Ernst Mach and the Shabby Pedagogue: On Belief De Se

1. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote:

     Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was
     very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at
     the other end. 'What a shabby pedagogue that is, that has just
     entered,' thought I. It was myself; opposite me hung a large
     mirror. The physiognomy of my class, accordingly, was better known
     to me than my own.

When Mach got on the bus he saw himself, but not as himself. His first thought was one expressible by 'The man who just boarded is a shabby pedagogue.' 'The man who just boarded' referred to Mach. Only later did Mach realize that he was referring to himself, a thought that he might have expressed by saying, 'I am a shabby pedagogue.'

Clearly, the thought expressed by 'The man who just boarded is shabby' is distinct from the thought expressed by 'I am shabby.' After all, Mach had the first thought but not the second.  So they can't be the same thought.  And this despite the fact that the very same property is ascribed to the very same person by both sentences. The second thought is the content of a belief de se.  Such a belief is a belief about oneself as oneself.

One can have a belief about oneself without having a belief about oneself as oneself.

The difference emerges even more clearly if we alter the example slightly. Suppose Mach sees that the man who has just got on the bus has his fly open. He thinks to himself: The man who has just boarded has his fly open, a thought that leads to no action on Mach's part. But from the thought, I have my fly open, behavioral consequences ensue: Mach buttons his fly. Since the two thoughts have different behavioral consequences, they cannot be the same thought, despite the fact that they attribute the very same property to the very same person.

But if they attribute the same property to the same person, what exactly is the difference between the two thoughts?

Linguistically, the difference is that between a definite description ('the man who just boarded') and the first-person singular pronoun 'I.'   Since the referent (Frege's Bedeutung) is the same in both cases, namely Mach, one will be tempted to say that the difference is a difference in sense (Frege's Sinn) or mode of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweise). Mach refers to himself in two different ways, a third-person objective way via a definite description, and a first-person subjective way via the first-person singular pronoun.

If this is right, then although there are two different thoughts or propositions, one indexical and the other non-indexical, it might seem  that there need only be one fact in the world to serve as truth-maker for both, the fact of Mach's being shabby.  This is a non-indexical fact.  It might seem that reality is exhausted by non-indexical facts, and that there are no such indexical or perspectival facts as those expressed by 'I am shabby' or 'I am BV' or 'I am the man who just got on the bus.' Accordingly, indexicality is merely a subjective addition, a projection: it belongs to the world as it appears to us, not to the world as it is in itself, in reality.  On this approach, when BV says or thinks 'I,' he refers to BV  in the first-person way with the result that BV appears to BV under the guise of 'I'; but in reality there is no fact corresponding to 'I am BV.'

2. But is this right? There are billions of people in the world and one of them is me. Which one?  BV! But if the view sketched above is correct, then it is not an objective fact that one of these people is me. That BV exists is an objective fact, but not that BV is me.  BV has two ways of referring to himself but there is only one underlying objective fact.  Geoffrey Maddell strenuously disagrees:

     If I am to see the world in a certain way, then the fact that the
     world seen in this way is apprehended as such by me cannot be part
     of the content of that apprehension. If I impose a subjective grid
     on the world, then it is objectively the case that I do so. To put
     it bluntly, it is an objective fact about the world that one of the
     billions of people in it is me. Mind and Materialism, 1988, p.
     119.)

Maddell's point is that the first-person point of view is irreducibly real: it itself cannot be a subjective addition supplied from the first-person point of view. It makes sense to say that secondary qualities are projections, but it makes no sense to say that the first-person point of view is a projection. That which first makes possible subjective additions cannot itself be a subjective addition. That which is at the root of the very distinction between the for-us and the in-itself cannot be merely for-us. (Maddell might not approve of this last sentence of mine. It sounds a little 'Continental.')

Consider the phenomenal redness of a stop sign. It makes sense to say that this secondary quality does not belong to the sign itself in reality, but is instead a property the sign has only in relation to a   perceiver. In this sense, secondary qualities are subjective. But to say that subjectivity itself, first-person perspectivity itself, is a subjective projection is unintelligible. It cannot belong to mere   appearance, but must exist in reality. As Madell puts it, "Indexical  thought cannot be analysed as a certain 'mode of presentation', for the fact that reality is presented to me in some particular way cannot be part of the way in which it is presented." (p. 120)

3. Trouble for materialism. According to materialism, reality is exhausted by non-indexical physical facts. But we have just seen that  indexical thoughts are underpinned by indexical facts such as the fact of BV's being me. These facts are irreducibly real, but not physically real. Therefore, materialism is false: reality is not exhausted by  non-indexical physical facts.

Romantic Postscript

That most mysterious of all pronouns, the first-person singular, is the key, or one of them, to  the riddle of the universe. 

Comments

[oz]

How does Mach's example differ from where we see the masked Coriscus, thinking "the man in the mask is approaching", but without thinking "Coriscus is approaching"? What role does the first person pronoun play in that example?

[David Brightly]

Hello Bill. You argue,

Clearly, the thought expressed by 'The man who just boarded is shabby' is distinct from the thought expressed by 'I am shabby.' After all, Mach had the first thought but not the second. So they can't be the same thought. And this despite the fact that the very same property is ascribed to the very same person by both sentences.

May I offer an alternative analysis? Mach is not ascribing shabbiness to the same person (himself) in both sentences. This I think is very clear from the variant example where the property is 'has his fly open': if Mach thought his fly open he would act to button it. Rather, Mach's first thought is better expressed as

A second man has boarded the bus and this man is shabby/has his fly open.

This thought has an existential component,

There is a second man who has just boarded the bus,

which is false. This false existential claim renders the subsequent referring phrase 'this man' empty, since it refers back to the putative 'second man', and there is no such man.

The structure of this example is very close to that of Kripke's 'Paderewski' example in 'A puzzle about belief'. Both hinge on an ambiguity. In this case the phrase 'the man who just boarded' is ambiguous, for Mach, between Mach himself and his putative second man. In Kripke, for his protagonist Peter, 'Paderewski' is ambiguous between two individuals, one a politician, the other a musician. Kripke's puzzle succumbs to an analysis parallel to the one I give above.

Lastly, I am sceptical that your account of the Mach story justifies the exceptionality of 'I'. The puzzle, in your wording, remains even if we replace the 'I' in Mach's later thought with 'Mach'.

[oz the ostrich]

"the fact that reality is presented to me in some particular way cannot be part of the way in which it is presented"

This reminds me of one of the key points in my 1986 PhD thesis (which only survives in draft, the University having apparently lost the final copy).

I called it The Paradox of the Observer. Every point in my visual field, i.e. every point that I can see, is 'given' at a certain distance from my eye. Yet the eye is the one thing I cannot see: it is the one component of my visual field that is missing. So that relation to my eye (or rather the bit of me that sees) must be part of the way in which the things in my field of vision are presented. But the things in my field of vision are part of reality: how can that reality contain the fact that it is being presented to me in a certain way?

I remember Mach (and Wittgenstein's take on Mach) formed part of my thinking then.

[BV]

Gentlemen: I am thinking about your comments. The topic is very difficult. But now I have to see if I can get onto Zoom for Ed's presentation. I have never used it.