In §16 of Experience and Prediction, “An Egocentric Language,”
Reichenbach formulates the difference between positivism and realism as a matter of choice between an “egocentric language” (in which things exist only when observed to exist by the subject, and have all and only the properties they appear—to that same subject—to have), and “usual language” which allows inferences to unobserved objects.
(A similar distinction occurs in “Testability and Meaning,” although not under these labels.) At the beginning of the next section, §17,
“Positivism and Realism as a Prob lem of Language,” he writes, “The difference of the positivistic and the realistic conception of the world has taken a dif fer ent turn; this difference has been formulated as the difference of two languages.” And he immediately adds, “This form of consideration, which has been applied particularly by Carnap, seems to be a means appropriate to the prob lem in question, and we shall make use of it for illustration of our results.”36
What a reader of Carnap would expect at this point is some such argument as the following: the more liberal language (“usual language”) allows the formulation of statements from which we can deduce or induce many useful predictions which are not permitted by the re-strictions of the older positivism ( because the statements cannot be formulated in “egocentric language”). In short, the statements science makes about, for example, objects too small to see, or events before there were sentient beings, are part of a system that leads to valuable predic-tions about what we observe here and now, predicpredic-tions each scientist could in princi ple test for herself. But Reichenbach offers a remarkably dif fer ent argument:
35. See part V of Experience and Prediction, “Probability and Induction.”
36. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 145 (emphasis added).
The insuffi ciency of a positivist language in which talk of events after my death is construed as a device for predicting my experi-ences while I am alive is revealed as soon as we try to use it for the rational reconstruction of the thought pro cesses under lying actions concerned with events after our death, such as expressed in the ex-ample of [purchasing] life insurance policies.37
I contend that this argument makes a deep point, and one quite un-like anything to be found in Carnap’s writing. What Reichenbach is telling us is that if I view my whole language as just a device for pre-dicting what experiences I myself will have—if even statements about my family, and about what will happen to them after I die, are no more than gears in a prediction machine, a machine whose whole purpose is to predict what I will experience here and now— then that view will vi-olate the deepest intuitions we have about what we are doing when we utter sentences about others and about events after (and before) our own lives. One might add (although Reichenbach unfortunately did not) that even if I deny that such statements are translatable into an “egocentric language,” if the only account I have of what it is to understand a “re-alist” language is that it consists in being able to use it to predict one’s own sensory stimulations, the view remains just as unsatisfactory. As I have myself put this further moral:
Moral: to preserve our commonsense realist convictions it is not enough to preserve some set of “realist” sentences; the interpretation you give those sentences, or, more broadly, your account of what understanding them consists in, is also impor tant!38
I do not claim that Reichenbach drew this further moral. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that he failed to see that in consistency his
ar-37. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 150. In “Logical Positivism and Intention-ality,” in Words and Life, 90–93, I argue that Reichenbach fails to realize that this defense of realist language is, in fact, incompatible with the defense he offers of the claim that all that is at stake is a choice of a language. It assumes, in par tic u lar, that my understanding of the language doesn’t consist merely in my ability to assign weights to sentences on the basis of my own experiences, but recognizes this involves recognizing that some account of refer-ence is needed.
38. Hilary Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real ity and Justifi cation,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 81–87 (emphasis in original).
gument required him to give a nonpositivist account of understanding.39 But the intuition behind Reichenbach’s little argument about “the life insurance policies” is, I think, quite clear.
Conclusion
In closing, it is appropriate to ask, when all is said and done, just what did Reichenbach understand by his contrast of “the positivistic and realistic conceptions of the world”? I take it, that at least this much is safe to say:
(1) A realistic conception of the world did not, in Reichenbach’s eyes, presuppose a theory of truth. His realism was, in the main, a rejection of a picture that he saw as inadequate to our scientifi c lives and, in the re-markable paragraph I just quoted, to our humanity as well, not a proposal for a metaphysical foundation of some kind. (2) Reichenbach did not, however, think through the question of whether what he retained from positivism was fully adequate to his “realistic conception of the world.”
39. Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Real ity and Justifi cation.”
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