HILARY PUTNAM
269
dard cases. Other classes
A'
may have a high statistical correlation
with the occurrence of an utterance of this type, but that is irrelevant
if the correlation is not truly causal.
But in the empiricist view, events don't have objective, perspec–
tive-independent "bringers-about." "Bringing about" is something
we read into the world. "Bringing about" cannot be appealed to in
explaining the nature of "primary recognition." On the other hand,
mere statistical association is too weak a connection. The only re–
maining alternative is the one Russell and Ayer choose- to assume,
or simply posit, a primitive, totally unanalyzed act of "primary
recognition" which connects a sign directly to tokens that are not
present to the mind performing the act (or, what comes to the same
thing, connects the mind directly to one and only one "quality" of a
token which is before it) . This act of "primary recognition" is simply
a mystery act, an occult sort of performance which establishes an in–
tensional link between certain particulars and certain universals.
Perhaps it is no more of a mystery than Descartes' God, or
Aristotle's prime mover (one needs
some
Archimedian point to avoid
infinite regress, Ayer might claim), but a mystery nonetheless. For it
has long been central to naturalistic psychology that the mind can in–
teract with universals only through causal transactions involving in–
stances of those universals, transactions which it is the business of
psychology to analyze into elementary processes of a sort compatible
with our scientific image of the world. But Ayer has no theory of the
mind at all, nor is it clear that he has the building materials out of
which such a theory - a theory of an organ with such capabilities as
"primary recognition" - might be constructed. Is the mind supposed
to be a collection of sense-qualia (as Hume thought)? Can a collec–
tion of sense-qualia engage in acts of primary recognition of univer–
sals? Ayer gives us nothing but matter and sense-qualia, and neither
seems the sort of stuff that can perform such acts.
It
is strange that
an empiricist and former positivist would feel so untroubled by the
need to postulate a mysterious mental act.
Now that Ayer has become a realist about material objects,
other problems occur which he does not notice, as well. The ex–
istence of material objects cannot really be a hypothesis which ex–
plains my sense-qualia, as Ayer thinks, unless I can
understand
this
hypothesis. To explain how I can understand it I must solve the
problem which so troubled Berkeley and Hume - I must succeed in
somehow establishing a correspondence between the sign "material
