The Problem of Other Minds:

A Debate between Schrdinger and Carnap

Michel Bitbol1
CREA, CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique, 1, rue Descartes, 75005, Paris, France
Published in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 3 (1), 115-123, 2004
"All the premises on which science depends, when they are not of a purely
conventional nature, rest on experience". It is with this programmatic sentence that Carnap
concludes an article published in French, in 1936, in the journal Scientia. This article was
entitled "Existe-t-il des prmisses de la science qui soient incontrlables?"2 (Are there
premises of science which are beyond control?).
If Carnap believed himself obliged, in 1936, to reaffirm a strict partitioning of analytic
and synthetic propositions, and if he regarded himself as having a duty to indicate again the
impossibility of a synthetic proposition being beyond empirical test, thus blocking any return
to some form of synthetic a priori, he took the opportunity first of all by responding to an
article of Schrdinger's which appeared a year earlier in the same journal, and was originally
written in French. The response to Schrdinger is nevertheless undoubtedly aimed, by way of
Schrdinger himself, at other philosophers such as Neurath, Schlick or Popper, whom Carnap
does not name but with whom a debate is underway in the mid-1930s3.
Schrdinger's article, modestly titled "Quelques remarques au sujet des bases de la
connaissance scientifique"4 (Some remarks on the bases of scientific knowledge), contains a
thesis which is outrageous for Carnap, explaining his prompt and vigorous response. That
thesis, all the more provocative to Carnap because it had been formulated by one of the
greatest physicists of the time, is as follows: "Science is not self-sufficient; it needs a
fundamental axiom, a basic axiom from without". An "axiom" which is radically outside the
system of science because it is neither empirically testable nor assimilable to a convention. A
basic axiom which Carnap thereby identifies as a trans-empirical premise which should be
called metaphysical.
But what is, then, this "fundamental axiom"? Schrdinger avoids stating the content of
it straight away, as if he sensed that even giving expression to it was going too far, and as if
1 Translated into English by Paul Tappenden. A preliminary version of this paper was first published (In French) in:
Philosophia Scientiae, 3 (cahier 2), 203-213, 1999 (with the title: "L'alter-ego et les sciences de la nature, Autour d'un dbat
entre Schrdinger et Carnap"), and also as chapter 2-13 of: Michel Bitbol, Physique et philosophie de l'esprit, Flammarion,
2000.
2 R. Carnap, "Existe-t-il des prmisses de la science qui soient incontrlables?" Scienta LX, 129-135, 1936.
3 This point was suggested to me by Antonia Soulez. I should like, here, to warmly thank her for her careful reading of an
earlier draft and for her constructive criticisms.
4 E. Schrdinger, "Quelques remarques au sujet des bases de la connaissance scientifique", Scientia, LVII, 181-191, 1935.
On the Schrdinger-Carnap debate, see F. Nef, "A propos d'une controverse entre Carnap et Schrdinger", in M. Bitbol & O.
Darrigol (eds.), Erwin Schrdinger, Philosophy and the birth of quantum mechanics, Editions Frontires, 1992.

he anticipated an argumentative strategy of Carnap's wherein the most force rested, in the
end, on what was nave in the explicit formulation of such an "axiom".
The beginning of Schrdinger's article consequently seems to be a long preamble
whose sole clear objective is to play for time. Then, after having underlined the impossibility
of a researcher himself rethinking every theory and, above all, of himself alone repeating all
the experiments which have led to the present state of his science, he starts to let his
fundamental hypothesis or axiom be glimpsed. He writes: "The sensory perceptions of
another human being are something which I have never experienced myself. Nevertheless, I
do not hesitate to interpret them by calling up the memory of what I call my own similar
perceptions". To be able to use a colleague's account of an experiment as if I myself had
made and recorded all the observations, continues Schrdinger, I must accord him "sensory
perceptions" like my own. The work of a scientist rests in the end on an anti-solipsistic
hypothesis which Schrdinger calls "Hypothesis P" (for the "Personality" of other human
beings) but of which Carnap alone, it must be emphasised, gives a synthetic version of in his
reply to Schrdinger:
"Hypothesis P: It is no only I who have sensations (and consequently thoughts,
feelings, memories, etc.); other human beings have them too".
That this hypothesis cannot be "verified by exact scientific method" (or rather that it is
beyond "empirical control", as Carnap preferred to say following his then recent critique of
verificationism in Testability and Meaning) is certainly not a circumstance which is
accidental or auxiliary so far as Schrdinger is concerned. It is not just that all the
observations which I am capable of making of the behaviour of another person are equally
interpretable either in terms of neurophysiological processes or in terms of sensations and
thoughts, but that the second type of interpretation (which would tend to confirm Hypothesis
P) must necessarily, methodologically, be rejected in a particular framework of scientific
explanation. To demonstrate this, Schrdinger chooses a very simple illustration: I pinch
another man; the man will perhaps make an exclamation, but wouldn't that be the way in
which an automaton reacts to being pinched? On one hand, says Schrdinger, we indignantly
reject this degrading suggestion according to which the alter-ego could not be anything but an
automaton, but on the other hand we must insist that the physiologist gives a systematic
treatment. If we ask why the man makes an exclamation, Schrdinger continues, would you
believe that a physiologist (in the rle of physiologist) would be inclined to reply that the man
made an exclamation because he felt a pain? Certainly not, because in replying in that way
the physiologist would be ignoring the genuine scientific problem.
The physiologist who would insert into his account of neuronal processes a reference
to what is felt by the owner of the nervous system would thereby merely show his partial
ignorance of the class of phenomena he is responsible for elucidating. Even more seriously, if
he regularised the surreptitious involvement of Hypothesis P in his explanations, he would be
2

in great danger of falling back into some sort of vitalism, or of returning to the invocation of
entelechies.
The physiologist is in fact bound to conform to a way of thinking which no-one has
ever accepted overtly, but which characterises the scientific enterprise from start to finish.
That way of thinking, which Schrdinger puts into a dramatic setting at the end of his Nature
and the Greeks (1948)5, and then in his 1956 book Mind and matter6, is that which moves
towards objectivising. In striving to construct our representation of the external world, he
writes, we have used a simplifying device which involves the exclusion of ourselves: "The
scientist subconsciously, almost inadvertently, simplifies the problem of understanding
Nature by disregarding or cutting out of the picture to be constructed, himself, his own
personality, the subject of cognizance"7. That is exactly the reason why the scientific picture
of the world does not itself contain any ethical values; nothing about esthetics, no word of our
ultimate aims and destiny8. Nevertheless, this melancholic observation does not amount to an
invitation to regress. Once his work is determined by opting for objectivising, that is to say,
by opting to subtract from our representation of the world everything which is proper to "the
subject of cognizance", the scientist must follow through. He must never again head back
towards a lost paradise which Schrdinger refers to, following his reading of The Advaita
Vedanta and then Schopenhauer, as the domain of a mystic unity between minds and
between the One-Mind and the world. Objectivising, for Schrdinger, thus involves neither
the contingency of fact nor the indifference of convention; it has the imperative character of a
commandment to which Heraclitus gives voice in his fragment 2: "It is therefore necessary to
follow the common. But while reason is common, the majority live as though they had a
private insight of their own"9.
For Schrdinger, the seemingly paradoxical reason why Hypothesis P has no place in
scientific discourse is that the mode of scientific discourse is wholly supported by it; it is the
background of science (in a sense close to that intended by John Searle10); it will not be seen
amongst the resolutions put forward by science. The elements of Hypothesis P cannot count
amongst the properties of the ob-jects of scientific knowledge, not even when those objects
are human beings. Schrdinger points this out in a sentence of his 1935 article. Hypothesis P
is not scientific, he insists, and that "(...) prohibits mentioning it in the very dealing with a
scientific problem, in spite of , and perhaps because of the fact that science in its totality
5 E.Schrdinger, Nature and the Greeks, Cambridge University Press, 1948, and (in French translation), La nature et les
Grecs, prefaced by La clture de la reprsentation , M.Bitbol, Seuil, 1992.
6 E.Schrdinger, Mind and Matter (with What is life?), Cambridge University Press, 1967, and (in French translation),
L'esprit et la matire, prefaced by L'lision , M.Bitbol, Seuil, 1990.
7 ibid., p.90.
8 E.Schrdinger, Nature and the Greeks, op. cit., p.95.
9 ibid. p. 70
10 J. Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 143... insert original English quote beginning "The
background is 'pre-intentional' in the sense that though not a form or forms of intentionality, it is nonetheless a precondition
or a set of preconditions of intentionality". It amounts to a knowing-how rather than a knowing-that.

depends on that hypothesis". This exterior character of the foundation of the sciences would
undoubtedly seem unacceptable to a philosopher for whom the scientific method constitutes
the exclusive test of the validity of propositions, and for whom, consequently, no proposition
must in principle be placed beyond the reach of that method, even, and perhaps above all,
where its own premises are concerned. But Schrdinger, who holds for a long time that
"physics does not reduce to atomic physics, nor science to physics, nor life to science"11, is
not affected by that exterior character at all. On the contrary, according to him the scientific
ex-territoriality of Hypothesis P enables it, to its credit, to provide one of those signs, at once
ambiguous and undeniable, of the rootedness of the sciences in a lebenswelt which alwaysalready came before it12. As Schrdinger writes in his 1935 article, he does not even think
that science needs to regret the fact that one of its principal pillars rests on non-scientific
ground; for it is thus that science links itself more directly with other human thoughts and
aims than if it existed in and of itself.
In making his reply, Carnap does not radically doubt Schrdinger's Hypothesis P. He
shares ("obviously", he would say) the anti-solipsism of his interlocutor. But his way of
defending this position in 1936 shows signs of an evolution in his thinking which had taken
place since the appearance in 1928 of Der logische Aufbau der Welt13.
In the Aufbau, Carnap chose to adopt a position which he qualified as "methodological
solipsism"; that is to say, to proceed to the construction of the world from "autopsychological" material. Methodological solipsism was clearly distinguished throughout the
work from some sort of metaphysical solipsism. One of the most acute remarks which serves
to establish this distinction is that the characterisation of the basic elements of the
constructive system as "auto-psychological" and as "mine" does acquire a meaning only after
the domain of the non-psychological (and, to begin with, of the physical), as well as of the
"you", have been constructed14. To put it another way, the characterisation of elements as
"mine" has no meaning other than in opposition to the things which are "theirs" and "yours"
and which constitute at once one of the products of the construction and its point of departure.
In his 1936 text, on the other hand, Carnap bases his metaphysical anti-solipsism on
an argument which is borrowed from the article "Physicalismus" published by Neurath in
1931, and which arises from what the latter called "social behaviourism". According to
Carnap, it is legitimate to infer the possession of feelings, thoughts, memories and
perceptions by someone on the basis of a "determinate exterior behaviour". That inference is
just as legitimate as that which allows the derivation of the intensity of an electric current in a
11 E. Schrdinger, letter to W. Wien 25 August 1926, in K.Przibram (ed.), Letters in Wave Mechanics, Philosophical
Library, 1967.
12 The use of the Husserlian (and Diltheyan) term 'Lebenswelt' serves to underline such an insistent reference by Schrdinger
to the rootedness of science in "life" that it sometimes has the tone of Husserl's Krisis. However, there was not, so far as I
know, any direct influence on Schrdinger from either Dilthey or Husserl.
13 R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.
14 ibid. p.201.

wire on the basis of quantities measured such as the rise in temperature of the wire or the
deviation of a magnetised needle placed in the vicinity of the wire. Just as the physicist would
never think of doubting the existence of the current in the wire because he could not himself
be the wire and establish from the inside that by which the current manifests itself
experimentally, so the psychologist must not doubt the existence of the feelings, thoughts and
sensations of others because he cannot merge with others and establish from the inside that
which motivates their behaviours. The proposition according to which other human beings
have feelings, thoughts and sensations is in the end experimentally testable on condition that
we allow only exact relational laws linking mental states with behaviours. Hypothesis P, in
this modest version which Carnap favoured and labelled P1, thus does not elude empirical
control. Only a strong and metaphysical version of Hypothesis P, labelled P2, which would
return to postulating the impossibility of establishing a law-like relation between mental
states and behaviours would remain beyond the reach of control by experience. But, Carnap
adds, only the modest version P1 of Hypothesis P counts amongst the premises of scientific
work. And consequently, he believes himself warranted to conclude, the type of antisolipsistic premise demanded by science is empirically testable.
What are we to make of this debate and the arguments put forward by the two
protagonists? I find it quite striking that throughout their discussion both Schrdinger and
Carnap, without wishing to, occupy ground which gives too much purchase for the others'
arguments; and that they thereby weaken their ability to defend their real theses.
Let us see first of all how Schrdinger puts himself in a position which gives an
advantage to Carnap. As we have seen, Schrdinger shows at the beginning of his article a
certain reluctance to say just what is this extra-scientific background of the scientific
enterprise, the existence of which he invokes without spelling it out. But he ends by
presenting the elements of a description which Carnap can afterwards rearrange, and he goes
so far as to endow it with the status of an "hypothesis" or "axiom". Schrdinger, despite
himself, thus puts his "fundamental hypothesis" within the sphere of the propositions of
empirical science; a sphere where some propositions implicitly have the status of intangible
premises and where others are in the position of being experimentally tested, but where none
is intrinsically sheltered from empirical testing. Carnap is right under these circumstances to
emphasise that there is no reason why Hypothesis P should in principle be exempted from
empirical control. The expression of Hypothesis P, however much it is shielded from doubt,
like a "hinge" on which doubt turns15, cannot take advantage of any other justification but this
function of being a fixed point in the network of reasoning in order to escape de facto (and
not de jure) from a process of experimental testing. Even if we urge that Schrdinger has
good reasons to believe that that proposition, or at least what underlies it, is truly outside the

15 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1969, 341.

ordinary domain, the fact of having included it amongst the propositions serving as explicit
premises of empirical sciences cannot but expose it to being subjected to ordinary treatment.
Reciprocally, Carnap makes enough concessions to Schrdinger to weaken his own
arguments. Carnap concedes, for example, that it is necessary to rest the scientific enterprise
on a belief in the perceptions and thoughts of other human beings. From then on, all his
efforts consist in demonstrating the validity of an inference from that which is experimentally
accessible to that which is not; from behaviours to perceptions and thoughts. Unfortunately,
the inductive character of this inference leads Carnap to loose sight of the underdetermination of his mentalistic explanation by the behaviours explained; that is to say, the
fact that even if the mentalistic account is sufficiently corroborated it is undoubtedly not the
only acceptable one. From then on he cannot see the subtlety in Schrdinger's line of
thinking. The latter did not, in effect, propose to separate the mentalistic account from the
domain of possible explanations of behaviour other than by comparison with a purely
physiological type of explanation. Schrdinger did not deny the plausibility of the mentalistic
account; he even went so far as to admit that the physiological account is less satisfactory
because generally incomplete. But he did not hesitate, despite that, to exclude the mentalistic
account from the class of scientifically acceptable explanations and to himself prefer the
physiological account. And if he excluded mentalism, it is that he thought that the mentalistic
account of behaviours was profoundly at odds with the founding aim of science, namely the
objectivisation. We would say nowadays that Schrdinger had rested his affirmation of the
intangibility of Hypothesis P on the pragmatico-transcendental principle which consists in
making manifest the performative contradiction which arises in the practice of a science
conditioned by objectivisation whenever it attempts to make use of a type of explanation of
which, until better informed, all the elements cannot be considered as objectivised.
Let us now imagine that neither Carnap nor Schrdinger had made such advances
into each others' territory. Suppose that Schrdinger had not given Carnap to understand that
the background of science could be expressed in the form of a proposition labelled
'hypothesis' or 'axiom', and that Carnap, for his part, had not conceded to Schrdinger that
science requires amongst its premises the proposition according to which other human beings
have perceptions and thoughts similar to mine. Schrdinger and Carnap would then have been
able to agree on this: the point of support of science is not an explicit assertion concerning
what other human beings see and think; it is simply a practice of communication which
anticipates or presupposes the prefect interchangeability of positions amongst the members
of the linguistic community. The belief in thoughts analogous to my own for other human
beings, the mentalistic vocabulary of folk-psychology, used by Carnap, as by Schrdinger, do
not take first but last place in this perspective; because these devices do nothing but express
after the event the confidence to which the disputants bear witness regarding a generally
successful practice of communication. The difficulties only arise when we accord to this
retrospective verbal expression of mutual understanding the position of the process of mutual
6

understanding. But, we will ask, how can we do otherwise; how are we to express the
primeval understanding without giving it the form of propositions by which we come to
interpret it once its first step has already been taken?
Maybe in asking a poet, in this case Paul Eluard, to effect the desired mediation
without compromising us with a psychologising language which comes, inevitably, too late.
"Ce n'est pas plus difficile de parler avec les oiseaux qu'avec n'importe qui sur terre:
tu parles, l'oiseau fait celui qui a compris, il te rpond et tu fais celle qui a compris; et tu
rponds ton tour" (It is no more difficult to speak with the birds than with anyone on Earth:
you speak, the bird acts the one who has understood, it replies to you and you act the one who
has understood; and you reply in turn)16.
It is not here a question of comprehension, of perceptions or of thoughts, but of acting
the one who has understood, who sees or who thinks. No inference from behaviour to
"interior" representations, but nothing either to favour a reductionist behaviourism which
would not see anything but isolated gesticulations there, instead of the play of echoes and
reciprocities by which an understanding manifests itself. Picking up on a remark of J.
Bouveresse's concerning the Wittgensteinian concept of a rule17, we should say this: it is only
for someone who takes communication as a form of recognition which is purely external,
reduced to behaviour as a simple anthropological fact (human beings emitting sounds and
making movements) that the ideas of significance and expression disappear. From the point
of view of internal recognition, that is to say, for someone who effectively participates in
verbal and gestural exchange, utterances signify and gestures express, without its being at any
time indispensable to support the signification and expression on the explicit belief in their
mental counterparts. In place of the difference between mentalistic and neurophysiological
accounts of communication there is substituted a much more decisive difference between the
engaged conduct of the speaker and a multitude of disengaged accounts variously produced
by the ethnologist (behaviours), or the physiologist (neuronal processes) or even the
psychologist (mental processes).
If they had recognised that, Schrdinger and Carnap would have had no difficulty in
being in agreement. Schrdinger would have admitted that as soon as the dynamic of
understanding translated into the form of a proposition, it finds itself projected onto the same
plane of disengagement as that of the propositions of natural science, none of which is
intrinsically beyond empirical control. He would have also recognised that the use of the
terms 'hypothesis' or 'axiom', including when qualified as "fundamental" and when expressed
with the help of a psychologising vocabulary which would make claim to being closest to the
point of view of the speaker, really does nothing but manifest the partially disengaged
position of he who speaks of it. What other word than 'hypothesis' must we use under these

16 P. Eluard, Grain d'aile, Rouge et Or.

17 J. Bouveresse, Le mythe de l'intriorit, Minuit, 1987, p.56.

conditions? Surely not 'convention', which encompasses a dimension of intersubjective

agreement, and which thus presupposes that which it is meant to express. Perhaps, then, it
would be more suitable to invoke some "form of life", or better still, as Wittgenstein
proposed in On Certainty, a Weltbild which might be thought of as the integrated and active
totality of forms of life:
"I say Weltbild and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for
his research and as such also goes unmentioned"18
Once this move is made, Carnap could have for his part understood without difficulty
Schrdinger's insistence on placing his Hypothesis P beyond the reach of the empirical
control applied to propositions of a factual form; because what Hypothesis P tries, a little
clumsily, to translate is not really an hypothesis, nor an axiom, nor a proposition, but rather
the pre-condition of a linguistic practice which puts into play hypotheses, axioms and every
other sort of proposition.
One can sometimes get the impression, on reading the articles of Schrdinger and
Carnap, that these two authors came within an inch of the pragmatic turn of which I have
been making myself an advocate. Consider Schrdinger: when he says of his hypothesis not
that it is simply evident or commonly accepted, but that it is "very, very, very evident"; or
when he admits that if he is absolutely sure that one hypothesis is correct then he has only to
build on it without concerning himself with the reasons for his certitude. He then recognises
that the explicit acceptance of his Hypothesis P is indispensable neither in the course of
communication nor in the practice of science. As for Carnap, he goes even further in this
direction in writing in his response to Schrdinger that, without doubt, in everyday life the
relational laws between behaviours and mental events are not explicitly formulated but tacitly
presupposed and applied.
Carnap and Schrdinger did not, however, draw all the consequences from their
remarks. It is easy to understand why. Carnap was committed to the Weltbild of logical
positivism, which drove him to ignore the transcendental dimension of the pragmatic and to
not attribute to it anything more than the status of empirical knowledge19. Schrdinger, for his
part, was a late representative of the Weltbild of German post-Kantian idealism, which
included amongst its tasks the metaphysical hypostatisation of performative backgrounds.
The core, at once minimal, global and universally shared, of the Weltbild which preconditions simple communication could not be sufficient in itself to reduce the divergence
which was in place between the two historic Weltbilder in which Carnap and Schrdinger
enlisted themselves.

18 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, op. cit., 167.

19 The definition of the pragmatic which Carnap gives in Meaning and Necessity (University of Chicago Press, 1958, p.233)

is exactly in this vein: "...pragmatics, that is, the empirical investigation of historically given natural languages".