Reichenbach and Spinozism
One of the minor oddities of Reichenbach’s (1951) The Rise of Scientific Philosophy is the repeated explicit references to Spinoza (four times spaced through various chapters). None of these are especially interesting, but Spinoza’s work is held up as an “extreme form” of “ethico-cognitive parallelism” (p.53) in an arc that runs from Plato to Kant. On Reichenbach’s account the project of this arc of philosophers comes to an end once it’s clear after the development of nineteenth century mathematics that the synthetic a priori does not exist (p. 143 & 278). The fourth mention of Spinoza involves the claim that Spinoza’s deterministic worldview presupposes a causal principle (p. 165), which, if I am not mistaken, on Reichenbach’s account is undermined by quantum mechanics. (There is also the suggestion that Spinozism is ruled out by the probabilism implied by statistical mechanics.) None of this is especially illuminating or exhibits much interest in Spinoza’s philosophy.
Now, let me shift gears momentarily. Reichenbach’s philosophy of mind is, when it is discussed at all, usually treated as a contribution to the “identity theory of mind, which “holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain.” In fact, J.J. Smart explicitly lists Reichenbach’s (1938) Experience and Prediction in his own pre-history in his SEP entry. There is plenty of evidence in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy that Reichenbach continued to be attracted to the view. So, what follows is not meant to undermine that claim.
However, in one of the best chapters of Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, the 16th one on “Functional Conception of Knowledge,” returns, inter alia, to his philosophy of mind in the context of handling a kind of skeptical challenge that his empiricist/verificationist and functional account of knowledge can’t really identify differences between waking and dreaming states. His response to this worry is to create a thought experiment in which somebody creates a diary in which everything that is experienced is written down. On Reichenbach’s view, the diary will eventually exhibit “structural differences within the collection of” diary “reports.” (p. 261). I am not especially impressed by or interested in analyzing this response to the skeptical worry, but at this point Reichenbach asserts the following:
From sentences we proceed to things: reports that are objectively true are said to refer to objective things, reports that are merely subjectively true are said to refer to subjective things. So we have now two kinds of things; all of them are immediate things, but only the first are objective, or real things. What are the others?
In order to deal with them, we invent the concept “my body”. We say that among the physical objects there is one, called “my body”, which is causally affected by other physical things and thus put into a certain physiological state. Whenever there is an objective thing reported in the diary, my body is in a certain state; but it may even be in that state when there is no objective thing. In such a case we speak of a subjective thing. Thus subjective things, though having no reality, indicate real things of another kind: they indicate states of my body. p. 261-262 (emphasis in original)
Now, the claim that subjective experience indicates the state of one’s body is a Spinozist doctrine usually called ‘parallelism.’ And it is no surprise that in addressing skeptical worries Reichenbach would end up here, because arguably Spinoza got there by a similar route (albeit starting from Descartes’ substance dualism). Reichenbach himself immediately recognizes that he has said something odd because he goes on to write, “The last statement looks like a logical fallacy: if something nonexistent indicates something existent, it must also exist.” (p. 262)
So, he ends up restating his position such that when we experience what one might call ‘subjective things,’ “there is a state of our body such as would also occur if there were a corresponding object.” (p. 262) Admittedly this is not quite parallelism anymore, but I think it is entailed by it; as it happens this is pretty much what Spinoza would say (see the material following E2P17C).
In fact, there is more evidence that Reichenbach has drifted into a characteristically parallelist position. We see this as he goes on to try to explain what he calls ‘stimulus language:’
This sort of language may be illustrated by a physical example. The speedometer measures the speed of a car by the deviation of a needle. For this purpose, the revolving wheels of the car are connected through gears and a flexible shaft with the needle in such a way that greater speed corresponds to greater angular deviation of the needle. For every position of the needle, the corresponding speed is written on the dial. What the needle indicates directly is an internal state of the speedometer; but indirectly it thus indicates a speed, which acting as a “stimulus” puts the instrument into this state. Instead of using the figures on the dial as a measure of the speed of the car, we could also use them to indicate the internal states of the speedometer. Assume that someone takes the instrument out of the car and moves its shaft; then the speedometer is in a certain internal state. Looking at the figures on the dial, we may say “the speedometer is in the state sixty miles per hour”. We thus characterize the state of the instrument indirectly in stimulus language.
This illustration will help to clarify the nature of subjective things. The things seen in a dream have the kind of existence which the speed of sixty miles has in the example of the speedometer taken out of the car. To speak here of existence is justifiable as a mode of speech, but physical existence is restricted to the states of the speedometer which are thus described indirectly. The duality of the dream state and the waking state offers no difficulties to an empiricist philosophy. It does not require the introduction of things “beyond” the realm of physical things; and it does not open the path to transcendentalism. It can be accounted for entirely in a “this- world philosophy”. The meaning of statements about things existing in a dream is translatable into the meaning of statements about objective things.
This analysis permits us to clarify the meaning of the question whether the world is real. (p. 264-5’emphasis added)
I wish I could ask Dennett, whether Reichenbach’s functional account of knowledge helped him toward developing the intentional stance. As noted, I am not much impressed by this approach to defusing skepticism about the external world.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reichenbach intended the first quoted paragraph to express an identity theory of mind. But the speedometer example better illustrates a parallelist position. For Spinoza while our ideas directly indicates states of the body, this is, in turn, is shaped by contact with an external world such that ideas indirectly, as it were, represent it.
I think there is more evidence that Reichenbach has ended up in parallelism. Because for him what we would call ‘Zombies’ are possible:
Imagine that scientists had succeeded in constructing a perfect robot. The machine would talk, answer questions, do what it is ordered to do, and give all kinds of information wanted; for instance, one could send it to a grocery store, have it ask the grocer how much the eggs are today, and it would return with the answer. It would be a perfect machine, but without a mind. (p. 271)
In fact, he concludes his discussion with this robot/zombie with the following statement of his position: “The mind is inseparable from a certain state of bodily organization. It follows that mind and bodily organization of a certain kind are the same thing.” (p. 271-272)
I have no idea if Reichenbach intended this passage to be read as an identity theorist. But the language of inseparability here is compatible with parallelism. In addition, the terminology of ‘organization’ is incredibly close to Spinoza’s account in which maintaining internal order/organization is central to identity. In fact, for Spinoza, “Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension.”
I should stop here. I want to note, however, that it seems plausible that Reichenbach inherited more from the tradition he dubbed, “ethico-cognitive parallelism,” than he seems to have been conscious of.