Remarks on Realism Gustav Bergmann Philosophy of Science, Vol. 13, No. 4. (Oct., 1946), pp. 261-273. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248%28194610%2913%3A4%3C261%3AROR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D Philosophy of Science is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.
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VOL.
13
October, I 946
NO.
4
REMARKS ON REALISM GITSTAV BERGMANN
Positivists and phenomenalists of all sorts maintain, and long have maintained, some variant of the folloming thesis concerning the existence of physical objects: Such statements as 'There is (exists) now a wall behind my back' are synonymous with a class of statements of which the following is representative 'If I shall turn my head (have certain kinesthetic experiences), then I shall also have the visual experience called 'seeing a wall'.' This amounts to proposing what many of us call a philosophical analysis of 'exist' or, more precisely, of one meaning of 'exist'; for the thesis implies that this verb, in the sense in which we use it when n-e say 'This wall exists', is dispensable in the sense of being definable. Realists, who oppose the thesis, hold that 'exist', in the sense mentioned, is what I would call an undefined descriptive predicate; and then they go on to recommend that instead of defining existence in terms of what we (shall) see, we had better say that we shall, if we turn, see a wall because there is a wall (and because we have put ourselves in a position to perceive it). Thus one could say, perhaps, that the realists wish to convert the positivistic position; instead of founding existence upon experience, they want to found experience (among other things) upon existence. T o be sure, this is but a bare and crudely formulated schema of an issue that has been argued for a long time. Also, contemporary analysts for the most part do not discuss the issue directly; they give their attention to preliminary and, therefore, more fundamental questions. Like experienced chess players, who know to which characteristic situations in the middle game certain openings will eventually lead, we try to convince each other of the excellence of our respective openings. There is, in particular, one fundamental or opening move that is now widely discussed and which, I believe, most of us examine with a view t o the position in which we shall find ourselves-in the middle game-with respect to the realism issue. I refer to the clarification of the relations between meaning and verification1 or, to put it the way positivists do, to the formulation of an adequate meaning criterion. Let me indicate the connection between these questions and the crude schema I have given for the realism issue. According to current garden varieties of positivism, a statement is (empirically) meaningful if it is verifiable by (future) 1 '\'erification' is used in its generic sense which includes falsification and, if you please, also confirmation and its opposite.
261
experience. 'There is a n7all behind my back' is, in this view, meaningful because i t is synonymous with a class of statements each of which is verifiable by future experience. More pointedly, the familiar comnion sense statements about the existence of physical objects are considered as ~zeani.lzgful because they are verijabte. This has again the subjectivistic ring realists dislike so much; so they may again be inclined to convert the positivistic position, if only tentatively and because they feel that a piece of realistic common sense n-ould thus be preserved. Rut to make the conversion ii; to say that 'There is a \\-all behind my back' is verifiable because i t i s ~zeaningflful. One of the conclusions of the following analysis may be expressed by saying, the existence of external as the realists do, that the familiar s t a t e m e ~ ~about ts objects are verifiable because they are meaningful-and I shall arri3-e a t this within the framework of my own positivistic position. But perhaps concl~~sion I had better explain mhy I believe such a "verbal" concession to be important when it occurs in the context of what is, after all, a positivistic position, and also what in my opinion constitutes a positivistic position on the realism issue. To begin with the second question, n positivist will (I) embrace the thesis that has been stated in the opening sentence of this paper, and he mill (2) distinguish t ~ v omeanings of 'exist'. The first meaning is that in which the term occurs in 'This wall exists (This is a real wall)'; this meaning we have, in (I), analyzed and thus, in a well-known sense, rejected. In its second meaning the term occurs in descriptions, that is, in the phrase 'There is (exists) a such-and-such', wl~ichme symbolize by combining the prefix 'E' with a bound variable. This phrase, thus symbolized, belongs to the logical or nondescriptive skeleton of our language; its use is, therefore, by no means prejudicial to one's position on the realism issue while, on the other hand, failure to distinguish between the tn70 meanings of 'exist' confuses that issue beyond repair. One of the peculiarities of the situation is that positivists who neglect the distinction are virtually forced to accept the patently absurd meanings of the ambiguous formula esse esl percipi. All this I discuss ,else\~here,2as one partial clarification of the realism issue; in the present paper I propose to analyze, as another partial clarification, another group of interrelated questions. But I have still t o explain why I have, in this introductory statement, singled out a result which some will be inclined to regard as a mere verbalism, and a trifling one a t that, namely, that we should say, and as positivists may say, that certain statements are verifable because they are meaningful, rather than to say that they are meaningful because they are verifiable. The point has something to do with my views on the nature and function of philosophical analysis. Whether or not philosophical analysis is, as many believe, definitional reconstruction is not a t the moment my concern, though I think that as such sweeping formulae go, this one is rather suggestive. But while we may not know exactly what reconstruction is, there is, to my mind, no uncertainty about what it is that we wish to reconstruct. Philosophical arlalysis tries to reconstruct ordinary common sense and nothing but ordinary "Sense Data, Linguistic Conventions, and Existence'! (lo appear).
REMARKS ON REALISM
263
common sense. I n arriving a t this opinion I have been greatly influenced by G. E. Moore; so I shall, as a means of explicating it, indicate mhere I disagree with what I take to be his views on the matter. (I) I wish to circumscribe common sense so narrowly that all philosophical statements, no matter how inchoate or naive, remain excluded. 'This is a real mall' is, according to this view, a common sense statement; 'Walls are real' is a border case, to say the least. (2) I mould insist that while the reconstruction of common sense is our goal, our analysis (or reconstruction-that amounts to the same thing) need not and, as a rule, will not itself be common-sensical. (3) Reconstruction is, in a certain sense, purely linguistic. This means two things to me and I shall, in order to explain them, use the case at hand. (a) In reconstructing such words as 'real', 'meaningful', 'verifiable'-terms that belong only in some of their usages to the language of common sense-, we must not be expected to vindicate their metaphysical meanings, that is, to reconstruct sentences in which they occur and which, though they belong to our philosophical tradition, do not belong to the language of common sense. (b) We shall be the more successful the more closely me reproduce, in our reconstructed language, the verbal patterns of our common usage in all those cases where this usage does lie within, or very close to, the limits of common sense. In this sense, I agree with the realists, the schema 'verifiable because meaningful' does preserve a piece of "realistic" common sense, which the converse seems to abandon. And in this sense, I feel, it is incumbent upon positivism, as upon any other serious metaphysical position, to preserve the common-sense cores of all other positions.
The meaning criterion I propose has two parts. To be meaningful, a statement is, *first,required to have a certain form. I t must be what logicians call a well-formed sentence according to the (syntactical) rules of that logic which, as we have overwhelming reasons to believe, is in fact the logic of the language that we all speak about the world, or-to put it even more cautiously-which would become the logic of our language, if that language could be perfected in the direction perfection has been sought during the past decades of analytical labor. This logic is a subject-predicate schema with an unramified type rule, and i t contains the ordinary connectives ('and', 'or7, etc.) as well as operators and variables ('all', 'some7);it is, in brief, the logic of the noncontroversial parts of Principia Mathematica. This part of the criterion has the familiar consequence that the existential schema, 'There is a such-and-such', and the various schemata for universal statements, such as 'Every so-and-so is a such-and-such' are all well formed, while 'This exists (Ea)' and 'green exists (Ef,)' are not.a The second part of the criterion is what I have elsewhere2 called a Principle of Acquaintance (abbreviated:PA). I shall state it for a sense data language, that is, for a language whose particulars (proper names) refer to the sort of momentary givennesses many philosophers call sense data and whose undefined 3 Symbols with subscripts, such as 'fl', stand for constant predicates; 'f' is always a variable.
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GUSTAT BERGMANN
predicates (of the first type) designate qualities of and relations between sense data. Stated for this language, the PA requires (1)that a particular is t o occur in a statement only if its referent is immediately apprehended-in perception, memory, or imagination-by the speaker; and (2) that an undefined predicate is to occur in a statement only if at least one exemplification of it is known t o the speaker. Thus, if 'green' and 'square' are, by assumption, two undefined predicates with which the speaker is acquainted while he has never seen a green square, then the two propositions 'There are green squares' and '-411 squares are green' are both meaningful for him, though he is, for obvious reasons, not likely to entertain the latter. The customary example is 'There are centaurs', or something like that, rather than 'There are green sqclares': but I do not yet want to mention physical objects. So mucli for the proposed version of the meaning criterion. It restores, quite generally and not just for certain statements about physical objects, an important piece of conlmon sense, for it allo\vs us to say unambiguously that when a proposition is meaningful, i t is so by virtue of what we know when we entertain it. Now for some comments and explanations. 1. T o see clearly what the PA implies for existential statements, we observe that in order to make legitimately the statement '(Ex)t~(x)'we must know a t least one instance of its predicate, say, 'fl(a)'. Kote, furthermore, that the schema 'If this is a such-and-such then there is a such-and-such', in symbols
belongs to the tautologies of our language. T o say the same thing differently, 'fl(a)' implies '(Ex)fl(x)'. An existential statement with an undefined (nonrelational) predicate is thus, according to the criterion, a statement of a very peculiar kind. It is either meaningless or i t is not informative, in the sense that it does not assert anything that \ye cannot deduce from what we must know to be in a position to make it. I n other words, if it is meaningful then it is necessarily true. But let us now look a t the case of undefined relations. If a n undefined relation is t o occur, the PA requires again that me know a t least one exemplification of it, say, %(a, b)'. If tve lcnow this, then we can meaningfully make either of the following two statements (Ex)rdx, dl,
( E Y ) ~ I (Y). ~ ,
Both these statements are injormative, in the sense that neither is implied by 'rl(a, b)', which implies merely the three statements Finally, as has been seen in the case of the green squares, existential statements that contain defined predicates may be informative, in the sense in which I have used 'informative', irrespective of the relational or qualitative nature of these predicates. But, of course, defined predicates are meaningful if and only if none but meaningful undefined predicates occur in their (well-formed) definitions.
REMARKS ON REALISM
265
2. To illustrate the case of undefined relations, assume 'earlier than' to be an undefined relation, known t o us, as one usually says, from the specious present. Then I can, when hearing a certain kind of noise, meaningfully and informatively say 'This is a noise and there was a lightning flash that preceded it'; and I can say this, meaningfully and informatively, whether or not the lightning $ash lies in the specious present and whether or not I remember it.4 The example is important in itself, for presently it will be seen that one of my results rests on the assumption that some spatial and temporal relations are among the undefined predicates of the language that we speak about the external world. This is, by the testimony of my experience, indubitably so. To those who deny it I can only say, as Locke would, that I cannot communicate with them, just as I cannot talk with a blind man about color. 3. If all the predicates that occur in a universal statement are meaningful according to the PA, then the statement itself is meaningful according to the first part of the criterion. Thus the statement 'A noise (i.e., an instance of a certain quality) is always preceded by a lightning flash (i.e., an instance of a certain other quality)' is meaningful provided that we are acquainted with the two qualities that are, for the sake of illustration, assumed to be undefined. But from this universal statement (empirical law) in conjunction with the statement 'This is a noise' the statement 'There was a lightning flash that preceded this noise' can be inferred, quite independently of whether or not the referent of the inferred statement lies in the specious present, in the future, or in the past, and whether or not, in case it happens to lie in the past, i t is being remembered. The case of the past deserves attention, since its correct description (or analysis-that amounts to the same thing) disposes of the familiar contention that positivism irnplies what some call solipsism of the present. The particulars of the language that is here considered do not refer to physical objects. But i t is worth noting that if they did, we would already be a t the end of this analysis. For then it tx-ould follow from mhat has been said that we can say and, in the light of the criterion, must say (1) that statements about the past, such as 'Caesar crossed the Rubicon' are meaningful in their own right quite independently of verifiability or verification and (2) that we infer them, whenever we do not remember them or do not accept them on authority, from what we know now. (3) We verify them as we verify most other statements, namely, indirectly, by inferring from them, in conjunction with empirical laws, statements that describe what we can immediately apprehend. Or, as I had better say, we verify them if and when we apprehend what these latter statements speak about. All this restores another important piece of "realistic" common sense, which is, I believe, the kernel of the traditional arguments for the reality or existence of the past. That we can not BOW or in the future apprehend mhat I shall for the moment 4 I n symbols, 'n(a).E(x)[l(x).p(x, a)]', where 'a' is the name of the particular noise, 'p' stands for 'precedes' and '1' and 'n' for the (undefined) predicates 'lightning flash' and 'noise'. The example makes it clear t h a t the 'is' in 'there is' is timeless; in particular i t does not mean 'there will be'.
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GUSTAV BERGMANN
permit myself to call the past particular is thus shown to be what I believe it to be, namely, a matter of contingent fact, a consequence of the axiomatics of time, as it were. And since time, that is, the temporal relations, is in our world, this factual feature is extraneous to the analysis of the realism issue and of meaning. This, a t any rate, is what I mean by calling contingent what one would otherwise hardly think of calling so. For contingency is, in the last analysis, a matter of levels or, as one also says, a relative notion. But let me make one more remark about this question of the past. Perhaps it has been noticed that I was very careful not to prejudge the analysis of memory. I am, in fact, inclined to believe that memory is a direct and irreducible source of knowledge about the past in exactly the same sense in which perception may be said to be such a source for kno~vledgeof the p r e ~ e n t . ~But on the other hand I would say this. The question whether me could, without memory, be sure that the world has not been created at this moment is, to my mind, not a good question. I am afraid it is one of those questions that do, in a sense, justify the temperamental use of 'meaningless' in which my positivistic friends so often indulge. Furthermore, I see no reason to believe that we cannot, in one sense, know everything about the past that could be known about it if it mere present, by inferring it from what we know now. The point is that, if we know it by memory, we do not, in principle, know more, but me know whatever we know diflerently, since we know it through an additional source. Nor should it be overlooked that knowledge derived either from our own memory or, inductively, from that of others, if it jibes with other knowledge, provides additional evidence for the truth of statements about the past. If this is all that is meant by those who cite the fact of memory in their arguments for the '(reality" or "existence" of the "past", then I have no quarrel with them. I would insist, though, that their may of speaking, far from constituting an analysis, is itself rather badly in need of analysis. Physical objects are not particulars, not, at least, according to the view here taken or, as I had better say, not in a sense data language; and because of the many clarifications it yields reconstruction of the sense data language has long been among the classical problems of analysis. I n this language physical objects are patterns, and what I have said about the past particular does, therefore, not apply to them directly. On the other hand, the reader may easily convince himself that the analysis of ordinary statements about the past, such as 'Caesar crossed the Rubicon' does not offer any new problems if ~ v h a It have said in this section is taken in conjunction with what I shall say in the next. So I shall not return to the question.
A lightning flash followed by a thunder clap exemplifies a pattern of which, as I have insisted, the temporal succession forms a part. Simultaneous sounding "he analysis of memory is part of the reconstruction of those higher levels of our language, called pragmatic, which refer primarily, not t o the "external world", but to the activities of the "Self". That is why memory does not need t o be discussed, for its own sake, i n the present context. See also "A Positivistic Metaphysics of Consciousness", Mind, 54,1945, 193-226.
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REMARKS ON REALISM
of the c-major tonic triad in the middle octave exemplifies another pattern, and it is worth noticing that in this case, too, the simultaneity of the three tones is part of the pattern, for if they are sounded in succession, say, for instance, in ascending order of their pitches, then they constitute quite obviously a different pattern. It is in this sense of pattern that physical objects are (as Berkeley first pointed out) spatio-temporal patterns of undefined qualities and (as we have to add) relations. If this is so, then we must turn to the analysis of exislenlial statements about patterns, that is, as me shall see, to the analysis of the form '(Ef). . . .' and its cognates. For so far, it will be noticed, I have dealt only with existential statements about particulars, that is, with statements that contain the clause '(Ex)'. But before turning to this task, I wish t o correct a slight inaccuracy in what I have just said, and I also wish to make a fen7 preliminary remarks. 1. Let 'c', 'e', 'g' signify the pitches of the chord mentioned and let 's' stand for the relation of simultaneity. Then one can define the predicate 'triad (tr)' as f ollo~~.s : tr(x7 y, z)
=
c(x) .e(y) .g(z).s(x, Y) .s(y, z).s(x,
~ 1 . ~
The pattern is, in this simple instance, a triadic relation of the first type. Generally it can be said that a pattern is a relational predicate. From logic we remember that the definition is of the kind that is called in use and that in such definitions the variables that occur in the definiendum do not carry any implication of existence in any sense of the term. But let us also remember that in such definitions the dejiniens may contain operators that bind d
