoughts to objects is not, I believe, the simple essential thing that Brentano and Meinong represent it as being. It seems to me derivative, and to consist largely in beliefs; beliefs that what constitutes the thought is connected with various other elements which together make up the object. You have, say, an image of St. Paul’s, or merely the word ‘St. Paul’s’ in your head. You believe, however vaguely and dimly, that this is connected with what you would see if you went to St. Paul’s, or what you would feel if you touched the walls; it is further connected with what other people see and feel, with services and the Dean and Chapter and Sir Christopher Wren. These things are not mere thoughts of yours, but your thought stands in a relation to them of which you are more or less aware. The awareness of this relation is a further thought, and constitutes your feeling that the original thought had an ‘object’. (Russell 1921, 18–9)

Thinking of St. Paul’s is standing in relation to a word or image and believing that certain counterfactuals hold. These beliefs constitute the feeling that the thought has an object. On Russell’s own account of belief it is difficult to see what a belief in a counterfactual might amount to. But the main point of criticism is that Russell attacks a straw man. When Brentano and Meinong distinguished the mental from the physical in terms of intentionality, the directedness of a mental act was not supposed to consist in the act having an external object. ‘The essential thing’ is that every mental phenomenon has an immanent content in virtue of which it is directed upon something. Russell has so far given us no reason to accept that this view is false or in need of reconstruction.

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The view Russell presents after his conversion seems unsatisfying. Russell’s theory of belief does not answer the diaphaneity challenge. Merely making content a mental event does not make content empirically discoverable. Russell unsuccessfully laboured to solve a problem that Stout and Husserl had already solved.

5. Conclusion of Part III In Part III we looked at the work of especially Moore and Russell from the perspective of a follower of Brentano. The revolt against idealism is based on Moore’s and Russell’s particular takes on the act/object distinction. Russell tests whether the theory of acts can be combined with the assumption of a subject and reconstructs it in a way that is supposed to make mental acts empirically respectable. Both Moore and Russell never gave up the basic Brentanian idea that there is a duality between the mental act and what it is of. They just tried to improve or limit its scope. However, the most valuable contribution to the development of Brentano’s ideas in Cambridge can be found in Stout’s (and Husserl’s) work: he made a promising suggestion of how one can accept diaphaneity with jettisoning the duality of act and content.

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PART IV

INTUITION, METAPHYSICS, AND T H E LI M I T S OF KN O W L E D G E Introduction to Part IV: 1. German Pragmatism and Voluntarism In his overview of the papers presented at the twelfth annual meeting of the Western Philosophical Association the American philosopher H.W. Wright gives a concise summary of Günther Jacoby’s paper ‘German Pragmatism’: In opposition to Professor James’s formula: ‘Germany lags behind in pragmatism’, we propose that ‘America lags behind Germany’. American pragmatism is the reaction of a biological type of philosophy against the rationalistic idealism of the so-called ‘Hegelian’ school of this country. Forty years ago a similar biological philosophy in Germany reacted against the true Hegelian school of Hegel himself. From this anti-Hegelian movement derives the well-known German pragmatism of Ernest Mach, Wilhelm Jerusalem, George Simmel, Richard Avenarius, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Hans Vaihinger, whose recently published standard work on ‘Die Philosophie des Als Ob’ was written in 1816–1818 [?]. If American pragmatism meets at present with disapproval in Germany this is due to the fact, that just at the time when anti-Hegelian pragmatism became popular in this country, Germany had become tired of it and had just entered a new counter-reaction, the so-called ‘revival of philosophy’. (Wright 1912, 356–7)¹

While American philosophers get started with pragmatism, German philosophers are already bored of it and start to move on.² Later, Marcuse independently came up with the label ‘German Pragmatism’. The grandfather of German Pragmatism, Marcuse submitted, is Schopenhauer: ¹ The dating of the writing of Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob can’t be right. After all, Vaihinger was only born in 1852. Vaihinger himself relates that he wrote the first part of the book in 1876/7. See foreword to the second edition, I. ² Uebel (2019) argues that Mach and Jerusalem developed a form of Pragmatism before and independently of Peirce and James. This section supports his conclusion.

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Schopenhauer showed in his characterisation of the ‘intellect’ as a weapon of the blind will a long time before Pragmatism an essentially pragmatic motive that put Nietzsche, Jerusalem, Vaihinger, Simmel, and everyone who followed them in Germany close to the Pragmatists. (Marcuse 1955, 265)

Thinking, reasoning, and perceiving have evolved as ‘service providers’ for the Will. While they find much to criticize in Schopenhauer, Mach, Jerusalem, and Vaihinger explicitly appeal to Schopenhauer’s slogan ‘the Will created the intellect’ in their writings.³ We have encountered the slogan ‘the Will created the intellect’ already in section 2.9. In his discussion of instinctive knowledge of causality Mach explicitly endorsed it: A knowledge of causality in this form certainly reaches far below the level of Schopenhauer’s pet dog, to whom it was ascribed. It probably exists in the whole animal world, and confirms that great thinker’s statement regarding the will which created the intellect for its purposes. These primitive psychical functions are rooted in the economy of our organism not less firmly than are motion and digestion. (Mach 1882, 188–9 [219]; my emphasis)

What the slogan ‘The Will created the intellect for its purposes’ exactly means depends on what one takes the Will to be. More about this in due course. Marcuse (1955, 260) singled out Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) as the main instigator of German Pragmatism. Jersualem was a secondary school teacher (Gymnasialprofessor) who taught from 1892/3 onwards an introductory course on philosophy at Vienna. Jerusalem worked in psychology and wrote a highly regarded study on the deaf-blind Laura Bridgeman. He translated William James’s Pragmatism and wrote an influential Lehrbuch der Psychologie.⁴ Jerusalem criticizes traditional psychology as intellectualistic and contrasts it with voluntaristic psychology for which ‘feeling and will are the central powers of the soul’: This view [voluntaristic psychology] to whose development also Schopenhauer and Darwin have contributed much has also became guiding for Wundt’s metaphysic, but as in Schopenhauer the acknowledgement of the primary meaning of the will for psychology is much more important and convincing than the metaphysics founded on it. (Jerusalem 1905a, 177)

³ On Mach and Schopenhauer see Becher (1905). On the general influence of Schopenhauer on the Pre-Vienna circle generation see Luft (1983, 68–75). ⁴ See Uebel (2012, 8–9). See also Schlick (1928).

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Schopenhauer provides guidance with respect to psychology and epistemology, but not with respect to metaphysics. In the foreword to the re-edition of his The Philosophy of ‘As if ’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind Hans Vaihinger (1922, xiv) calls the doctrine of primacy of the Will ‘Voluntarism’. Stumpf (1939, 364) expounded and criticized Voluntarism as the view that takes ‘the Will, instead of being the product of individual development, to be the root and nature of all mental functions whatsoever’. Let us see now in more detail how Schopenhauer and Mach expound Voluntarism.

2. Schopenhauer and Mach on How Cognition Serves the Will Thoughts are not all of life. They are only momentary efflorescences of light, designed to illuminate the paths of the Will. Ernst Mach, On Transformation and Adaptation in Scientific Thought (1883) We have already seen in section 2.10 that Mach appealed to the Will to explain why we bundle some elements together and not others. The Will also plays an important role in the theory of cognition. In order to explain this let’s start again with Schopenhauer. He called perception in the service of the Will ‘ordinary perception’.⁵ Ordinary perception makes us aware of objects that are of interest to us. One way to make Schopenhauer’s claims plausible is to use the notion of affordance; Young (2005, 109) speaks of potential threats or allurements to the Will.⁶ Taking a leaf from contemporary philosophy of mind we can say that we perceive what furthers our survival and striving. We perceive the onrushing car as a danger to us because it comes towards us, the cake as a treat for us, the water as drinkable by us, and so on. What we perceive are objects having dispositional properties that are of interest to us. Awareness of these properties allows the perceiver to predict future events and thereby enables her to satisfy her desires. The drinkable stuff, for example, will quench her thirst when she drinks it. This thought is congenial to Mach’s that our cognitive habits further our well-being and take us from perceptions to mental images of or thoughts about what objects related to these perceptions afford us. Science is just the continuation of ordinary cognition:

⁵ See Schopenhauer (1844a I, 199 [208]). ⁶ On perceiving affordances see Prosser (2011, 481).

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sciences also view things in essentially the same way, namely as nothing other than relations, connections of time, of space, the causes of natural alterations, the comparison of shapes, motives for events, and thus simply relations. (Schopenhauer 1844a I, 199 [208])

The drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain shapes our cognitive faculties and science in several ways. In the quote above Schopenhauer focuses on the objects of perception that are also explored in empirical science. Philosophers of perception characterize perception as immediate awareness of objects and properties or, when they take hallucinations and illusions into account, as a particular form of entertaining modes of presentation of objects and properties. Schopenhauer gives a more fine-grained description of ordinary perception that is in the service of the Will. Ordinary perception provides access to a limited range of properties, namely those that afford us pleasure and pain. We recognize that an object has dispositions to affect our well-being here and now. In Schopenhauer’s terminology: ordinary consciousness can only recognize relative essences. Awareness of such relative essences furthers our well-being and allows us to make predictions about future events that bear on it. For Schopenhauer ordinary cognition is only part of what humans are able to achieve. Importantly, humans are also able to overcome the Will. He conveyed this idea by expanding the trunk/head analogy further: In the lower animals, the two [the intellect and the will] are still completely united: in all of them, the head faces the ground where the objects of the will can be found: even in the higher animals the head and trunk are still much more unified than in humans, whose head seems to be placed freely on the body, borne by it without serving it. This prerogative of humans is displayed by the Apollo Belvedere to the highest degree: the far-seeing head of the god of the Muses sits so freely on its shoulders that it seems entirely wrenched away from the body and no longer subject to its cares. (Schopenhauer 1844a I, 200, [209])

The head of the Apollo statue in the Vatican is ‘entirely wrenched away’ from its body. Schopenhauer uses this property of the statue to illustrate that the intellect can become to some extent independent of the Will. Although Apollo’s head—read intellect—is part of and biologically dependent on Apollo’s body, it has not only bodily desires and needs. Schopenhauer’s claim is that human beings are distinguished from other animals in that their intellect, while developed in order to service the Will, can become independent of the Will and set its own agenda. Mach agreed with Schopenhauer’s slogan: the Will created the intellect for its purposes. However, he took issue with Schopenhauer’s characterization of the goal of this striving. The Will is not the Will to preserve the species:

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The preservation of the species is only one factual valuable guide [Anhaltspunkt] for inquiry, but by no means the final [Letzte] or highest. Species certainly have been destroyed, and new ones have undoubtedly arisen. The pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding will, therefore, is directed perforce beyond the preservation of the species. (Mach 1914, 81–2 [67])

Species come and go, but the Will that drives all animal life remains the same. The Will is the drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. This seems also not quite right. Either Mach has an extended meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ in mind in which animals that have no phenomenal consciousness such as amoebae can be in pain or the Will does not pervade all organic life. I will not try to come up with a better characterization of the Will. For our purposes it is sufficient to say that all human animals are driven by the Will to avoid pain and seek pleasure. What does it take to realize the Will, the striving to minimize pain and maximize pleasure? It depends. First, imagine you are an immobile organism that lives in a nutrient-rich fluid. Not much machinery is necessary for you to survive and thrive. You need to register when you have ingested enough nutrients, but not much more. Second, now assume that your environment is no longer constant—its properties change over time or are different in different places. In order to realize the Will in a variable environment the organism needs to be able to perceive things and their properties in space before they can be acted upon. The advantage bestowed by the perceptual faculty is enhanced by memory and the ability to predict future events. Mach stressed the importance of memory. There is a gradual difference between animals and human beings and it lies in the strength of man’s memory: What guarantees to primitive man a [quantitative advantage] over his animal fellows is doubtless only the strength of his individual memory which is gradually [supported] by the communicated memory of his forebearers and his tribe. (Mach 1976, 1 [1]. I have modified the translation.)

Why is memory so decisive? Because it allows human beings to bring past perceptions to bear on present and future actions. Memory allows us to develop the habit of mimicking and forecasting facts and thereby to acquire knowledge: Man acquires his first knowledge of nature half-consciously and automatically, from an instinctive habit of mimicking and forecasting facts in thought, of supplementing sluggish experience with the swift wings of thought, at first only for his material welfare. When he hears a noise in the underbrush he constructs there, just as the animal does, the enemy which he fears; when he sees a certain

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rind he forms mentally the image of the fruit which he is in search of; just as we mentally associate a certain kind of matter with a certain line in the spectrum or an electric spark with the friction of a piece of glass. (Mach 1882, 188–9 [218–19]; my emphasis)

Our ordinary knowledge consists in habits of thought that are in the service of our practical needs. Musil (1908, 15) wrote that consciousness has for Mach the character of an ‘economic instrument’: concepts, judgements, etc. are tools with the purpose to further satisfaction of the Will. Mach calls the exercises of those dispositions that cause action judgements. In first approximation one can say that a judgement that serves our well-being is a cognition (Erkenntnis) and a cognition is a picture of a fact. Scientific and common-sense knowledge are the results of the same kind of activity. There is no principled difference between the dog’s habit to move from hearing a particular noise in the bush to the expectation that a cat is about to jump out and the scientist’s habit to move from a perception of a line in spectrum to the thought that the probe contains a certain kind of matter. The dog mimics facts instinctively, I have instincts as well as acquired habits to mimic facts, the scientist consciously and methodically mimics facts: scientific investigation is the intentional adaptation of thoughts to facts.⁷ Like Schopenhauer, Mach argues that humans can overcome the Will. For Mach, science, not the contemplation of art, frees us from the Will. Initially the mimicking and forecasting is only in the service of our well-being. However, mimicking and forecasting can become an end in itself: [Scientific thought] serves practical ends, and first of all the satisfaction of bodily needs. The more vigorous mental exercise of scientific thought fashions its own ends and seeks to satisfy itself by removing all intellectual uneasiness: having grown in the service of practical ends, it becomes its own master. Ordinary thought does not serve purely epistemic purposes [reinen Erkenntniszwecken], and therefore suffers from various defects that at first survive in scientific thought, which is derived from it. Science only very gradually shakes itself free from these flaws. (Mach 1976, 2 [2]; I have changed the translation).⁸

Think of cooking: it is first a means to serve a practical purpose. But now the means has become an end (for some people): they don’t cook to nourish

⁷ Mach (1914, 320 [261]). ⁸ Mach (1914, 37 [29]) argues that even scientific thinking has a biological task and any other task or ideal seems ‘meaningless’.

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themselves and others; they cook in order to cook and because they take pleasure in this activity. According to Mach, scientific thinking can similarly become an end in itself: scientists mimic facts and make forecasts because they want to mimic and forecast facts.⁹ The difference between animal thinking, common sense, and scientific investigation lies therefore in the purpose for which the activity is performed and the control the scientists have over what they do.¹⁰ Scientists don’t do experiments etc. to protect themselves from enemies or find food and mates. Science produces habits of the same kind as the habits nature endowed us with for different purposes. Unlike dogs and cats, scientists can also theorize about their habits. Mach’s psychology of knowledge acquisition is the product of such reflection. Mach faces a problem that is similar to Schopenhauer’s. If our faculties were ‘designed’ by evolution to further our well-being, we can use them for purposes they were not designed for, but because of their inbuilt ‘design features’, they will not yield knowledge of the world as it is independently of any perspective. In addition, we cannot but use our faculties to satisfy our practical needs. Although scientific thought may give up on practical unities such as egos and bodies, we can’t do so when we teach a class or cook a meal or repair a bike. Scientific thought may correct vulgar thought, but unfortunately most corrections cannot change our behaviour. When science has become independent of the Will, it has also become insignificant: The philosophical point of view of the average man if that term may be applied to his naive realism has a claim to the highest consideration. It has arisen in the process of immeasurable time without the intentional assistance of man. It is a product of nature, and is preserved by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished—though we may admit the biological justification of every advance, nay, of every error—is, as compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. (Mach 1914, 37 [30]; my emphasis)

3. Mach’s Ally: Jerusalem’s Voluntarism We have seen that Jerusalem played an important role in the development of German Pragmatism. Jerusalem was in direct contact with Mach during his time in Vienna and he corresponded with him.¹¹ In turn, Mach refers his readers

⁹ See Mach (1914, 314 [256]). ¹⁰ In the final instance a scientific interest is still a mediate biological or practical interest. See Musil (1908, 14) who refers to Mach (1976, 352 [451]). ¹¹ See Jerusalem (1922, 59).

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frequently to Jerusalem’s work in psychology.¹² Jerusalem and Mach share the empiricist/pragmatist orientation, but Jerusalem is not a Neutral Monist.¹³ In contrast to Mach, Jerusalem takes ‘the Will’ to be the individual’s striving to preserve or procreate. This idea is implemented in particular investigations. For example, Jerusalem writes in the foreword to the 1912 re-edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychologie (originally published 1888) that its distinctive feature is ‘the biological approach to mental life’: With respect to all mental processes it is inquired which meaning they have for the survival of the individual and the species. (Jerusalem 1912, v)

As an example of the fruitfulness of the biological approach he lists his treatment of ‘typical’ presentations; something we would now call ‘stereotypes’. There are more or less typical birds, for instance. A typical presentation of Fs contains as marks features of typical Fs. Which are the ‘typical’ features of Fs? Can one determine which features most birds have and collect them in the typical presentation of birds? No, answers Jerusalem: The reason for their development has to be found in biological motives. We have to know about the objects of our environment so much that we can determine our behavior in relation to them. I need to know about the table in my room that it is made from wood, that it is hard and that I can put something on it. (Jerusalem 1912, 100)

A typical presentation of Fs is a presentation of Fs that serves a biological purpose. It is therefore a presentation of those properties of Fs that afford us the satisfaction of some of our biological needs and those that pose threats to us. Jerusalem proposed to study a phenomenon by determining what it contributes to satisfying a biological need, here the survival or well-being of an organism. We get a grip on a phenomenon by getting clear what it does for us with respect to these needs. The guiding assumption that cognition has a purpose brings Jerusalem and Mach close to the American pragmatists. Mach himself refers to James’s article ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ in which James (1879, 319) characterizes a conception as a ‘teleological instrument’. A conception is a property of an object which meets one of our needs. For example, the property of water to quench thirst is one of our conceptions of water. Later the pragmatist Josiah Royce (1900, 308) stressed the purposiveness of cognition: ‘Ideas are like tools. They are there for an end.’ It is therefore unsurprising that Mach’s work is

¹² See, for instance, Mach (1976, 83 [115]).

¹³ See Jerusalem (1922, 77).

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welcomed by James and other pragmatists and James sees himself as a collaborator of Mach.¹⁴ Is every mental faculty and its activities such an instrument? Can every important property of our mental life be understood by seeing it as an economic instrument? Schopenhauer and Mach himself endorsed a negative answer. We can overcome the Will and have a drive for knowledge for its own sake. But it is not clear how according to their views there can be, for instance, knowledge that does not serve the Will. Knowledge seems to be conceived as just those mental states that are apt to satisfy an organism’s biological needs. Hence, only mental states that are apt to serve the needs of an organism can be knowledge. The pragmatist stance imposes a limit on what we can know. This limit does not operate only with respect to common sense but with respect to scientific knowledge. If there is a mental state that is not directly or indirectly (potentially) beneficial for an organism, it is not knowledge. In turn, the constraint that only biologically useful mental states can be cognition is supposed to ground conclusions about what a judgement is. A judgement, Jerusalem will argue, must at least have two terms: it must relate something new to something known. I will look at Jerusalem’s detailed development of this idea in Chapter 11.

4. Constructive Criticism and Synthesis with Criticism: Schlick Jerusalem helps to articulate and defend the idea that cognition is always, roughly put, seeing the new and unknown in the light of the already known. Moritz Schlick is a constructive critic of the way this idea was developed by Mach, Avenarius, and Jerusalem. Schlick is now well-known as the central figure of the Vienna Circle. But it is still worth introducing him in more detail to make clear which role he will play in the coming chapters. Schlick earned a PhD in Physics from the Humboldt University in Berlin where his supervisor was the Nobel prize winner in physics Max Planck. In contrast to Mach and Boltzmann in Austria and von Helmholtz and Planck in Germany, Schlick is not primarily a scientist who brings scientific methodology and theory to bear on philosophy. He is rather a philosopher who has done scientific work and tries to understand scientific knowledge. Between 1908 and 1910 he studied philosophy and psychology in Zurich under the supervision of Gustav Störring. Schlick’s Habilitationsschrift The Nature of Truth in Modern Logic was published in 1910 and constituted with other papers on knowledge the basis of his main work General Theory of Knowledge (1st edition

¹⁴ See Stadler (2017).

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1918, 2nd edition 1925). Quinton takes General Theory of Knowledge to be a philosophical achievement that rivals Russell’s and Moore’s: [A]t a time when Russell had got as far as Mysticism and Logic and Moore to Philosophical Studies, and with the obstructive weight of the German philosophical tradition clogging his heels Schlick produced a lucid, stylish and comprehensive treatise on the whole range of what were for several decades afterwards to be seen as the central questions of philosophy. (Quinton 1985, 410)

Schlick’s General Theory of Knowledge together with his book Space and Time in Contemporary Physics (1917) get him the attention of Hans Hahn and Albert Einstein and earn him the chair in Vienna previously held by Mach.¹⁵ While Schlick like Mach trained as a physicist and wrote a PhD in physics under the supervision of Max Planck, Schlick’s interests are mainly philosophical. He is widely read: in addition to his contemporaries such as Becher, Bergson, Cornelius, Erdmann, Husserl, and Russell, and his nineteenth-century influences (Avenarius, Nietzsche, Mach, and Schopenhauer), he frequently goes back to ancient (Plato) and modern philosophy (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant). The guiding question of Schlick’s article series in the 1910s and his General Theory of Knowledge is what makes a process a process of knowledge acquisition. In his answer he refers the reader back to ‘Avenarius, among others’. Schlick quoted from Avenarius’ Philosophie als Denken der Welt in the following passage: [The integrating] element has already been previously recognized as the essential one—by Avenarius, among others, who says that in apprehending [Begreifen], the mind ‘reduces the unapprehended [Unbegriffene] to something that, as apprehended [Begriffene], is already part of our mental stock [geistiges Besitztum].’ (Schlick 1913, 145 [478])

While Avenarius and Mach are on the right track when isolating the common element in knowledge-acquisition, their core insight needs to be further ‘enlarged and deepened in many respects’ (Schlick 1913, 145 [478]). Schlick’s work on judgement, truth, and cognition aims to develop the basic insight of Mach and Avenarius further. The description of Schlick in the Vienna Circle manifesto seems therefore fitting: [H]e awakened to new life the tradition that had been started by Mach and Boltzmann [ . . . ]. (Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath 1929, 304)

¹⁵ See Friedman (1997, 41).

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But Schlick seeks to improve and enrich this tradition. For while its basic thought is sound, Mach and Avenarius combine it with further, false assumptions. In the following three will be important: First, Mach and Avenarius uncritically assume the existence of intuitive knowledge. But it is impossible to have such knowledge (see section 13.3.4). Second, Mach and Avenarius misconstrue the principle of the economy of thought (see section 12.4). Third, Mach’s ontology posits only elements and functional relations between them. Some functional relations collect the related elements into relatively stable complexes. Schlick argues in General Theory of Knowledge § 26 that ontology cannot dispense with objects that are distinct from elements and complexes of elements (see section 3.9).

If we focus on Schlick’s treatment of these assumptions in his papers in the 1910s and General Theory of Knowledge, Schlick will come across as a critic of Positivism.¹⁶ But given that he agrees with Mach and Avenarius on a fundamental epistemological point, it is more fruitful to see him as a constructive critic that wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in Mach’s and Avenarius’ epistemological views. In his paper ‘Ideality of Space, Introjection and the Psycho-Physical Problem’ (Schlick 1916, 203 [250]) Schlick outlined his ‘big project’: to merge the Positivism of Mach and Avenarius with the Criticism of Alois Riehl into one position. The Positivists Mach and Avenarius must give up their sparse ontology that contains only elements and complexes and accept the Criticist view that there are things in themselves; the Criticist must ‘sacrifice’ the concept of appearance. The resulting position ‘would need to fear no critical attack’ (Schlick 1916, 203 [250]). Schlick’s General Theory of Knowledge tries to make progress with the ‘big synthesis’ especially with respect to knowledge. More in Chapters 12–14.

5. The Road Ahead: Two Terms or One? The Austrian voluntarists take Voluntarism to imply that any judgement has, as they put it, two terms. Judgement is not a propositional attitude, but a relation that bonds at least two terms, mental representations. Why? Because judging is in the service of the Will: it allows us to predict the future by comparing something new, one term, with something known, the second term. In Schlick it also motivates the further claim that judging is applying concepts. I will come back to Schlick’s

¹⁶ See, for example, Lewis (1988). See also Friedman (1983, 500).

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application in Chapter 12. In Chapter 10 I will show that two-term theories of judgement and therefore Voluntarism are in conflict with Brentano’s theory of judgement. Brentano famously presented arguments for the conclusion that judgements can have only one term. If he is right, Voluntarism is wrong. The voluntarist Jerusalem responded to Brentano’s arguments in detail. In Chapters 10 and 11 I will use the debate about judgement as guideline to reconstruct an important strand in the development of Austrian philosophy that connects Avenarius, Mach, Jerusalem, and the synthesist Schlick on the one hand with Brentano and Riehl on the other.

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10 Brentano’s One-Term View of Judgement 1. Introduction In this chapter I will introduce a fundamental issue that is contested between Brentano and the Voluntarists. Can there be judgements that have only one term? Voluntarists say NO, Brentano YES. Voluntarists argue that every judgement must have two terms if the faculty of judgement shall be biologically useful. I will start by setting up Brentano’s view in more detail before moving to his critics Jerusalem, Mach, and later Schlick. Brentano gave an argument based on assumptions about (non-epistemic) perception for the conclusion that there are judgements that have only one term. I think Brentano’s view is still a minority view about judgement. Consider, for example, the influential computer model of the mind according to which a belief is a sentence of the language of thought that is stored in the belief box. Prima facie, we need a complete sentence expressing a proposition to make a judgement. Brentano’s view is so radical that it may even strike one as unintelligible: what could a non-propositional judgement even be? A judgement should be true or false. But how can merely thinking of an object be true or false? Truth and falsity seems to require the application of something to the object thought of. I will make Brentano’s view intelligible and assess the argument that in his own view has the best chances to convince those readers that are not already in the firm grip of the propositional dogma.

2. The Two-Term Dogma Let us start here by reminding ourselves of what Brentano is up against. There is a long tradition that takes a judging to be an activity that operates on several things. An important reference point in this tradition is Aristotle. He defined thinking truly in his Metaphysics as follows: [H]e who thinks the separated to be separated and the combined to be combined has the truth, while he whose thought is in a state contrary to that of the objects is in object. (Metaphysics 1051b3–5; W.D. Ross’s translation.)

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When I think that A is separated from/combined with B, I think truly if, and only if, A is separated from/combined with B. Aristotle’s characterization of truthevaluable thought is very general and very uninformative: we are not told what the two things are, what separation or combination amount to. Yet, it is clear that for our thinking to be true or false it must concern at least two things and represent them as related. Now judging, in a broad sense, is thinking truly or falsely. When I desire or wish, I don’t think truly or falsely. Hence, Aristotle suggests a close connection between truth, judgement, and combining/separating. Aristotle applied the separation/combination model also to speech-acts: Just as some thoughts in the soul are neither true nor false while some are necessarily one or the other, so also with spoken words. For falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation. (De Interpretatione 1, 16a1 10–12; J.L Ackrill’s translation)

In less metaphorical terminology: An affirmation is a statement affirming something of something, a negation is a statement denying something of something. (De Interpretatione 6, 17a1 25–6)

Affirmations are true or false. Truth and falsity have to do with combination and separation. Hence, an affirmation must combine in some sense several things. It does so by referring to something and affirming something of it. Separation is referring to something and denying something of it. Verbs and names make up sentences that are the vehicles of affirmation. But they are simple: they don’t combine or separate something. Hence, they are neither true nor false. Brentano is in most points a faithful follower of Aristotle. However, he took the Aristotelian model of truth-evaluable thinking and saying to embody a mistake that prevented philosophers from making progress. Here is a telling quote from Brentano’s Psychology: It is not [ . . . ] correct to say that there is a combination or separation of presented attributes in all judgements. Acknowledgement and denial are no more always directed toward combinations or connections than desires or aversions are. A single feature which is the object of a presentation can be affirmed or denied, too. (PES, 161 [I, 48–9])

So you can judge without judging that something is a certain way. Truth-evaluable thought does not require combination and separation. It is worth noting the surprising fact that Brentano has an unlikely Neo-Kantian ally: Riehl agreed with Brentano:

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Every judgement contains as its basic component the assertion: it is. This assertion is the expression of the function of judging itself and in comparison with it all other components of a judgement are to be seen as further determinations of it. Because of this it is not essential to judgement to consist of two contentful presentations or even two conceptual presentations. (Riehl 1925, 55)

In Psychology (PES, 212 fn. [II, 54 fn.]) Brentano observes that Aristotle hinted at the right conception of existential judgement in Metaphysics and in De Interpretatione.¹ In Metaphysics Book IX (θ) 10 Aristotle dealt with incomposites that are not combined with anything. How can one judge truly/falsely with respect to them? Judgements pertaining to incomposites are ‘touchings’ of or put us into ‘contact’ with these things, a notion that Brentano renders as ‘perception’: In fact, as truth is not the same in these cases, so also being is not the same; but truth or falsity is as follows—contact and assertion are truth (assertion not being affirmation), and ignorance is non-contact. (Metaphysics 1051b21–5)

In the following section we will see that Brentano will argue for and flesh out the idea that some judgements are ‘contacts’ or ‘touchings’ of things. Another important reference point for the idea that ‘it takes two’ for truthevaluable thinking and saying is Kant. He gives the two-term model of truth-evaluable thought a distinctive twist. Aristotle left open what is combined or separated in truth-evaluable thought. According to Kant, human beings like you and me can only think true or false thoughts by bringing appearances under concepts, general representations. The nature of understanding: consists in thinking everything discursively, i.e. through concepts, hence through mere predicates, among which the absolute subject must always be absent. Consequently, all real properties by which we cognize bodies are mere accidents. (Kant 1783, § 46)

A judgement is therefore a representation of a relation among concepts: in the judgement, e.g. ‘All bodies are divisible,’ the concept of the divisible is related to various other concepts; among these, however, it is here particularly related to the concept of body, and this in turn is related to certain appearances. (Kant 1781/7, B93)

¹ Crivelli (2004, 103–4) gives a Brentano-inspired discussion of this problem for Aristotle.

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A judgement is ‘a function of unity’ (A69/B94) because representing some concepts as related to each other unifies these concepts into something new. The understanding is the faculty of judgement.² There is a surprising convergence between Voluntarists and Kant. Voluntarists give naturalistic grounds for Kant’s view that thinking is discursive. In a judgement one makes something unfamiliar familiar by bringing it under a general representation. I will labour this point in more detail in Chapter 11.

3. Brentano’s Empiricism at Work Brentano pursued psychology from an empirical point of view. A conceptempiricist tries to find the source of a concept or its defining marks if it has any in perception. What does this come to with respect to judgement? Judging is an activity, not a mental state like belief. We can be aware of it. What do we notice when we episodically remember judging and train our attention on it? Brentano answered: It is [ . . . ] true that nothing is an object of judgement which is not an object of presentation, and we maintain that when the object of presentation becomes the object of an affirmative or negative judgement, our consciousness enters into a completely new kind of relationship with the object. This object is present in consciousness in a twofold way, first as an object of presentation, then as an object held to be true or denied, just as when someone desires an object, the object is immanent both as presented and as desired at the same time. (Fn.: It is not that the object is contained in consciousness in duplicate, but that one is concerned with the thing in a twofold way.) This, we maintain, is revealed clearly to us by inner perception and the attentive observation of the phenomena of judgement in memory. (PES, 156 [I, 38–9]; my emphasis)

Consider an example for illustration. After reading stories about a man called Napoleon Bonaparte you have many thoughts ‘about him’. But you are not sure whether there was such a man. Finally, you come to believe in him. Brentano appeals to our episodic memory of such episodes to convince us of three propositions about judgement:

² See Rosenkoetter (2010) for an interpretation of Kant on judgement that takes Kant to reject the thesis that it takes at least two concepts for a judgement. He argues that Kant is close to Brentano in this point.

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A presentation and a judgement can have the same object.

(BJudge2) The judging and presenting are two different ways of being conscious or directed towards an object. (BJudge3) Judging can be positive or negative: it can be an acknowledgement or a rejection. The bone of contention between Brentano and the Voluntarists will be (BJudge1). I can have a presentation of Napoleon without predicating properties to him. According to (BJudge1), my presentation and my acknowledgement of Napoleon can have the same complete object or content, my presentation and judgement only differ in the mode in which they are directed on an object. Hence, there can and will be judgements in which nothing is predicated of an object. Or, in Aristotle’s terminology, there are judgements that are don’t combine or separate elements. Again we can use our episodic recall of conscious perceiving to convince us that there are judgings that are exhaustively described as acknowledgements of objects and events: No one who pays attention to what goes on within himself when he hears or sees and perceives his act of hearing or seeing could be mistaken about the fact that this judgement of inner perception does not consist in the connection of a mental act as subject with existence as a predicate, but consists rather in the simple acknowledgement of the mental phenomenon which is present in inner consciousness. (PES, 110 [I, 201])

When a young child is aware of hearing F, it doesn’t predicate a property such as existence of its hearing.³ The child ‘takes its hearing F to be or to occur’ without ascribing a property to it.⁴ One way to make Brentano’s proposal intelligible is to consider the mental state of believing-in. English has the intensional transitive construction ‘S believes in A’ as well as the propositional one ‘S believes that p’. ‘Believe in’ takes as complements singular terms (‘Santa Claus’), plural terms (‘dwarves’), and mass terms (‘dark matter’). The same distinction can be found in German (‘glauben an’ versus ‘glauben, daß’). Sometimes ‘believe in’ is used to express a positive evaluative attitude (‘I believe in love’), but often we use it to convey our ontological commitments.⁵ Here is a dramatic example that illustrates the ontological use of ‘believe in’:

³ Bergmann (1908, 5) stresses the importance of this notion for Brentano’s view of inner perception. ⁴ Bell (1990, 20) misses this point when he (mis)construes Brentano’s perceptions as ‘acts of taking something to be thus-and-so’. ⁵ See Gendler Szabó (2003, 585) who uses ‘believing in’ as a term of art, but in a way that ‘roughly corresponds to one of its natural English uses-that which places it into the loose class of ontologicallycommittal terms such as “accept” or “acknowledge”.’

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Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit in front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you’re scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday, you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. (Russell Hoban, Fremder)

Gendler Szabó (2003, 591–4) argues that believing that A(s) exists is not the same mental state as believing-in A(s). I will not rehearse his argument here, but simply rely on the reader’s grasp of the concept of belief-in. Acknowledgement of an object is the episodic and factive counterpart to this mental state. If one acknowledges an object, one comes to believe in it such that one cannot be wrong in this belief-in. So far we have not made the notion of non-propositional denial intelligible, but for our purposes this is not necessary. To sum up: Brentano has mapped out a possibility—there are one-term judgings—and appealed to our own awareness of judgings to confirm that this possibility is actual. This appeal to intuition will not convince someone who is in the grip of the propositional/predicational dogma. Can Brentano make plausible that there are one-term judgements?

4. Brentano’s Argument from Perception Brentano claims to have strong evidence for the one-term thesis that does not merely appeal to our awareness of judgement. He presents this in the form of an argument: That predication is not the essence of every judgement emerges quite clearly from the fact that all perceptions are judgements, whether they are instances of knowledge or just mistaken taking to be true [Fürwahrnehmen]. And this is not denied by those thinkers who hold that every judgement consists in a conjunction of subject and predicate. [ . . . ] [I]t is hard to think of anything more obvious and unmistakable than the fact that a perception is not a [connection] of a concept of the subject and a concept of a predicate, nor does it refer to such a connection. Rather, the object of an inner perception is simply a mental phenomenon, and the object of an external perception is simply a physical phenomenon, a sound, odor, or the like. We have here, then, an obvious piece of evidence [augenscheinlichen Beleg] of the truth of our assertion. (PES, 162 [II, 50–1]; in part my translation: ‘augenscheinlicher Beleg’ should not be translated as ‘obvious proof ’. Not every Beleg is a Beweis (proof).)⁶

⁶ See also Stumpf (1919, 36).

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Let us work through Brentano’s Argument from Perception to see whether it is convincing. Brentano’s premises are: 1. All perceptions are judgements. 2. Perception is not a connection of a concept of a subject with a concept of the predicate. 3. Every judgement is a connection of a concept of a subject with a concept of the predicate. 1.–3. are inconsistent. Which thesis should one reject? Brentano keeps 1. and 2. and rejects 3. The rejection of 3. makes a revision of the theory of judgement necessary. In turn, Brentano’s opponents will respond by rejecting 1., while accepting 2. and 3. To break the deadlock we need a different, independent reason to prefer the option that perceiving is judging and one should revise a deeply entrenched view of judgement. Let’s see what happens if one accepts the conclusion that perception is not judgement. The German mathematician and philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) is famous for the ‘Grelling-Nelson paradox’ as well as his claim that epistemology is impossible. Nelson’s pronouncement sounds hyperbolic. But he does not aim to show that epistemology is an impossible undertaking; he argues that there could not be a secure criterion of knowledge. In his argument for this conclusion he discusses sensory cognitions, events in which we acquire knowledge by perceiving something. Nelson’s examples for cognitions that are not judgements are sensory perceptions, in his terminology ‘intuitions’ (Anschauungen). According to Nelson, intuitions are cognitions, but not judgements. Why? To convince ourselves of the existence of cognitions [Erkenntnis] that are not judgments, we need only consider any intuition at all, such as an ordinary sensory perception. For example, I have a sensory perception of the sheet of paper that lies here on the table before me. This perception is, first of all, a cognition [Erkenntnis], not merely a problematic notion. The assertion that is included in this cognition is, however, not a judgment. To be sure, I can also report in a judgment the same circumstances that I here cognize through the perception; but when I judge that a piece of paper is lying before me on the table, that is an altogether different sort of cognition from the perception of this situation. I need concepts for the judgment, e.g. the concept ‘table’, the concept ‘paper’, etc. (Nelson 1912, 598–9; translation Friesian.com.)

For Nelson a mental event can only be a judgement if it involves or is constituted by the application of concepts. My perception of the sheet of paper is a coming to know and we can only acquire knowledge if we, metaphorically speaking, assert

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something. Hence, my perceiving the sheet of paper is an assertion, but not a judgement. Nelson ends up with a new kind of mental act, assertion, of which judgement and perception are sub-kinds. Brentano, in turn, does not need a new mental act, but he revised the view that a mental event can only be a judgement if it involves or is constituted by the application of concepts. Without an independently motivated theory of concepts it is difficult to decide the question which response is preferable. However, it seems to me that we don’t need to decide this question. Both Brentano and Nelson take the argument to establish that there are ‘assertions’ that don’t combine concepts. These assertions do what judgements are supposed to do: they commit the asserter to a course of action, are events in which knowledge is acquired, etc. Brentano invites us to see the important similarities between assertions and judgements and encourages us to extend our notion of judgement by seeing one of the restrictions we have imposed on it as artificial. Let us then look at the crucial premises of the Argument from Perception. I take them in order. First, non-epistemic perception is not predicative: [I]t is hard to think of anything more obvious and unmistakable than the fact that a perception is not a [connection] of a concept of the subject and a concept of a predicate, nor does it refer to such a connection. (PES, 162 [II, 51])

You direct your gaze ahead. You see a scene composed of several things and focus on one, the pen on the table. In this situation it is certainly right to say that you see the pen. It is in the foreground of your perceiving, you perceive also further objects, but don’t attend to them; they are in the background. If we consider how things seem to us in such a perception, Brentano argues that perceiving is not applying a property to something. In perception something, the object in the foreground, looks distinct from other things and you can attend to it. This object may be a coloured expanse as Brentano would hold or a material object. In perception we experience things.⁷ Prima facie, this constitutes a problem for Brentano’s thesis about the objects of perception. For me to see an object it must look some way to me. Does this not require that one predicates something of it? No, it requires that it looks different to its surroundings. The pen may look green while its surroundings are uniformly white. I think in a particular way of the pen, but don’t predicate any property of it.

⁷ Contemporary allies of Brentano are Ayers (2004) and Crane (2009, 464).

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My perception of the pen can be accurate or veridical. Can I perceive an object accurately/veridically or not without the experience predicating properties of the pen? Siegel answers this question negatively: Might something be ‘given’, without having any properties attributed to it by the experience, so that the experience lacks accuracy conditions altogether? (Siegel 2006, 374 fn. 20)

Possession of accuracy conditions requires attribution of properties: the experience is accurate if, and only if, the object has the properties attributed. This argument against Brentano construes veridicality conditions too narrowly. My experience posits an object, but does not characterize it. It is veridical if, and only if, the object posited exists. No attribution of properties to the object of perception is required for the perception to be veridical or not. Second, every non-epistemic perception is a judgement. It is informative to approach this premise via Reid’s theory of perception. We will see why in due course. Consider again your perception of the pen. The pen stands out from its surroundings; it looks different from its surroundings to you and you can train your attention on it. In this situation you will, to use a non-committal phrase, take the pen to be real. You may not know what kind of thing it is, but you cannot fail to take it to be real. This is the plausible core of Reid’s theory of perception. In his words: [I]n perception we not only have a notion more or less distinct of the object perceived, but also an irresistible conviction and belief of its existence. This is always the case when we are certain that we perceive it. There may be a perception so faint and indistinct, as to leave us in doubt whether we perceive the object or not. Thus, when a star begins to twinkle as the light of the sun withdraws, one may, for a short time, think he sees it, without being certain, until the perception acquires some strength and steadiness. (Reid 1785, 97)

For Reid perceiving is a complex mental act. Our senses are belief-forming mechanisms. Under certain conditions, particular sensations cause us to believe that an object exists without further reason. In cases in which we are certain that we perceive something we perceive an object A if, and only if, we believe that A exists, and this belief has been caused by A in the right way. What about cases in which we are not certain that we perceive something? Reid does not answer this question and I will set it aside. Reid’s idea needs also to be refined. A belief is a dispositional mental state that normally endures for a period of time. It is not an episode of conscious thought. A judgement is a conscious mental event that may initiate a belief. When the pencil looks to me a certain way in good light, I will ‘take it to exist’ in the

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judgement sense and thereby come to ‘take it to exist’ in the belief sense. Certainly further necessary conditions about causation etc need to be added. But we can set them aside for our purposes and focus on the ‘irresistible conviction and belief ’ of the object’s existence. Brentano had, I submit, this belief of the object’s existence in mind when he wrote the following:⁸ Because we say not only that we perceive a color, a sound, an act of seeing, an act of hearing, but also that we perceive the existence of an act of seeing or of an act of hearing, someone might be led to believe that perception, too, consists in the acknowledgement [Anerkennung] of the conjunction of the attribute ‘existence’ with the phenomenon in question. Such a misunderstanding of obvious facts seems to me almost inconceivable. (PES, 162–3 [II, 51–2])

Why is the view that perception consists, in part, in judgements (beliefs) of the existence of an object a ‘misunderstanding of obvious facts’? Consider Reid’s own comment on his theory of perception: The belief of the existence of any thing seems to suppose a notion of existence: a notion too abstract perhaps to enter into the mind of an infant. I speak of the power of perception in those that are adult, and of sound mind, who believe that there are some things which do really exist; and that there are many things conceived in themselves, and by others, which have no existence. That such persons do invariably ascribe existence to every thing which we distinctly perceive, without seeking reasons or arguments for doing so, is perfectly evident from the whole tenor of human life. (Reid 1785, 100; my emphasis)

If perceiving involves predicating existence of something, one cannot perceive without possessing the concept of existence. Consequently infants etc. don’t perceive. Reid is happy to accept this consequence. His theory of perception, he claims, is a theory of a power that only mature and rational humans possess. Brentano finds this response incredible. Children and dogs navigate their environment by seeing, touching, and smelling objects. It seems ad hoc and unmotivated to deny them this power. One can try to escape this conclusion by denying that perception involves belief. Reid suggests that his conception of perception only applies to adults who are of sound mind. Someone who is thoroughly confused or deeply depressed may have lost their sense of reality and not trust their senses. Again these people perceive objects in their environment, yet they don’t form beliefs. In the light of

⁸ Brentano knew Reid’s work in detail, see his R.

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such counterexamples Pelser recommended to replace ‘believe that x exists’ with ‘construal’: In the language of recent defenders of phenomenal conservatism, construals are a subclass of propositionally structured ‘appearances’ or ‘seemings’. (Pelser 2010, 370)

A construal seems to lack ‘assertoric force’, but has a propositional structure. If part of its propositional structure is the concept of existence, the envisaged repair of Reid’s theory does not move things forward very much. Children still can’t perceive because they can’t construe that x exists on the basis of an appearance. A frequent response to prima facie cases of perception without belief is that the subject would have a belief if there were not a factor blocking the belief. Someone who has a perceptual experience as of a pencil in his visual field is in a mental state that would be a belief if the impeding background beliefs were undercut: A perceptual state does not become a belief by the addition of anything, but only by the elimination of what impedes its intrinsic doxastic force. Because of this we can, as Pitcher stresses, be phenomenologically aware of them as thus potent. (Smith 2001, 291)

So seeing something requires being disposed to take something to exist where this disposition is only due to how things look to one. This response allows us to say that people who have lost their sense of reality or who have reason to believe that their senses deceive them perceive objects. They don’t form beliefs, but are still disposed to do so when certain blocking factors are removed. Even if we take perceiving x to be, in part, the acquisition of the disposition to form the belief that x exists, children and dogs are still not able to perceive. Like any disposition a disposition to form a belief is individuated by its manifestations. The manifestations of the disposition under consideration are supposed to be beliefs. If these beliefs are beliefs that something x exists, then children and dogs cannot have the dispositions in question. The same problem arises for other proposals to modify the belief condition. For example, one may hold that any perceiving is a judging, but that sometimes a judging is not the initiation of a state of belief. When I have a misleading reason to doubt that my senses are working properly, while they do, I may perceive the pencil on my table and judge it to exist, yet the judgement is not the acquisition of belief. As soon as I bring my belief about my senses to bear my disposition to repeat my judgement is either blocked or extinguished. Everyone who takes seriously the intuition that perceiving has doxastic force and holds that judgement and belief that something exists are propositional attitudes whose content contains the concept of existence faces the problems

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discussed: implausibly, only beings who possess the concept of existence can perceive objects. Brentano addressed this problem. We already know that judgements of inner perception consist ‘in the simple acknowledgement of the mental phenomenon which is present in inner consciousness’ (PES, 110 [I, 201]). If believing in A (acknowledging A) is not believing that A exists (acknowledging that A exists), yet we take these attitudes as ontologically committing, this commitment is independent of the propositional content of the act or state. This makes it plausible that the commitment is due to the psychological mode in which one thinks of A when one acknowledges or believes in it. As Kriegel puts it: [On Brentano’s view], to think that Obama exists is to represent-as-existent Obama. The content of the thought is thus exhausted by Obama. Existence does not come into the thought at the level of content, but at the level of attitude. (Kriegel 2015, 87)

An independent example of commitment in virtue of attitude mode is propositional judgement.⁹ On pain of vicious regress not all commitments to the truth of a proposition p can be a matter of content, that is, represent p as being true or as falling under the concept of truth. For representing p as true in this way is just thinking a more complex thought, the thought that p is true. Hence, the question whether we have committed us to the truth of this distinct thought arises again. Consequently, there must be one way to commit oneself to p’s being true which does not bring p under the concept of truth. It must be a matter of attitude mode and not of attitude content. Similarly, ontological commitment is a matter of attitude mode and not of attitude content. If ‘taking an object to be’ is a matter of attitude mode and not of applying a concept to something, thinkers who don’t possess the concept of existence can take something to be. This allows, to use Reid’s example, perceiving a ship to be a ‘taking a ship to be’. One has an attitude directed towards the ship and that attitude has a particular mode, but does not predicate anything of the ship. In order to support this view of judgement one needs to say more about the mode of thinking. I have tried to do so in other publications.¹⁰ If we assume for the purpose of the argument that ‘attitude mode’ can be characterized further, Brentano has made a good case for the existence of judgements that only involve one term. The assumption of such judgements allows us to solve a problem in the theory of perception. Hence, ‘one-term’ judgements start to look attractive.

⁹ For the following see Frege (1892, 217 [35–6]).

¹⁰ See, for example, Textor (2017c).

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5. Brentano against the Two-Term Prejudice If Brentano is right, we are all in a position to convince ourselves that judging is a conceptually primitive way of thinking of an object that need not involve any complexity by attending to our first-person knowledge of this mental phenomenon. But while we all should be inclined to accept it, the opposite is true. When considering judgements, philosophers are inclined to reject (BJudge1), even if they accept (BJudge2) and (BJudge3). A good example is Mill who wrote in a letter to Brentano: 1. I agree with you that Belief is the essential constituent in a Differentia of judgment, and that the putting together of two ideas is merely a prerequisite or antecedent condition. 2. I cannot, however, think that one idea is a sufficient prerequisite for a judgment. I cannot see how there can be Belief without both a subject and a predicate. If you say that the idea of an elephant suffices for belief in an elephant, belief in an elephant can only mean belief that there is such a thing as an elephant—that an elephant exists: or, in other words, that under some circumstances, and in some place known or unknown, I should perceive by my senses a thing answering the definition of an elephant. Now this, which is the truth really believed, is a fact, in two terms, not in one only. Existence, that is capacity, in some circumstances really to be found in Nature, of being seen or felt, is a real conception [or?] Idea and a real predicate. I therefore do not think that your modification of the received theory of judgment is sustainable. [ . . . ] (Mill 1872, 1928–9)

Why can’t Mill and others ‘see the light’? What blocks acceptance of the oneterm view of judgement? Brentano’s answer is that there are ‘prejudices that are rooted in habit’ which either prevent us from attending properly or undermine the justification of the belief we acquire in this way.¹¹ These prejudices are engendered and stabilized by language. For if we want to express a judgement in a language like English we need to use expressions composed out of several words. Why? Although the expression of judgement is the chief end of linguistic communication, this very fact strongly suggests that the simplest form of expression, the individual word, should not be used by itself for this purpose. But if it were used by itself as the expression of the presentation on which both members of the pair of judgements are based, and if a double form of flexion or two kinds of stereotyped little words (such as ‘is’ and ‘is not’) were then added in order to

¹¹ See DP, 43 [41].

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express the judgements, this simple device would save one’s memory half the effort, for the same word would be used in both the affirmative and the corresponding negative judgements. Besides that, by omitting these supplementary signs you have the advantage of possessing a pure and isolated expression for another class of phenomena, presentations. (PES, 228 [II, 74–5])

Suppose somebody utters only one word, e.g. ‘Napoleon’. Brentano holds that one can acknowledge or reject (deny) an object. If we know this, the one-word utterance leaves open whether a positive or a negative judgement is expressed. To resolve that issue, we need to add something that distinguishes the expression of a negative from the expression of a positive judgement. According to Brentano, this is the raison d’être of ‘is’ and ‘is not’. If we cannot express judgements without these verbs, i.e. by uttering mere words like ‘Napoleon’, such words can’t express judgements, but only presentations.¹² Brentano shows that without further reason one can’t infer from ‘Every linguistic expression of a judgement contains at least two words’ that every judgement combines at least two things. The additional word, he suggests, doesn’t represent some things that are connected in the judgement with others, but tells us something about its mode. We have then an explanation for our misapprehension of the nature of judging: Accordingly, the view arose that judgement itself must also be a composite, and, of course, since the majority of words are names and names express presentations—a composite of presentations. (PES, 178 [II, 75])

One error engenders another error: And once this was established, we seemed to have a characteristic which distinguished judgement from presentation, and no one felt called upon to investigate further whether this could be the whole difference between them, or even whether the difference between them could possibly be understood in this way. Taking all this into account, we can explain quite well why the true relationship between two fundamentally different classes of mental phenomena remained concealed for such a long time. (PES, 178 [II, 75])

If every judging is a composite of two or more presentations, this suggests that the difference between the mental act of presenting and the mental act of judging lies in this fact alone. Presenting can be simple, judgings can’t. One makes progress in understanding judgement by investigating this difference.

¹² See also Marty (1884–1895, 21–2).

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How can one overcome the prejudice engendered by the linguistic expression of judgement? One antidote is to argue that while all sentences that can be used with assertoric force are composed of several words, the composition of the sentence out of words is not a picture of the way a judgement is composed out of presentations. Two kinds of sentences are important in this respect. First, existence sentences. Does an assertion of the sentence ‘God exists’ express a judgement in which the presentation of God is combined with a distinct second idea? No: In the Middle Ages, St. Thomas came as close as Kant to the truth, remarkably enough by reflecting upon the same proposition, ‘God exists’. According to him, the ‘is’ is not a real predicate but merely a sign of affirmation (Summa Theologica, P. I, Q. 3, A. 4 ad 2). (PES, 164 [II, 53])

Second, subjectless sentences. When I utter with assertoric force the sentence ‘It is raining’, the sentence I use is composed out of three words, but only one seems to express a presentation: ‘raining’. The pronoun ‘it’ is only added for grammatical reasons; without it there would be no grammatical sentence of English. But it is not a semantically significant unit that contributes a constituent, a presentation, to what someone says who utters ‘It is raining’ with assertoric force. In such sentences one cannot distinguish expressions that represent two or more things as combined or separated. Strawson (1959, 202–9) coined a suggestive term for the statement one can make by means of such a sentence. They are feature-placing statements. One places the feature raining, but the feature is neither combined with nor separated from anything. Brentano and especially Marty discussed feature-placing statements in detail to support their view of judgement. Brentano not only tries to train us not to project the complexity of a sentence on the judgement that one can express by means of it. He also argues that the suggestion that the distinction between a judgement and a presentation lies in the fact that the former is complex is theoretically unfruitful: it does not shed any light on the distinction under consideration. When I judge that dragons are either dangerous or tame, I don’t judge that dragons are dangerous, but my thinking combines several presentations. So why take the difference between judging and presenting to lie in the fact that one can distinguish more than one presentation in some judgements?

6. Summary Brentano gave his readers a reason to discard the philosophical view that truthevaluable thought must combine several presentations. One can think of an object

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in such a way that one is committed to its existence without bringing it under concepts or ascribing properties to it. The existence-committing character of the attitude is due to its mode, not to, as contemporary philosophers would put it, content. In the next chapter we will see whether Voluntarists have good arguments against Brentano’s heterodox view of judgement.

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11 Judgement in the Service of the Will: Mach and Jerusalem 1. Mach: Memory, Judgement, and Well-Being In Chapter 10 we have seen that Brentano made a good case for the existence of judgements that are simply acknowledgements of objects. Such acknowledgements don’t predicate something of the object they acknowledge. Brentano’s conclusion clashes not only with traditional ‘synthetic’ conceptions of judgement, but also with those of the Voluntarists Mach and Jerusalem. Let’s start with Mach. He made suggestive remarks about judgement which also point to the conclusion that a judgement relates at least two terms. Let’s make this clear by what Mach considers to be the elementary inner (non-verbal) judgement: Memory is always prepared to present known facts which are similar to the new one, that is, share certain marks with it, for comparison and enables in this way the elementary inner judgement which is soon followed by the verbalized one. Comparison, in enabling us to communicate in the first place, is at the same time the most powerful life element of science. The zoologist sees fingers in the bones of the flying membrane of the bat . . . (Mach 1894, 238–9 [266]; translation modified, emphasis in German original.)

The animal sees in the rind the fruit or in the toadstool the poison, the zoologist sees in bat bones fingers. What does this mean? The perception of the rind causes the animal to episodically remember objects already encountered that are similar to the one perceived. For example, it will cause memory images of objects like the rind and these will trigger further associations like tendencies to act in a suitable way. The comparison is not a conscious act, but rather the exercise of a disposition: a perception is associated with episodic memories and memory images. What is the judgement here? The elementary inner judgement is supposed to be enabled by the comparison. Is the elementary inner judgement the realization that this object is like those ones which were encountered before? This seems to demand too much of the animal which is already supposed to possess instinctive knowledge. Is the inner judgement simply the onset of the disposition to act upon this object in ways that lead to the satisfaction of the animal’s desires when it acted

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before upon things relevantly similar to this object? Mach does not clearly say. However, in either case judgement is enabled by comparison and relates either in thought or in action a new object with objects already encountered. All judgements either register comparisons or correct things we have stored in memory: The whole operation is a mere affair of economy. In the reproduction of facts, we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with bevelled edges, expressions involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken. All judgements are such supplementations [Ergänzungen] and corrections of ideas already admitted. (Mach 1883a, 483 [455]; my emphasis)¹

Why do we describe something that is not a cube as a cube with bevelled edges? Because it allows us to keep the stock of fundamental shapes small. We don’t need a new kind of shape. We keep things simple by discovering the familiar in the unfamiliar. The ‘natural instinct’ for economy is exercised in every judgement. We see familiar things in the unfamiliar ones we encounter—the perception triggers memory images—or we intentionally compare and liken an object to some we already know. This allows us to bring already known facts to bear on unfamiliar objects. Now neither Mach nor the authors influenced by him have a conception of judgement as a propositional attitude, that is, as an attitude with a propositional content. But on Mach’s conception of judgement, every judgement either is or presupposes the exercise of at least two abilities, namely to think of one kind of object and to think of another already known kind of object. Now, consider a simple model of predication: An act of predication, in the simplest case, is an act of sorting an object with other objects according to a rule determined by a property. To predicate the property of being green of an object x is to sort x with other green things. (Hanks 2013, 560)

The rule according to which we sort in elementary judgement is not an explicitly known or formulated rule, but an animal can act according to such a rule: if the perception of a triggers memory images of b, c, d, sort a with these things. Hence, it is natural to view Mach as conceiving of elementary judgements as predications: one thing is sorted with already known objects for a purpose. In his discussion of judgement Mach focuses on the question what judging must be like to serve the Will. He does not explicitly address a question that was of ¹ See also Mach (1882, 201/2 [230]).

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interest to philosophers from Hume onwards, namely: What distinguishes judgement from merely entertaining a thought? Mach is clear about how judgement and presentation are not distinguished. He wrote with reference to Brentano: I find myself unable to favour the view that belief is a special mental act at the basis of judgement and constituting its essence. Judgements are not a matter of belief, but naïve findings. It is rather that belief, doubt, unbelief rest on judgements about agreement or disagreement between often very complicated complexes of judgements [Urteilskomplexen]. (Mach 1976, 90 fn. [115 fn. 2]; in part my translation)

Mill and sometimes following him Brentano call ‘belief ’ the distinctive psychological mode in which one thinks of something if one takes it to be real or acknowledges it. They don’t hold that a belief is a mental act that is the foundation (in some sense of ‘foundation’) of judgement. In fact, they don’t say much about the mental state of belief at all. Hence, Mach’s comment seems misplaced. I am also unsure what Mach has in mind with ‘naïve findings’. Neither is Brentano, who writes in a brief commentary on the passage from Knowledge and Error: As expected he [Mach] completely misjudges the nature of belief as distinct from presentation. (OM, 54; my translation)

However, Mach’s example suggests that belief consists in a disposition to act: upon perceiving the specific way the toadstool looks, we are disposed to act in a way that was beneficial when we dealt with things similar to the toadstool in the past. Let’s take stock: in effect, Mach proposed an empiricist reconstruction of predication. A judgement is always a mental relation between at least two representations. It implies that in the simplest case a judgement has two terms: something which is grouped with known things and a presentation of known objects. The connection between the two presentations is causal. Mach’s two-term view of judgement puts him in opposition to Brentano. My perceptions warrant or, if Brentano is right, are existential judgements. But these judgements are not enabled by comparisons nor do they sort a new object with familiar ones. When we perceive something we are already committed to it; there is no effort saved by determining it as existent. The same goes for consciousness. In consciousness we acknowledge mental events and processes without sorting them into groups or kinds. Consciousness of our mental life seems not to be in the service of the Will, it has no predictive power. So Mach’s rationale does not apply to this kind of knowledge.

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According to Brentano, there is also an internal problem with Mach’s twotermism. Mach takes sensory experiences to be subject to adaptive pressure. One sensory experience can cause different thoughts that predict different events that can’t both take place.² In this case the predications ‘block’ each other and no actions ensue. Further mental representations are needed to remove the block and thereby the presentations are adapted to the facts. Brentano takes Mach to describe adaptation incorrectly: The desire for adaptation to the facts demands an adaptation of the presentations to each other. Now it is not really an adaptation of the presentations, but we are concerned with an adaptation of acknowledging and denying of whose nature he [Mach] has no understanding at all. (OM, 69)

For a sensory presentation to be relevant for prediction and action planning it must have ‘assertoric force’. If, for example, a presentation were a kind of imagining, it might give rise to a number of thoughts about the objects of presentations that can guide action. But no action takes place because the initial presentation lacks assertoric force. If this is right, Mach’s two-term view of judgement presupposes a one-term view of judgement. Mach’s view combines a one-term view of judgement with a view of beneficial habits to form further representations on the basis of acknowledgements of objects. In sum: Mach’s view of judgement seems to presuppose Brentano’s view of judging as acknowledging objects. If there are one-term judgements, their biological purpose can’t be to make the unfamiliar familiar. Hence, a basic assumption of Mach’s and Avenarius’ philosophy comes under pressure. For example, if our basic judgements are one-termed while there are predicative judgements in science, there is no continuity between our animal nature and science. Avenarius’ least expenditure principle that cognition aims to save intellectual expenditure would have no biological foundation (see section 3.3). If Mach wants to hold on to a least expenditure principle he needs to engage Brentano’s arguments. However, as already remarked upon Mach simply ignored Brentano’s work and never responded to Brentano’s objections. But Mach’s associate Wilhelm Jerusalem stepped in for Mach and set out to refute Brentano in his Urteilsfunktion. Jerusalem accepts the general view that our mental life is in the service of the Will and uses this view as the basis of a direct onslaught on the fundamentals of Brentano’s philosophy with a focus on Brentano’s view of judgement. In the next section I will assess Jerusalem’s arguments.

² See Mach (1976, 121 [166]).

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2. Jerusalem’s Urteilsfunktion Jerusalem published Die Urteilsfunktion in 1895. The book was widely read, reviewed in leading philosophy journals, and controversially discussed.³ It is worth engaging with because Jerusalem formulated criticisms of Brentano that Avenarius’ and Mach’s work left unarticulated.⁴ For Jerusalem, judgement is the philosophically most important mental act: It seems to me [ . . . ] that the psychology of the act of judgement is the ground and presupposition of the complete theoretical philosophy. (Jerusalem 1895, 2)

Why? Because every cognition, Jerusalem submits, takes the form of judgement.⁵ If we want to understand cognition in general and scientific cognition in particular and ground logic and epistemology in psychology, we need a study of judgement. More precisely, we need to uncover which relations obtain between judgement and other mental acts and what the constituents of judgement are. Jerusalem’s general project is to provide a psychological grounding for epistemology and logic, that is, to show how logic and epistemology can be reduced to special branches of psychology. I will set this general project aside for the purposes of this chapter and focus on his theory of judgement that serves it. In outlining his project Jerusalem assumes that judging is a complex activity: an act of judgement is supposed to be composed out of different prior activities that are exercised together. Jerusalem frequently writes that a judgement ‘arises out of a synthesis of different elements’.⁶ This assumption and his general philosophical outlook put him in opposition to Brentano’s theory of judgement. In Die Urteilsfunktion Jerusalem goes on to develop three arguments against Brentano’s view of judgement as a non-propositional and conceptually primitive attitude: The Circularity Argument, The Linguistic Articulation Argument, and The Argument from the Judgement Function. In the following sections I will look at all three. To anticipate: I will argue that Brentano can escape Jerusalem’s arguments. But working through the arguments will help to bring Brentano’s view into focus and The Argument from the Judgement Function is worth considering for independent reasons. Jerusalem is the first author I know of who suggests that there are question-directed attitudes and feelings that are satisfied in judgings.

³ Both The Philosophical Review and Mind devoted in 1896 critical notices to it. Husserl’s review of Die Urteilsfunktion is scathing. The basic idea of Die Urteilsfunktion, says Husserl, is of ‘a barely comprehensible naivety’ (Husserl 1903, 218). ⁴ See Uebel (2012, 13) for the background of Jerusalem’s view of judgement. ⁵ See Jerusalem (1895, 1). ⁶ See Jerusalem (1895, 17).

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3. Jerusalem’s Circularity Argument against Brentano’s Judgement Primitivism Brentano takes judging to be a phenomenon that can be studied fruitfully by paying attention to one’s own judgements in episodic memory. Jerusalem’s book title Die Urteilsfunktion suggests an alternative approach in line with Mach’s view that mental activities serve a biological function. Judgements have a function for the organism that makes them. They satisfy a need and understanding judging is understanding what this need is and how judgements can satisfy it. Jerusalem will argue that their function requires (i) that judgements are metaphysically complex—they are the joint exercises of different faculties—and (ii) that they articulate or form a manifold of ideas and therefore relate several things to each other. Both (i) and (ii) support Mach and contradict Brentano’s theory of judgement. In sections 11.5–6 I will argue that even if we assume that judging has a function, this assumption entails neither (i) nor (ii). But Jerusalem also argues against Brentano on independent grounds. I will begin with this argument. Jerusalem gives a concise account of Brentano’s Judgement Primitivism: Judging means acknowledging or rejecting a presented content. This acknowledging or rejecting is a primary act which can only be understood by appeal to everyone’s inner experience. (Jerusalem 1895, 67)

While Jerusalem properly expounds Judgement Primitivism his objection to it misses the mark. He answers the question ‘What is “acknowledging”?’ by saying: We have no other choice but to equate the term ‘acknowledging’ with ‘to take to exist’. [ . . . ] Judging would then mean as much as taking a presented content to exist or not to exist. If this shall be an explanation of the nature of the act of judgement, one has to say before clearly and distinctly, what one means by existence. (Jerusalem 1895, 68)

And, Jerusalem continues, Brentano holds that one cannot say what one means by ‘existence’ without invoking right judgements: correct acknowledgements of objects. Hence, Brentano moves in a tight circle. The response here is straightforward. There is no definitional circle because judgement is the fundamental notion on the basis of which existence is defined. Jerusalem wrongly assumes that ‘acknowledging’ is explained as ‘taking to exist’. Brentano’s view is that one can direct people to the right notion, but not explain it, by saying that in a judgement ‘one takes something to exist’. The nature of judgement cannot be explained at all, one needs to be aware of one’s judgements in order to come to know the nature of judgement by attending to one’s judgings.

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Brentano can therefore claim that the concept of existence can be defined by appeal to the conceptually primitive notion of judgement; whereas, the notion of existence or reality can be used to help to attend to judgement, but not to define it. Jerusalem’s criticism does not refute, but simply illustrates, Judgement Primitivism.

4. The Token Complexity Thesis and the Linguistic Articulation Argument Jerusalem presents two further arguments intended to show that Brentano’s Judgement Primitivism is false. One target of these arguments is the Primitivism in Judgement Primitivism. Brentano’s judgement and Mill’s belief, says Jerusalem, are not simple: [T]his ‘believing’ is neither something simple, nor identical with the act of judgement. (Jerusalem 1895, 14)

In which sense is judging not ‘something simple’? Judging, Jerusalem argues, consists in the exercise of several distinct powers: Judging is a process that consists of elements of presentation, feeling and willing. (Jerusalem 1895, 15)

It is unclear whether this is meant as a token identity theory of judgement—for every judging there are activities of the will, feeling, and the ability to present things such that the former is identical with a combination of the latter—or a type identity theory—the activity of judging is nothing but the activity that consists of the coordinated activities of the will, feeling, and the ability to present things. Since the Token Complexity Claim is weaker and therefore more plausible I will assess now whether Jerusalem gives us a good reason to accept it. Jerusalem supports the Token Complexity Claim with two arguments. The first argument is the Linguistic Articulation Argument. It can be glossed as follows: A particular judging cannot be a simple mental activity. For it must involve imagining saying a sentence and activities associated with such a saying.

Why should one believe Jerusalem’s premise? I believe to have shown that if one abstracts from the linguistic expression of an act of judgement nothing remains which deserves to be called ‘judgement’. (Jerusalem 1895, 17)

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And why is that? Your perceiving a rose triggers at the same time mental pictures, feelings, imaginations. Some of these mental activities are associated with a ‘silent’ utterance of the word ‘rose’ and are thereby collected together. The presentations of words serve as attractors for other presentations and bind them together. Without words as ‘attractors’ for presentations, there is nothing that binds some mental pictures, feelings, and imaginings together. If some mental presentations are bound by one word, there is a division in the totality of ideas that are activated by a perception. At the same time the binding stops the process of activating new ideas via further associations. If the presentations of words have attracted the available perceptions, feelings, etc. and there is nothing more to attract, attraction stops: We are provisionally finished with [the process] and precisely this concluding feature of the act of judgement prohibits one to take it [judgement] as an association. (Jerusalem 1895, 82)

Jerusalem’s argument is based on a plausible idea: judgement puts an end to a chain of associations. Jerusalem tries therefore to shed light on judgement by detailing how a train of associations can come to an end. In this description presentations of words play an essential role. Without presentations of words, there would be no attractors of presentations that can stop a train of association. Hence, without linguistic expressions judgements cannot be made. From Jerusalem’s perspective the first premise seems plausible. Jerusalem adds to this explanation the assumption that common sense conceives of the world as divided into things that have powers (Kraftcentren) and activities that are the exercises of these powers. Consider his example of judging that a tree is blossoming. You judge that the tree is blossoming if the ideas of tree, power, and blossoming have been bound together and your current ideas are thereby articulated in different groups representing the power centre and one of its exercises: In the judgement the whole complex of presentations, the unarticulated process is formed and articulated by presenting the tree as a unified being with powers that currently exercises these powers by blossoming. The function of judging is therefore not a separating and combining, but consists in articulating and forming presented contents. The tree of the judgement is in the judgement presented as a center of forces that is independent of the judger and the blossoming is grasped as his activity. In the judgement we put the power of blossoming into the tree. Thereby the process is extracted from the connection with the stock of my ideas, it is isolated and so to say closed for [erledigt] consciousness. (Jerusalem 1895, 82)

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The judgement that the tree is blossoming is a representation of the blossoming as an exercise of the power of the tree. Jerusalem’s addition of the power centre view seems unwarranted and implausible. We make judgements in which we attribute categorical properties to objects. When I judge that the tile is square I don’t represent the tile as a power centre and squareness as an exercise of one of its powers. The property of being square is not the exercise of a power. However, the power centre thesis seems not to be essential to Jerusalem’s theory of judgement. Jerusalem’s basic hypothesis is that a process of association must be brought to a standstill by something that attracts ideas. But why the attractor should be the idea of a power centre remains unclear. I will set Jerusalem’s addition therefore aside. If we accept Jerusalem’s premise, he has given us a reason to assume that there are processes that result in a judgement—the conclusion of a train of associations—but he has not given us any reason to assume that this result is itself complex. There is a causal mechanism that brings association to a standstill, but why should the event of coming to a standstill have the factors that figure in the mechanism as constituents? Let us also set this question aside. Jerusalem goes on to connect his conclusion that judgement is the articulation of a manifold of associated ideas into ideas of a centre and its activities to Brentano’s description of judgement. This further step is the most important for our purposes. For it is supposed to deliver the anti-Brentanian result that, necessarily, every judgement is an articulation of a manifold into at least two parts. A judging or acknowledging is nothing but finishing a train of association and articulating some presentations. Here is the further step in the argument: Simultaneously with the articulation and forming happens in judgement what the English call ‘belief ’ and the school of Brentano ‘acknowledgement’. The tree is put forth in judgement as something that exists independently of me and thereby in a way external to the presentation and objectified. (Jerusalem 1895, 82)

Hence, there can be no judgings that only acknowledge an object (and nothing else). This brings Jerusalem to his conclusion: My conception of the act of judgement implies that I take two-termedness [Zweigliedrigkeit] to be an essential property of it. The opposite view put forth by Brentano and Hume will be considered when discussing impersonal and existential statements. (Jerusalem 1895, 84)

However, Jerusalem’s premise: Every articulating of some ideas is simultaneous with an acknowledging

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does not imply the intended conclusion that, necessarily, every judgement has at least two terms. Distinct acts may happen simultaneously; the acts can be different in type and complexity. The articulating can constitute a form of complexity, while the simultaneous, but distinct acknowledging accepts an object. Even if the acknowledging happened because of the articulating or the articulating is necessary for the acknowledging, it does not follow that the acknowledging has the same constituents as the forming. Only if we make the stronger assumption: Every articulating of some ideas is identical with an acknowledging

can we conclude that, necessarily, every judging has at least two terms. On this reading, Jerusalem tries to reduce acknowledging to the naturalistically more acceptable articulating. When making a judgement we no longer merely associate ideas with further ideas: a judging stops the process of association. The process of association is stopped when the words have bound the activated ideas. The judgement is nothing but the binding of ideas to words and the binding of ideas to words is nothing but the articulating of the ideas. By transitivity of identity we get that the judgement is nothing but the articulation of ideas into ideas of a power centre and its activities. Jerusalem’s attempt to show that judging is metaphysically complex is suggestive, but fraught with problems.⁷ First, it simply begs the question against Brentano in assuming that judging implies an articulation of simultaneous ideas into different groups. This is just the question to be decided. If we take ‘subjectless’ statements like ‘It is raining’, the words of these statements don’t bind different groups of ideas together. Especially they don’t bind them into ideas of a power centre and ideas of activities of such a centre. Did Jerusalem fail to see this problem? No, in his previous book Lehrbuch der Psychologie he argued that such sentences have a subject: The subject is the spatio-temporal environment of the speaker. This is designated in German by ‘it’, in Latin and Greek only by the ending of the verb. (Jerusalem 1912, 116; the first edition was published in 1888.)

But if ‘it’ designated the environment of the speaker, the judgement that it is raining would amount to the judgement that the environment is raining. Maybe it is raining in the environment, but the environment is not raining. The German ‘es’ in the nominative case is just a grammatical filler, not, as Jerusalem holds, a singular term in subject position. Hence, assuming that there are no judgings without the utterance of a subject-predicate sentence is false.

⁷ See Husserl (1903, 220).

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Second, Jerusalem ignores the possibility that many things are acknowledged together without prior organization and division. This is a live option for Brentano. His student and editor of Psychologie Kraus summed this up in his introduction to Psychologie: By ‘inner perception’ Brentano understands a ‘secondary consciousness’ that is inseparable from and directed upon our total ‘primary consciousness’ and at the same time on itself. (Introduction to Brentano 1924 I, lxxxv; my translation and emphasis)

We are simultaneously aware of many mental acts; the secondary object is the totality of them and all of them are acknowledged together. Third, the thesis that the completion of the process of sorting ideas into groups is judging is implausible. Consider a thinker who has only a limited stock of ideas that can be grouped. If the grouping is completed, there may be structured mental representation, but why should the completion be a judgement? There is just no more material to be bound. Judging that a is F is one thing, grouping or binding the ideas of a and F together is another. Fourth, even if we agree that judging requires attractors that bind the simultaneously occurring feelings, perceptions, and willing into larger groups, why do the attractors need to be words of a natural language? Other things may serve as attractors if all that is required is that the attractor stands in relations of association to events of different psychological types. In sum, the Linguistic Articulation Argument is unconvincing.

5. The Argument from the Function of Judgement Jerusalem’s second argument for the thesis that every judging is metaphysically complex is based on the core assumptions of the biological approach to cognition. Jerusalem builds on August Döring’s theory of goods. I will start by introducing the necessary background. For every organism there are conditions that need to be satisfied for it to persist. Döring calls such conditions requirements (Erfordernisse). Unfulfilled requirements that are signalled to the organism by mental phenomena are needs (Bedürfnisse). The feeling of hunger, for example, is a mental phenomenon that makes us aware of an unfulfilled requirement; the requirement is therefore a need.⁸ The feeling of pain

⁸ See Döring (1888, 99–100).

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makes us aware of the unfulfilled requirement that our body parts are in good working order: another need. Döring distinguishes between formal and material needs. Our capacities need exercise. My muscles atrophy if they are not exercised.⁹ Hence, it is a requirement that my muscles are exercised. Such a requirement for the exercise of a capacity or faculty is a formal or functional requirement. The same goes for mental capacities. They will wane and waste away if not exercised. One such functional need gives Jerusalem’s book its title: the judgement function. We have a need to exercise our faculty of judgement in making judgements. Feelings make us aware of the fact that functional requirements are satisfied or unsatisfied. The feeling of sluggishness makes me aware that my capacity for movement is in need of exercise. Similarly, there is an experience of the unfulfilled formal requirement for mental exercise: the feeling of boredom.¹⁰ The experience that signals satisfaction of the formal requirement is interest. Jerusalem (1895, 88) defines interest as the pleasure one takes in the satisfaction of mental formal needs. Jerusalem (1895, 88) formulated within this framework of mental formal requirements and their experienced satisfaction an argument against Brentano. The primary conclusion is that judgements satisfy a formal mental need. From the primary conclusion Jerusalem hopes to arrive at two further conclusions: first, that the distinctive judgement mode is a combination of other modes; and second, that every judging is a forming and dividing of a manifold of ideas. The argument is contained in a detailed description of an example: Imagine yourself on the top of a mountain from where you have a beautiful view to many other mountain tops. One can imagine a spectator who gives himself completely to the visual sensory impression which the mountain shapes, the snowfields and the glaciers make. His mental functional needs will, then, be satisfied by the presentation alone. But much more often it will happen that we aim to determine how this or that mountain top is called, in which area it is located; especially if we enjoy the same view more often, we will not be satisfied by seeing alone. Our interest will be awakened, and we will be prompted to make judgements and call out, for instance: this is snow; this is the Dachstein; there is the peak of the Grossglockner; what is the name of the mountain under there. Our interest has been excited and the need for intellectual occupation [Beschäftigung] can only be satisfied by judgements. The questions that obtrude on us are the expression of the functional need [Funktionsbedürfniss], but they show by means of their form that judgements are expected and demanded. In

⁹ Döring (1888, 126).

¹⁰ Döring (1888, 128–9). I simplify here for purposes of exposition.

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most cases only through them is our need satisfied and one could even go as far to say that the interest be the pleasure in judging [Lust am Urteilen]. But how does the judgement satisfy the need? First, by the fact that it is an activity, an exercise of inner powers and not merely, as the presentation, a being affected [Affiziertwerden], but then mainly by concluding the process prompted by the presentation and by giving the content the form that is adequate to our consciousness and which makes the content our intellectual property. ‘This is the Dachstein’ does not mean anything else than: the visual impression that I just had is an effect of the power center which I know from previous experience. The need to exercise our intellectual powers is a motive for judging. The interest or the pleasure that results from satisfying this need is an element of the act itself that permeates and accompanies this act. Every judgement is therefore in itself pleasurable, because it satisfies a need. (Jerusalem 1895, 89–90)

The basic idea that drives Jerusalem’s argument is that perception and judgements satisfy different functional needs and that neither can satisfy the need the other satisfies.¹¹ This difference between them makes them activities of different types. The background assumption is that activities are grouped into types with respect to the functional needs they satisfy. The subargument for this conclusion is: (J1) A presentation only prompts us to make a judgement if it stirs an additional, distinct functional need. (J2) A presentation stirs an additional, distinct functional need only if it does not satisfy this need itself. (J3) The judgement can only satisfy the additional formal need if it brings about that a content has the form needed for it to become our ‘intellectual property’. (J4) If acts of type 1 can satisfy formal needs that acts of type 2 can’t satisfy, these act types are different. (JC1)

Judging and perceiving are different kinds or types of activity.

Now, Jerusalem wants to refute Brentano’s Judgement Primitivism, but (JC1) is perfectly compatible with the view that judging is a primitive mental activity. So he needs to add a further argument. This argument exploits the idea that judgings satisfy a distinctive mental functional need. In outline: (J5)

Judgements satisfy the need for intellectual occupation.

¹¹ When hearing a note, I may take an interest in hearing it better in order to appreciate it. One’s attention is primarily appraisive of something x if it contains or is suited to be developed into an appraisal of x (see Gallie 1954). Think of listening to a melody or looking at a painting. You attend to it because you want to appraise it and, under some circumstances, paying attention manifests positive appraisal. Jerusalem’s individuation principle allows aesthetic appreciation to be a form of perception.

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(J6) In order to satisfy the need for intellectual occupation judgements must (a) conclude a process of association and (b) articulate some ideas into at least two parts. (JC2)

Every judgement has at least two parts: judgements are two-termed.

Prima facie, Jerusalem’s line of argument does not seem promising. The need for intellectual occupation is only the need to exercise the judgement faculty by judging. Not much about the nature and metaphysics of judgement can be established on the basis of this need. However, Döring’s account of the need is independently implausible. We don’t want just to make judgements in order to exercise our ‘intellectual muscle’. I could judge that 1 is a number over and over again for hours without taking any pleasure in judging and, hence, my boredom would continue. Döring has failed to describe the need properly. Jerusalem tries to do better than Döring in saying what the functional need is to which judgements answer. He gives two characterizations that will resonate with the reader: (A) ‘Our interest has been excited and the need for intellectual pursuit can only be satisfied by judgements. The questions that obtrude on us are the expression of the functional need, but they show by means of their form that judgements are expected and demanded.’ (B) The feelings that makes us aware of the need we want to satisfy when judging are ‘agonies of uncertainty’ (Qual der Ungewissheit). (Jerusalem 1895, 90; my emphasis.)

Maybe ‘agonies of uncertainty’ is too dramatic: ‘curiosity’ will do better and is more general. (A) and (B) point in the same direction. The functional need to which judgements answer is expressed by questions that arise for us and it is manifest in the feeling of curiosity. Curiosity is a feeling that makes us aware of a functional mental requirement: we don’t just want to exercise our ability to make judgements; we want to exercise our ability to find out things that we are ignorant about. We have a drive to increase knowledge, not just a need to make judgements. We feel unsatisfied—pained by ignorance—and need to be relieved of our ignorance. The way to satisfy this need is to find out the answers to the questions that pose themselves for us. If we do so, we feel pleasure and we have recognized something; we have connected it to our knowledge: we have made it our intellectual property. Jerusalem’s account of the functional need answered by judgement is superior to Döring’s original account of the need for intellectual occupation. In general, we have a drive to find out answers to questions that arise for us. Often it is sufficient that something stands out in our perception for a question to arise. If I hear a

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strange noise, I will turn my head to find out what made the noise. If I see something I haven’t seen before, I will be curious about it and questions about it will press themselves on me. In (A) Jerusalem suggests that curiosity is a question-related attitude. It is the feeling of unpleasure in not knowing the answer to a question.¹² To say what the feeling is we need to say which questions need to be answered to alleviate the feeling and to bring about the pleasure of knowing. This brings us to (J6) in the argument. We can now use the need to be satisfied by judgings to shed light on the satisfier: judgement. Judging that the thing over there on the right is the mountain Grossglockner satisfies a need we have: the need to know what the mountain we see is. With this in mind, Jerusalem’s talk of judgement as articulating a content makes good sense. If the assertion ‘This is the mountain Grossglockner’ is an answer to the question ‘What thing is this?’, the parts of the sentence that contribute the new information are in focus: ‘This is the mountain Grossglockner.’ One can think of the sentence as generated from completing the gaps in ‘This is . . . ’ where the gaps are marked by the interrogative pronoun. Hence, we arrive at a distinction between known and new parts of a judged content. The judgement indeed brings about a relation between different things: some thing or other ‘plugs’ the gap in an incomplete concept. If the judgement articulates the content, we feel pleasure in knowing an answer: our curiosity has been satisfied. Jerusalem concludes that judging is constituted by taking pleasure in knowing. This pleasure in judging, Jerusalem says, ‘is an element of the act itself which accompanies and penetrates it’ (Jerusalem 1895, 90). If satisfying one’s curiosity—did I pass the exam? NO—is not even pleasurable, the initial pleasure in judging is overridden by a stronger unpleasure.

6. A Response to the Argument from the Function of Judgement Does Jerusalem’s argument refute the main tenets of Brentano’s theory of judgement? Let’s split this question up into two. First, does it show that judging is metaphysically complex? Here is how Jerusalem put this point: Judging is not only a presentation, but simultaneously a doing, an act of the will. Every act of the will, every internal drive presupposes feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. It is hence indubitable that the judgement contains elements of the will. (Jerusalem 1895, 86) ¹² See Whitcomb (2010, 673) who holds that curiosity is the desire to know the answer to a question.

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Jerusalem has given us a reason to think that there are judgings that satisfy a need—curiosity—and can give us pleasure. Now making a judgement may give one pleasure. But it is unclear why the pleasure is supposed to be a constitutive part of the judgement. We take pleasure in judging as we take pleasure in seeing. In neither case does the activity in which we take pleasure seem to be constituted by the pleasure we take. Second, does the argument give us a credible motivation for the view that it is necessary for judgement to have two terms? No, for not all questions decompose a content into parts. Take Yes/No questions. Sometimes we are interested to know whether the object we see is a mountain. In this situation the interest in knowing the answer to a Yes/No question does not effect a division of the content of the corresponding judgement into known and new components. The whole unarticulated content is known; we are curious whether the whole content is a fact. No analysis of a complex of presentations is required. Jerusalem needs a stronger premise than the one he is entitled to for his purposes, namely the need to know must be the need to recognize something as something previously encountered. This premise is ‘smuggled in’; it is not justified by the theory of functional needs. Brentano can therefore accept all the premises of Jerusalem’s Argument from the Function of Judgement without giving up his Judgement Primitivism. In fact, the idea that curiosity makes us aware of a need to know the answer to a question sheds light on Brentano’s theory. We feel curious about questions whose answer we don’t know. According to Brentano, there is a whole range of questions that inner and outer perceptions settle for us such that we are never curious about them. For instance, the question whether thinking or perceiving is going on now etc. is settled by inner perception. You have no reason to be curious about whether you are thinking or perceiving right now. What we learn from Jerusalem is that there is a range of questions which are not open for us. We cannot be curious about and driven to answer them. I think this makes clear why Brentano’s editor Kraus wrote the following about the judgements of inner perception: [Inner consciousness] is in essence independent of the will and accompanies every primary consciousness on the side [ . . . ]. (Introduction to Brentano 1924 I, lxxxv; my translation and emphasis)

Inner perception delivers knowledge independently of an inquiry you undertake and prevents ignorance. How can inner perception settle questions? Inner as well as outer perceivings are acknowledgements of objects. When I am aware of one or some mental events, I ‘take them to be’ with immediate evidence and thereby the question and my curiosity are pre-empted.

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12 The Nature of Knowledge: Avenarius and Schlick Zu jeder Erkenntnis gehören zwei Glieder: eines, das erkannt wird, und eines, durch das es erkannt wird. M. Schlick, Die Probleme der Philosophie in Ihrem Zusammenhang (1933/4, 96)

1. Introduction Chapter 11 introduced the idea that a judgement must have two terms by working through Jerusalem’s arguments against Brentano’s one-term view of judgement. These arguments prepare the ground for Schlick’s attack against metaphysics. Schlick’s main work General Theory of Knowledge uses the idea that cognition must have two terms as the basis for an argument that there is no metaphysical knowledge. Schlick accepted Riehl’s characterization of Criticism as the project to determine the nature of knowledge and thereby also its limits. If we have recognized that cognition must have two terms, Schlick argued, we will see that there can be no metaphysical knowledge. The entities postulated by metaphysicians are beyond the limits of knowledge. In this chapter I will reconstruct those parts of Schlick’s epistemology that are the basis for his criticism of metaphysics. Like Jerusalem before him, Schlick engaged with Brentano’s one-term view of judgement and I will assess Schlick’s arguments against Brentano. This chapter will provide the basis for Chapters 13 and 14 that discuss the limits of knowledge and what is beyond these limits.

2. Riehl’s Criticism + Avenarius’ Economy Theory = Schlick’s Erkenntnislehre We have encountered the Austrian philosopher Alois Riehl already in previous chapters.¹ Riehl was professor of philosophy in Berlin between 1905 and 1921. ¹ For an introduction to Riehl’s thought and his influence on Schlick, see Heidelberger (2004). See also Heidelberger (2007).

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Schlick finished his dissertation on physics a year before Riehl arrived in Berlin. But in 1905, Schlick got in personal contact with Riehl and they remained in contact during Riehl’s time in Berlin.² Riehl had a formative influence on the work of Schlick during the 1910s. The most fundamental influence concerns epistemology. Let us see why this is the case by bringing the relevant parts of Riehl’s work into view. Avenarius’ Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie and following him Riehl shaped and promoted the project of scientific philosophy. Riehl said in his programmatic inaugural lecture: Philosophy, in its new critical meaning, is the science of science [Lehre von der Wissenschaft], of knowledge [Erkenntnis] itself. It is the science of knowledge. It investigates the sources, ascertains the conditions and determines the limits of knowledge. So understood philosophy has indeed a central place among the sciences while the old philosophy presumed to stand above them. (Riehl 1883, 246)

Riehl called his own position ‘Criticism’ or ‘Critical Philosophy’. In the third volume of his main work, Der philosophische Kriticismus und seine Bedeutung für die positive Wissenschaft (first German edition of the first volume in 1887), Riehl credits Locke with the invention of Criticism: Instead of dealing with nature, which is the object of experimental investigation, philosophy deals with the conditions of the knowledge of nature. Instead of assuming the appearance of an all-embracing knowledge, it avoids the misuse of concepts that systematize knowledge. Its negative task is the criticism of these metaphysical concepts. It attacks metaphysics, and not only the open metaphysics which extends itself into whole systems, but also the latent variety which finds its place unseen in works of science, and which cannot be set aside without criticism of concepts. Its positive aim is explanation of science itself. Philosophy is the science and the criticism of knowledge. (Riehl 1926, 17 [16])

It may be controversial to say that Locke introduced Criticism but Riehl gives a good description of the main tenets of this view here. Criticism is a philosophical programme that has two parts: Constructive: clarification of the conditions of knowledge of nature, especially scientific knowledge. Critical: criticism of metaphysical concepts in general and in science in particular.

² See Heidelberger (2004, 232).

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What are metaphysical concepts? Roughly, concepts of essences or substances that are supposed to explain appearances. Riehl’s Criticism is congenial to Mach’s and Avenarius’ philosophical views. Both are antimetaphysical and science oriented. But the method of the Criticist is different from the one of Mach and Avenarius. Consider, for example, Mach’s treatment of the ego (see section 2.9). Mach gives an account of how the conception of an ego is acquired for practical purposes and then argues that because of this, it is not apt to be incorporated into the scientific view of the world. In contrast, the antimetaphysical thrust of Criticism is epistemological. There is real knowledge of nature, but only pseudo-knowledge of metaphysics (Scheinwissen der Metaphysik).³ There is no knowledge of metaphysics and no science of this name.⁴ Riehl’s Criticism aims to show that alleged knowledge of metaphysics is only pseudo-knowledge. Schlick will follow Riehl in this point. Philosophy is, however, not exhausted by criticism of knowledge. It has a practical part.⁵ The practical part is the doctrine of wisdom (praktische Weisheitslehre)—it tells us how to lead a good life. The practical part is not science: it does not specify propositions that can be known. There is more to life than knowledge: The understanding [der Verstand] does not exhaust the nature of mind and the destination of man is not only knowledge. Knowledge is not everything, does not mean everything. The real which acts upon us is not merely apprehended by the understanding, but experienced by the heart and valued by the feeling and strived after by the will. In this way ideas or value are produced and since they are not produced by the pure understanding, they are also not only objects of knowledge. It is not possible for us to bring something under the aspect of a value, to think something in relation to a value without thereby having valued it [ . . . ]. (Riehl 1903, 171–2)

Here, the (pure) understanding is a faculty, namely the faculty for conceptual thought. Then, there is a trio of non-epistemic faculties—the heart, feeling, and the will—that are coordinated. The heart loves or hates what we see, hear, or contemplate. The feeling evaluates these things and the will strives for them if they are good. Because the evaluation of an object is the product of the operation of the feeling, the value we feel cannot be understood only by the faculty of knowledge. Value judgements are not only judgements that something has a property; they themselves are evaluations. If you judge the Rembrandt painting to be beautiful, you have valued it and ought to act accordingly. Such judgements need to be seen as products of the understanding as well as of feeling (Gemüth).

³ Riehl (1924, 5).

⁴ See Riehl (1926, 18 [17]).

⁵ See Riehl (1926, chapter 1 §7).

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Art is a source of value. Riehl’s considerations about art suggest a diagnosis of what metaphysicians do: In the speculations of the metaphysicians the limits between science and poetry are constantly transgressed, half-poetic works are clothed in the form of scientific treatises. (Riehl 1926, 13 [13])

The metaphysician is a poet expressing valuations but he expresses them in the form of scientific claims about the world. Section 7 of Carnap’s ‘Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ (Carnap 1931) will repeat this diagnosis. The distinction between philosophy as the science and criticism of knowledge on the one hand and the doctrine of wisdom on the other also informs Schlick’s work. In 1908, he published a book called Lebensweisheit. Versuch einer Glückseligkeitslehre (Wisdom of Life: Attempt of a Doctrine of Happiness). The book lives up to its title: it is Schlick’s contribution to Weisheitslehre. Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Schlick 1918b) does what it says on the tin: it is a contribution to critical philosophy in that it studies the nature and limit of knowledge. In more detail: in order to make Criticism work, the Criticist needs a positive account of knowledge that: (i)

covers scientific knowledge as a special case

and (ii)

determines the limits of the knowable.

If something lies beyond these limits, it can still inform our search for practical wisdom. Riehl’s work contains a lot of exegetical material about Locke, Hume, Malebranche, and Kant, but there is little direct work on the central questions of epistemology. Here, Schlick steps in. In section IV.4, we saw that Schlick (1913, 145 [478]) held that Avenarius identified the essence of knowledge acquisition: acquiring knowledge is ‘begreifen’ and ‘begreifen’ is reducing something new (unknown) to something old (previously known). Schlick will use this idea to arrive at a conception of knowledge that allows him to separate the wheat of scientific knowledge from the chaff of metaphysical ‘pseudo’ knowledge. To anticipate: in this chapter, I will work through Schlick’s Avenarius-inspired positive account of knowledge; in Chapter 13 I will discuss how this account is put to use in the fight against the metaphysicians. So, let us start by getting clear about the parts of Avenarius’ philosophy that Schlick deployed. Avenarius’ Philosophy as Thinking of the World in accordance with the Principle of Least Effort. Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Experience is

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based on the assumption that the soul tries to minimize expenditure of its powers. It does so: by means of associating the new to the old, the uncommon to the common, the unknown to the known, the ungrasped to what as something grasped is already owned by us intellectually. Now thinking a new presentation no longer requires significant expenditure of power because the soul thinks it by means of the familiar presentations [ . . . ]. (Avenarius 1876, 9–10)

Avenarius called this activity ‘grasping’ (Begreifen). (The term suggests that grasping involves concepts (Begriffe). But this is only true of the second variety of this activity.) Human beings have a drive for grasping that becomes more and more powerful when exercised.⁶ There are exactly two kinds of Begreifen: A known and a general concept are the means or instruments or factors through whose acting a Begreifen is caused. Where one of them is completely missing, mental processes may arise in abundance, but a Begreifen cannot be among them. Thereby the limits of Begreifen are determined—at least provisionally and for our purposes: if a presentation is given that is taken to be familiar, the limits of Begreifen reach as far as our corresponding concepts reach. (Avenarius 1876, 17–18)

The first kind of Begreifen is Recognition: a familiar and a non-familiar singular presentation are ‘identified’. When I recognize you again, I come to know that you are the same person as one I already know. The cognitive effect, to use Avenarius’ picture, is that an unfamiliar singular presentation is ‘merged’ with one I already possess. Effort is saved, for now the soul needs to operate only with one instead of two presentations. The second kind of Begreifen is Subsumption: the content of a presentation is enriched by a general concept; the object or objects of the presentation are subsumed under the concept. If we think a general concept: we co-think [mitdenken] not only the content of the concept, but also all memories of things which are similar to the one just grasped by means of the concept and even anticipations of such object presentation. (Avenarius 1876, 15)

This will sound strange to logicians like Frege and Russell. But recent psychological theories of concepts, especially of natural kinds, support Avenarius. ⁶ See Avenarius (1876, 13).

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A concept is a ‘mental file’ which holds different kinds of representation relating to the members of a kind. This information can be activated and then primes our expectations about an object that is subsumed under the concept. Begreifen is either identifying a new individual with one already familiar—their mental representations are consequently merged—or the subsumption of a new individual under a general representation—the representation of the new individual is subsequently enriched and can guide action. Both require two things: either an unknown and a known object or an unknown object and a general concept. A brief commentary on Kant will be helpful to get a grip on the guiding idea here. Kant argued that human cognition is discursive, i.e. that thought: takes place through representations which take as the ground of cognition that which is common to many things, hence through marks as such. Thus we cognize things through marks and that is all cognizing [the German word for which] comes from [the German word for] being acquainted. (Kant 1800, 564 [58])

Kant’s etymological remark is philosophically suggestive. The German verb ‘erkennen’ (cognize), he submits, is derived from ‘kennen’ (being acquainted with). If I am acquainted with something, I can reliably predict its behaviour and know its properties.⁷ For example, if I am acquainted with you, I know what you are likely to do and need not make further inquiries etc. If you are getting acquainted with Vienna, your learn your way around the city, come to know where you need to go for a good schnitzel (Gmoa Keller, Am Heumarkt 25), learn how public transport works, etc. One way to understand that ‘erkennen’ is derived from ‘kennen’ is to think that erkennen activates kennen. If I cognize something, I activate my acquaintance with it and this allows me to smoothly interact with it. This connection between erkennen and kennen is very much along the lines of Avenarius’ and Schlick’s view about the purpose of cognition. The importance of Avenarius’ remarks is hard to overestimate. Consider his key themes: (AT1)

Begreifen is the exercise of a drive to save mental energy.

(AT2) Thinking is making the unfamiliar familiar either by recognition or by subsumption. (AT3) There are limits to thinking fixed by the nature and number of the presentations we have. Avenarius’ key themes shape Schlick’s epistemology: Schlick’s theory of knowledge is the attempt to work out a defensible version of Avenarius’ model of cognition. Let us look at this more closely. ⁷ See Craig (1990, 147–8).

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3. Avenarius and Schlick: ‘Cognition is Re-Cognition’ Let’s use the title of Schlick’s book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre to shed light on his project. First, Schlick’s title Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre is not properly translated as ‘General Theory of Knowledge’: Schlick is not providing a theory of knowledge. The German verb ‘erkennen’ refers to an event-token or event-type, while ‘know’ refers to a state and thus ‘erkennen’ can be used in the sense of ‘recognize’. Schlick’s book is a theory of the process of coming to know (‘Erkenntnisprozess’) and asks when we make progress in this process (‘Erkenntnisfortschritt’).⁸ It not about the state of knowing and the conditions for being in that state. In order to make this clearer, I will speak of events of coming to know or cognitions where Schlick uses ‘erkennen’. He noted later that there is a product/process ambiguity in the German verb ‘erkennen’: By ‘knowledge’ [Erkenntnis] we always mean an act or rather the result of an act. (Schlick 1932, 191)

Since we understand the products of coming to know in terms of the activities they are products of, it seems warranted to focus on the process of knowledge acquisition. Second, contemporary epistemologists take a theory of knowledge to be a theory of the nature of a propositional attitude: knowing that p. They either try to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for, or, given that these are hard to come by, give an illuminating characterization of, propositional knowledge. If we expect Schlick to produce a theory of this kind, we will be disappointed like Quinton: [A]lthough it is all right to practise epistemology without an explicit conception of what it is, it is less satisfactory to produce a theory of knowledge, as Schlick does, without ever stepping back to formulate at least a sketch of a definition of knowledge. (Quinton 1985, 394)

Schlick is manifestly not interested in a definition of propositional knowledge. He wants to extract from science and common sense the principles that govern the process of knowledge acquisition.⁹ In doing so he aims to understand knowledge genetically: by specifying the way it is produced and why we strive for it.¹⁰ The principles that govern the process of knowledge acquisition are supposed to be the same in science and common sense. Therefore Schlick’s theory is a general theory

⁸ See translation of Schlick (1913, 145). ¹⁰ Thanks to Nils Kürbis for this suggestion.

⁹ Schlick (1925a, 2 [2]).

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(Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre) and not specifically a theory of scientific knowledge acquisition. Let’s illustrate what Schlick has in mind with one of his examples of knowledge acquisition: Consider a simple case in which the word ‘know’ [erkennen] is employed in a natural way. I become aware, while walking home, of a brown object moving in the distance. By its movements, size and other characteristics I know [erkenne] that it is an animal. The distance diminishes and eventually a moment arrives when I know [erkenne] for certain that the animal is a dog. He comes closer, and soon I know [erkenne] that it is not some stray dog I have never seen before, but a familiar one, my own dog Tyras, or whatever his name may be. (Schlick 1925a, 6–7 [6])

The translation of Schlick’s ‘erkenne’ with ‘know’ is misleading as Schlick reports a series of events in which he acquires knowledge. With this in mind, we can analyse the example along the lines Avenarius proposed. The series of Erkenntnisse involves two subsumptions and one recognition: Subsumption 1:

The brown object is an animal.

Subsumption 2:

The animal of brown colour is a dog.

Recognition:

The brown dog = Tyras.

Each erkennen is the acquisition of knowledge and the transformation of something unknown into something known. Schlick’s description of the first step is representative of the others: I can thus say (the formulation is vulnerable psychologically and we use it with the proviso that it will be improved on later): ‘In the perception of that brown thing, I have rediscovered the mental image or idea that corresponds to the name “animal”.’ The object has become something familiar, and I can call it by its right name. (Schlick 1925a, 7 [7])

Schlick analysed the process of knowledge acquisition as transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar:¹¹ To cognize is to re-cognize [Wiederkennen] or rediscover [Wiederfinden]. And to rediscover is to equate what is known with that as which it is known. (Schlick 1925a, 15 [14])

¹¹ See Ryckman (1991, 77), who mentions Schlick’s dictum but does not explore it further.

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This is a direct echo of Avenarius’ (1876) description of the two varieties of Begreifen. Schlick went beyond Avenarius by providing a description of the event of coming to know: Knowing implies two terms: something known, and that as which it is known. [Zum Erkennen gehören zwei Glieder: etwas, das erkannt wird, und dasjenige, als was es erkannt wird.] If we encounter something new, it remains unknown to us, unexplained, so long as we can discover [entdecken] in it no resemblance with anything otherwise experienced, and are thus unable to place it among our recollections of what we have so far met with or to call it by a familiar name. (Schlick 1913, 144 [477])

Schlick’s analysis of the event of knowledge acquisition yields a variation of Jerusalem’s slogan that any judgement has two terms: Knowing implies two terms: something known, and that as which it is known. This view of the metaphysics of knowledge will be the crucial premise in his argument that intuition is not knowledge and that there is no special source of metaphysical insight. It puts him into opposition to Brentano and the Brentano School (see Chapter 10) and many others. Schlick added that the process of recognition always ends by naming or labelling what one has recognized. If we are able to label or name x, these labels give us access to a file about things of a relevant kind to which x belongs and we can plan now acting upon x. This is certainly advantageous.

4. Scientific Knowledge, Cognitive Sloth, and Theoretical Economy So far we have been concerned with mundane knowledge: coming to know that this animal is a dog, that thing is a bus, recognizing the car again, etc. Schlick’s theory of knowledge is general in that it is supposed to apply to mundane and scientific knowledge. But when it comes to scientific knowledge Avenarius’ ‘making the unfamiliar familiar’ slogan sounds implausible. Consider a so-called theoretical identification in science: The heat of a body B = the total kinetic energy of the molecules composing B.

Initially Schlick described such theoretical identifications as ‘rediscoveries’. The scientist is already familiar with the kinetic theory of gases that explains

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the behaviour of gases in terms of motion of particles. Now, she recognizes that the heat is just motion of a particular kind: When physics tells us, say, that it knows the nature of heat to be a motion of the minute parts of matter, this means that it has been able, by experimental research and theoretical reflection, to rediscover in the behavior of a hot body all the properties of a system made of particles in violent motion. (Schlick 1913, 144 [478])

But Avenarius’ characterization of erkennen as ‘making the unfamiliar familiar’ or ‘re-discovering something known in the unknown’ is out of place when applied to scientific research.¹² Certainly heat is more familiar to us than the motion of molecules. We ‘reduce’ something known to something un- or at least less known! Schlick (1925a, 12 [11]) responded to this problem by weakening Avenarius’ formula: Knowledge [Erkenntnis] is the reduction of one thing to another. This characterization is not open to our objection, but seems to be so general that it lacks explanatory value. For example, Avenarius’ original formula made clear why re-cognition is of value for beings like us and what it consists in. Schlick’s more general characterization of coming to know does not suggest what the reduction is and why it is of value. The last point helps us to understand why and how Schlick reconfigured Mach’s and Avenarius’ principle that all thinking aims to save mental energy. Here is a quick reminder about the principle. We make pictures of facts in order to save ourselves making new experiences. This is, in general, the function of cognition. Science is a special case of cognition. The method of science is to picture as many facts as possible with a minimum number of pictures: Science itself can therefore be conceived as a minimizing task which consists in representing the facts as completely as possible with the least possible effort of thought [Gedankenaufwand]. (Mach 1883a, 490, [461]; my translation.)

What is the least effort in thought? Is it a matter of ‘mental energy’ or attention one has to ‘invest’ in solving a problem? If so, how can one cash out these metaphors and quantify ‘mental effort’? As long as we have no answers to these questions, the economy principle seems useless.

¹² Thanks to Nils Kürbis for drawing my attention to this.

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The ‘least effort’ principle has been sharply criticized. Brentano argued that it is ‘laughable’ that progress in physics concerns saving cognitive effort.¹³ One of Schlick’s teachers, the physicist Max Planck, published a criticism of Mach’s principle of economy in 1910. Planck described himself as a former ardent follower of Mach’s theory of mental economy.¹⁴ Planck raised two points of criticism. First, according to the ‘least effort’ principle, we aim to save mental energy to achieve biological aims. But highly developed physics is not ‘servicing’ the biological and practical needs of man any longer. Mach’s response is to maintain the principle of least effort and deny that the effort saved is one to achieve biological and practical needs. But how can one then speak of economy at all? We need a purpose for which resources are invested to calculate whether we are proceeding in an economical way or not.¹⁵ Second, the ‘least effort’ principle is not only fruitless but also counterproductive: I have not been able to find any tangible physical result, for instance, a sentence of physics or merely a conception that is of value for physical research, that one could take to be characteristic for Mach’s biological-economic epistemology. Quite the opposite: where Mach tries to proceed independently in the spirit of his epistemology, he goes quite frequently wrong. (Planck 1910, 504–5)

If the ‘least effort’ principle does not yield scientific fruits, it cannot save us effort. Hence, by its own light, the principle should be given up. These are strong points against the economy principle. Now Schlick has already given us reason to think that scientific research is not, in general, the reduction of the unknown to the known. We need a more general characterization to understand scientific knowledge. Acquiring scientific knowledge consists in reducing one thing to another. But what does this amount to? According to Schlick, the theory of concepts helps to reformulate the ‘least effort’ principle so that it covers scientific thought: [The economy principle] does contain a kernel of truth, and the reader of the preceding sections will have no doubt where to look for it. Knowing consists in designating the things of the world completely and uniquely by means of a minimum number of concepts. To achieve this designation with the smallest number of concepts—this is the economy of science. (Schlick 1925a, 99 [91])

The ‘least effort’ principle is a biological-cognitive principle which concerned the effort spent on cognitive tasks. It is, says Schlick, a ‘principle of laziness’ or ‘cognitive sloth’ (Schlick 1925a, 99 [91]). The principle of laziness and the

¹³ See OM, 75.

¹⁴ See Planck (1910, 498).

¹⁵ Planck (1910, 500).

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characterization of cognition as reducing the unknown to the known are closely related. One reduces the known to the unknown in order to save mental energy. Schlick therefore replaces this characterization of cognition and the ‘least effort’ principle with a principle of theoretical simplification: use a minimal number of atomic concepts to conceptualize the things that there are. Schlick needs to do more work to turn his new principle into a proposition that has a chance of being true. For example, we have concepts whose extension is the totality of things (‘the universe’). I can designate the totality of things with one concept. Do I know the universe then? Certainly not. Schlick’s examples of theoretical reductions suggest that the principle he has in mind can be seen as a minimax principle: Minimax: Science aims to give a maximal number of laws with a minimal number of atomic concepts. Accordingly, the ideal of scientific cognition is to arrive at the theory with the best simple concept/law ratio. Scientific progress consists in improving the atomic concept/law ratio.

5. Cognitive Economy and Intellectual Hedonism Reducing the number of simple concepts of a theory, in general, requires great intellectual effort and it is a difficult task to work with a minimum number of primitives. For example, one will need many inferences and definitions to do so. Hence, according to the biological-cognitive principle of ‘least effort’, theoretical reduction is costly. In Avenarius and Mach, the rationale of the biological-cognitive principle was a general consideration about how organisms with limited resources cope with changing environments. This can no longer be the rationale for Schlick’s Minimax principle, according to which scientists ought to ‘invest’ cognitive resources in reducing the number of atomic concepts. So why follow Schlick’s principle? Planck argues that an economy principle is justified if applying it yields new scientific insights. Does this point help Schlick? The maxim: Use a minimum number of simple concepts in describing reality seems not to yield particular scientific results. So why follow it? Schlick argued that we need to replace the biological drive to save cognitive resources with a different one: Why do we devote our lives to this curious occupation of constantly searching out sameness in difference? Why do we strive to designate the rich manifold of

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the universe by means of only those concepts that are built up from a minimum number of elementary concepts? There is no doubt about the ultimate answer: the reduction of one thing to another affords us pleasure. And to say that we have within us a drive for knowledge which demands satisfaction is only to give the same answer in other words. (Schlick 1925a, 94 [86/7])

He elaborated on this line of thought in his lectures ‘Form and Content’: Whatever other case we may examine—in all genuine knowledge we find as a common feature an act of recognition which enables us to describe the object of it by means of signs that are used also on other occasions. Now this activity of finding similarities between things which at first sight do not seem to have anything in common has gradually become a pleasure in itself. The process of acquiring knowledge, at first nothing but an indispensable means of mastering things and situations for the purposes of life, has had the same fate as other useful activities: as walking developed into dancing, speaking into singing, so the pursuit of knowledge developed into science. The human mind takes a delight in reducing things to one another, man enjoys this game, no matter whether he can derive any practical advantage from it or not. (Schlick 1932, 186)

Cooking meat and vegetables was done once to produce sustenance. Now, many people cook meat and vegetables for the sake of cooking: the activity that is a means to do x can become an activity we do because we take pleasure in it. Similarly, the acquisition of knowledge originally had the purpose of supporting our survival. Coming to know something is pleasurable. Now, some people acquire knowledge for the pleasure of coming to know things. The value of cognition consists in the pleasure it gives the cognizer. Schlick has managed to give a non-psychological reconstruction of Mach’s economy principle and given a new reason why we should follow it. Following the economy principle gives us pleasure and is therefore valuable. Schlick’s hedonistic rationale for following the revised economy principle is controversial. Brentano took knowledge to have intrinsic value: knowledge is valuable in itself and not because coming to know things gives us pleasure. Schlick is aware of this view and he seems to have this in mind when he later writes: From time to time an attempt has been made to heighten still further the grandeur of knowledge by maintaining that it is a value ‘in itself ’, regardless of the pleasure it may afford us, and that we would have to strive for it even if it gave us no joy. (Schlick 1925a, 101 [93])

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Schlick does not fully engage with this objection. He merely points out that he finds the idea of a thing possessing a value independently of the pleasure and pain we get from it incomprehensible (Schlick 1925a, 101 [93]).¹⁶ But it may indeed be impossible to acquire knowledge without taking pleasure in one’s achievement, yet knowledge has a further intrinsic value not exhausted by the pleasure its acquisition affords us. We take pleasure, one may say, in acquiring knowledge because possessing knowledge is something we value for its own sake and if we acquire knowledge, we take pleasure in achieving our aim. Schlick does not engage a different argument that must have been well-known to him. According to Brentano, there is correct and incorrect pleasure.¹⁷ There may be people who take pleasure in torturing the innocent or listening to . . . (put in the name of the most horrible music you can think of). But if they take pleasure in these activities, they do something that is wrong: they wrongly love something. Hence, unrefined Hedonism is false: something is only valuable if we correctly take pleasure in it. Whether Schlick’s Epistemic Hedonism can be defended against these objections is a question for value theory and beyond the scope of this book.¹⁸ I will therefore put the question of the intrinsic value of knowledge on the to-do list for further research.

6. Mundane Knowledge and General Presentations Let us briefly take stock. According to Schlick, any case of knowledge, whether mundane or scientific, has two terms (Glieder). What are these terms? In this section, I will unpack Schlick’s answer first for common-sense knowledge and, in the following section, I will move on to scientific knowledge. After addressing this question I will discuss how Schlick engaged with Brentano’s theory of judgement. In non-scientific knowledge, we subsume an unfamiliar object under a general presentation (Allgemeinvorstellung) and thereby recognize in it something familiar.¹⁹ A general presentation is a mental sign that is supposed to represent sets of things, for example, the set that has all and only the members of a kind as elements.²⁰ Schlick surprises the reader by, on the one hand, stressing the importance of such presentations for mundane knowledge and, on the other hand, siding with Berkeley: there are no general presentations, that is, imagistic representations that represent sets.²¹ There are of course ideas of sets. I have an idea of the empty ¹⁶ See also Riehl (1903, 171–2). ¹⁷ See OKRW, §§ 22–3. ¹⁸ In 1927/8, Schlick gave a seminar on Brentano’s and Moore’s value theory. Brentano’s theory is very briefly mentioned in Schlick (1930, 448–9). But his rendering of Brentano’s view is too sketchy to really get to grips with Brentano’s view. ¹⁹ Blumenberg incorrectly translates ‘Vorstellung’ as ‘image’. I have changed this throughout. ²⁰ Schlick (1925a, 18 [17]). ²¹ Schlick (1925a, 18 [17]).

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set. Schlick’s point is that my idea of dogs is not such an idea. He seems not always to be clear about whether a general presentation is a presentation of the set or of each member of the set. Schlick is a Berkeleian about general representation. There are only singular presentations that play the role of general representations.²² How can a singular representation play the role of a general one? By visualizing a member of the class: What sort of visual picture comes to mind when I hear this word [‘dog’], when I think of dogs in general? A variety of mental processes occur. What usually happens is that a vague picture takes form in my consciousness of a dog belonging to some particular breed, a Saint Bernard perhaps. At the same time, a secondary thought arises to the effect that not only this kind of dog but all other kinds are to be taken into account. The secondary thought may, in turn, make itself felt in my consciousness through the emergence, dimly and for a moment, of faintly indicated images of other breeds, such as terriers and the like. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: it is absolutely impossible for me to form an intuitive image of an animal that is just a dog in general. (Schlick 1925a, 18 [17])

The visual image of a particular dog of a particular breed is not a general representation of the dog breeds: it is an image of one particular dog breed. It needs what Schlick calls ‘secondary thought’ to become general. But if the secondary thought had the propositional content that all dog breeds are taken into account, Schlick’s appeal to mental pictures in his ‘psychology of general representation’ would be futile. Why not simply think directly that all dog breeds are under consideration? There is a more charitable reading of what Schlick says that avoids this result. His description of the ‘secondary thought’ as ‘making itself felt through the emergence of further images’ makes the secondary ‘thought’ seem like a disposition. If I am disposed to associate with the mental image of a member of a kind further images of other members, my mental image is not just an image of a particular member, but it represents the kind or class by means of a proxy. Now, subsuming something unfamiliar under a ‘general representation’ shall make it familiar. Schlick has provided the materials to make psychological sense of this. He (1925a, 19 [18]) himself speaks of matching the perceptual image of a dog with others. One way to spell this out further is to think of the perception of the dog playing the role of the visualization of the dog. My perception of a particular dog activates dispositions to have images of other breeds and memory images of dogs; the perceived animal is subsumed under the ‘general presentation’: it is recognized as a dog.

²² Schlick (1925a, 18 [17]).

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Such matching is always a matter of degree and dependent on the contingent fact that my memory supplies the right images in sufficient detail.²³ So the animal may be more or less a dog.²⁴ In modern terminology: there will be borderline cases where our general presentation F allows us to say neither that something is an F nor that it is not an F. General presentations are vague. For the practical purposes of ordinary life, such general presentations will do. Something that is more or less like a dog behaves more often than not like a dog. A presentation can enable us to recognize something with a certain degree of probability and the recognition may be defeasible or only partial (‘The thing looks more like an F than a G’). And this is mostly good enough to get by.

7. Scientific Knowledge and Concepts The ‘general presentation’ mechanism is not good enough for science. For science demands certainty and precision: Since images are vague and incapable of precise identification, science seeks to replace them with something else, something clearly determined, something that has fixed bounds and can always be identified with complete assurance. This something, which is meant to take the place of images, is the concept. (Schlick 1925a, 19 [18–19])

Schlick defines a concept simply as that kind of mental presentation that is not vague. A general presentation M is only a concept if any object either falls under M or does not and whether an object falls under M can be recognized with certainty. In short: a concept is a ‘super’ general presentation that satisfies the demands of scientific knowledge. Schlick’s understanding of ‘concept’ is idiosyncratic. In the Kantian tradition, a concept is any representation that purports to subsume several things.²⁵ I will therefore speak of ‘s-concepts’. From the point of view of psychology, s-concepts are in the same boat as general presentations: Strictly speaking, concepts do not exist at all. What does exist is a conceptual function. And this function, depending on the circumstances, can be performed on the one hand by images of various mental acts and on the other by names and written signs. (Schlick 1925a, 22 [21])

²³ See Schlick (1925a, 18 [19]). ²⁴ See Schlick (1925a, 19 [18]). ²⁵ See, for example, Kant (1781/7, A320/B376–7).

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There are only singular mental images that play a particular functional role in our thought. General presentations are singular mental images that dispose us to remember and imagine a whole range of similar things; s-concepts are mental images that play a more demanding functional role and are used in scientific theorizing. In the first edition, Schlick went further: [Concepts] are nothing but fictions that shall enable an exact designation of objects for the purposes of recognition similar to how he graticule’s spanning the globe enables the definite designation of a location on its surface. (Schlick 1918b, 23)

In the second edition, he no longer draws the conclusion that s-concepts are fictions: Anyone who speaks of concepts as if they were images, as if they were real occurrences in consciousness, creates thereby a fiction in Vaihinger’s sense. (Die Philosophie des Als-Ob, 2nd edition, pp. 53, 399). (Schlick 1925a, 22 [21])

I think the right way to read Schlick here is as recommending not to speak of s-concepts as if they were images.²⁶ When one speaks about the ‘s-concept’, one speaks about the functional role of a singular mental image. Schlick comes close to this when he uses the ‘conceptual function’ terminology. Now, the big problem. There are no mental images that play the functional role that Schlick labels ‘concept’. There are no non-vague mental representations such that they yield a sure-fire mechanism to decide whether any object either falls under them or does not. How do we ‘refine’ presentations such that they become s-concepts? it is through definitions that we seek to obtain what we never find in the world of presentations [Vorstellungen] but must have for scientific knowledge: absolute constancy and determinateness. No longer is the object to be known compared with vague presentations; instead we investigate whether or not the object possesses certain properties fixed by definition. (Schlick 1925a, 20 [19])

However, Schlick’s answer seems to be a non-starter. If we do not already have non-vague presentations available to define s-concepts, the defined presentation will not be non-vague either. If we work our way to the basic presentations that cannot be defined, these will not be sharp:

²⁶ See Ryckman (1991, 89), who takes Schlick (1925a) to be inconsistent on this point. But the problem seems only to arise if we speak of s-concepts as if they were images. Why should one want to speak of them in this way?

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We cannot learn what ‘blue’ or ‘pleasure’ is by definition, but only by intuiting something blue or experiencing pleasure. With this we appear, however, to have answered our question definitely and in the negative: an eventual return to what is immediately given, to intuition and experience, is unavoidable. And since the immediately given is in principle always marked by a certain vagueness [Unschärfe], it seems altogether impossible to obtain absolutely precise concepts. Must we not then concede that skepticism is right in denying the existence of indisputably certain knowledge? (Schlick 1925a, 28 [27])

Imagine that you are looking at a piece of bright blue cloth in normal light. You see a particular shade of blue but you are not able to distinguish it from shades that are in hue etc. very much like it. Even if you have a very good memory, you will not be able to apply ‘blue’ with absolute certainty. The capacity you acquire is a capacity to recognize a whole ‘bunch’ of shades of blue. For a certain range of shades, it does not allow you to classify them as either falling under the concept or not falling under the concept. Brentano completely agrees with Schlick on this point. We perceive qualities that we are not able to distinguish from closely related ones: Many things are apprehended only implicitly and confusedly. I believe I have demonstrated in my Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie that the notes combined in a chord and the color elements of a compound color are always really apprehended, but often not distinguished. (PES, 216 [II, 140]; my translation and emphasis)

There is the further issue of whether the perception which grounds the possession of basic concepts can give rise to a shared and stable concept. Your perceptual apparatus is different from mine. Can we expect to come away with the same concept when visually attending to the same piece of bright blue cloth? We all trust that this is so in everyday communication and transaction but we have no certainty that it is so. If I learn ‘is blue’ by visually attending to samples of this colour, the concept acquired will be vague: it will admit borderline cases that are neither blue nor not blue. Now let us go back to Brentano’s concept-empiricism. He reminded us: Many believe such elucidation always requires some general determination, and they forget that the ultimate and most effective means of elucidation must always consist in an appeal to the individual’s intuition, from which all our general marks [Merkmale] are derived. What would be the use of trying to elucidate the concepts red or blue if I could not present one with something red or with something blue? (OCT, 17 [29])

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Every concept, argues Brentano, is derived from intuition. Brentano’s method (see section 5.2) is to trace back concepts to their origin and thereby gain a better understanding of them. If Brentano’s concept-empiricism is on the right track, there are no s-concepts, since every s-concept is supposed to be built up from intuition-based, and therefore vague, general presentations. Brentano’s modus ponens is Schlick’s modus tollens: There must be s-concepts. Hence, concept-empiricism is false as a general theory of s-concept acquisition. Concept-empiricism works, if it works at all, for presentations. S-concepts need to be introduced in a different way. How?

8. Scientific Concepts and Implicit Definition Schlick finds an alternative to the standard model of concept-formation in Hilbert’s Grundlagen der Geometrie. For the purposes of this chapter, it is not necessary to expound Hilbert’s view of concepts and definitions in detail, but we need to remind ourselves of his main points.²⁷ Hilbert starts with three undefined primitive terms: Point, line, plane And three undefined two-place predicates: Relations: between, lies on, congruent with These are combined in a number of axioms, such as: For every two points A and B there exists a line a that contains them both. For every two points there exists no more than one line that contains them both. There exist at least two points on a line. Here, we assume to know the meaning of the logical vocabulary—‘there exists’, ‘for every’—and the ‘meaning’ of the geometrical expressions is fixed by the axioms. How? We ‘stipulate’ that all axioms are true and then assign extensions and objects to the geometrical terms and predicates such that the axioms come out true. There is no unique assignment of references that makes the axioms true, there are many. In which sense has, for example, ‘point’ been implicitly defined by the axioms? Their stipulated joint truth imposes a constraint on the reference of ‘point’: only those assignments of objects to ‘point’ that make the axioms true are legitimate. The ‘meaning’ of ‘point’ can be conceived as a constraint on extensions, not a ²⁷ For an introduction to implicit definition, see Giovannini and Schiemer (2019). On Schlick and implicit definition, see Coffa (1991, 176), Ryckman (1991, 79), and Oberdan (2015, 39–41).

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concept that determines such an extension. The implicitly defined ‘point’ is referentially indeterminate. Implicit definitions don’t trace the definiens back to its origin in intuition. Hence, if s-concepts are mental symbols introduced by implicit definition, a source of vagueness is eliminated. Schlick seems to assume that this is the only relevant source of vagueness. Hence, we are able to introduce s-concepts by implicit definition. The sharpness of s-concepts comes at a price. If you have implicitly defined the s-concept of a line and want to apply it to objects in space, there are no things that fall under it. There are only approximations of s-lines. Schlick expounds the epistemological form of this problem: When real objects are given us, how can we know with absolute certainty that they stand in just the relations to one another that are laid down in the postulates through which we are able to define the concepts? (Schlick 1925a, 38 [35])

The answer is simple: we can’t. Many sciences are not even axiomatized. Take biology. Biology is not axiomatized. Yet, Schlick would not want to deny that biology, say the theory of evolution, is scientific knowledge. Why then raise the bar in such a way that representative cases of scientific knowledge are excluded? Schlick is undeterred: [In] implicit definition we have found an instrument that enables us to determine concepts completely and thus to attain strict precision in thinking. To achieve this end, however, we have had to effect a radical separation between concept and intuition, thought and reality. While we do relate the two spheres to one another, they seem not to be joined together at all. The bridges between them are down. Even though the price is very high, it must for the time being be paid. (Schlick 1925a, 38 [35–6])

One reason for Schlick’s perseverance with implicit definition is that he sees implicit definitions as creating a number of truths. Critics of implicit definition point out that we can’t stipulate truths and that even if a system of axioms is consistent, it may not be true of anything. Implicit definition does not make certain knowledge possible. So how does implicit definition further our acquisition of scientific knowledge?

9. The Concept of Existence and Necessary Ignorance There is one general presentation that is non-vague yet acquired from (inner) perception: the concept of existence. Something either exists or does not, but there is no in-between. How do we acquire this concept?

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As a matter of fact, the experience of conscious states [ . . . ] is the original and sole source of the concept of existence; thus it is not an instance to which a concept already at hand is subsequently applied. The ‘I am’ is simply a fact, not knowledge. (Schlick 1925a, 86 [79])

The Cartesian conclusion, ‘Ergo Sum’, is not a judgement in which the concept of existence is applied; it is an experience in which the concept of existence is acquired or reactivated. Hence, thinking that I am is not acquiring knowledge of an independent fact. Schlick’s argument assumes that one act cannot have two true descriptions. For instance, my saying ‘The door is open’ may be an assertion as well as a request to close it. Similarly, we need a reason to hold that one cannot acquire a concept and apply it at the same time. If the conditions for the application of the concept are extremely minimal, this possibility may be real. Can one justify this exception from the general principle that concepts are not to be explained with recourse to perception? Schlick argues for the positive answer to this question by drawing on his sign theory of judgement. What is the real (das Wirkliche)? Whatever the answer [to the question ‘What is reality?’] may be, it must itself be a judgement. But a judgement, as we very well know by now, is a sign for a fact and nothing more. An object is subsumed under a concept; the latter is correlated with it. This correlation takes place precisely in judgement, which thus designates the whole state of affairs. A judgement cannot supply anything more. No matter what we try to do, no matter how many judgements we invoke to explain and clarify the concepts that are used, knowing—which indeed consists in judging— gives us only signs, never what is designated. The latter remains forever beyond reach. (Schlick 1925a, 172 [158])

Schlick’s argument seems to be: (SP1)

Any answer to the question ‘What is reality?’ is a judgement.

(SP2)

A judgement designates a state of affairs.

Hence: (SC1) of affairs.

Any answer to the question ‘What is reality?’ designates a state

Hence: (SC2) No answer to the question ‘What is reality?’ determines reality independently of our way of designating it. Hence: (SC3) ‘The real can never be given to us through cognitions of any kind.’ (Schlick 1925a, 173 [158]; in part my translation)

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The nature and constituents of reality are supposed to be epistemically inaccessible. But there is a different mode of access: [A]cquaintance [Kenntnis] with the nature of reality is not obtained through knowledge of reality. The former, if it is possible at all, must precede the latter, because what is designated is prior to the designating. Thus we are directly acquainted with the whole realm of our own data of consciousness; it is simply there, before any questioning, before any cognition. Nothing in it can be altered by cognition, nothing taken from it, nothing added to it. These immediately given data are the only reality with which we are acquainted; but it would be altogether wrong to conclude that therefore they must be the only reality, or even the only known, knowable, designatable reality. (Schlick 1925a, 173 [159])

So we have one concept, existence or reality, that we acquire prior to any judgement. We can do so because we are acquainted with our own mental acts. Acquaintance is not knowledge, argues Schlick. I will devote Chapter 14 to assessing Schlick’s distinction between knowledge and acquaintance. Here, it is only important to note that if acquaintance is not knowledge, it does not need to have two terms or be the designation of a state of affairs. It can be ‘direct contact’ with real things and allow us to acquire the concept of something that is prior to any judgement and designation. However, if presentations that are acquired by abstraction from perception—either inner or outer—cannot be applicable with certainty and are therefore unsuitable for science, the concept of existence is not scientifically respectable. Schlick is happy to accept this conclusion. The concept of existence is not a scientific but a philosophical one.²⁸ However, there is a slide between Schlick’s argument and his conclusion. He starts out with considerations about the concept of existence, a concept that should subsume anything whatsoever. But he ends up with a concept that is acquired on the basis of awareness of mental activities and that seems to be restricted to real, that is, causally efficacious objects. This drives Schlick to discuss the question whether we think of anything on the model of perceivable objects. It is helpful to compare Schlick’s argument with an argument that can be found in Frege. Schlick’s terminology of signs and designated is reminiscent of Frege’s ‘On Sense and Reference’. Indeed, Frege runs the same argument in this paper but rejects one of the premises that Schlick endorses: By combining subject and predicate, one reaches only a thought, never passes from sense to reference, never from a thought to its truth-value. One moves at the same level but never advances from one level to the next. A truth-value cannot be

²⁸ Schlick (1925a, 175 [161] and 176 [162]).

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a part of the thought, any more than, say, the sun can, for it is not a sense but an object. (Frege 1892, 217 [35–6])

Frege’s conclusion is that judging is not combining subject and predicate, here understood as two modes of presentations that are analogous to grammatical subject and predicate. The suppressed premise is that we can and do move in judging from the level of sense to the level of reference. In judgement, we are responsive to the facts: they enter into its existence conditions. In sum: Schlick’s modus ponens is Frege’s modus tollens.

10. Schlick versus Brentano Schlick’s two-termism is in conflict with Brentano’s view of judgement. We have seen in Chapter 10 that Brentano allows for judgements that combine no concepts at all. For Schlick, such judgements could not have the epistemological role he takes to be distinctive of judgement. Hence, he must deny that there can be onetermed judgements. In General Theory of Knowledge he tried to show that the judgements that Brentano takes to be the strongest support for the one-term view are actually two-termed: It is evident that on this theory the so-called universal affirmative judgements of logic would in reality be negative existential propositions. This is surely an artificial construction which turns the natural state of affairs upside down. That the formulation is unsuitable is revealed even more clearly by a conclusion that seems to follow from the theory, namely that a judgement need not always designate the existence of a relation, that its subject-matter can just as well be constituted by a single, simple object. The sense of the judgement would then consist merely in the ‘acknowledging’ of this object; nothing would have to be said about any relations. The situation with respect to negative judgments would be the same, except that ‘rejection’ would take the place of acknowledgement. But it is obvious that acknowledgement and rejection can at most characterize judging as a psychological act. They do not reach its epistemological and logical significance and this is what is at issue in our inquiry into the nature of judgement. The logical side of Brentano’s theory—the claim that basically every judgement is one-termed—is an error that can lead to serious mistakes, in particular to the attempt to detach ‘things’ from the relations existing among them (of which we will speak at another place). We expose the error best if we simply verify that not even those judgements that are avowedly existential propositions can be looked upon one-termed or free of relations. (Schlick 1925a, 42–3 [40]; my emphasis)

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He goes on to analyse existential and impersonal sentences and tries to show that there meaning is in harmony with the two-term view. He says about the sentences under consideration: For despite their simple form, it is obvious that these short sentences invariably designate a state of affairs with several elements (e.g. ‘It is snowing’ means ‘Flakes are falling down’). (Schlick 1925a, 44 [41])

Is that right? Let’s focus on Schlick’s example of such a statement: an utterance of ‘It is snowing’. When uttering ‘It is snowing’ with assertoric force, I seem not to subsume anything under a general concept. It is a fact of grammar that ‘it’ in ‘It is snowing’ is just a grammatical filler. In linguistic terms ‘snowing’ or ‘raining’ are zero-place predicates that have no argument-position that needs to be filled by a singular term.²⁹ If these sentences state facts, the stated facts have neither particulars nor sortal universals as their constituents. Prima facie, the only constituent of such a fact is a universal feature.³⁰ This initial description needs further defence. Brentano argues that subjectpredicate sentences mislead us about the nature of judgement and cognition, whereas impersonal and existence-sentences reveal it. It is open to the proponents of the two-term view to argue the other way round: impersonal statements and existence-sentences have a misleading grammatical form. Schlick’s own proposal is that in uttering the sentence ‘It is snowing’ we express the judgement that flakes are falling down. However, this does not get the truth-conditions of the statement made right. There may be flakes falling down, but this is not snowing. Three flakes falling down over a period of time does not make it snowing. Similarly, if I create some snowflakes and pour them down from the rooftop I am not making it snow. A different proposal available to two-termists is to claim that in uttering ‘It is snowing’ a location or region is characterized in judgement. But to say a region, say West Yorkshire, is snowy characterizes it as covered in snow. So this does not get the intended statement right. Judging that West Yorkshire is snowy is clearly different from judging in West Yorkshire that it is snowing. However, the problem of the last proposal suggests a new idea: Does my assertoric utterance of ‘It is snowing’ when made at a location in West Yorkshire not voice the judgement that it is snowing at my location? The answer to this question is hotly debated among linguists and philosophers of language.³¹ But for our purposes we don’t need to answer it. The two-termists hold that in every judgement one term is reduced to another. This certainly does not happen in ²⁹ See Recanati (2007, 127–30). ³⁰ See Strawson (1959, 211). ³¹ Several nineteenth-century authors suggested that an undetermined part of reality is the subject of the sentence, see Marty (1884, 21). The ideas outlined above can be seen as making this suggestion more precise. See also Recanati (2007, 131).

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my judgement that it is snowing. I judge that a snowing event is occurring and the fact that I make it at a time and a place suffices to make a time and place relevant to the truth of my judgement. But the time and place are not the known term that makes the unknown term familiar. In sum: Brentano can give a more plausible description of the judgements expressed by the assertions of impersonal statements than the Voluntarists Jerusalem and Schlick.

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13 Drawing the Limits of Knowledge 1. Introduction In Chapter 12 we introduced Schlick’s thesis that cognition requires two terms. In this chapter we will look at the use he made of it in his criticism of metaphysics. Schlick followed Riehl’s Criticism and rejected metaphysics on epistemological grounds: if there are metaphysical facts, that is, facts about the underlying nature of the things we observe, they are beyond the bounds of knowledge. In more detail: if metaphysics is supposed to be distinct from science, there must be a special source of knowledge of metaphysical facts: intuition. Now, the actualizations of this faculty, intuitions, are supposed to have only one term. But if cognition is the reduction of something unknown to something known, it must have two terms. Therefore, there cannot be any knowledge that has just one term. Even if there were essences etc., the metaphysician could not know them. The claims of metaphysics are not unintelligible, but unknowable. Metaphysics is no science.

2. Metaphysics and Intuitive Knowledge 2.1 What is Metaphysics? The distinction between appearance and reality seems initially plausible and hard to dispense with. But it leads to the view that either there are things we cannot know about or there is a source of knowledge that is distinct from perception and induction. Mach et al. find both consequences unacceptable. They argue, therefore, that the appearance/reality distinction needs to be given up. This conclusion is independently supported: there are no mental acts that represent correctly or incorrectly an independent reality that could underlie or ground ‘appearances’. There are only elements in various relations to each other. Schlick gave a more detailed account of the pernicious metaphysics of appearances and reality than Mach. Let us briefly rehearse it. In his writings in the 1910s and 1920s, Schlick called the truly real objects ‘essences’. To the twenty-firstcentury reader, this word will suggest a theory of essences in which essences concern those properties that make an object the thing it is. This is not the

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intended meaning of ‘essence’ here. The terminology of ‘appearance’ versus ‘essence’ just labels the contrast between the ontologically independent on the one hand and the ontologically dependent on the other. In his lectures on the problems of philosophy, Schlick called the ‘truly real’ simply ‘substance’: That which underlies being is expressed by the word ‘substance’. (Schlick 1933/4, 19 [37])

‘Substance’ points us in the right direction but needs to be understood in a very wide sense. The metaphysics Mach and Schlick want to combat is a metaphysics of inequality: Metaphysical Inequality: there are things that are more real than others. The appearances are less real than that of which they are appearances. The metaphysical inequality is due to an asymmetry in explanation: True reality is supposed to be grounded [zugrunde liegen] on something fixed, in order that the multiplicity of appearances may be thereby explained, the diversity interpreted through what grounds it. (Schlick 1933/4, 19 [37])

With this in mind, Schlick can articulate one important notion of metaphysics: By metaphysics it has been customary to understand the knowledge [Erkenntnis] of that realm that as the genuine, true and core reality is opposed to the realm of appearances. (Schlick 1933/4, 19 [37]; my emphasis)

Metaphysics in the traditional sense is, then, a body of knowledge about the ‘truly real’.¹ I think Schlick is right to see the conception of metaphysics as a body of knowledge of the truly real as influential and important. If we look back at Chapter 1, we can see that Austrian philosophy is directed against metaphysics in the sense under consideration. Let us take the science of the soul as a model (see Chapter 1). Herbart, and before him Wolff, thought that there is a scientific knowledge of the soul, an ontologically independent and fundamental object. Souls are the things that ground, individuate, and unify mental phenomena. They act, as Herbart put it, ‘behind the curtain’ of perceivable mental phenomena. ¹ By Schlick’s lights, Kant is not a metaphysician. For while Kant’s things-in-themselves comprise the truly real, he does not believe that we have knowledge of them. We can act and think as if they exist and have faith in them, but there is not and cannot be a science of things-in-themselves.

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This gives a good sense of the characterization of some things being more real than others. There are facts about mental substances that explain and individuate facts about mental phenomena, but not the other way around. The direction of explanation goes from mental substances to mental phenomena, but not the other way around: the former are more real than the latter. Austrian philosophers and Neo-Kantians agree that there is no permanent mental essence, soul, in virtue of which a complex of mental phenomena can be explained and unified. There are mental phenomena and they form complexes. A soul is a Gedankending (Kant), a useful fiction (Brentano, Vaihinger), or a practical unity (Lichtenberg, Mach). As such, the assumption of a soul has its value but it is not an object that can be adduced in explanations of mental phenomena as Herbart assumes in his Seelenwissenschaft. Rather, its value lies in being a posit that enables action planning. Are, then, mental phenomena the truly real things and do souls turn out to be ‘appearances’? No, because mental phenomena are not supposed to have natures or essences that figure in the explanation of the existence of important wholes or bundles. Mental phenomena, together with laws and regularities about practical interests, do the explanatory work. In general, there is no privileged kind of thing that grounds the existence and properties of other things. There are phenomena and laws that together explain the existence and development of wholes. The wholes depend on their parts but this is a non-mysterious form of grounding. In contrast, metaphysical psychologists assumed that a simple mental substance can ground a mental life and its development. Schlick’s concept of metaphysics generalizes the view that was the target of the different objections against souls and physical substances in Part I. In turn, these objections make an alternative metaphysical hypothesis plausible: we seek to make do with the hypothesis—or, if you will, to follow out the postulate—that the mutual dependency of elements that are simply given is governed in principle by the same law-like regularity that governs not only processes in the transcendent world but also the relations between that world and the contents of my consciousness. (Schlick 1925a, 239 [220])

I will call this hypothesis the Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis: There is only one kind of reality, and it is to be ascribed to all objects equally. (Schlick 1925a, 240 [220])

The Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis needs explanation. It cannot require that there are no things that exist in virtue of others. For any complex exists in virtue of relations between its parts. According to The Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis, principles of unity are the only source of metaphysical inequalities. It rules out

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that there are kinds of objects that are more real than others because objects of this kind possess intrinsic properties or natures: Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis: For any objects x and y, either x and y are metaphysical equals or there are some zs such that x is composed of the zs or y is composed of the zs, but not both are.²

Traditional metaphysics assumes that there are metaphysical simples—souls and other substances—that are more real than other things independently of their complexity. The Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis denies this. To sum up: Schlick gave a concise articulation, both of the conception of metaphysics that worried nineteenth-century Austro-German philosophers and of the conception of metaphysics that their criticism positively suggested.

2.2 Inductive Metaphysics and Intuition If metaphysics is a body of knowledge, what is its source? The method of the natural sciences is induction. Can the method of metaphysics also be induction? In his ‘Experience, Cognition, and Metaphysics’, Schlick (1926, 105 [155]) called philosophers who answer this question positively ‘the champions of inductive metaphysics’. According to Schlick, inductive metaphysics does not really deserve the name ‘metaphysics’. Why not? Induction ‘infers’ from particular cases to general laws that subsume the particular cases. It is a method to acquire knowledge of general propositions about particulars we already know. It is not a method of acquiring knowledge about things we don’t know yet and that are the ontological ground of things we know. Only if we already had knowledge of particular substances could we acquire by induction general metaphysical knowledge. But we don’t know what would put us into the position to have such knowledge yet. Moreover, inductive metaphysics would aim for the most general laws. Because of their generality such laws are likely to be false. Schlick does not name the inductive metaphysicians. But he might have Lange and other Neo-Kantians in mind. Let us take Lange as a representative example. He takes the distinction between appearance and nature to be an empirical distinction: We find above all nothing but the common empirical opposition . . . between appearance [Erscheinung] and nature [Wesen]. What is nature at this level of consideration, turns out to be appearance again at another level, considered in relation to a deeper, hidden nature. (Lange 1866, 268)

² Thanks to Nils Kürbis for the final formulation.

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Essences are, here, causes that produce observable effects, the appearances.³ Inductive metaphysics does not use induction as a method to gain knowledge about the substance of the world. Rather: the exponents of inductive metaphysics uncritically assume an old viewpoint, whereby all those objects which science and daily life make valid statements about are not assigned to the transcendent at all, but are allotted, along with the given, to an enlarged ‘empirical world’. (Schlick 1926, 105 [155])

The ‘enlarged part’ of the empirical world is still part of the empirical world: it is observable by standard methods and instruments, only not yet observed. Hence, what the champion of inductive ‘metaphysics’ comes to know, if anything, is just more of empirical reality and nothing of its underlying nature. If induction is not the method by means of which we acquire knowledge of metaphysics worth the name, which method does the metaphysician have at his disposal? Contemporary metaphysicians argue that abduction or inference to the best explanation is a method of metaphysics. We should compare theories of metaphysics and accept the best theory, that is, the one that has most of the virtues of good theories.⁴ Schlick did not consider abduction to be a method of metaphysics. The reason is that in his time it was not a live option. The live option is that the epistemological basis of metaphysics is intuition: It can be read off only from the history of philosophy, and the latter shows us, I think, with the greatest clarity, that the name of metaphysics has not just been used for knowledge of the transcendent in general, but only for so-called ‘intuitive knowledge’ of the transcendent. What this means has been told to us with great incisiveness by modern metaphysicians, notably Schopenhauer and Bergson, but a historical survey shows that even earlier thinkers, without expressly stating it, still had the same concept of metaphysical knowledge. [ . . . ] This special mode of metaphysical knowledge is intuition. (Schlick 1926, 107–8 [155–6])⁵

Schlick lists Bergson and Schopenhauer as representative examples of recent philosophers of intuition. He does not tell us who the earlier philosophers are that connected metaphysics and intuition but the paradigm example of an Inequality Metaphysician is Plato. He assumes that we have a distinctive faculty that enables us to ‘see’ forms, that is, those objects that play the role of essences in

³ I owe the quote to Edgar (2013, 105). See his further discussion on p. 105–6. ⁴ See Williamson (2013, chapter 9) and Williamson (2016). ⁵ See also Schlick (1933/4, 71 [100]) on Schopenhauer and Bergson.

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Plato’s system.⁶ The other Inequality Metaphysicians follow in his footsteps. They all subscribe to the following thesis: (IM)

Intuition is a distinctive source of knowledge of the truly real.

No other sources of metaphysical knowledge are considered by the philosophers Schlick is interested in. Hence, he focuses on (IM). To anticipate, Schlick argues that (IM) is false.⁷ There are intuitions, but they don’t yield knowledge of what they are intuitions of. Intuition is not a mode of knowledge at all. A fortiori, it is not a or the only source of metaphysical knowledge. There is no such knowledge and if there is none, there is no metaphysics. Schlick agrees with Kant that there can be no knowledge of the truly real or the things-in-themselves. Because such knowledge is unattainable, complaining that we don’t have it is irrational: If by the complaint—that we have no insight whatever into the inner [nature] of things—it be meant that we cannot conceive by pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, they are entirely illegitimate and unreasonable. For what is demanded is that we should know things, and therefore to intuit them, without the senses, and therefore that we should have a faculty of knowledge altogether different from the human faculty and this not only in degree but as regards intuition likewise in kind—in other words, that we should be not men but beings of whom we are unable to say whether they are even possible, much less how they are constituted. (Kant 1781/7, A277–8/B333–4)

We can describe a faculty, intellectual intuition, that has intuitions of things-inthemselves but we don’t know whether it is possible that the description is realized. What we know is that we don’t have such a faculty. Beings like us have only discursive knowledge: knowing requires that we bring things under general concepts. This is music to Schlick’s ears. For Kant’s doctrine of the discursive nature of cognition coincides with the basic tenet of the two-term theory of knowledge he found in Avenarius and Jerusalem. All knowledge consists in subsuming particular representations under general concepts or marks (Kant) because we must bring what we already know to bear on the new objects we encounter to make them familiar (Avenarius). If all possible human knowledge is discursive, then there can’t be intuitive knowledge at all. A fortiori, there can’t be intuitive knowledge of the ⁶ Schlick (1925a, 135 [124]) mentions Plato’s view only to set it immediately aside. ⁷ See, for example, Schlick (1918a, 282 [203]) for an outline of his epistemic approach to metaphysics.

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underlying nature of reality. Hence, metaphysics is impossible and should be given up. This move will liberate us from pursuing an ill-conceived philosophical project. In contrast, if the Metaphysical Equality Thesis is true, no distinct method is required. All non-complex parts of reality are on a par and covered by the same method. If we have knowledge of the relations in which they stand to each other, we also know which complexes exist. In sum, if there are metaphysical inequalities, there need to be epistemological inequalities. If there are no metaphysical inequalities, there do not need to be epistemological inequalities and one source of knowledge suffices. If Schlick is right in his criticism of metaphysics, there is no special source of insight into the truly real objects. There is no metaphysics independently of the natural sciences. For instance, there is supposed to be no distinction between the natural sciences and philosophy: The supreme concepts, which permeate all others in virtue of their generality, link the particular sciences together and create bridges between the latter and practical life, since they are common to all. (Schlick 1918a, 271 [190])

Philosophy is ‘the most general science of all, the science of principles’ (Schlick 1926, 272 [190]). Philosophy is more general than other sciences such as physics, but not different in kind. Why are Inequality Metaphysicians such as Plato and Schopenhauer convinced that intuition is a mode of knowledge? Prima facie, these philosophers have a good reason for their view. Looking at a bright red patch in good light is the best way to come to know red. Schlick makes this objection himself: When I gaze at a red surface, the red is part of the content of my consciousness; I experience it, and only in this experience of immediate intuition, never through concepts, can I know what red is. Hearing a sound is an intuitive experience; I can know what the note A is only if someone actually sounds the note for me to hear. Only intuition teaches me what pleasure is, or pain, or cold, or heat. Are we not then fully justified in saying that intuition is knowledge? (Schlick 1925a, 81 [75]; my emphasis)

Intuition is supposed to be pre-conceptual and non-inferential and, in turn, allows for the acquisition of concepts. If hearing the note F is coming to know F, this knowledge can ground possessing a concept of F: if one has preserved knowledge of F, one has a re-deployable concept of F. As we go along, it will become clear that knowing what the note A is is different from knowing the note A and the latter notion is the one of interest for most of the authors under consideration. Schlick encourages us to resist this tempting line of thought. I will work through his argument in Chapter 14. First, I want to firm up our understanding

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by looking at what ‘philosophers of intuition’ say about (IM). A philosopher of intuition is a philosopher who holds that intuition puts us into contact with the truly real: it delivers knowledge of the nature of things that ground appearances. There are philosophers who are interested in intuition for other purposes. These are not of interest for Schlick and therefore not of interest in this chapter. I will start with Schopenhauer, who is repeatedly mentioned by Schlick as a philosopher of intuition. Schlick will also draw on Schopenhauer when he develops his positive account of intuition (see section 13.4).

3. Intuition as the Source of Metaphysical Knowledge 3.1 Schopenhauer and Bergson We have already seen in the introduction to part IV (IV.2) that Schopenhauer distinguished between ordinary and extra-ordinary perception. Ordinary perception reveals affordances to us. This is a very vivid way of filling out the notion of an appearance: perception provides us with knowledge of relations things bear to us and our interests, but not their intrinsic properties. While mostly we are servants of the Will, we have the mental strength to resist the Will. If we do so, we are able to have extra-ordinary cognitions. Schopenhauer described what happens when we free our perceiving from the Will in evocative language. Schlick (2013, 425–6) quotes the relevant sentence from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Presentation almost completely. So will I, now: When elevated by strength of mind to stop viewing things in the ordinary way, no longer led by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason to pursue merely the relations between things (which in the end always aims at their relation to our own will), if we stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the What, if we do not allow our consciousness to become engrossed by abstract thinking, concepts of reason; but if, instead of all this, we devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present, a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be, and, according to a suggestive figure of speech, we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone to perceive it, and we can no longer separate the intuited from the intuition as the two have become one, and the whole of consciousness is completely filled and engrossed by a single intuitive image—if, therefore, the object is in this manner removed from any relation to things outside of itself, and

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the subject is removed from any relation to the will, then what we thus cognize is no longer the individual thing as such, but rather the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objecthood of the will at this level: and this is precisely how someone gripped by this intuition is at the same time no longer an individual: the individual has lost himself in this very intuition: rather, he is the pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition. (Schopenhauer 1844a I, 201 [210–11])

While detailed and highly suggestive, Schopenhauer’s description of the changes that come about when we free ourselves from the Will is rather abstract. Let us consider an example. Imagine you look at a strikingly beautiful thing; say you see the Watzmann in the morning sun. Its beauty overwhelms and intrigues you; you devote all your attention to appreciating it. When you thus ‘lose yourself in the object’, you no longer perceive only what it affords you. Schopenhauer suggests a rendering of the metaphor of the shackles that prevent us from coming to know the forms. Our sensory faculties serve the Will and are thereby shackled by the Will: we cannot come to recognize forms as long as we are driven to satisfy the Will. Only when we are ‘will-less’ have we managed to escape the cave. When you have overcome the Will and are fully absorbed, you can perceive what the object is independently of what it affords you; you can ‘simply and exclusively consider the What’, that is, know the essence of the object. The Watzmann no longer seems to you to be the obstacle to your journey, the climbable object, etc. but it appears as the monumental mountain that it is. If we overcome the Will, our perception no longer just reveals relational dispositional properties to us. This is part of what it means that ‘we lose ourselves in the object’. If I give my mind completely to the object and thereby stop being a separate agent with my own aims, I end up as a ‘mirror of the object’.⁸ In this state, I am no longer in contact with phenomena, but with the truly real. Schopenhauer says we are in contact with the form of the object. This term harks back to Plato’s theory of forms. Janaway comments on the connection between Schopenhauer and Plato: the motivation here is deeply Platonic: the search for something more real than the ever-changing realm of phenomena, something that the mind can mirror in a state of ‘timeless, will-less, painless’ calm. Like Plato, Schopenhauer thinks this calm is reached at the moment of greatest knowledge—in aesthetic experience we are the ‘pure subject of knowing’. (Janaway 1989, 9–10)

I think one can hardly find a better rendering of the view Schlick’s targets. The state of pure knowing is simple: The wholly immediate, unreflective, yet also inexpressible, pleasure that is excited in us by the impression of colours, which is strengthened by metallic lustre, and ⁸ See also Reginster (2008, 264).

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still more by transparency, as for example in stained glass windows, and even more by means of clouds and their reflection at sunset—this pleasure, I say, ultimately rests on the fact that in the easiest manner, in a manner that is almost physically necessary, the whole of our interest is here won for knowledge without any excitement of our will. We thus enter into the state of pure knowing, although in the main this consists in this case in a mere sensation of the retina’s affection. But as this sensation is in itself wholly free from pain or pleasure, it is without any direct excitement of the will, and thus belongs to pure knowledge. (Schopenhauer 1844b II, 375; my emphasis)

Only something that does not excite the Will can be pure knowledge. According to Schopenhauer, the sensation of a colour qualifies as pure knowledge. But how could we become free of the Will if our faculties have been designed to service it? We may be able to suppress or satisfy our biological needs so that we no longer perceive and think in order to satisfy them. But if our perceptual faculties were designed by evolution to track affordances, they won’t change their biological make-up if we have managed to control our needs. Even if we overcome the Will, we still won’t be able to get in touch with reality. According to Allen, Bergson suggested an answer to this worry for Schopenhauer:⁹ Intellect can do what it must for adaptation only if it can do more than that. The eye, to do what it must, must be capable of more. To reveal potentials for acting on things, eyes must be able to reveal things (like stars) that we cannot act on. Intelligence, to do what it must (for example, invent tools) must be able to go beyond instrumental analysis. Bergson is calling on philosophy to make a use of cognitive powers for which we are not adapted and not accustomed, but which lie potential in those powers, and would raise their employment to a higher power. (Allen 2013, 51)

Our perceptions can only reveal affordances to us if they also reveal colours, shapes, etc. to us. We can perceive such tropes whether they are indicators of affordances or not. We can contemplate such qualities independently of their role for action. Bergson himself followed Schopenhauer: Either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge of things is practical knowledge aimed at the profit to be drawn from them, or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition. (Bergson 1912, 43)

⁹ On Bergson and Schopenhauer, see Jacoby: ‘Like Bergson, Schopenhauer is a pragmatist; like the pragmatism of Bergson, that of Schopenhauer holds good for understanding only; and as for Bergson, so for Schopenhauer, philosophy begins just where understanding and pragmatism cease’ (Jacoby 1912, 598).

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Bergson and Schopenhauer disagree about the object of intuition, but they agree that intuition no longer serves the Will and yields knowledge of forms. We have seen before that the idea that we can overcome the Will can also be found in Mach. Science is an activity that has emancipated itself from the Will. To recapitulate: Strengthened scientific thinking creates its own goals, seeks to satisfy itself and eliminate all intellectual uneasiness. Raised in the service of practical interests, it becomes its own master. Vulgar thinking does not serve pure cognitive purposes . . . (Mach 1976, 2 [2]; my translation)

The scientific method was born and raised in the service of the Will. But if our immediate biological needs are satisfied, science can liberate itself from the Will and the scientific method can be used for the sake of knowledge acquisition. This is far away from Schopenhauer’s pure knowledge of essence. We get knowledge for the sake of knowledge but it is not knowledge of a new kind of object. As we will see in Chapter 14, Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience is Schlick’s model for intuition. But there is another part of Schopenhauer’s thought that provides an illustration of the role of intuition in Inequality Metaphysics. Schopenhauer summed up Kant’s main message as follows: But as perception can furnish only phenomena, not things-in-themselves, we too have absolutely no knowledge of things-in-themselves.

And went on to comment: I admit this of everything, but not of the knowledge everyone has of his own willing. This is neither a perception (for all perception is spatial), nor is it empty; on the contrary, it is more real than any other knowledge. (Schopenhauer 1844b II, 196)

The thing-in-itself, the truly real, is according to Schopenhauer the Will. The Will is manifest in the willing of each thinker and the thinker has immediate knowledge of his willing: one’s willing is not given to one by means of a representation. This knowledge of one’s own willing is intuitive knowledge of reality ‘as it is’ or better, as close as we will ever get to the thing in itself.¹⁰

¹⁰ For discussion, see Schlick (1913, 150 [486]).

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3.2 Lotze: Cognitio Rei versus Cognitio Circa Rem Schlick (1926, 108 [156]) named Lotze as another major defender of intuition as a form of metaphysical knowledge. In the course of expounding the difference between our knowledge of matter and spirit, Lotze introduced a distinction between two kinds of knowledge.¹¹ It is worth quoting Lotze because his characterization of the distinction contains a pointer to the nature of ‘metaphysical knowledge’ that will be taken up in Chapter 14. Here is how he introduced the distinction: Our knowledge of things is of two kinds; it concerns either the essential nature of the object itself or the manifold of relations that can externally happen to it. The first kind of knowledge, a cognitio rei, is only under consideration where our perception not only meets an object in its external behavior, but the object is given to us in immediate intuition in such a way that we can absorb the center of its distinctive nature in our feeling as well as in our presentation, that we can project ourselves in it and come to know by empathy how such a being in virtue of its inner specific nature feels. In contrast, the other external knowledge about things, a cognitio circa rem, consists primarily in a clear and distinct knowledge of those conditions, under which we have an appearance of an object, and under which conditions it changes in interaction with other objects according to laws. Both kinds of knowledge are not everywhere combined, they also are divided in relation to the objects under discussion: matter and spirit. (Lotze 1852, 57)

Our knowledge of matter is cognitio circa rem: it is not knowledge of the essence of matter but of the laws that govern it. Matter is the stuff for which the following laws . . . hold. These laws are discovered in scientific investigation. Cognitio rei—knowledge of things—is different. In the previous section, we saw that Bergson speaks of philosophy as consisting in ‘placing oneself within [an] object’. This is certainly an overstatement. Lotze’s characterization of knowledge of things is similar: it consists in projecting oneself into the nature of a thing. Now, we can’t project ourselves into the nature of matter. But we can project ourselves into the nature of spiritual beings like us. We have the power of empathy and Lotze treats it as a source of knowledge. Lotze (1868, 257) appeals to the literal meaning of German verbs like ‘mitfühlen’, ‘mitleiden’ or ‘mitfreuen’. Composite verbs of the form ‘mit-verb’ are frequently used in German. Take as an independent example ‘mithelfen’ composed of ‘mit-’ and the verb ‘helfen’ (to help). If I say ‘Kannst Du mir mithelfen?’ I ask you to do something together with me. Saying that I mitfühle with you suggests that I feel with you, we share the same feeling. ¹¹ Kraushaar (1936, 255) argues that Lotze’s cognitio rei exactly corresponds to James’s (1890 I, 221–3) knowledge by acquaintance. An influence of Lotze on James is likely but I will not assess it here.

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By sharing your feeling of sadness I come to know what a particular kind of sadness is like. I don’t come to know relations that hold between a particular set of causes and your mental state etc. Lotze gives co-feeling an important role in his aesthetics. The shared feelings appreciate the value or unvalue the other has experienced. The basic idea that empathy is a source of knowledge is developed in the work of Lipps and others.¹² Empathy is supposed to be the foundation of knowledge of value. The shared experiences give rise to shared valuations that we conceive as social values. The connection between empathy and value gives us a pointer to Schlick’s response to metaphysicians like Lotze. Yes, there is empathy; it allows us to ‘re-experience’ the feeling and experience of others. But it is not knowledge. It is non-epistemic uptake of value. The reasons why our uptake of value is not cognitive will be discussed in Chapter 14.

3.3 Husserl on the a Priori Science of Essence In Chapter 6, we have already encountered Edmund Husserl. In his philosophy, Husserl built on the work of his teachers, Brentano and Stumpf, but developed his own views of intentionality and philosophical method. In 1910/11, Husserl published a programmatic paper, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’. In this paper, he proposed a renewal of philosophy as a rigorous science different from the mathematical and physical sciences: Since in the most impressive sciences of modernity, the mathematical-physical sciences, the greatest amount of work by far was done by indirect methods, we are only too inclined to overestimate indirect methods and to misjudge the value of direct seizing upon. Yet it lies precisely in the essence of philosophy, insofar as it returns to the ultimate origins, that its scientific work moves in spheres of direct intuition, and it is the greatest step our age has to make to see that with philosophical intuition in the right sense, the phenomenological seizing upon essences, an endless field of work opens up and a science that, without any indirectly symbolizing and mathematizing methods, without the apparatus of inferences and proofs, nevertheless obtains an abundance of the most rigorous cognitions, which are decisive for all further philosophy. (Husserl 1910/11, 294 [341])

Husserl developed the beginnings of this rigorous science in his Ideas. Jerusalem wrote about Husserl’s Ideas in a letter to Mach:

¹² See, for example, Lipps (1909, 234) on empathy as a source of knowledge.

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Husserl has written in the Yearbook for Phenomenology (published by Niemeyer in Halle) a more than 300 pages long treatise on Ideas towards a Pure Phenomenology. He talks very self-assuredly ex cathedra and looks down full of mercy upon the empiricists [Empiriker] who, he admits, are not all bad people, although they have not found the knack of the phenomenological intuition of ‘Wesenserschauung’. (Jerusalem 1913, 297)

Large parts of Ideas are programmatic. But Husserl gives more details about the methodology of the rigorous science of philosophy. There are sciences of facts (Tatsachenwissenschaften) and sciences of essence (Wesenswissenschaften): [The student of nature] observes and experiments, i.e. he fixes what is concretely there just as he experiences it, experience is for him an act that supplies grounds, and for which mere imagination never could be a substitute. For this very reason science of fact and science of experience are equivalent concepts. But for the geometer, who studies not actualities, but ‘ideal possibilities’, not actual but essential relationships, essential insight and not experience is the act that supplies the ultimate grounds. (Husserl 1913b, 18 [17])

The science of essence is concerned with discerning the essence of things. It does so by a special kind of intuition: Essential intuition is still intuition, just as the eidetic object is still an object. [ . . . ] Empirical intuition, more specifically sense-experience, is consciousness of an individual object, and as an intuiting agency ‘bring it to givenness’ [ . . . ]. On quite similar lines essential intuition is the consciousness of something, of an ‘object’, a something towards which its glance is directed, a something ‘self-given’ within it [ . . . ]. (Husserl 1913b, 13 [11])

An empirical intuition is awareness of an object in space and time; and essential intuition is an awareness of an essence, say a geometrical form. Both forms of intuition are one-termed: they are a form of awareness of an object and not of a fact. Husserl’s approach is another representative example of the connection between metaphysics and intuitive knowledge. He endorses that there are essences and appearances. These essences ground the way the actual objects that are given in perception are. Intuition is supposed to deliver non-conceptual knowledge of essence. Again, intuition is the mode of metaphysical knowledge.

3.4 Avenarius and Mach According to Neutral Monists, all there is are elements which are neither physical nor mental. How do we know the elements? Or how are some elements aware of

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other elements? I found no clear answer to this question in Avenarius or Mach. The question seems simply not pressing for them. Schlick takes both to assume that we are acquainted with the elements: What the ‘elements’, in the case of Mach and Avenarius, ‘are’ we know by direct acquaintance; colours, sounds, smells are simply given. It is not a judgement or a definition but experience alone that gives us information about their ‘nature’. But this does not mean that the elements and their nature are known. (Schlick 1925a, 231 [212])

The word ‘known’ translates here from Schlick’s ‘erkannt’: we are acquainted with or experience elements, but this does not constitute or give us knowledge of what they are or what their nature is. By Schlick’s light, Mach and Avenarius failed to provide us with this knowledge.

4. Schlick against Intuitive Knowledge 4.1 Overview Schlick agrees with the philosophers of intuition that intuition is a two-place relation between a mind and a thing, either a universal or a particular. But he denies that this relation is or can constitute knowledge of things. Why? Schlick’s argument, in outline, goes as follows: (IM) Intuition is a source of metaphysical knowledge. (P2) Intuition/knowledge of things has only one term. (P3) Every case of knowledge has two terms. Therefore: (C1) Intuition is not a source of knowledge. Therefore: (C2) Intuition is not a source of metaphysical knowledge. If no other source of knowledge for metaphysics is offered, metaphysics is not a viable scientific enterprise. Let us now see how Schlick spelled out this argument.

4.2 The Argument from the Metaphysics of the Knowledge Relation Voluntarists take biologically useful mental states to relate two things in order to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar. We have seen in Chapter 12 that Schlick followed, in this respect, in the footsteps of Avenarius and Mach. Knowledge, Schlick argues, is the relation between a mind and at least two things. According to

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him, knowledge requires two terms because knowledge is constituted by comparing one thing with something already known:¹³ The knowing [ . . . ] comes about only by comparison of a new object with an old one, and a rediscovery of the latter in the former. Knowing implies two terms: something known, and that as which it is known. (Schlick 1913, 144 [477])

Schlick follows Mach’s lead. Mach took the most basic non-perceptual mental act to be comparing (see section 11.1). Comparing is instinctive: we see in a particular its kind, in a present event a future event of a certain kind, and hear in a sound its maker. Schlick describes instinctive comparing as association of an idea of an object with a memory idea or a fusion with such an idea.¹⁴ Other forms of comparing, for instance, scientific knowledge, require more complex abilities.¹⁵ But these complications are not important for our purposes. So, we have an initial reason to say that there are cases of knowledge that have two terms. We will, however, need a further argument to show that it is necessary or even essential that knowledge has two terms. Brentano and Russell gave us at least the outline of a conception of knowledge of objects which allows for knowledge with only one term. Schlick argued that intuition or acquaintance, whatever they are, cannot be knowledge. Intuition or acquaintance are even the very opposite of knowledge: Intuition, as we continue to find, is the very opposite of knowledge. In pure intuition, raw contemplation, everything is utterly individual, for itself, compared to nothing. The multifariousness of experience is infinite—the same thing never recurs in it exactly as before. To abandon oneself to intuition is therefore to ignore all resemblances, to reject all combinations and order, in short to disdain everything that actually constitutes knowledge. (Schlick 1913, 150 [486])

As a first stab, we can reconstruct Schlick’s argument as follows: The Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition (P1)

Knowledge requires comparing one thing to another already known.

Therefore: (C1)

Knowledge has at least two terms.

¹³ The thesis that cognition requires two terms is a constant in Schlick’s work. He repeats the ‘knowledge requires two terms’ slogan for example in Schlick (1933/4, 96 [67]). (Russell counts the subject as one relatum of acquaintance, while Schlick does not count the subject as a further relatum of cognition. Hence, although both talk of two terms, they nonetheless disagree about the adicity of cognition.) ¹⁴ See Schlick (1925a, 16 [15]). ¹⁵ See Schlick (1925a, 94–5 [87–8]) for the thesis that there is continuity between instinctive and scientific knowledge.

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(P2) Intuition or acquaintance of x requires ignorance of resemblances of x with other things. Therefore: (C2)

Intuition or acquaintance of x can only have one term.

Therefore: (C3) and (C2))

Intuition or acquaintance cannot be knowledge. (From (C1)

The premises of Schlick’s Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition are not obvious. Why believe them? I will start answering this question by having a closer look at the first premise.

4.3 From the Aim of Cognition to its Metaphysics Why does knowledge require comparison of something with something else? We have already seen in Chapter 12 that knowledge acquisition is distinguished from other mental processes by its effect: the reduction of something unfamiliar to something familiar. Schlick takes this initial characterization to be in need of refinement, but the refinements are not of interest for our purposes. He follows Avenarius in holding that acquiring knowledge is ‘begreifen’ and ‘begreifen’ is reducing something new (unknown) to something old (known). The ‘reduction’ is effected by comparing a new object n to already known objects (Os) and exercising the habits one has with respect to Os also with respect to n. Consider Schlick’s dog example from section 12.3 again: if I ‘compare’ this thing to a dog, I will expect that it will behave like dogs I have encountered. In short: comparing puts me in a position to apply my dispositions for responding to the behaviour of known objects to as yet new objects while saving me from making new experiences. In this way, comparing enables prediction and prediction enables successful action which, in turn, serves our drive to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. Schlick quotes Comte’s slogan, ‘savoir pour prévoir et prévoir pour pouvoir’ (Schlick 1932, 185). We seek knowledge in order to have foreknowledge of events and we seek foreknowledge of events in order to control them and we want to control future events to survive and thrive. Schlick (1925a, 95–7 [88–90]) identifies the future action-enabling role of knowledge as its primary aim. However, activities done for one aim can become intrinsically valuable. Initially people hunted to satisfy biological needs. Now, some people, royals etc., hunt because they like to hunt. The same goes for knowledge acquisition.¹⁶ It can become an end in itself. Schlick goes an important step further than Avenarius. Schlick (1925a, 94 [87]) tries to shed light on the nature of knowledge via its primary aim. Our ¹⁶ See also Schlick (1932,186).

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concept of knowledge is that of a state that enables successful future-oriented action. In ‘Form and Content’, this idea comes to the fore: In every case the practical aim of knowledge is prediction, and we have good reasons to regard as the defining characteristics of knowledge those properties of it which make prediction possible. ‘Savoir pour prevoir’. (Schlick 1932, 185)

The properties of a mental state that enable it to have predictive power are those that make it knowledge. A necessary condition for a mental state to have predictive power is that it is awareness of a resemblance between an object and objects one has already encountered. Hence, only a mental state that has two terms can be knowledge. A mental state that has only one term is by definition not knowledge! It lacks the properties that make prediction possible. We now have an argument for the first premise of The Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition: The Aim of Knowledge Argument (P1)

The practical aim of knowledge is prediction.

(P2) The defining marks of the concept of knowledge are those properties knowledge must have to make prediction possible. (P3) In order to predict how an object will behave, one must compare it to objects one already knows. Therefore: (C) It is a defining mark of knowledge to be a mental relation between at least two terms. By this argument, a relation to an object like Russell’s acquaintance cannot be knowledge.

4.4 Knowledge, Foreknowledge, and Factivity Is Schlick’s case against intuitive knowledge convincing? In order to answer this question, let us have a look at The Aim of Knowledge Argument. According to this argument, a mental state is only knowledge if it has the purpose to enable predictions. The constitutive features of knowledge are those features of a mental state that make prediction possible. Now it is plausible that knowledge often enables us to make predictions. For example, if I know that x is a dog, I am in a position to make a number of predictions about x’s future behaviour. Such knowledge has practical value. But Schlick’s teleological view of knowledge goes further and takes the concept of knowledge to be that of a state whose features enable predictions. However, there are paradigm examples of knowledge that have no obvious predictive power or

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purpose. For example, I know that Hadrian’s Wall was begun in 122 . I also know that I exist etc. Such knowledge has little or no use for the planning of actions. It does not help me to make something unfamiliar familiar. Yet, there seems to be no independent reason to say that such knowledge is botched or not ‘real’ knowledge. Propositional knowledge can be of any facts whatsoever. Schlick suggests that knowledge that does not yield predictions is not useful: The immediate presence of certain contents is doubtless an enjoyable thing: but knowledge creates order, and that is a useful thing. (Schlick 1933/4, 74 [104])

But imagine that you were never directly aware of red. Without further aids, you will not be able to make predictions about objects that depend on recognizing that they are red. Insofar as acquaintance with features is involved in tracking objects, it is useful and should not be discarded. Similarly, my knowledge that Hadrian’s Wall was begun in 122  may come in handy in many circumstances without enabling prediction. I can, for example, explain past events by appealing to this knowledge. There is a further, more explanatory reason why Schlick’s The Aim of Knowledge Argument is unsatisfactory. Some cases of knowledge yield predictions but so do true beliefs. If I believe truly, but do not know, that the object coming towards me is a Rottweiler, I am right to expect that it will bite me. One may even truly guess future behaviour. Schlick’s teleological theory of knowledge cannot distinguish between foreknowledge and other mental states that enable prediction. Now, the view that it is an essential feature of knowledge to be a factive state distinguishes knowledge from true belief and similar states independently of any purpose. If my belief that p is true, it is the case that p. But a true belief is not a kind of mental state, it is a mental state with an additional property, truth, and this property guarantees that it is the case that p. In contrast, the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge makes it plausible that it is a conceptually and metaphysically simple factive state. Knowledge has practical value for us, and we rightly rely on it when making predictions because it is a state ‘whose essence includes a matching between mind and world’ (Williamson 2000, 39). If we know that p, we are safely right about p and therefore our predictions are better than those based on mere true belief. The factivity of knowledge captures cases of knowledge that do not underwrite predictions. If I know that Hadrian’s Wall was begun in 122 , it is a fact that Hadrian’s Wall was begun in 122 . I am in this state in virtue of having learned by testimony that Hadrian’s Wall was begun in 122 . In sum: we have a reason to resist Schlick’s claim that knowledge can be defined in terms of features that enable it to yield predictions. Knowledge that enables us to predict future behaviour is of special importance for us. But a mental state is knowledge independently of whether it enables us to make predictions; it is knowledge if its essence includes a matching between mind and world.

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Schlick may, of course, integrate the ‘matching feature’ into his account of knowledge and use it to explain the predictive success of knowledge, but if he does so he has no longer a reason to exclude acquaintance from knowledge. When I am directly aware of magenta by seeing, I know magenta because my mental state essentially matches the world. We have, then, reason to doubt the first premise of The Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition: knowledge does not always require ‘comparison’. What about premise (P2) of this argument? Does acquaintance with x preclude comparison of x with other things? Answering this question requires articulating Schlick’s broader philosophical ‘system’ at the time of General Theory of Knowledge and even beyond. We need to go from the theory of knowledge to the doctrine of wisdom to understand the nature of our contact with things that are not epistemic in nature. I will do so in Chapter 14 and return to our question in section 14.5.

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14 Beyond the Limits of Knowledge: Intuition and Value 1. Introduction Chapter 13 was devoted to Schlick’s arguments against metaphysics. Now, Schlick not only claimed that intuition or acquaintance is not knowledge. Intuition is even opposed to knowledge. If one is acquainted with an object, one cannot simultaneously possess knowledge of it. Why? In order to answer this question, we need to know more about intuition. Schlick has a positive view of intuition according to which it is a form of evaluation. If I have an intuition of something, I evaluate it without bringing it under concepts. Schlick’s view of intuition is based on plausible and important observations. It provides us also with the beginning of a positive conception of what lies beyond the limits of knowledge: life and experience. Yet, it remains unclear whether his view of intuition helps him to make a case for the conclusion that acquaintance and knowledge are incompatible.

2. The Drive to Perceive and Sensory Pleasure First, we need some background. It can be found in Döring and Jerusalem. In section 11.5, we have already given an overview of Döring’s theory of requirements and needs. Functional requirements are requirements to exercise our faculties. In Chapter 11, we were concerned with the functional requirement to exercise one’s understanding, the faculty of judgement. But there are also functional requirements for sensibility: our sensory faculties. We don’t notice the functional requirements of our senses until they are not satisfied because they normally are satisfied without any effort on our side. We don’t need to do anything to satisfy these needs; the satisfaction ‘happens’ if things are normal. However, there are telling cases in which these requirements go unsatisfied: Absolute darkness is painful after some time for the eye, absolute silence for the ear. After the long time of sparse and monotonous sensory impressions, the prisoner in the castle dungeon, the wanderer in the desert or seafarer welcomes even insignificant or materially unpleasant excitations with delight. As any kind

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of sparseness is an evil, the variety of sensory impressions which ordinary life provides, is a good. (Döring 1888, 103–4)

So it is a requirement to exercise our senses. Luckily, we usually don’t need to do anything to satisfy the requirement. As we have seen in Chapter 11, Jerusalem built his Urteilsfunktion on Döring’s theory of requirements and needs. When we exercise our senses, we enjoy the activity: It is indeed often the case that we are completely absorbed in looking and listening and find nothing in us to prompt further activity. The activity of our sensory function does us good and the constant satisfaction of our need for presentation gives us sufficient pleasure. (Jerusalem 1895, 88)

We take pleasure in passively seeing and hearing as well as in watching and listening to something. Jerusalem quotes from Goethe’s Poetry and Truth to make a further point: It is impossible to overestimate the quiet influence of those impressions which we allow ourselves to accept and enjoy without attempting to dissect and criticize them. (Goethe 1811, 50 [502–3])

The translation does not quite capture Goethe’s point. He wrote about ‘enjoying taking in impressions without a splintering judgement’ (‘ohne zersplitterndes Urteil’).¹ If your functional sensory requirement is satisfied, you don’t go on to judge and thereby classify and compare the things your perceptions disclose to you. In his Lebensweisheit. Versuch einer Glückseligkeitslehre (Schlick 1908), Schlick employs concepts very similar to Döring’s requirement and need. We have different basic drives and sometimes their satisfaction requires us to act. I need to buy and cook food to sate my hunger. However, often no such activity is required in the case of the functional requirement for sensory activity: The impacts of the external world can happen in such a favourable way that our drives are satisfied without noticeable activity on our side and we only need to offer up our chalices to the showers of pleasure which flow from the heaven of coincidence. (Schlick 1908, 91)

Which drives are satisfied in this passive way? We do not only perceive; we have a general drive for the free exercise of our senses. I think Döring’s example gives

¹ See German text, 502–3.

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initial support to the existence of such a drive. Schlick gives a poetic description of passive satisfaction of this drive: All senses are occupied in bustling activity to receive the external impressions, they feel the caress of the wind, the glowing of the landscape, the whispering of the treetops and the rumbling of the surf as an immeasurable pleasure—for certainly the drives of man are not the weakest which long for a free activity in conformity to their nature; the eye thirsts for colours and shapes, the ear for harmonies, the skin for soft caresses; and the pleasure drawn from the calm acting of the senses alone can make us happy if it is not deafened by the violence of vehement acting. (Schlick 1908, 91–2)

The drive for the free exercise of our senses is satisfied when we perceive and its satisfaction is a sensory pleasure. Schlick’s description of the perceptual drives seems incomplete. Is the drive to perceive satisfied if we perceive at all? Or do our senses ‘thirst’ to perceive particular shapes, forms, and sounds? It seems plausible that the general and specific drives come as a package deal. Let us highlight a point that is important for our purposes. Perceptual activities can satisfy the functional requirement and give us pleasure without the activity constituting or leading to a judgement. We can call this ‘Goethe’s point’. Jerusalem illustrates it with an example: Imagine yourself on the top of a mountain from where you have a beautiful view to many other mountain tops. One can imagine a spectator who gives himself completely to the visual sensory impression which the mountain shapes, the snowfields and the glaciers make. Her mental functional needs will, then, be satisfied by the presentation alone. (Jerusalem 1895, 89)

If the perceptual activity is pleasant and no further functional requirements need to be satisfied, the perceiver will be content with a presentation and not move to a judgement. Schlick combines the thesis that perceiving is a form of enjoyment with Hedonism. He expounded Hedonism as follows: [One cannot talk of the value of pleasure] because it is the only valuable thing and the measure of all values in the world—it makes it the case in the first place that living beings take an interest in something. For the treasures and dramas of the universe are nothing but vessels of pleasure for everything living; and what we call the value of a thing is nothing but the pleasure we can drink from it. (Schlick 1908, 85)

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Hedonism is characterised by (H1) and (H2): (H1)

x is valuable for y if, and only if, y takes pleasure in x.

(H2) x is objectively valuable if, and only if, all or most take pleasure in x. (Schlick 1908, 87) The combination of the thesis that we take pleasure in perceiving and (H2) implies that perceptual activities are bearers of value. Moreover, they seem to be the primary bearer of value. For we don’t enjoy, say, colours and tones; we enjoy perceiving colours and tones. The colours and tones etc. can be said to be valuable because we enjoy perceiving them. There is not just the general functional requirement to exercise our sensory faculties, there are more specific desires to perceive objects of pleasing kinds and, if these are satisfied, we take pleasure and the objects have value for us. The perceptual activities are, therefore, not only themselves of value; they reveal the value of the perceived objects to us. My seeing a colour can satisfy the general functional requirement of being active and the particular ‘thirst’ for colours. I enjoy, among other things, seeing the colour and the colour has value for me. Nonepistemic perception of colour—perceiving the red of the rose—is, then, a form of affective evaluation of it: one takes pleasure in it and thereby feels its value for one.

3. The Theoretical versus the Practical Standpoint According to Schlick, one can perceptually evaluate objects without making judgements about them. Hence, there is a dichotomy between the standpoint of value and the standpoint of science: Man can take two standpoints in relation to the objects of the world: either he studies their nature [Wesen] or he asks for their value; he has, as Kant would express it, a theoretical or a practical interest in things. The first of these ways of considering things is the one of science and only of science; the second is the one of all other areas of life. Here we need to be aware that science itself has its source in practical interest insofar as theoretical pursuit is something valuable for man since it satisfies his drive for knowledge and gives him the pleasure of knowledge. Only scientific statements are not of practical nature; all other judgements, every thought, uttered or inscribed sentence is a value judgement. (Schlick 1908, 86)

Schlick’s metaphor of two standpoints is not helpful. The notion of functional requirement is more illuminating and allows us to articulate Schlick’s thought in

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more detail. Instead of saying that there are two standpoints, we should say that there are two functional requirements: The epistemic functional requirement: there is a functional requirement for making knowledgeable judgements and its satisfaction yields pleasure. The exercise functional requirement: the functional requirement for exercising the senses. Its satisfaction yields a distinct kind of pleasure.

Can one satisfy both functional requirements in one activity? No, one can’t: The essence of knowing absolutely requires that he who would practise it must betake himself far away from things and to a height far above them, from which he can then view their relations to all other things. Whoever comes close to things participates in their ways and works, is engaged in living, not in knowing; to him, things display their value aspect [Antlitz ihres Wertes], not their nature. (Schlick 1925a, 80 [74]; in part my translation)

This is again very metaphorical. In which sense does knowledge require ‘distance’? If we put distance between us and an object, we are able to see it as well as its surrounding objects; if we are too close to the object, we see all its details, but not its surroundings. Knowledge about an object requires comparison with others. Hence, we must ‘view it from a distance’. According to Schlick, this implies that we bring the object under concepts and thereby make the unfamiliar familiar. In contrast, perceptual evaluation does not require and even prevents the exercise of concepts. When we are immersed in the perception of an object and take pleasure in it, we sensorily evaluate it, but we don’t relate it to other things.

4. Non-Conceptual Evaluation and Life Schlick has an important insight here that deserves to be highlighted. There are basic forms of evaluation that don’t require concepts or, more neutrally, relating an object to previously encountered objects, their kinds or stereotypes. An object of a kind I have never encountered before may look disgusting or attractive to me and this sensory evaluation does not require the exercise of any general representation. Tye gives a suggestive illustration of the basic idea: Suppose you are walking towards the Plaza Hotel in New York and just before you get there, you encounter a large quantity of vomit on the sidewalk. You are appalled, of course. Why didn’t someone clean it up? Afternoon tea is waiting for you at the hotel and you no longer feel like eating. The vomit smells bad to you.

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In so doing, it elicits in you an olfactory experience directed on the vomit and its odor. Your experience represents the odor of the vomit as bad. But it does not just represent the odor as bad simpliciter. It represents the odor as bad in a certain way, namely as foul. Your experience, then, has an evaluative content. It represents the vomit and its odor as having a kind of negative value, as being foul. Must one have the capacity to think a thought into which the concept foul enters in order for something to smell foul to one? Surely not. (Tye 2005, 225)

When you smell the vomit, it smells foul to you, whether you have encountered smells like this one before or not. There is no need for you to exercise memory of previous smells or bring any general representation you already possess to bear in order to sensorily evaluate the smell. You are pained by the smell and motivated to bring about that you smell something different. In contrast, something can only look to me like a vase if its look triggers the right associations or disposes me to apply general representations like stereotypes or concepts. Mitchell (2020) uses what he calls ‘first-exposure experiences’ to make plausible that there is non-conceptual evaluative content. When I see a picture of a genre that is new to me, I may take pleasure in my viewing it or not. It may look nice or puzzling to me, although I lack the concepts needed to represent these properties and make value judgements. Examples like this suggest again that sensory evaluation does not require general representation. Sensory evaluation can therefore be, to use Schlick’s favoured terminology, one-termed. Some sensory evaluations are affective relations between a thinker and the value of an object. The relation holds in virtue of a felt evaluation of a perceptual activity directed onto a property of the object. Because sensory evaluation does not require the exercise of general representations, it can be directed onto determinates of determinable properties. You take pleasure or displeasure in perceiving the particular determinate property.² The vomit does not just smell bad to you; it has this particular bad smell that makes you heave. Schlick finds the same determinateness in intuition: In pure intuition, raw contemplation, everything is utterly individual, for itself, compared to nothing. The multifariousness of experience is infinite—the same thing never recurs in it exactly as before. [ . . . ] The would-be knower must ascend into the sphere of the universal, where he finds the concepts he has need of to order and designate the individual; the devotee of intuition is tied from the start to the individual, which he cannot get free from and therefore cannot know. (Schlick 1913, 150 [486])

This suggests a close relation between intuition and sensory evaluation. We will see in due course how Schlick spells out this connection. ² See Johnston (2001, 182).

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If our senses evaluate objects, they are biologically useful. If the vomit smells bad to you, you won’t eat it and will thereby prevent infection etc. Tye plausibly suggests, therefore, that: nature wired into us (and many other creatures) value-tracking detectors— detectors that enable us to track value in a primitive way and thereby to behave in a fashion most conducive to our survival. (Tye 2005, 227)

With this in mind, we can return to the two aforementioned distinct functional requirements. The epistemic requirement to exercise the faculty of judgement. The exercise of the faculty of judgement requires, Schlick argues, the application of concepts. The faculty is discursive; if properly exercised and the world cooperates, it yields knowledge as well as pleasure in knowing. The functional requirement to exercise the sensory faculties. When we exercise the senses, we don’t need to apply concepts; we can sense utterly determinate values without relating them to anything beyond what we presently experience. The faculty is non-discursive; if properly exercised and the world cooperates, it yields sensory pleasure, but not knowledge. Schlick adds that satisfaction of the first functional requirement yields knowledge of essence, but there is no further justification given that we indeed come to know the essence of things. I will therefore only speak of knowledge that does not relate to values. Schlick locates acquaintance and intuition in the dichotomy between understanding and the sensory faculties. We can represent his reasoning as an inference to the best explanation: (P1) Acquaintance (Intuition) is one-termed. It does not require the exercise of general representations and its content is fully determinate. (P2) Sensory evaluation is one-termed. It does not require the exercise of general representations and its content is fully determinate. Therefore: (C) Acquaintance with x is nothing but sensory evaluation of x. Schlick does not formulate his conclusion in this terminology in General Theory of Knowledge. But in ‘Form and Content’, we find a clear statement of (C): Intuition is enjoyment, enjoyment is life, not knowledge.

(Schlick 1932, 196)

In light of (C), Schlick proposes to revise Russell’s theory of acquaintance: If we insist in using a verb which takes ‘content’ as its object and the ‘ego’, or ‘mind’ as its subject, the word ‘enjoying’ presents itself. It is the nearest equivalent to the German ‘erleben’, but has certain disadvantages; we shall have to say, for

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instance, that the mind ‘enjoys pain’. But as we know, there is no way of speaking correctly here, we must be satisfied to banish the word ‘knowledge’ from these phrases. (Schlick 1932, 191; marked as an addition to the manuscript)

As a first stab, Russell’s ‘S is acquainted with O’ should be replaced with ‘S is directly aware of O’ which, then, should be glossed as ‘S enjoys O’. Now, there are many things we don’t enjoy perceiving. Smelling vomit is rather a pain or unpleasure. This creates a terminological problem for Schlick. For it seems wrong to say ‘S enjoys smelling the vomit’. But why not say that acquaintance with O is taking sensory pleasure or unpleasure in O because perceiving O satisfies functional sensory requirements? Schlick argues that this terminological problem does not exist in German. The word ‘erleben’ covers perceptions with positive and negative hedonic value. He appeals to the ordinary meaning of ‘erleben’ that can be specified by the gloss ‘to be impressed or taken by something’ (‘von etwas betroffen sein’). It has the evaluative connotations that help to express Schlick’s view of intuition. One erlebt a colour shade if one has an affective relation to it. In a footnote of General Theory of Knowledge, Schlick refers the reader to several philosophers who share his view that intuition is not knowledge. First and foremost, this is Riehl, who writes: We see that science reduces the content of experience to what is lawlike in it, on what reoccurs uniformly, what is amenable to quantitative determination and can therefore be represented by operations of magnitude, in short to what can be understood [das Begreifliche]. Everything else is not an object of understanding [des Begreifens], but of immediate knowledge, hence of feeling, sensation [Empfindung] and perception. (Riehl 1925, 257)

Riehl calls ‘immediate knowledge’ what really is a form of felt evaluation, feeling, that contrasts with knowledge. Schlick sums up the dichotomy in the following diagram:³

³ Schlick (1932, 197).

Intuition

Knowledge

only one term enjoyable living presentation acquaintance inexpressible that which is ordered content

two terms useful thinking explanation description expressible order form

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Only two-term mental relations can be cognitions; only one-term mental relations can be sensory evaluations. In this dichotomy, intuition (acquaintance) is more fundamental than knowledge: We become acquainted with [kennen] things through intuition, since everything that is given to us from the world is given to us in intuition. But we come to know [erkennen] things only through thinking, for the ordering and coordinating needed for cognition is precisely what we designate as thinking. Science does not make us acquainted with objects; it teaches us to understand or comprehend what we are already acquainted with, and that means to know. (Schlick 1925a, 83 [77])

In fact, intuition is indispensable for everything: [T]he fact that intuition, immediate awareness, or as we should rather say, the mere presence of content, is indispensable for all knowledge, this fact has no significance whatsoever, for it is indispensable for everything; it is the ineffable ever present fundament of all else, also of knowledge, but this does not mean that it is itself knowledge—on the contrary, it makes it impossible to apply to it the word knowledge, which is reserved for something utterly different. (Schlick 1932, 194)

If intuition is sensory evaluation of something, it does not constitute knowledge of it or some of its properties. It constitutes a basic form of evaluation or appraisal of x or some of its properties. How can all cognition be grounded in such sensory evaluation? Schlick does not answer this question. But the following proposal seems initially plausible: we take an interest in perceiving colours because we track their value for us. Our interest makes us selectively attend to them and seek them out repeatedly. Our interest directs us to find the common factor in the many perceptions and thereby we form a concept of a universal. If you can define a concept in terms of concepts of properties that are given to you in sensory evaluations, there is a natural stopping point of the regress of definitions. The regress stops with properties that are of value for you and therefore you have a felt appreciation of their meaning for you. Consider Johnston’s report: I take myself as having come to understand the complete nature of the property of being nauseated one afternoon twenty five years ago when I tasted a juicy apricot on a ferry crossing from Melbourne to Hobart. (Johnston 1992, 258)

The nature of the property is revealed in an affective response because it consists in such a response. Our displeasure in a state of our body makes the negative value that partly constitutes the property manifest.

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Schlick uses the notion of sensory evaluation to say what it means that something is immediately given and how the fact that it is immediately given can be the ground of concept-acquisition. But why can’t knowledge of a property and its sensory evaluation go hand in hand? In the next section, I will have a look at the example that is supposed to suggest an answer to this question.

5. Schlick and Schopenhauer on Acquaintance as Immersion Why is acquaintance with a supposed to rule out comparing a (associating a with further things), thereby making acquaintance essentially one-termed? In ‘Form and Content’, Schlick gives an example of an intuition of a colour that sheds light on his reasoning: When I look at the blue sky and lose myself in the contemplation of it without thinking that I am enjoying the blue, I am in a state of pure intuition, the blue fills my mind completely, they have become one, it is the kind of union of which the mystic dreams. Bergsonian intuition is the mystical conception of knowledge. (Schlick 1932, 194)

If ‘blue fills my mind completely’, I don’t compare or associate it with other sensory qualities. Hence, this remark takes us closer to the second premise of The Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition. Now, it seems excessive to say that when I am acquainted with blue, I and blue enter a ‘mystic union’. Why does Schlick frame his point this way? Schlick speaks of ‘Bergsonian intuition’. Bergson (1912, 7) wrote that in intuition ‘one places oneself into’ the object intuited. However, Bergson does not explain this any further and in his papers on intuitive knowledge, Schlick takes for granted that his readers don’t need further explanation about the notion of acquaintance under discussion. We can make progress in understanding the conception in play here if we go back to Schopenhauer. For Schlick’s remarks on acquaintance are not only influenced by Bergson, but mainly and fundamentally by Schopenhauer’s theory of ‘extra-ordinary cognition’. Schlick had already discussed Schopenhauer in his Lebensweisheit in 1908. He went on to lecture on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in Rostock and Vienna.⁴ While Schlick rejected many Schopenhauerian theses, Schopenhauer’s distinction between ordinary and non-ordinary cognition is congenial to the basic tenets of the economy philosophy of Mach and Avenarius and Schlick draws on Schopenhauer in his theory of acquaintance.⁵ ⁴ See Stadler (2001, 726). ⁵ Bergson is, in these points, so close to Schopenhauer that Jacoby (1912, 609) raises the question whether Bergson plagiarized Schopenhauer (Jacoby gives a negative answer).

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If we introduce the Schopenhauerian background of Schlick (and Bergson), the ‘fusion’ view of acquaintance will become clearer. So, let us first get those Schopenhauerian ideas in view that Schlick will use. We have already seen in section 13.3.1 that Schopenhauer distinguished between ordinary and extra-ordinary cognition. Extra-ordinary cognition is, to use a neutral term, contact with a form: ‘Using the very perceptual apparatus produced in us by the will, we can subvert the will’ (Janaway 1989, 276). The subversion happens when our interests in satisfying our needs are trumped by the beauty of an object. We start to perceive it because we want to perceive it and not to plan and act upon it. In this situation, ‘we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object’ (Schopenhauer 1844a I, 201 [211]). In his lectures on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Schlick describes acquaintance in the same way and with the same words with which Schopenhauer described will-free perception, here aesthetic appreciation: the perceiver ‘loses himself in’ (‘sich verlieren’) the object of perception.⁶ The state I am in when I lose myself in an object merits also Schlick’s description of acquaintance as a union of object and perceiver, quoted above. In the state of being lost in an object, ‘the object does not stand in any relation to something external to it’ (Schlick 2013, 426; my translation). What does this mean? The object of my contemplation does not suddenly lose all its relations. Here is a way to make sense of Schlick’s remark. When I am immersed in the object, my habits of association and the drive to compare the object to others are blocked. I have overcome ‘the Will’ and my cognition is no longer an instrument of it. The perceiver is: no longer concerned with relations following the principle of sufficient reason but instead resting and becoming absorbed in a steady contemplation of the object presented, aside from its inter-connections with any other object. (Schopenhauer 1844a I, 200–1)

If we manage to overcome the Will and immerse ourselves in an object, we are acquainted with it. But acquaintance does not make us aware of affordances and similarities. We are aware of the object and nothing else: we don’t relate it to us or other objects. Hence, what we arrive at is the feature of acquaintance that is important for Schlick’s argument. To repeat: In pure intuition, raw contemplation, everything is utterly individual, for itself, compared to nothing. (Schlick 1913, 150 [486])

⁶ See Schlick (2013, 425–6).

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The consequence for the metaphysics of acquaintance is that acquaintance has just one term: the object. With this in mind, we can now go back to The Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition. If you immerse yourself fully in perceiving an object, you satisfy functional requirements for the senses. If I am overwhelmed by the beauty of Bach’s Air on the G String and listen attentively to it, I am not seeking to recognize it as something I heard before or find a melody in it that is similar to others. I just respond to its beauty and aim to appreciate it, nothing more. Because the functional requirements are satisfied and you wish this satisfaction to last, you are not motivated to follow associations or make comparisons. This reasoning gives Schlick the premise (P2). But is this plausible in all cases of sensory evaluation? Is it not possible to satisfy each of the functional requirements to make judgements and exercise one’s senses to some degree and hence appreciate an object as well as to acquire knowledge about it in one perceptual process? Schlick seems to reserve the label ‘intuition’ or ‘acquaintance’ for cases in which one has fully immersed oneself in an object: When I give myself fully to an intuitive content of my consciousness, say a red patch I see before me, or when in behaving I submerge myself fully in the feeling of activity, I experience through intuition the red or the activity. (Schlick 1925a, 82–3 [77])

But such cases of full immersion are rare. Mixed cases of sensory evaluation and inquisitive attention are possible and may even be the rule, rather than the exception. But let us set this problem aside for now and focus on a theoretically more interesting problem. We have seen that Brentano argued that there are judgements that have only one term: acknowledgements of objects. Now, we cannot take pleasure in perceiving something without acknowledging the perceptual activity as well as its object. Hence, taking pleasure in something presupposes an acknowledgement of an object and, if I correctly take pleasure in something, my acknowledgement constitutes knowledge of an object. For this reason, acquaintance and knowledge must be compatible. Brentano’s one-term view of judgement allows them to be compatible. I take this to be a point that speaks in its favour. Brentano goes even further. The acknowledgement of an object is the same mental activity as the sensory evaluation: [E]very mental act, even the simplest has four different aspects under which it may be considered. It may be considered as a presentation of its primary object, as when the act in which we perceive a sound is considered as an act of hearing; however, it may also be considered as a presentation of itself, as a cognition of itself, and as a feeling toward itself. (PES , 119 [I, 218–19])

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Brentano will later backtrack: not every mental act has these four aspects. But some have. My perceiving a colour is my taking pleasure in my perceiving, which is the same as sensory evaluation of its object. The same activity is also an acknowledgement of itself and the object acknowledged. Acquaintance is different from propositional knowledge and may even exclude it. Yet, acquaintance can be knowledge and evaluation of an object if there are one-term judgements, as Brentano argued.

6. Conclusion Schlick’s arguments against intuitive knowledge have several loopholes. He provided an intriguing evaluative account of acquaintance but this account does not show that acquaintance excludes knowledge of things. At the same time, his account of knowledge implies that only two-termed mental relations can be knowledge. But one cannot merely characterize knowledge as a mental state that serves the Will by enabling predictions. Schlick lacks a theory about the distinction between knowledge and other attitudes that can make predictions rational. If we add an independently plausible conception of knowledge, his arguments to the effect that acquaintance cannot be knowledge fail. A general account of knowledge leaves room for one-term relations to be knowledge. Schlick gives us, therefore, no reason to deny the possibility of intuitive knowledge. He rejected intuitive knowledge to show that there is no metaphysical knowledge: if there were knowledge of the truly real, it could only be intuitive knowledge. But there can be no such knowledge. Hence, we should give up metaphysics. Now, one can believe in intuitive knowledge, like Russell and Brentano, without thereby lending support to Inequality Metaphysics. For the intuitive knowledge we have when we are acquainted with an object is rather uninteresting. If we put it in propositional form, it is the knowledge that a particular object or feature exists. This knowledge does not require the exercise of concepts or other general representations or abilities but it is unclear why it should be knowledge of the truly real. Acquaintance puts us in contact with determinate features of objects but not with substances or essences that ground them. A proponent of Inequality Metaphysics must go further than Russell and Brentano and offer us an account of how acquaintance with substance is possible. In turn, we have an initial argument against Voluntarism in the theory of judgement. If Voluntarism is supposed to make plausible that every judgement must have two terms, the viability of one-term judgements makes Voluntarism in its original form implausible. Either there are judgements that don’t serve the Will and should not be evaluated in terms of their biological usefulness, so that Voluntarism is too narrow, or Voluntarism must be revised in order to accommodate such judgements. In either case, Voluntarists have their work cut out.

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Ward, J. 1906. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edition. 2 vols. London: Adam Charles Black. Ward, J. 1919. Psychological Principles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watkins, J.W.N. 1977. Moritz Schlick and the Mind-Body Problem. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 28, 369–81. Whitcomb, D. 2010. Curiosity Was Framed. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81, 664–87. Williams, D.C. 1953. The Elements of Being I. Review of Metaphysics 7, 3–18. Williamson, T. 1994. Vagueness. London: Routledge. Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. 2013. Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. 2016. Abductive Philosophy. The Philosophical Forum 47, 263–80. Williford, K. 2004. Moore, the Diaphanousness of Consciousness, and Physicalism. Metaphysica 5, 133–50. Williford, K. 2006. The Self-Representational Structure of Consciousness. In U. Kriegel and K. Williford, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 111–43. Wisdom, J. 1942. Moore’s Technique. In P.A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G.E. Moore. Evanston and Chicago, Ill.: The Northwestern University Press, 419–51. Wishon, D. 2017. Russellian Acquaintance and Frege’s Puzzle. Mind 126, 321–70. Wishon, D. 2018. Russell on Introspection and Self-Knowledge. In R. Wahl (ed.) The Bloomsbury Companion to Russell. London: Bloomsbury, 256–85. Witasek, S. 1908. Grundlinien der Psychologie. Leipzig: Dürr’sche Buchhandlung. Wittgenstein, L. 1918. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Side-by-side edition online at: https://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/ Wolff, C. 1732/4. Prolegomena to Empirical and Rational Psychology. Translation and commentary by R.J. Richards, 1980. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, 227–39. Woodward, W.R. 1978. Lotze, the Self, and American Psychology. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 291, 168–77. Woodward, W.R. 2015. Hermann Lotze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, H.W. 1912. The Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Western Philosophical Association. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9, 350–57. Wundt, W. 1874. Grundzüge Der Physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann. Translated by E. Titchener as Principles of Physiological Psychology. London: Swan Sonnenschein/New York: Macmillan & Co, 1910. Wundt, W. 1877. Philosophy in Germany. Mind 2, 493–518. Wundt, W. 1888. Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung. Philosophische Studien 4, 292–309. Wundt, W. 1896. Ueber die Definition der Psychologie. Philosophische Studien 12, 1–66. Wundt, W. 1897. Grundriss der Psychologie, 2nd edition. Leipzig: Engelmann. Translated as Outlines of Psychology by C.H. Judd. London/New York: Williams & Norgate/Stechert. Wundt, W. 1903. Über empirische und metaphysische Psychologie. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie II(1), 333–61. Young, J. 2005. Schopenhauer. London: Routledge. Ziehen, T. 1900. Das Verhältnise der Herbart’schen Psychologie zur physiologischexperimentellen Forschung. Berlin: Reuter & Reichard. Zimmermann, R. 1853. Philosophische Propädeutik für Obergymnasien. Wien: Braunmüller.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. aboutness 138, 233–5 abstraction 58, 75–6, 101, 124, 127–8, 132, 134, 147, 150–2, 165–6, 170, 186–7, 196–8, 222, 270, 314, 326 accidents 1, 4, 19, 23, 36–7, 61, 69, 78–9, 93, 239, 263 achievements 40–1, 197, 257–8, 306 acknowledging 271–2, 280, 282–3, 285–7, 315, 349 Ackrill, John L. 262 acquaintance 177, 202–3, 205, 209–13, 240, 244–5, 298, 329n.11, 332–3, 333n.13, 335, 337, 344–50 as immersion 347–50 relation 204–6, 208, 211, 216 with acquaintance 204–5, 208 with an experience 240 with complexes 204, 211, 240, 242 with doubts 158 with elements 331–2 with features 336 with mental acts 314 with objects 180, 202, 204, 338, 346–7, 350 with psychological acts 208n.9 with reality 314 with sense-data 205, 211 with sound 204, 209, 211 with subjects 204–6, 208–10 act content 140, 142, 148, 173, 215–16, 225–6, 228–9 act/content distinction 140, 144, 150, 238, 246–7 act/content/object distinction 5–6, 146n.22, 178, 181, 193–201, 215–17, 225, 233, 240, 243, 246, see also akt/inhalt/object distinction, content/object distinction, tripartite distinction action planning 37–41, 165, 280, 320 activity 6, 26, 29, 36, 38–41, 47, 57, 92, 127, 129, 164, 206–7, 238–9, 254–5, 283–6, 289, 292, 297, 299, 305–6, 328, 334, 339–40, 342, 349–50 of apprehension 216

of attending/attention 39–41 of being conscious 239 of comparing 38, 52 of distinguishing 52 of hearing 51 of judging 261, 264, 281, 283, 289 of mind 62 of relating 38 of the soul 82, 88 of the will 283 see also mental activity act/object distinction 148, 152–3, 215–16, 218, 229–48 Aczel, Peter 190n.23 Adamson, Robert 26 Adler, Friedrich 99n.22, 145n.21 aesthetic appreciation 289n.11, 348 aesthetic experience 326, 328 aesthetics 330 Aim of Knowledge Argument 335–6 akt/inhalt/object distinction 145–50, see also act/ content/object distinction, tripartite distinction alienation model 14 Allen, B. 327 American philosophers 32, 65, 98, 109, 215–16, 249 American pragmatism/pragmatists 249, 256–7 Amijee, Fatima 207n.8 analogy 21, 26, 72, 80, 90–1, 116–17, 121n.15, 138–9, 144–5, 222, 231, 238, 252 analytic definitions 14, 42, 132–4, 165, 177n.1 analytic philosophy 1, 5, 11–13, 31–2, 50–1, 155, 175, 177–9, 181 analytic psychologists/psychology 194–5, 215–16 Anglo-Austrian Analytic Axis 5, 178 Anglo-Austrian conception 179, 181 anti-Brentanian result 285 Anti-Dualists 109 anti-Hegelian movement 249 anti-metaphysical import 132 orientation 4, 11–12, 17

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anti-metaphysical (cont.) stance 94 thrust 295 tradition 13 views 295 anti-metaphysics 13, 18, 94–6 appearance/reality distinction 89–94, 318 appearances 24, 26, 31, 33, 35, 39–40, 57, 79–80, 84–94, 90n.12, 97, 100, 108–19, 125, 127–9, 131, 161, 197–8, 212–13, 232–3, 259, 263, 271, 295, 318–22, 324–5, 329, 331 apprehension 21, 54, 85, 107, 110, 112–13, 124, 135–6, 142, 200–1, 216, 228, 258, 295, 310 Aquinas, Thomas 50 Argument from Perception 266–73, see also perception Argument from the Function of Judgement 277, 281, 287–92 Argument from the Metaphysics of Cognition 333–5, 337, 347, 349, see also cognition, metaphysics of cognition Argument from the Metaphysics of the Knowledge Relation 332–4 Argument from the Unity of Consciousness 35, see also unity of consciousness Aristotelian idealizations 76n.44 logic 13n.29 notion of substance 31n.36 texts 50 Aristotelian-Scholastic approach 142 model of thinking 262 philosophy 141 psychologist 140 view of the mind 140–2 Aristotle 3, 50, 53n.17, 80, 238, 262–3, 265 De Anima 50, 238 De Interpretatione 262–3 Metaphysics 53, 261 Armstrong, David M. 96 assertion 33, 66, 80, 84, 125, 127, 143, 168–9, 186–7, 220, 242, 263, 266–8, 275, 291, 313, 316–17 assertoric force 271, 275, 280, 316 Atomists 26 attention 20–1, 25, 34, 38–9, 54–7, 93, 119, 126–7, 131, 134, 137–9, 143, 152–3, 155, 164, 185, 196–8, 200–1, 206–8, 207n.8, 213n.16, 222, 232, 238, 240, 264–5, 269, 282, 289n.11, 302, 326, 349, see also activity of attending/attention, unity of the attention process, visual attention

attitudes 7, 13, 65, 152, 160–1, 177, 198, 247, 265, 272, 275–6, 281–2, 350, see also propositional attitudes Aufderheide, Joachim 53n.17 Austro-German collaboration 10 philosophers 5–6, 180, 321 philosophical literature 154 philosophy 4–5, 19n.2, 22, 109–10, 150–5, 180 Austro-Hungarian Empire 8–9, 11–13, see also Habsburg Empire Avenarius, Richard 4, 6, 9–10, 27–8, 27n.25, 42–3, 65, 81–7, 89, 91–2, 96–7, 101n.26, 109–10, 249, 257–60, 280–1, 293–302, 304, 323–4, 331–4, 347–8 Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung) 81–2, 296–7 Der Menschliche Weltbegriff 81 Philosophy as Thinking of the World (Philosophie als Denken der Welt) 81–2, 258, 296–7 Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 294 awareness 3n.4, 47, 51–2, 54, 57–8, 64, 69, 78, 112–13, 115, 119–20, 127, 130, 134, 137, 139, 143, 155, 159, 162, 178, 184, 190–1, 193–4, 202, 205, 208–9, 218–21, 245, 247, 346 of acquaintance 210 of anger 237–8 of experience 71, 209 of hearing 146–7 of intentionality 145 of judgement 266 of judgings 266 of mental activities 56–7, 137, 314 of mental acts 72, 140 of mental life 55, 136, 138–9, 150, 175 of neutral elements 157 of objects 228–9, 245, 252, 331, 335 of perceptions 205 of properties 251–2 of sensations 72, 187 of sense-data 227–8 awareness-of 155, 203, 218–22, 228–31, 237–8 Ayers, Michael 268n.23 Backhaus, Wilf K. 118n.11 bad metaphysics 95 Bain, Alexander 180n.7, 183, 192n.25 Mr. Ward’s ‘Psychology’ 183 Baldwin, Thomas 181n.10, 218n.1, 220n.2, 230n.11

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 Banks, Eric 19n.7, 94–5, 98n.19, 100–1, 156n.2, 161–2, 171 bearers 27, 31n.35, 47, 66, 79, 97–8, 184 of appearances 80 of change 85 of intentionality 223 of mental acts 34 of mental properties 29, 37, 51, 73 of mental states 45, 186 of physical effects 124 of presentations 142, 186 of properties 18–19, 28–9, 36, 45, 47, 51, 69, 78–80, 96, 98, 100–1, 186 of qualities 96 of value 341 Becher, Ernst 95, 250n.3, 258 Begreifen 82, 258, 296–8, 301, 334, 345 behaviour 75–6, 144, 184, 222, 242, 244–5, 255–6, 298, 301–2, 329, 334–6 belief about mental phenomena 24 about ourselves 25 box 55, 261 in a self 47 in objects 199, 270 in subjects 75–6, 181 in substances 86 in the soul 30, 34–5, 59, 61 of existence 270 beliefs 2, 27, 29, 47, 56–8, 75, 115, 117, 144, 165, 169, 171, 196, 230–1, 242, 246–8, 264, 266, 269–73, 279, 283, 285 Bell, David 179–80, 194, 265n.20 Bergmann, Hugo 265n.19 Bergmann, Julius 137n.8 Bergson, Henri 258, 322–3, 322n.5, 325–30, 347–8 Bergsonian intuition 347–8 Berkeley, George 151–2, 306–7 Berlin 9–10, 81, 87, 183, 225–6, 257, 293–4 Berlin Group 11–12 Betti, Arianna 149n.25 Binder, Thomas 13n.30, 50n.11 Binet, Alfred. 213n.17 biological approach 256, 287 dependence 252 dog 189–91 drive 304 fitness/pleasure–pain ratio 174 function 282 justification 255 laws 189–90 motives 256 needs 95, 132, 167, 256–7, 303, 327–8, 334

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organisms 87–8, 186 philosophy 249 purpose 6, 256, 280 task 254n.8 usefulness 257, 261, 332–3, 344, 350 biological–cognitive principle 303–4 biologism 6n.10 biologists 21, 189–90 biology 65, 189–90, 312 Blackmore, John T. 156 Blumenberg, Albert E. 306n.19 Bode, Boyd Henry 98, 233n.16 bodies 28, 33, 51, 66–7, 69, 75–6, 78, 82, 89, 93, 95, 97–101, 107–8, 110, 120–5, 141, 144–5, 157, 166, 169, 188, 222, 233, 252, 255, 263, 287–8, 301–2, 346 Boltzmann, Ludwig 257–8 Bolzano, Bernard 11–12, 177–9 Boring, Edwin G. 19n.4, 59n.27 Bostock, David 204n.4, 208 Bradley, Francis H. 28, 180n.7, 186–8, 187n.20, 235 Bradley’s Regress 28 Brandl, Johannes 11n.24 Brentanian distinction 143 element 189 idea 248 mental phenomena 145 methodology 133 philosophy of mind 163 terms 218 themes 50–1 tradition 11, 179n.5 tripartite distinction 5–6, 178, 193–9 view 154 Brentanians 9–10, 13n.30, 103, 141, 153, 178, 181, 189, 192, 226–8, 233–4 Brentano, Franz Descriptive Psychology (DP) 147n.24, 162, 273n.27 Lehre vom Richtigen Urteil (LRU) 134n.6, 163 ‘On the Concept of Truth’ (OCT) 132–3, 310 On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle 50 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint 3, 5, 10–12, 17, 24, 31, 50–1, 50n.10, 53, 58n.25, 78, 131, 136, 137n.8, 141–2, 146n.22, 150, 194, 213, 262–3, 287 The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (OKRW) 133, 178, 221, 306n.17 The Psychology of Aristotle 50 ‘Über die Gründe der Entmutigung auf philosophischem Gebiet’ (GEPG) 12 Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie 310

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Brentano School 11n.24, 156n.1, 178–80, 245, 301 Bridgman, Laura 250 British Brentanian tradition 11, 179n.5 Idealism 177, 217 Idealists 217 mathematician 99n.22 Neo-Hegelians 31 philosophers 18, 32, 216 British Psychological Society 32 Buddha/Buddhism 3–4, 35, 44 bundles 320 of elements 65, 98, 172, 251 of mental processes 47 of perceptions 45, 87–8 of presentations 181 of tropes 100 of universals 100 Cambridge 5–6, 32, 69, 178–9, 179n.5, 183, 248 Cambridge Realists 216 Cantor, Georg 179 Čapek, Milic 6n.10 Carnap, Rudolf 4n.6, 63, 65, 102n.28, 118–19, 258 ‘Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ 296 The Logical Construction of the World (Der Logische Aufbau der Welt) 13, 65, 118 Cartesian sceptic 47 substance 152 substance dualist 107 view 45 see also Descartes Carus, Paul The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records 44 Cassirer, Ernst 97n.17 causal connection 279 correlations 196 effects 236–7 efficacy 314 mechanism 285 powers 58, 66, 101, 123, 140, 215–16 processes 52n.12 relations 18, 243 roles 32, 66, 155 thinking 125 causal–functional relations 100 causality 95, 135, 250 causation 168–70, 244, 269–70

cause and effect 100–1 Central European Philosophy 11 Chisholm, Roderick 133n.3, 136n.7, 138n.11 Cho, Kay Kyung. 131n.1 Chrudzimski, Arkadius 136n.7 circularity 205–7 Circularity Argument 281–3 Clifford, William K. 59n.26, 99n.22, 217–18 Coffa, Alberto J. 311n.27 cognitio circa rem 329–30 cognition 6–7, 42–3, 67, 75, 82, 90–1, 164–9, 173, 243–4, 251–8, 267, 280–1, 287, 293, 298–302, 304–5, 313–14, 316, 318, 323–6, 330, 333–5, 333n.13, 337, 346–9 cognitio rei 329–30, 329n.11 cognitive complex 154 economy 304–6 effect 86–7, 297, 303 faculties 252 habits 251 illusions 161 powers 327 purposes 328 relations 202, 211 resources 304 scientists 184 sloth 301–4 colour 28, 36, 51, 54, 58–9, 78, 80, 83, 97–100, 98n.19, 112, 118, 120–1, 134, 137–8, 140–1, 145–6, 148, 151n.27, 152–4, 158–60, 163–4, 197, 199, 209–11, 220–1, 227–8, 236–8, 251, 270, 300, 310, 326–7, 332, 340–1, 345–7, 350 common sense 2, 2n.1, 34, 52, 61, 65, 71, 85n.6, 88–9, 99, 157, 184, 212, 234–5, 244, 254–5, 257, 284, 299–300, 306 comparing/comparison 37–8, 42, 52, 137–8, 189–90, 218, 252, 259–60, 263, 277–8, 332–4, 337, 342, 347 complementation 24–5, 29–30, 55–7 complexes 13, 25, 65–6, 75–6, 78, 83, 95, 97–8, 100–3, 109, 118–19, 154, 168, 202, 204, 259, 320–1, 324 of elements 67, 75, 89, 101, 120, 165–6, 169, 259 of judgements 279 of objects 168 of qualities 66, 96 of sensations 66, 75–6, 99, 102, 120, 122–3 of sense-data 211–13 of sensory features 83 see also acquaintance with complexes, Token Complexity Claim, Token Complexity Thesis

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 composition 36 in physics 36 of a sentence 275 of fabric 124 of mental elements 36 of results 37–8 via substance 36–7 Comte, Auguste 7–8, 22–3, 50, 53–6, 153, 192, 334 concept acquisition 12, 347 empiricism 132–4, 264, 310–11 falsity 171 formation 63, 311 of a predicate 266–8 of a relation 39 of a self 186 of a subject 185–6, 266–8 of a universal 346 of acquaintance 178 of an ego 295 of appearance 259 of awareness 178 of Begreifen 82 of belief-in 266 of body 263 of causality 135 of change 84–5 of complexity 58 of existence 270–2, 282–3, 312–15 of experience 93, 216 of good 133 of heat and light 60–1 of judgement 263, 277–8, 285 of knowledge 245, 296, 322, 333–6, 347, 350 of matter 127 of metaphysics 320–1, 340 of mind 24 of motion 60, 127 of objects 165, 333 of perception 270–1 of presentation 185 of properties 165, 346 of psychology 45, 50, 142, 184, 213 of reason 325–6 of sensations 72 of substance 26–9, 59, 78–80, 83–6, 88, 295 of substantiality 107–8 of the divisible 263 of the mental 87, 108, 119, 128, 135–6, 143–4, 217–18 of the physical 87, 108, 119, 128, 135 of the soul 31n.35, 33, 38, 40n.49, 60–2, 186 of thing 93n.15 of thinking 135–6

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of truth 272 system 60 conceptual change 78–9 clarification 12 connection 245 distinction 140 divisions 58 elucidation 133 function 308–9 parts 58–9, 140 presentations 263 sensations 73 thought 295 truth 72, 138 consciousness 3, 17, 23, 25, 29, 33, 35–6, 42, 44–8, 56, 60–3, 73, 79, 83, 88, 108, 117, 122, 127–30, 135, 137–8, 137n.8, 140–8, 151–5, 162, 186, 191–5, 199–200, 206–7, 210, 213–14, 216, 221–2, 229–33, 237–42, 245–6, 252–4, 264, 284, 287, 289, 307, 309, 314, 320, 324–6, 328, 349 of a colour 58, 227, 237–8 of a mental act 150, 233 of itself 192 of mental life 279 of seeing 54 of something 119, 121, 137, 159–60, 197, 331 of the world 206–7 see also inner consciousness, unity of consciousness consciousnesses 189, 238 consciousness-of 153, 221, 233, 237–8 constructive criticism/critics 257–9, 294 Constructive Response 91–2, 94 content/object distinction 147, 149, 178, 193–5, 198–9, 216, 223–9, 233, 243, see also act/ content/object distinction contents 124, 140–2, 149, 153–5, 161, 216, 223–9, 246–7, 284, 336 of consciousness 152, 195, 206–7, 320 of mental acts 142, 147 contradictions 57, 86–7, 169–71, 174–5, 278 Cook Wilson, John 32 Cornelius, Hans 126n.21, 258 Cory, Daniel 81, 109n.1 Craig, Edward 298n.7 Crampton, Colin. 32 Crane, Tim 136n.7, 161n.5, 268n.23 Critical Monism 109–10 Criticism 259, 293–9, 318 Criticists 7, 10, 259, 295 Crivelli, Paolo 263n.17 curiosity 290–2

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Damböck, Christian 8n.11, 9n.16 Darwin, Charles 6, 61, 250 Dawes Hicks, George 31, 179n.5, 180–1, 216, 228–9, 233n.17 Dedekind, Richard 43n.50, 179 Demi-Monist 242 Dennett, Daniel 138n.9 dependence 72, 94, 98–9, 120–2, 127–8, 145, 166, 184 dependence relations 121, 125, 130, 157, 167, 172 Descartes, René 2, 19n.2, 26–7, 47–9, 122, 135–6, 150–2, 194, 258, 300, see also Cartesian desire 52–3, 59, 69n.34, 136, 144, 160–1, 236, 245, 251–2, 262, 264, 277–8, 280, 291n.12, 341 determination 2, 25, 61, 69n.34, 73, 113–14, 132–3, 137–8, 148, 263, 310, 345 Dewalque, Arnaud 143n.19 Dewey, John 109 dialogue model 14 diaphaneity 5–6, 56, 130, 150–5, 162–3, 175, 195, 198–9, 213–14, 217, 229–31, 233, 237, 240, 243, 247–8 direct realism 112 directedness 130, 135, 138–40, 143–7, 151, 153, 155, 162, 173, 222, 232–3, 247 doctrine of evolution 217–18 of primacy of the Will 251 of the nature of cognition 323–4 of the soul 49 of wisdom 295–6, 337 dogma/dogmatism 127, 144–5, 261–4, 266 Döring, August 287–8, 288n.10, 290–1, 338–40 Drobisch, Moritz 9–10, 30, 35n.46, 58 Empirische Psychologie nach naturwissenschaftlicher Methode 29–30 dual dependence 119–23, 127–8 dualism 117–18, 127–8, 155, 217, 220–1, 231 dualists 3, 20, 109, 155, 203, 216, 240, see also substance dualists duality 195, 242–3, 248 Dummett, Michael 5, 177n.1, 179 Duncan, Matt 205n.6 dyadic acquaintance 211–12 dyadic relation 204, 208, 211, 240 eccentric colleagues 14 economic instruments 95, 254, 257 economic unities 67 economy 250, 278, 303 of science 303 of thought 259

philosophy 347–8 principle 302–5 theory 293–9, 301–4 Edgar, Scott 322n.3 ego 4, 14, 44, 65–9, 70n.37, 73–7, 93, 97, 100, 102, 119–20, 122, 125, 144–5, 152, 172, 180–1, 180n.7, 190–1, 199–200, 202n.1, 212–13, 255, 295, 344–5 Ehring, Douglas 100n.25 Einstein, Albert 64, 258 Eleatic metaphysics 29, 31 One 26 soul 42, 57–9 thinkers 26 view of substance 26–9, 57, 68 Eleatics 26 elements 4, 13, 17–18, 35–6, 41, 66–8, 71–2, 74–5, 78, 89, 92–103, 113–114, 118, 120–3, 125, 129, 131, 145, 157, 159, 160–2, 166–7, 169, 170–3, 178, 189–90, 215, 218–19, 222, 229, 231–7, 244, 246–7, 258–9, 264, 277, 281, 283, 289, 291, 306–7, 310, 316, 318, 320, 331–2, see also bundles of elements, complexes of elements, mental elements, neutral elements empathy 109–10, 329–30 empirical concepts 26, 128 data 79, 212 foundation 70–1 intuition 331 psychologists 4, 17, 31, 44, 64, 69, 72–3 psychology 4, 13, 17–20, 23–4, 29, 48, 50, 53, 57–60, 62–3, 71, 76–9, 110, 152–4, 180, 193 research 29–30, 76–7, 199n.37 science 3–4, 8n.11, 18–20, 22–3, 45, 48, 53, 55–6, 131–2, 134–5, 252 empiricism 1, 7–9, 13, 132–4, 255–6, 264–6, 279, 310–11 empiricists 8, 12, 47, 69–73, 98, 100, 264, 331 England 7–9, 13, 177–8, 183 environment 69, 76–7, 82, 86–7, 101n.26, 157, 164, 167, 207, 253, 256, 270–1, 286, 304 episodic memory 51, 55–7, 137, 155, 197–9, 264, 282 epistemic access 90, 123 approach 323n.7 facts 61–2 functional requirement 342 hedonism 306

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 property 62–3 purposes 254 requirement 344 state 246 epistemology 43, 126, 150, 251, 267, 281, 293–4, 296, 298–9, 303 Erdmann, Benno 258 error 55–6, 171, 173, 186–7, 236, 245, 253, 274, 315, see also great error error theories 27n.25, 66, 75–6 essence 12, 26, 90n.12, 91, 101, 107–8, 112, 121, 252, 266, 279, 292, 295–6, 318–20, 322–3, 326, 328–31, 336, 342, 344, 350 ethics 135 evaporation of the soul 17 evolution 6, 217–18, 255, 312, 327 existence of cognitions 267 of expectations 172 of experience 71, 218–19 of hearing 265 of intentionality 174 of judgements 272, 277 of knowledge 259, 310 of objects 90, 129, 136, 226, 270 of power 41–2 of sensations 46 of subjects 35, 143, 189, 193, 203, 210, 213 of substances 39–41 of the soul 4, 17–18, 34–6, 40, 52, 180–1 of things-in-themselves 91, 102 see also concept of existence expectation 67, 92–3, 115–16, 119, 157, 160–1, 164–5, 169–74, 215–16, 242, 246, 254, 297–8 Experience/Experiencer Thesis 70–3 external behaviour 329 circumstances 92 experience 60 impressions 340 knowledge 329 objects 145–9, 151n.27, 158, 160–1, 163, 195, 213, 225, 247, 348 perception 54, 57, 150–1, 227–8, 266 phenomena 129 processes 127 reality 67, 128, 139 relations 109, 118–19, 187, 202, 216, 223–4, 348 standpoint 112, 115–16 world 102, 146, 154, 159–60, 339

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factivity 266, 335–7 faculties 6, 18–19, 22–3, 55, 141, 252–3, 255, 257, 261, 264, 282, 288, 290, 295, 318, 322–3, 326–7, 338, 341, 344 falsity 33, 171, 175, 261–3 Farber, Marvin 131–2 Farrell Smith, Janet 209n.12 Fechner, Gustav Theodor 5, 9–10, 19, 32, 37, 59n.27, 87–8, 109–19, 115n.8, 179 Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht 69 Elemente der Psychophysik 110 Ueber die Physikalische und Philosophische Atomenlehre 87, 113–17, 141 Zend-Avesta 112–13 Feest, Uljana 55n.23 Fichte, Johann Gottlob 19 Fine, Kit 185n.17 Fisette, Dennis 156n.1 foreknowledge 87, 334–7 four positions 215–17 France 7–8, 13 Frankfurt, Harry 70n.38 Fréchette, Guillaume 8n.11, 12 Frege, Gottlob 9, 32, 70, 70n.36, 71, 81, 168, 177–9, 223n.3, 272n.25, 297–8, 314–15 ‘On Sense and Reference’ 314 Friedman, Michael 102n.28, 258n.15, 259n.16 Frigg, Roman 76n.44 functional needs 7, 288–92, 340 functional requirements 288, 338–42, 344, 349 fundamental power 41 Gallie, Walter B. 289n.11 Gendler Szabó, Zoltan 265n.21, 266 general presentations 306–9, 311–12 general representation 6, 263–4, 298, 307, 342–4, 347 Genova, Anthony C. 128n.23 German-speaking world 8–10, 178 Germany 7–11, 8n.11, 9n.16, 18–19, 44, 50, 178n.2, 179, 183, 215, 226, 249–50, 257 Gestaltpsychologie 97n.17 ghost of the subject 191–3 Giovannini, Eduoardo N. 311n.27 Given 26–9, 65, 80, 96, 131 Glock, Hans-Johann 9n.15, 11n.25, 178n.2 God 2, 41, 142, 275 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 339–40 Poetry and Truth 339

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Gori, Pietro 49n.9 Göttingen 9, 9n.15, 32, 70, 183 Graz 9–10, 64, 139 great error 56–9 Greek 286 letters 166 philosophy 26 Griffin, Nicholas 177, 179n.5 Grounding 83–6 Habsburg Empire 8–11, see also AustroHungarian Empire Hahn, Hans 4n.6, 65, 258 Haller, Rudolf 3n.5, 7–9, 11–12, 145n.21 hallucinations 92, 115, 139, 143, 157, 171, 252 Hamilton, Andy 98n.21 Hamilton, William 50, 185–6 Hanks, Peter 278 Harman, Gilbert 230n.11 Hartmann, Stephan 76n.44 Hatfield, Gary 32n.40 Haugeland, John 138n.9 having an object 137–8, 140, 143, 162, 169, 186–7, 225, 243–5, 247 Hawking, Stephen 168 hedonism 304–6, 340 Hegel, Georg 8, 19, 187n.20 Hegelian school 249 Heidegger, Martin 163 Heidelberger, Michael 24n.21, 32n.41, 112, 117–18, 293 Hellie, Benj 230n.11 Helmholtz, Hermann von 9–10, 179, 257 Hempel, Carl 2n.2 Herbart/Comte problem 50, 55–6 Herbartian metaphysics 31 school 19, 29n.31 soul 26–7, 68 substance 26–7, 67 view 52 Herbartians 9–10, 19, 29–33, 35, 65, 183 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 4, 8, 10, 17–31, 33–6, 42, 49, 52n.12, 53–9, 61, 65–9, 69n.34, 73, 80, 83, 96, 130, 141–2, 178–9, 181, 183–4, 194, 319–20 Metaphysik 28, 31–2, 36, 38, 71, 79 Psychology as Science 4, 18–19 Hertz, Heinrich 167, 167n.11 Hickerson, Ryan. 149, 149n.25 Hintikka, Jaakko 12n.27, 64 Hoban, Russell 266 Höfler, Alois 146n.22, 148–9 Philosophische Propädeutik 148

Horwicz, Adolf 22, 23n.20 Huemer, Wolfgang 19n.3, 52n.12 Hume, David 3–4, 44–9, 45n.1, 51, 71, 79n.2, 117–18, 118n.11, 129–30, 135, 204, 206, 208, 234–5, 278–9, 285, 296 A Treatise of Human Nature 44 Hume/Lichtenberg objection/problem 187, 203, 205 Husserl, Edmund 131–2, 138n.11, 143n.19, 156, 163–4, 179–80, 199, 215, 225, 233, 240, 248, 258, 281n.3, 286n.7, 330–1 Ideas Towards a Pure Phenomenology 330–1 Logical Investigations 152–3, 163, 226–7 ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ 330 idealism 5–6, 8, 10–11, 13, 32, 129, 177, 193–4, 202, 214, 217–23, 229, 248–9 Idealistic Monists 155 idealists 10, 19, 31–2, 129, 154, 215, 217–18, 220, 230–1 identity 27, 44, 70–1, 142, 159–60, 164, 172, 200, 213, 286 judgement 27 theory 157–63, 283 illusions 29, 44, 64, 89, 92–3, 115, 150–1, 157, 160–1, 163, 171, 227–8, 230, 252 images 56, 85, 117, 149, 165, 198, 246–7, 253–4, 307–9, 325–6, see also memory images, mental images imagination 54, 79, 92, 146, 150–1, 162, 172–3, 196, 284, 331 immanent objects 131, 138, 143, 145–9, 158, 160–1, 195, 199n.37, 220–1, 228, 264 immanentists 102 immersion 347–50 inequality 319 Inequality Metaphysicians 322–4 Inequality Metaphysics 328, 350 Ingarden, Roman 239 inner activity 26 consciousness 45, 119, 152, 265, 271–2, 292 duality 242 duplicity 216, 234, 244 experience 17, 45, 62–4, 123–4, 127, 139–40, 282 judgement 277–8 life 38–9, 59, 180–1 observation 21n.13, 22–4, 62–3 perception 7, 34, 51, 54, 55n.23, 57–8, 72, 78, 121, 132, 134–5, 137, 146, 148, 152–3, 158, 264–6, 271–2, 287, 292, 312, 314 sense 23, 127–8 standpoint 110–13, 116

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 states 18–19, 33, 127 what 12 intentionality 5, 129–32, 136–8, 140, 142–6, 148, 162–3, 167, 170–1, 173–5, 178, 181, 184, 189, 199n.37, 203, 217–25, 233–6, 247, 330 challenge 156 of sensations 5, 157–64 of thought 164–75 thesis 139, 159 internal coherence 207 experience 60, 62–3 observation 63 perception 150–1, 154 phenomena 3, 36 relations 223–5 standpoint 115–16 intrinsic distinction 131 intrinsic properties 62–3, 103, 109–10, 118–19, 131, 143, 175, 230n.11, 233–4, 320, 325 introspection 3–4, 21, 22n.17, 23–5, 45–6, 45n.1, 53, 56–7, 66, 73, 109, 121, 123, 142, 145–7, 153–4, 189, 195, 198, 206, 216, 227–31, 240 intuition 113–14, 116, 128–9, 132–4, 175, 209–10, 244, 266–7, 271–2, 301, 310–12, 318, 321–33, 338, 343–9 Jacoby, Günther 327n.9, 347n.5 ‘German Pragmatism’ 249 James, William 5, 17, 22n.15, 31–2, 37, 41, 48n.6, 54n.18, 56, 59n.27, 65, 100, 109, 118n.12, 119, 130, 151, 155, 162, 164, 171, 180, 187n.20, 191–2, 193n.27, 209n.11, 214, 216, 231–8, 241, 243–4, 250, 256–7, 329n.11 ‘Bradley or Bergson?’ 187n.20 ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ 231 ‘On the Function of Cognition’ 236 Pragmatism 250 ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ 256–7 Janaway, Christopher 326, 348 Jerusalem, Wilhelm 6–7, 9–11, 249–50, 255–7, 259–61, 277, 281–93, 301, 316–17, 323–4, 330–1, 338–40 Die Urteilsfunktion 280–2, 339 Lehrbuch der Psychologie 250, 256, 286 Johnston, Mark 188, 343n.2, 346 Judd, Charles Hubbard 4n.7 Judgement Primitivism 282–3, 289, 292 Kantian appearance 26 arguments 127 notion 61 tradition 308

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Kantianism 8, 10 Kant, Immanuel 3, 8, 13, 23, 34, 47n.4, 57, 61, 65, 85n.6, 89n.10, 91, 109–10, 117–18, 127–9, 192n.26, 217, 227, 258, 263–4, 275, 296, 298, 319n.1, 320, 323–4, 328, 341 Critique of Pure Reason 61 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 22 Kemp Smith, Norman 110n.2 Klein, Alexander 179, 237–8 Kleinpeter, Hans 99 Kraushaar, Otto F. 32nn.39,43, 329n.11 Kraus, Oskar 13n.30, 22n.14, 34n.44, 50n.11, 287, 292 Kreiser, Lothar 32n.38 Kriegel, Uriah 11n.24, 50n.11, 138n.13, 143n.18, 271–2 Külpe, Otto 110n.3, 215 Künne, Wolfgang 225n.4 Laird, John 180n.7 Landerer, Christoph 19n.3, 52n.12 Landini, Gregory 245n.24 Lange, Friedrich Albert 4, 17, 22, 45, 49–51, 56, 63, 130, 150–3, 195, 214, 229, 321 Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism) 49, 150 language 33–4, 47, 60, 63, 73, 83, 86, 147, 165, 177n.1, 234–5, 246–7, 261, 271, 273, 287, 296, 316–17, 325, see also linguistic Lapointe, Sandra 11n.26 Leibniz, Gottfried 59, 68, 258 Leibniz’s Law 241 Leipzig 9–10, 32, 59–60, 81, 179n.6 Lewis, Joia 259n.16 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 3–4, 44–9, 51, 63–4, 66, 73, 99n.22, 130, 184, 187, 203, 205, 320 Waste Books 46 limits of knowledge 7, 12–13, 293–4, 296, 318, 338 linguistic appearances 84 communication 273–4 consciousness 62 expression 274–5, 283–4 signs 196 terms 316 twist 243 see also language Linguistic Articulation Argument 281, 283–7 Lipps, Theodor 9–10, 109–10, 124–7, 130, 178–9, 194n.29, 195, 215, 329–30 Locke, John 80, 184, 294, 296

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logical empiricism 1, 7 logical subject 46, 59–64 Lotzean ego 119–20 element 189 influence 181n.12 question 74 soul 39–42 strand in analytic philosophy 181 subject 119–20 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann Medizinische Psychologie 31–3, 35, 37 Metaphysik 31–2, 35, 38, 71, 79 Mikrokosmos 10, 32, 35, 35n.47, 37 ‘seele und seelenleben’ 35–6 Luft, David S. 10–11, 250n.3 Mach, Ernst Analysis of Sensations 65–6, 89, 91, 107, 109, 125, 169, 172 ‘Anti-Metaphysical Remarks’ 32, 94 Die Geschichte und Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit 78 Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung 64 History and Root of the Principle of the Conversation of Energy 81 Knowledge and Error 19, 121, 156, 169, 171, 279 ‘Lectures on Psychophysics’ 19 On the Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry 121 On Transformation and Adaptation in Scientific Thought 251 The Science of Mechanics 1 Madden, Rory 206n.7 Malebranche, Nicolas 296 Marburg 152 Marcuse, Ludwig 9n.16, 249–50 Marty, Anton 50–1, 119, 151n.27, 156–7, 159–62, 274n.28, 275, 316n.31 materialism 7 matter 1, 2n.1, 24, 78–9, 81, 97, 109–10, 117–18, 127–8, 154, 165, 221–3, 225–6, 232–3, 238–9, 253–4, 265, 302, 329–30 Mauthner, Fritz 3n.5, 44 Meinong, Alexius 50–1, 56, 146n.22, 147n.23, 148–50, 154, 156, 178–80, 193, 215, 224–5, 247 Philosophische Propädeutik 148 memories 113–14, 122, 144, 161–2, 245, 277, 297 memory 38–9, 62, 122, 142, 144, 184, 196, 198, 209n.11, 242–6, 253, 264, 277–81, 308, 310, 333, 343, see also episodic memory memory images 56, 85, 277–8, 307

mental activity 3, 20–1, 45–6, 47n.4, 51, 54, 56–8, 58n.25, 137, 139, 150, 153–4, 161, 192, 199, 216, 257, 282–4, 289, 314, 349 elements 36–7, 69, 231n.14 events 20, 25, 33–4, 36, 44–5, 47, 55, 99–100, 121–2, 130, 135, 140, 143n.19, 153, 157, 169, 174, 184, 196, 223, 235, 245–6, 248, 267–70, 279, 292 faculties 6, 18–19, 257 images 149, 168–9, 194–5, 197–8, 234–5, 247, 251, 300, 307–9 life 21–3, 29–30, 34, 47, 54–5, 57–9, 65, 67, 73, 88, 113, 119–20, 122, 131, 135–9, 143–5, 150, 175, 222, 256–7, 279–80, 320 properties 28–9, 37, 46, 51, 64, 73 representations 259–60, 280, 287, 298, 309 substance 17–19, 29, 34, 36–7, 45–6, 52, 59–64, 79, 86, 88, 107–8, 117–18, 141, 319–20 mental/physical distinction 2n.2, 108, 123, 131–2, 137, 144–5, 147, 154, 213, 221 Messer, August 115n.8, 215, 225–7 metaphysical knowledge 7, 12–13, 34, 56–7, 293, 321–3, 325–32, 350 psychologists 4, 44, 67, 320 psychology 20–6, 31–2, 34, 44, 59–60, 193 Metaphysical Equality Hypothesis 320–1, 324 metaphysicians 31, 59–60, 293, 296, 318, 319n.1, 321–4, 330 metaphysics of acquaintance 349 acts 155 appearances 318–19 cognition 42, 333–5, 337, 347, 349 inequality 319 judgement 290 knowledge 301 mental acts 154 monads 11–12 properties 80 relations 181 science 18 sensation 74 substances 4, 23, 65, 95 the knowledge relation 332–4 the soul 4, 4n.6, 24, 29–30, 32, 46 the Will 95 Meumann, Eduard 124n.20 Mill, John Stuart 50, 55, 273, 279, 283

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 mind–body problem 128n.23 mind-independence 200–1, 239 minds 1–2, 100, 144–6, 184, 190–1, 241–2 mnemic causation 244 effects 243–5 phenomena 244 Modern Dualists 108–9 Molnar, Georg 138n.10 momentary subjects 212–14 monads 11–12, 26, 83, 88 monism 99n.22, 110 Moore, George Edward 2n.1, 5–6, 13, 56, 69, 129–30, 141, 149, 153–5, 162, 177–81, 183, 189, 193–4, 202, 206, 214, 216–34, 237–40, 248, 257–8, 306n.18 Philosophical Studies 258 ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ 178, 217, 229 Moran, Dermot 136n.7, 138n.13 Müller–Lyer illusion 29 Mulligan, Kevin 9n.15, 78n.1, 89n.10, 97n.17, 179n.5, 226n.5 Munich 9–10, 81, 109–10 Münsterberg, Hugo 124n.20 Musil, Robert 156, 254, 255n.10 Nasim, Omar W. 11, 179n.5, 194n.30 Natorp, Paul 56, 117–18, 139, 141, 152–5, 185n.16, 192, 192n.25, 199, 229, 231 Nayak, Abhaya C. 22n.14 Neale, Stephen 227n.8 Neo-Hegelian philosophy 177 Neo-Hegelians 31 Neo-Kantianism 7, 42 Neo-Kantian Neutral Monism 127–30 Neo-Kantians 9–10, 17, 91, 102–3, 109–10, 152, 262, 320–1 Neo-Soul Movement 29–33 Neurath–Haller thesis 7 Neurath, Otto 4n.6, 7–9, 11n.25, 13, 65, 258 neutral elements 126, 156–7, 161–3, 166, 168–9, 172–3, 216, 231n.14, 234, 243–4 Neutral Monism 5, 79, 81–2, 109–20, 118n.11, 123n.19, 123–30, 155–7, 162, 166–7, 174–5, 199, 203, 205–6, 211, 213, 217, 231, 236, 241n.20, 242–3 Newton, Isaac 64 Nominalism 7 Oberdan, Thomas 311n.27 Ostwald, Wilhelm 9–10, 249 outer experience 62–3, 123–4, 127

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observation 55–6, 62–3, 123 perception 7, 137, 148, 158–9, 292 standpoint 110–13, 116 Oxford Realism 32 panpsychism 59n.26, 99n.22, 109 panpsychists 99n.22 Papineau, David 2n.2 Parmenides 26–9 Peacocke, Christopher 70n.36, 71 Peano, Giuseppe 179 Peirce, Charles Sanders 94–5, 249n.2 Pelser, Adam 270–1 perception 1–2, 6, 22, 32–4, 45, 48, 55–6, 60, 72–3, 82–3, 87–8, 91–3, 97–8, 102, 102n.29, 110, 112–15, 118–19, 134, 144, 151–2, 161, 163–4, 169, 195–9, 199n.37, 201, 205, 218–19, 223, 227, 229, 230–1, 237, 240, 245, 251–4, 261, 263–4, 266–73, 277–9, 284, 287, 289–91, 300, 307, 310, 313–14, 318, 325–9, 331, 339, 341–2, 345–6, 348, see also external perception, inner perception, internal perception, outer perception Perler, Dominik 14 Pfänder, Alexander 194n.29 philosophy of mind 19, 19n.3, 50n.11, 109–10, 140, 142–3, 163, 178, 180–1, 193, 202, 206–7, 215, 251 philosophy of psychology 20, 22, 50, 109–10 physical phenomena 51, 53–5, 78, 103, 108, 123, 127, 129–31, 134–40, 143, 148–51, 153–4, 156, 158, 216, 266 physicalism 108–9 physics 2–3, 5, 18, 36, 41, 60–1, 64–5, 81, 101–2, 124–5, 167n.11, 172n.14, 257–8, 293–4, 302–3, 324 picture theory 67–9, 75, 149, 157, 164–9, 171, 174 Pincock, Christopher 213n.16, 244n.21 Planck, Max 257–8, 303–4 Plato 79, 89–91, 94, 258, 322–4 Platonic forms 91, 326 metaphysics 93 motivation 326 Poland 7 polyadic experience 211 polyadic relation 211, 211n.13 Positivism 7–8, 22, 129, 157, 259 Positivists 4–5, 103, 129, 259 pragmatism 9n.16, 31, 94, 249–51, 255–6, 327n.9 Prague 6, 9, 64

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Preti, Consuelo 179n.5 Price, Henry Hubberly 117–18 primitivism 100, 149, 283, see also Judgement Primitivism principle of least effort 81, 86, 296–7, 303–4 principle of parallelism 140–1 principle of psychology 48 principle of sufficient reason 325–6, 348 principle of unity 29, 35, 66, 73, 200–1 Pritchard, Harold Arthur 32n.38 propositional attitudes 42, 68, 165, 169, 259–60, 271–2, 278, 299 propositional knowledge 146–7, 299–300, 335–6, 350 Prosser, Simon 251n.6 Prussia 225–6 psychical 107, 112, 125, 127, 154, 220–1, act 162 experience 24, 74 functions 250 life 161–2 phenomena 128, 150–1 processes 24, 200 psychology without a soul 4, 44, 49–51, 49n.9, 180, 184, 189, 203 psycho-physical 127 psycho-physical problem 107, 129, 259 Quine, Willard Van Orman Word and Object 228–9 Quinton, Anthony 102n.27, 257–8, 299 reality 2–3, 5, 51, 57, 58n.25, 69, 78–9, 86, 89–95, 99, 107–9, 116, 127–8, 136, 139, 156–7, 161, 166–7, 177, 181, 217–18, 230, 236, 243, 270–1, 282–3, 304, 312–15, 316n.31, 318–20, 322–4, 327–8 Recanati, François 316nn.29,31 re-cognition 299–302 Recognition 297 Reginster, Bernard 326n.8 regress 28, 134, 272, 346 Reid, Thomas 137n.8, 196–8, 238, 269–72, 270n.24 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man 21n.11, 195 Reininger, Robert 17, 107–8, 110 representations 6, 32, 46, 68, 75–6, 95, 116, 157, 160, 165, 169, 172, 193, 231, 235, 259–60, 263–4, 279–80, 285, 287, 297–8, 306–9, 323–4, 328, 342–4, 350 resemblance 172, 236, 301, 333, 335 Revisionary Response 91–2, 94 Ribot, Théodule 19n.2

Richardson, Alan 10nn.18–19 Riehl, Alois 5, 9–10, 81, 91, 109–10, 117–18, 127–30, 139, 157, 216, 259–60, 262–3, 293–9, 306n.16, 318, 345 Introduction to the Theory of Science and Metaphysics 117–18, 127 The Principles of the Critical Philosophy (Der Philosophische Kritizismus) 19, 127, 129, 294 Riemann, Bernhard 179 Rollinger, Robin D. 146n.22 Rorty, Richard 3n.4 Rosenkoetter, Timothy 264n.18 Ross, William David 261 Royce, Josiah 32, 59n.26, 256–7 rug dealer model 14 Rusnock, Paul 11n.26 Russell, Bertrand Mysticism and Logic 258 ‘On Denoting’ 178 Philosophy of Logical Atomism 213n.16 Problems of Philosophy 203 Ryckman, Thomas A. 43n.50, 300n.11, 309n.26, 311n.27 Sainsbury, Mark 241n.20 Saint-Simon, Henri de 8 Santayana, George 31n.36, 42, 89n.9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 163 Sauer, Werner 147n.24 Schelling, Friedrich 8 Schiemer, Georg 311n.27 Schlick, Moritz Die Probleme der Philosophie in Ihrem Zusammenhang 293 ‘Experience, Cognition, and Metaphysics’ 321 ‘Form and Content’ 305, 320, 344, 347 General Theory of Knowledge (Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre) 7, 48, 102, 257–9, 293–300, 315, 337, 344–5 ‘Ideality of Space, Introjection and the PsychoPhysical Problem’ 259 Lebensweisheit 296, 339, 347–8 Naturphilosophie 96 Space and Time in Contemporary Physics 258 The Nature of Truth in Modern Logic 257–8 Schlimm, Dirk 43n.50 Schneewind, Elizabeth H. 133n.3 Scholastics 3, 129, 136, 140–2 Schopenhauer, Arthur 9–11, 67, 90–1, 95–6, 249–55, 257–8, 322–9, 322n.5, 347–50 The World as Will and Representation 325

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 Schwitzgebel, Eric 22n.17 science of the soul 2–3, 17–18, 22, 24, 34, 44–5, 51–2, 59–60, 62, 78, 103, 184, 319–20 Sebestik, Jan 11n.26 Self-Fulfilling Expectation Argument 169–74 self-knowledge 21, 127 self-observation 20–6, 22n.17, 33, 50, 55, 153 sensations, see awareness of sensations, complexes of sensations, intentionality of sensations senses 2, 8, 58, 67, 90–2, 99–100, 115, 120, 122, 127–8, 148–52, 160, 196, 199n.37, 210, 269–71, 273, 323, 338–40, 342, 344, 349 Shoemaker, Sydney 72 Sidgwick, Henry 32 Siebert, Otto Geschichte der Neueren Deutschen Philosophie 50–1 Siegel, Susanna 269 Siewert, Charles 230 Simmel, George 9–10, 249–50 Simons, Peter M. 5, 9–11, 11n.26, 13n.29, 31, 79n.3, 178–9 Smith, A. David 129n.24, 161n.6, 271 Smith, Barry 8n.13, 10n.19, 50n.11, 78n.1, 97n.17, 98n.20 Austrian Philosophy 11n.24 Soteriou, Matthew 139n.14 Sotnak, Eric 22n.14 soul-searching 1 soul-substance 17, 31, 37, 41, 66, 88–9, 88n.8 Sprigge, Timothy 235n.18 Spurrett, David 2n.2 Stadler, Friedrich 3n.5, 145n.21, 257n.14, 347n.4 standpoint 101, 110–11, 113, 123–5, 135, 143, 194, 341–2, see also external standpoint, inner standpoint, internal standpoint, outer standpoint states of mind 185, 187–9, 192, 204, 213, 232 Stebbing, Susan 216 Stoneham, Tom 102n.29 Störring, Gustav 257–8 Stout, George Frederick 5, 19nn.3,5, 24n.21, 32, 38–9, 149, 163, 179–81, 193–201, 215–16, 233, 237, 240, 248 Analytic Psychology 194–5, 199 The Groundwork of Psychology 200 Strawson, Galen 45n.1, 70–1, 70nn.35,36, 193n.27, 195n.31 Strawsonian persons 70–1 Strawson, Peter F. 70, 70n.37, 85n.6, 226–7, 275, 316n.30

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Stubenberg, Leopold 118n.11 Stumpf, Carl 4, 9–10, 10n.21, 21n.13, 28, 31n.36, 32, 46, 50–1, 50n.10, 55n.21, 58–9, 59n.27, 79–81, 88, 97, 99, 110n.2, 131–3, 139–41, 155–6, 163, 179–80, 210–11, 251, 330 Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (The Psychological Origin of the Presentation of Space) 31, 133 Sturm, Thomas 22n.14, 23n.19 substance dualists 3, 107, 127–8, 297–8, 300 Sully, James 18, 32, 59–60 Switzerland 9–11 Taieb, Hamid 138n.12 Taylor, Alfred Edward 217–18 Tester, Steven 46n.3 Textor, Mark 4n.8, 11n.26, 53n.14, 55n.19, 123n.19, 137n.8, 211n.13, 272n.26 Theistic Idealism 217 Thiele, Joachim 19n.8 Thiel, Udo 45n.1 things-in-themselves 91, 94, 102, 127–8, 130, 319, 323, 328 thinking substances 2, 26, 45 Titchener, Edward B. 50n.10, 60n.28, 63 Token Complexity Claim 283 Token Complexity Thesis 283–7 transcendental experience 98 object 128 philosophy 8, 89n.10 tendencies 8–9 Transcendental Idealism 217 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf 50, 183 tripartite distinction 145–50, 146n.22, 178, 193–9, 215–16, 233n.16, see also act/ content/object distinction, akt/inhalt/object distinction tropes 100, 100n.25, 148, 172, 327 truly real 7, 94, 318–20, 323–6, 328, 346–7 truth-evaluable representation 165 truth-evaluable thinking/thought 262–3, 275–6 Tully, Robert Edmund 204, 242 Twardowski, Kazimierz 50–1, 146n.22, 149, 179–80, 194–5, 197–8 Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen 194 two terms 6–7, 135, 208, 211, 257, 259–64, 273–5, 277, 279–80, 285–6, 289, 292–3, 301, 306, 315–18, 323–4, 332–3, 335, 345–6, 350 Tye, Michael 208n.10, 342–4 Uebel, Thomas 11n.26, 249n.2, 250n.4, 281n.4 Ulrici, Hermann 142, 153

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unconscious dispositions 141 inferences 243 operation 224 presentations 37 processes 167 unity of consciousness 4, 17, 30–1, 34–43, 57, 59, 65, 69–70, 74, 113–15, 141, 189, 201, 209n.12, 210–11 unity of the attention process 38–42 universals 98, 100, 203, 225–7, 241 unscientific prejudice 33–4 Vaihinger, Hans 9–10, 17n.1, 34n.44, 47n.4, 93n.15, 250–1, 309, 320 The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (Die Philosophie des Als Ob) 249, 251, 309 van Cleve, James 195n.31, 230n.11 van der Schaar, Maria 179n.5, 194n.28, 194n.30 Vienna 8–10, 12–13, 50–1, 64, 156, 250, 255–6, 258, 298, 347–8 Vienna Circle 7–8, 11–12, 13n.30, 19, 250n.3, 257 Vienna Circle Manifesto 4n.6, 65, 258 Visser, Thomas 167n.11 visual anticipations 93 appearances 111 attention 38, 73 black dot 243–4 data 199, 243 experience 140–1, 161, 197–8 field 243, 271 impression 288–9, 340 phenomenology 73 picture 307 presentation 161, 165 system 209–10 Volkmann, Alfred Wilhelm 9–10, 29–30 Voluntarism 249–51, 255–7, 259–60, 350 Voluntaristic psychology 9–10, 250

Voluntarists 259–61, 264–5, 275–7, 316–17, 332–3, 350 von Ehrenfels, Christian 50–1, 97n.17 Wahrnehmungsflüchtigkeit 56, 150–5 Waitz, Theodor 9–10, 29–30 Ward, James 5, 19n.2, 32, 179–81, 183–94, 202–3, 205, 213, 216 ‘“Modern” Psychology: A Reflexion’ 186 Psychological Principles 183 Weisse, Christian H. 32 well-being 173, 251–2, 254–7, 277–81 Whitcomb, Dennis 291n.12 Will 10–11, 67, 90–1, 95–7, 125–7, 132, 157, 250–7, 259–60, 277–9, 325, 327–30, 350 Williamson, Timothy 322n.4, 336 Williford, Kenneth 190n.24, 231n.13 wisdom 61, 295–6, 337 Wisdom, John 180 Wishon, Donovan 204n.4, 208n.9, 213n.15 Witasek, Stephan 52n.13, 139–40, 147n.23, 150, 155–6, 195–6, 228n.10, 240 Grundlinien der Psychologie 150 witchology 49 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 69 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5–6, 68, 167, 181n.13 Wolff, Christian 319–20 Psychologica Empirica 19n.2 Psychologica Rationalis 19n.2 Wright, Henry W. 249 Wundt, Wilhelm 4, 9–10, 9n.14, 17–19, 19n.2, 22–4, 22n.14, 30, 46, 50, 55–6, 59–64, 68, 109–10, 123–5, 143, 178–9, 179n.5, 183, 250 Principles of Physiological Psychology (Grundzüge Der Physiologischen Psychologie) 19, 24, 59–61, 68 Young, Julian 251 Ziehen, Theodor 19n.3 Zurich 9n.15, 10, 81, 257–8