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Physicalism, Introspection, and Psychophysics: The Carnap/Duncker Exchange

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Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer

Part of the book series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science ((WONS,volume 81))

Abstract

In 1932, Rudolf Carnap published his article “Psychology in a Physical Language.” The article prompted a critical response by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. The exchange is marked by mutual lack of comprehension. In this paper I will provide a contextualized explication of the exchange. I will show that Carnap’s physicalism was deeply rooted in the psychophysical tradition that also informed Gestalt psychological research. By failing to acknowledge this, Carnap missed out on the possibility to enter into a serious debate and to forge an alliance with a like-minded psychologist at the time. I conclude by suggesting that the kind of physicalism practiced by Gestalt psychologists deserves to be taken seriously by current philosophy of psychology.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In his “Physical Language” article he still maintained that protocol-sentences were the most basic sentences of science that could not themselves be doubted (438), but in response to Neurath’s critique, he revised this position to say that any scientific sentence within a physicalist system could function as a protocol sentence (“Über Protokollsätze” 224) and no sentence could function as an ultimate epistemic basis (225).

  2. 2.

    It follows that even though Carnap took every experiential sentence to be extensionally equivalent with a physical sentence, this equivalence was, for him, an empirical fact, not an analytical truth. Crawford (2014) therefore argues that Carnap’s position is not accurately described as “analytical behaviorism.”

  3. 3.

    Even if this historical thesis does not hold up, I maintain that psychologists at the time would have recognized the similarity (and that’s all that matters for my subsequent argument).

  4. 4.

    Tolman’s book, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men also appeared in 1932.

  5. 5.

    I would like to thank Christoph Limbeck for drawing my attention to this! (As Sturm, 2012, points out, this has also been noted by Toccafondi, 2004).

  6. 6.

    Here Carnap mentions that J. B. Watson’s Der Behaviorismus had been translated into German in 1930.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 meeting of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science (HOPOS). I wish to thank members of the audience for a helpful discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy, Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Uljana Feest

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  1. Uljana Feest
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Correspondence to Uljana Feest .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University at Albany SUNY, Albany, New York, USA

    Marcus P. Adams

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Zvi Biener

  3. Institute of Philosophy, Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Uljana Feest

  4. Department of Philosophy, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

    Jacqueline A. Sullivan

Additional information

This article is dedicated to Peter Machamer, who helped me find my voice as a historian and philosopher of science, and who taught me so much more than I realized at the time.

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Feest, U. (2017). Physicalism, Introspection, and Psychophysics: The Carnap/Duncker Exchange. In: Adams, M., Biener, Z., Feest, U., Sullivan, J. (eds) Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 81. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52768-0_8

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