BOOK REVIEWS

Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue – The Making of a Revolution. Chicago

University Press, Chicago, 1999, xv + 365 pp., ISBN 0-226-04181-6, USD
35.00 (cloth) US $20.00 (paper).

In June 1925, Werner Heisenberg retreated to the rocky island of Helgo-

land to recover from a heavy attack of hay fever. All alone, he struggled
day and night with the intricate problems of atomic physics until he made
a breakthrough to a new quantum theory. This is a well-known story: we
cherish the romantic image of the lonely genius discovering new truths.
But it distorts the reality of scientific practice. Though Heisenberg was
indeed alone on Helgoland, his innovation would never have seen the light
of day without the contributions of many other physicists. Heisenberg’s
achievement was not a monologue but an element in a web of dialogues.
At least, that is the view taken by Mara Beller in her book Quantum Dia-
logue. On Beller’s ‘dialogical approach’, science should be regarded and
analyzed as a process in which “ideas [ . . . ] gradually form in numerous
dialogues between scientists” (p. 3).
Mara Beller has published on the history of quantum theory since 1983.
Her early papers are purely historiographical, but later she added philo-
sophical and sociological analyses. The book under review integrates much
of her work since 1983 with new material, combining detailed historical
analysis with a philosophical view on science and the way it should be
studied.
Quantum Dialogue is concerned with the ‘quantum revolution’, that
is to say, the development of quantum mechanics in the period 1925–
1927 and the ensuing debate about interpretative issues, which resulted
in the Copenhagen Interpretation (henceforth: CI). The book consists of
two parts. Part One (‘Dialogical Emergence’) analyzes “the complex, mul-
tidirectional dialogical nature of scientific theorizing” (p. 2), while Part
Two (‘Rhetorical Consolidation’) discusses “the strategies by which this
dialogical flux is flattened into a monological narrative” (ibid.). Contrary
to what one might expect, this division does not reflect the theory – inter-
pretation distinction. In fact, already in Part One Beller focuses mainly

Erkenntnis 56: 247–252, 2002.

248 BOOK REVIEWS

on the developments and discussions that pertain to CI: she gives de-
tailed discussions of the genesis of Born’s probabilistic interpretation of
the wave function (Ch. 2), Heisenberg’s uncertainty paper (Chs. 4 and
5), Bohr’s Como lecture (Ch. 6), and Bohr’s response to the Einstein–
Podolsky–Rosen argument (Ch. 7). The three papers by Heisenberg and
Bohr, which can be considered as cornerstones of CI, are submitted to
scrupulous ‘dialogical analysis’; that is, Beller uncovers the dialogues with
various interlocutors that lie at the basis of these articles by analyzing,
sometimes almost sentence by sentence, whom the author is addressing or
to whom he is responding.
In the second part of her book Beller turns from the construction of
CI to the ways it was disseminated and consolidated by its proponents.
Here the main focus is on the “rhetorical strategies”, which aimed at con-
vincing the physics community of the “finality and inevitability” of CI.
Her analysis of the Copenhagen rhetoric leads to a deconstruction of the
arguments. Its main targets are: Bohr’s thesis of the indispensability of
classical concepts (Ch. 9), Copenhagen antirealism (Ch. 8), and wave–
particle complementarity (Ch. 11). Accordingly, Beller’s account is not
without bias: her sympathies are evidently not with the mainstream ortho-
doxy of CI but with the alternative interpretations that tasted defeat as a
result of the effective rhetoric of the winners (Bohm’s hidden variables
theory is the prime example). Finally, Beller presents a “general critique
of the revolutionary narratives for the description of the scientific change”
(p. xiii). In such narratives the division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is
fabricated, opposition is misrepresented and delegitimized, and the illu-
sion of paradigmatic consensus is created. In the penultimate chapter she
fleshes this out in a critical discussion of the notion of incommensurable
paradigms, arguing that Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis is historically
linked with CI (see below). Her own alternative to Kuhnian philosophy
and historiography of science, which she calls ‘dialogism’, is outlined in
the last chapter of the book.
What exactly is dialogism? The general idea is clear: science is the
result of dialogues among scientists, and philosophers and historians of
science should analyze it as such. But how does this differ from traditional
views and what is gained by it? The general idea should be given more
substance before we can answer these questions. Although Beller does not
always sharply distinguish them, there appear to be two aspects to dialo-
gism: first, it is a (historiographical) approach to science, and second, it is
a (philosophical) view of science. Beller claims that dialogical philosophy
and historiography is novel and superior to extant approaches and views
of science. I will argue that the dialogical approach is indeed illuminating
 BOOK REVIEWS 249

and has important advantages, but that the dialogical view is ill-defined and
unconvincing.
Dialogism as an approach implies that historians should conceive of a
scientific text as a collection of addresses and responses to one or more in-
terlocutors. Beller has analyzed Bohr’s notoriously obscure Como paper in
this manner, and concludes: “Without identifying the interlocutors of each
sentence of the Como lecture, it is impossible to understand the meaning of
these sentences and the connections among them. Yet when we realize that
the text is filled with implicit arguments with the leading physicists of the
time – Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Compton, Born, Dirac, Pauli,
and the lesser known Campbell – the fog lifts and Bohr’s presentation
becomes clear” (p. 120). Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty paper resulted
from many dialogues, and accordingly does not contain an unambiguous
single argument but a “polyphony” of voices. Beller’s analysis of these
papers is enlightening. For example, the dialogical approach accounts in a
natural way for contradictions in the texts. There is no tendency to explain
away or ignore the inconsistencies; they are instead “the most useful guides
to the fascinating local context” (p. 187). This applies also to Bohr’s 1935
reply to the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen argument. Beller dissects two lines
of argument in his paper: the old disturbance analysis and a new opera-
tional answer. Because the two are opposing and not clearly distinguished
by Bohr, the resulting text is filled with contradictions and obscurities.
Attempts to distil a coherent philosophy of complementarity from Bohr’s
papers are therefore futile. Beller (p. 190): “It seems impossible to recon-
struct a coherent philosophical framework from a multitude of utterances
and deliberations that were aimed at meeting challenges in shifting sci-
entific and sociopolitical circumstances”. Incidentally, although Beller
regularly refers to ‘sociopolitical circumstances’, almost nowhere do these
figure in her historical accounts and the evidence for their influence is
therefore rather meager. I read only some brief and rather suggestive re-
marks, e.g., about Born’s response to the atom bomb in relation to his
defense of complementarity (p. 189). As the thesis that scientific dialogues
have sociopolitical roots is controversial, it should be supported by much
more systematic and detailed argumentation.
Although I agree with Beller that the dialogical approach is “a po-
tent tool for deciphering opaque and obscure texts” (p. 117), I wonder
whether it is also applicable to more mundane scientific papers. Heisen-
berg’s and Bohr’s papers clearly are exceptional pieces that are concerned
with interpretative and philosophical issues. But what about the average
research paper? It is of course true that the author of any paper addresses an
audience of scientists and responds to earlier (theoretical or experimental)
250 BOOK REVIEWS

findings. However, calling this a ‘dialogue’ seems but a fancy rephrasing

of something with which nobody – not even a diehard positivist – would
care to disagree. Therefore, I am not sure whether the general import of
the dialogical approach is as great as Beller suggests.
My doubts are reinforced by the observation that Beller stretches the
notion of ‘dialogue’: in many cases there is no dialogue in the literal
sense because the addressed ‘interlocutor’ never replies or even is unable
to reply. For example, she cites Heisenberg’s dialogue with the German
philosopher Fichte (p. 67), but obviously Fichte could not have heard or
read Heisenberg as he had been dead for over a century. Beller is aware of
the fact that she stretches the interpretation but apparently sees no danger in
it: “We constantly conduct conversations with others – with living people,
with the dead, and even with the yet unborn” (p. 14). But this runs the risk
of reducing the term ‘dialogue’ to an empty buzz word. Every utterance
can obviously be interpreted as part of a dialogue. For example, I do not
see what is gained by calling Bohr’s discussion of the nature of radiation a
dialogue with Einstein and Compton (pp. 131–35).
These criticisms notwithstanding, Beller’s dialogical approach has im-
portant merits. One has already been mentioned: the way in which it can
elucidate contradictions in papers. Another interesting and innovative as-
pect is the inherent attention for the role of “lesser scientists” (Beller’s
term), leading to a rehabilitation of their contributions to scientific devel-
opment. A dialogical analysis of a scientific paper requires that one does
not consider it a self-contained product of a ‘genius’, but that one devel-
ops instead a sensitivity for the significance of less visible ‘interlocutors’.
In the case of Heisenberg’s uncertainty paper, Beller highlights the role
of such lesser-known physicists as Zernike, Ising, Duane, Campbell, and
Senftleben. Attention for their contributions is historically interesting in
itself but also important for a revision of the “hero worship” tradition.
Beller argues convincingly that neglect of lesser-known scientists leads
to accounts in which the contributions of the protagonists are regarded as
giant revolutionary leaps while in fact there was a more continuous devel-
opment (p. 96, cf. p. 269). In Chapter 13, she critically discusses the “hero
worship” tradition for the case of Bohr. Bohr’s obscure way of expressing
himself, combined with his personal charisma, lent him the aura of a guru.
Not only his scientific pupils but also later interpreters of his work (present-
day historians and philosophers of science) fell prey to it, and Beller cites
an amusing list of reverent attempts to make sense of Bohr’s utterances.
Bohr scholar John Honner beats the lot: “If Bohr’s thought is not found to
provide a consistent framework for the interpretation of quantum mechan-
 BOOK REVIEWS 251

ics, then perhaps one’s expectations of ‘interpretation’ should be revised”

(Honner quoted by Beller, p. 276).
While rehabilitation of lesser-known scientists is laudable, I found
Beller’s specific cases not always convincing. For example, Beller claims
that Heisenberg “received impetus” from the work of Campbell and Senft-
leben (see her summarizing statement on p. 103), but the evidence presen-
ted is not very substantial: there are no references or other proofs of direct
contact. Beller merely points at “striking similarities” between the ideas of
Heisenberg and Senftleben (pp. 100–101); similarly, she suggests but does
not prove an influence in the case of Campbell.
Let us now turn to Beller’s general ‘dialogical view of science’. As
“dialogical analysis of a scientific paper [ . . . ] is inherently contextual and
historicist” (p. 117), it comes as no surprise that Beller’s view departs from
traditional conceptions such as positivism. “From the dialogical perspec-
tive, there simply are no final stable elements, or facts – everything can
be questioned and doubted” (p. 105). However, she does not succumb to
relativism, but opts for a balanced position on which “science is simulta-
neously rational and social” (p. 14). Chapter 15 is devoted to a defense of
this position, which is called a form of “social epistemology” (p. 321). Un-
fortunately, this defense lacks a systematic exposition of what dialogism
asserts and entails. It contains many suggestive general remarks, on the
role of the ‘other’, emotions, communication systems and disagreement;
but these are not combined into a coherent whole. Accordingly, the epis-
temological implications remain unclear. For example, Beller claims that
“scientific theorizing is both free and nonarbitrary” (p. 321), but fails to
explain how precisely the two can go together and what this entails for
the interpretation of theories (cf. the realism debate). In general, she often
states what dialogism is not, contrasting it to other views, but refrains from
formulating a concrete alternative.
One view of science with which Beller dissociates herself in partic-
ular is that of Thomas Kuhn. In Chapter 14, she challenges the radical
version of Kuhn’s model of science, in which paradigms are monolithic,
incommensurable entities and revolutions require wholesale leaps of faith.
Beller’s criticism of Kuhn is connected with her criticism of CI: she ar-
gues that the dogmatic elements in Kuhn’s model – paradigms cannot be
criticized, normal science is conservative – are designed to protect the
orthodoxy and to minimize influence of deviant scientists. She claims that
Kuhnian incommensurability is rooted in CI: Kuhn got the idea from N. R.
Hanson, who in turn was a staunch defender of CI and plausibly based his
idea on Heisenberg’s notion of ‘closed theory’. This historical reconstruc-
tion is interesting, but it does not validate the strong claim that “Thomas
252 BOOK REVIEWS

Kuhn [ . . . ] incorporated the Copenhagen ideology into an overarching the-

ory of the growth of scientific knowledge” (p. 13). Beller sometimes gets
carried away by her antipathy to Copenhagen. She focuses strongly on the
alleged normative dimension of Kuhn’s model (e.g., dogmatism is neces-
sary for scientific progress), and draws the surprising conclusion that the
model legitimizes the Copenhagen orthodoxy, the winner’s paradigm. But
Kuhn’s Structure is largely descriptive and makes only some very implicit
normative claims. And is not Beller’s own historical analysis of the way
in which the Copenhagen hegemony was achieved a remarkable confirma-
tion of Kuhn’s descriptive model? According to Kuhn, a feature of normal
science is the absence of philosophical debate: foundational problems are
considered irrelevant or non-existent. And that is exactly what happened
in the case of quantum mechanics, as explained by Beller’s analysis of
the rhetorical consolidation of CI: most physicists have no interest in the
EPR paradox and believe that Bohr solved it once and for all. Beller will
probably disagree, for she argues that Kuhn’s analysis of normal science is
inadequate (p. 306). But I believe that here she is guided too much by her
sympathy for history’s losers (such as David Bohm), leading her to blame
the one who brings the bad news: Thomas Kuhn.
In this review I have focused mainly on general topics, as these seem
to be of greatest interest to the readers of this journal, finding Beller’s
analyses intriguing but debatable. However, Quantum Dialogue can be
read also for its in-depth historical studies. Beller’s contributions to the
historiography of quantum theory are intended for an audience of special-
ists (the uninitiated should look elsewhere for a first introduction), offering
a wealth of detail and interpretation.
Faculty of Philosophy HENK W. DE REGT
Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

van Brakel, J., Philosophy of Chemistry, Leuven University Press, Leuven,

2000, ix + 246 pages, BEF 700.00 ISBN: 90 5867 063 5.

Why should we need a “philosophy of chemistry”? There are, in principle,

three different answers to this question: (1) because the solution of con-
temporary problems of chemical theory is not possible within the existing
discipline of chemistry, for either contingent sociological and historical

Erkenntnis 56: 252–256, 2002.

 BOOK REVIEWS 253

or systematic reasons, but requires the assistance of philosophers or even

a philosophical approach; (2) because of the disunity of sciences, which
debunks the project of a general, normative and/or descriptive, philosophy
of science; (3) because a descriptive general philosophy of science would
be enriched by paying attention to the peculiarities of the science of
chemistry. While only a few scholars presently engaged in philosophy of
chemistry agree with (1), and even less wish to invest in (2), the great
majority unequivocally accepts (3). Van Brakel is somewhat exceptional
in this respect as he attempts to reconcile versions (2) and (3). On the one
hand, he asserts that all attempts to provide present a picture of a unified
science have failed and makes a plea for a “discipline” of philosophy of
chemistry, but on the other hand he does not question the adequacy of a
general philosophy of science and explicitly wishes to connect issues of
the philosophy of chemistry to the general philosophy of science. Perhaps
his book is so stimulating because it contains lots a number of similar
ambiguities.
Much of the book is dedicated to the discussion of themes familiar from
the general philosophy of science, such as reduction, supervenience, and
emergence, natural kinds, essentialistic realism and ceteris paribus laws.
The way how van Brakel links these themes to examples stemming from
modern chemistry often provides new insights, although ambiguity lurks
everywhere, for example when he states in his discussion of essentialistic
realism that “what is essential to being water is that it is the manifest or
macroscopic natural kind or substance water”, but that “talk about es-
sences is better dropped”. Furthermore, the book gives valuable insights
into competing contemporary approaches to philosophy of chemistry, such
as ongoing attempts to reduce chemistry to physics and to construct a
“protochemistry”. In the following I wish to focus on van Brakel’s own
approach to the philosophy of chemistry.
Van Brakel’s approach to the philosophy of chemistry is descriptive
rather than normative. A descriptive philosophy of chemistry needs to take
into account that its referent, chemistry, is changing over time. It must not
ignore the historical dimension of chemistry, as van Brakel concedes in
chapter one, where he introduces his subject “philosophy of chemistry”
along with a historiography that aims at uniting the historical trajectories
of chemistry with its philosophical meta-discussion. Yet universalism is
omnipresent in this chapter. Apart from the fact that van Brakel’s histor-
ical treatment of alchemy (which is not mentioned) and modern chemistry
is a rational reconstruction that would be outrageous for most historians
of science, his historical account of the emergence of the philosophy of
chemistry implies presuppositions concerning the history of Western meta-
254 BOOK REVIEWS

physics and its relation to the history of science which ask beg for more
detailed philosophical and historical analysis and reflection. The most
problematic is the presupposition, made right at the beginning of chapter
one, that there is an invariant universal “interest in substance and matter” in
the Western tradition, including something like a sort of common denom-
inator of both the metaphysical concepts of “substance” and “matter”, as
treated by such philosophers as for example in the philosophy of Thales
and Aristotle, and the modern scientific concepts of “pure substance”,
“element”, “compound” and so on. This highly contestable approach to
the meaning of concepts implies a dual decontextualization, one from the
network of interrelated concepts in the framework of a given theory and
another one from the specific, historically situated, scholarly life form. The
result is a historiographical and epistemological artifact which constructs
continuities where a more careful, contextualized analysis would reveal
discontinuities. Van Brakel’s “philosophy of chemistry”, so it seems, must
refer to something less mundane than a historically changing subject, and
accordingly constructs an universal, abstract essence of chemistry – des-
pite the overall descriptive approach – that fits his goal of a universally
applicable philosophy of chemistry.
A decisive conceptual distinction of van Brakel’s philosophy of chem-
istry is that between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”,
developed from Sellars’ terminology. The “manifest image” is defined as
belonging to a cross-cultural “daily practice or common-sense-human-life-
form”, in which most things are macroscopic and can be observed directly,
whereas the “scientific image” is entrenched by scientists’ theories and
theoretical concepts, and referring mostly to microscopic or submicro-
scopic entities. Van Brakel’s manifest-scientific-dualism cuts across the
distinction between ordinary people’s life form and the practice of science,
such as chemical experimentation. In other words, ordinary everyday “life
forms” and experimental “life forms” are treated as a unity. Simultaneously
it reinstates the familiar distinction between experimentation and theory by
ordering experimentation to the side of the “manifest image” and theory to
that of the “scientific image”. The mistake error of this conception can be
seen in van Brakel’s discussion of the meaning of “pure water”.
Van Brakel argues that the notion of “pure water” has kept “much
the same sense” in the Western culture since Aristotle, implying that
the “manifest image”, which is also characteristic of the “practice” of
modern chemistry, yields comparatively robust knowledge (76f.). It de-
pends, of course, on what aspects of “manifest water” are emphasized, but
viewed from the modern chemical distinction between “compounds” and
“mixtures”, van Brakel’s assertion is wrong. What contemporary ordinary
 BOOK REVIEWS 255

people mean by “pure water” is context-dependent, for example differing

when depending, for example, whether “pure water” is used for to refilling
a car -battery or to quenching people’s thirst. In most cases, contemporary
common-sense “pure water” means unpolluted, healthy water that contains
lots of minerals and other invisible admixtures. In contrast, in academic
chemistry since the late eighteenth-century “pure water” means a single
“chemical compound”, consisting of hydrogen and oxygen, that does not
contain any minerals or other admixtures and hence is an utterly unhealthy
stuff that should not used by humans for quenching their thirst. Just as
the more general chemical notion of the “pure substance”, this modern
chemical notion of “pure water” implies a clear cut distinction between
a single “chemical compound” and “mixtures”. If the specific chemical
notion of “pure water”, and of “pure substances” in general, plays any
role in contemporary everyday life, it is not because ordinary people and
experimental scientists have the same “life form”, but because general
education in science has become routine today. Furthermore, the modern
chemical notion of the “pure substance”, which emerged in the late seven-
teenth century along with concepts like “chemical compound”, affinity”,
“chemical analysis” and “synthesis”, is also utterly different from earlier
alchemical notions of “pure” matter, which meant “subtle essences” of
bodies deprived from their “impure” or “corporeal qualities”. The mod-
ern chemical notion of “pure substance” roots in the historically specific
laboratory practice of late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth cen-
tury European chemistry, and it was not only laboratory practice alone,
deprived of any theoretical reasoning, that entrenched its generalization.
Despite his earlier assertion that “the chemical notion of substance is
wholly defined in terms of laboratory procedures and other experimental
practices, and can be given no essentialist definition” (73), van Brakel’s
lumping together of scientific laboratory practices and everyday life forms
indeed does indeed imply a kind of essentialism, which that differs from
what he rejects as “essentialist realism” only by the assumption that the
“essence doesn’t have to be microscopic”.
The merits of van Brakel’s philosophy of chemistry become apparent
only if we forget about his manifest-scientific dualism and his univer-
salism and translate most of what he has to say about “chemistry” into
“twentieth-century chemistry”. From this new perspective the book be-
comes a compelling achievement, outstanding in present philosophy of
chemistry, as it is able to capture features that are specific for to twentieth-
century chemistry. It is in particular van Brakel’s immunity against phys-
ical reductionism that makes the book so valuable. There is no unbalanced
emphasis on high-level theory, (notoriously, quantum chemistry); but in-
256 BOOK REVIEWS

stead, chemical substances, their experimental production, and the study

of their transformations, are given as much attention as chemical models
and the various kinds of chemical theories apart from quantum mechanics.

Max-Planck-Institut fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte U . KLEIN

Wilhelmstrasse 44
10117 Berlin
Germany

Peter Stemmer, Handeln zugunsten anderer, Eine moralphilosophische

Untersuchung, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2000, 392 pages, ISBN 3-11-016966-5,
DEM 68.00 (hardback).

The title of Stemmer’s book indicates an inquiry into, say, altruism or char-
ity. In fact, only the final section of the book deals with these subjects. In
the remainder, foundational issues in ethics like “How can ethical claims
be justified?”, “What is the meaning of ‘ought’?” “How does morality
depend on sanctions?”, “What is a rational and fair distribution of goods?”
and “Who can be a member of a moral community?” are discussed. Stem-
mer answers these basic questions from a rational choice perspective. In his
opinion, moral ought derives from personal preferences, moral duties rest
on individual advantage in social co-operation, and the entire force of eth-
ical claims depends on the existence of positive or negative reinforcements.
Animals, foetuses and small children thus cannot really be members of a
moral community, since they are unfit for strategic rationality. Such non-
members of our moral community are nevertheless protected by altruistic
feelings, which most people have and which Stemmer acknowledges in a
rational agent.
Of course, Stemmer provides reasons for his austerity. He attempts
to construct an ethics within the limits of rationality alone. And given
the demise of theological arguments in modern ethics, these limits are
of Procrustean narrowness. So narrow, in fact, that they call for sacri-
fices. With remarkable intellectual honesty, Stemmer sacrifices whatever
his approach tells him cannot be salvaged. Since he clearly perceives that
game-theoretical incentives for co-operation fail in many contexts of secret
wrong-doing, he assumes no moral duties in these contexts. In a similar
vein, Stemmer would have to concede that there are no ethical limits to
absolute power.
Not many moral philosophers will accept these conclusions, at least as
long as there is any hope of success for alternative approaches to morality.

Erkenntnis 56: 256–258, 2002.

 BOOK REVIEWS 257

Accordingly, very much depends on Stemmer’s ability to show that no

viable alternatives to his own approach exist. In my view, he fails to reach
his aims, among other things because his initial steps can be rejected.
Stemmer, like so many philosophers, asks how a moral sceptic could be
convinced to act morally. For Stemmer, “moral sceptic” is the second name
of homo oeconomicus, and therefore the sceptic will only be convinced by
reasons of self-interest. I would not follow Stemmer even so far, although
he presents his arguments in an exemplary perspicuous manner. Scepticism
is an epistemological position and has no implications for motivational
psychology. I see no reason why moral scepticism should always come in
a package deal with rational egoism. Furthermore, the meaning of “ought”
can be assessed without involving motivational issues according to some
defensible meta-ethical views. If Stemmer’s moral sceptic cannot be con-
vinced except by threats and promises, this therefore creates a problem for
police departments and for some meta-ethical stances, but not for all eli-
gible meta-ethical stances. Because of this theoretical impasse, Stemmer’s
opening moves would gain importance if widespread moral scepticism
were a clear and present danger to social order. But it is not. There are few
complete moral sceptics in this world, and relapses into a war of all against
all usually result from misunderstood or idiosyncratic morality and not
from moral scepticism, as Hobbes well knew. Ironically, even the results
of game-theoretical experiments undermine Stemmer’s opening move. It
would become all the less important to cater to the moral sceptic if rational
egoists acted indeed quite often as if they were moral agents.
Another important step in Stemmer’s argument concerns the genera-
tion of rights and duties. Here, I believe, he runs into trouble even if
judged from an internal perspective (meaning internal to the rational choice
paradigm). Stemmer devises a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situation in which
all players win if all acknowledge basic rights for all players. Conversely,
all players lose if no system of rights is introduced. This looks like good
modern Hobbesianism. Hobbes, however, introduced mighty Leviathan as
arbiter for the settlement of conflicting claims. In modern ethics there is
no subgroup of authoritative arbiters for moral conflict. Each individual
is ideally considered to hold the same interpretative power in moral con-
flicts. So, whereas it might be advantageous for all to install an arbitrated
system of rights (a juridical system, in other words), it is an open question
whether an additional system of morality with equal interpretative rights
of all agents would also be regarded as Pareto-superior to no system. If
the players expect unending and possibly damaging disputes about moral
rights and duties, they might prefer to live without such extras under the
protection of positive law. In other words, the utility of a right very much
258 BOOK REVIEWS

depends on an answer to the question “Who will judge (quis judicabit)?”

Note that no analogous problem exists for normal PD-utilities. The con-
struction of von Neumann–Morgenstern-utilities excludes intersubjective
haggling about “correct” utilities. This is precisely why one can be scep-
tical about (non-co-operative) game-theoretical scenarios of the emergence
of unarbitrated moral rights and duties. Rights are in need of intersub-
jective interpretation, as are duties, and if an arbiter for interpretations is
chosen, a standard PD will no longer represent the situation correctly.
My last comment concerns Stemmer’s conception of distributive
justice. From his rational agent perspective, he adjudicates a distributive
principle which reflects the relative powers of agents. This principle im-
plies that stronger players can legitimately claim a larger piece of the cake.
Stemmer calls such a distribution contractually just, so we may assume that
he mainly wants to legitimise the agents’ uses of their bargaining power in
contract dealings. Then, however, it is astonishing that the name “Nash” is
not mentioned by Stemmer. The Nobel-honoured Nash-solution to game-
theoretical bargaining problems rests on the agents’ imagined or real use of
their bargaining power. There is a momentous “Nash-programme” in bar-
gaining theory which attempts to spell out the implications of Nash’s fertile
ideas. Of course, recourse to violence is ruled out in game-theoretical bar-
gaining scenarios. But Stemmer, who introduces no such limitation, cannot
very well allow this move, since “winner takes all” instead of proportional
partition would be the likely result of winning Hobbesian combats.
My critical remarks show that I do not think that Stemmer has improved
the defences of the rational choice paradigm’s ventures into ethics. The
virtues of his book consist in a very clear delineation of the basic features
(as standardly understood) of an ethics within the limits of rational choice.
Stemmer is to be applauded for not retouching what others dislike about
the rational choice approach. Except, of course, that he adds a Schopen-
hauerian section on altruism and pity. This section helps remind us that
rational agents need not be cold and self-interested in a narrow sense.
University of Bayreuth RUDOLF SCHÜSSLER
Bayreuth, Germany

Phil Dowe, Physical Causation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,

2000, 225 pages, GBP 35.00, ISBN: 0521780497.

Physical Causation by Phil Dowe is both a very good book and further
proof that philosophy can benefit from the contributions of contempo-

Erkenntnis 56: 258–263, 2002.

 BOOK REVIEWS 259

rary science. The focus of Physical Causation is on the following three

questions:

1. What are causal processes and interactions?

2. What is the connection between causes and effects?

3. What makes a cause different from its effects?

Dowe claims that there are two ways to interpret each of these ques-
tions. One might intend by asking questions (1)–(3) to ask for a conceptual
analysis of our ordinary concept of causation (or the concept of causation
as employed by contemporary scientists, if that concept differs from the
ordinary concept). Alternatively, one might intend to ask what causation
in fact is in the actual world. Dowe calls this latter question a request for
an empirical analysis of causation. According to Dowe, a true conceptual
analysis will be a priori and necessarily true, whereas an empirical ana-
lysis will be a posteriori and (probably) contingently true.1 Dowe’s goal
in Physical Causation is to provide a true empirical analysis.
Given that Dowe focuses on providing empirical analyses, it is curious
that he never explicitly states what justifies one in believing that a par-
ticular empirical analysis is correct. One might think that what justifies an
empirical analysis is evidence that the relation picked out by the conceptual
analysis is both contingently co-extensive with and supervenient on the
relation picked out by the empirical analysis. But Dowe does not explicitly
argue that his empirical analysis is extensionally equivalent to the correct
conceptual analysis, i.e., that for any actual pair of events, the true con-
ceptual analysis implies that pair of events is causally related if and only if
the empirical analysis implies that they are causally related. I wonder if the
quest for an empirical analysis is motivated by the assumption that there
is one fairly natural non-disjunctive relation that is actually co-extensive
with the causal relation. Is there a point to empirical analysis if this is not
the case?
In the first half of the book, Dowe states, explains, and provides con-
vincing arguments against a variety of alternative answers to questions
(1)–(3). Here, Dowe discusses Hume’s regularity theory, various versions
of David Lewis’s counterfactual account, Patrick Suppes’s positive statis-
tical relevance account, Jerold Aronson and David Fair’s versions of the
transference theory, Russell’s account of causal lines, and various versions
of Wesley Salmon’s account of causation.2 The second half of the book is
260 BOOK REVIEWS

occupied with Dowe’s own answers to these questions. I will concentrate

here on Dowe’s answer to the first question:

(1) A causal process is a world line of an object that possesses a

conserved quantity; a causal interaction is an intersection of
world lines that involves exchange of a conserved quantity.3

Dowe’s account is interesting, resourceful, and forcefully presented.

However, I do have a few worries about it. My first worry is metaphysical:
Dowe’s account of a causal process makes use of the concept of an object
persisting through time. Dowe claims that an object is ‘anything found in
the ontology of science (such as particles, waves, or fields), or common
sense (such as chairs, buildings, or people).4 Now, I endorse two admit-
tedly controversial theses about mereology and persistence: the doctrine of
unrestricted composition, which is the thesis that whenever there are some
x’s, there is a y that is the fusion of these objects, and four-dimensionalism,
which is the thesis that for any way of dividing up the set of times at
which an object exists, there is a corresponding way of dividing the object
itself.5 Given these two theses, there is more in heaven and earth than what
can be found in the ontology of science or common sense. But, as Dowe
recognizes, allowing these entities to count as objects creates trouble for
his account. The case Dowe considers involves a rotating spotlight that
casts a spot in a circular path around the wall of a large building. As Dowe
notes, such a spot could move faster than the speed of light, so there is a lot
of pressure to deny that there is a causal process proceeding from one part
of the wall to the next. However, consider the fusion of each successive
area of the wall as the spot moves across it. Let’s call this putative object
‘Wally.’ If Wally really does exist, then energy is conserved by it, and
accordingly, given Dowe’s account, there is a causal process.6
So either Dowe is introducing a special sense of object, according to
which an entity counts as an ‘object’ if we pay attention to it, or Dowe must
reject either four-dimensionalism or unrestricted composition. I suspect
that Dowe will find the first alternative unpalatable; since this move would
make object-hood relative to our interests or conceptual scheme, Dowe’s
analysis of causation would also imply that causation is subjective. But
there are powerful reasons to endorse both four-dimensionalism and un-
restricted composition, e.g., relativity theory favors four-dimensionalism
and the doctrine of unrestricted composition is arguably a truth of logic.7
Dowe does provide an interesting discussion of the so-called causal
theory of identity, according to which ‘for an object to display identity
over time it is required as a necessary condition that its temporal parts
be related as cause and effect’.8 I think that Dowe provides a plausible
 BOOK REVIEWS 261

reason to believe that we do think of some objects as continuing over time

despite the lack of causal connectivity between their parts. (Dowe gives an
example of water ripples moving at phase-velocity.) Accordingly, Dowe
concludes that we should reject the causal theory of identity. I agree with
Dowe here, but I think that this example also shows that our conventions
for picking out what entities count as ‘objects’ in his sense are extremely
arbitrary.9 Once we let shadows, ripples, and moving spots of light into our
ontology, do we have a good reason to keep any other putative object out?
Specifically, do we have a good reason to exclude Wally?
My second worry concerns Dowe’s account of a conserved quantity.
Dowe writes that ‘it is common to define conservation in terms of con-
stancy within a closed system. [. . . ] we need to explicate the notion of
a closed system in terms only of the quantities concerned. For example,
energy is conserved in chemical reactions on the assumption that there is
no net flow of energy into or out of the system’.10 But as Jonathan Schaffer
has pointed out, this account of a closed system seems to make Dowe’s
account circular because there doesn’t seem to be a way to explicate the
concept of energy flow without appealing to the concept of causation.11
As I see it, Dowe has two ways to respond to this worry. First, Dowe
could simply provide a list of the quantities whose conservation he be-
lieves is relevant to causation and cash out what a causal interaction is in
terms of the items on that list; such a list might appear somewhat ad hoc,
but it avoids circularity, and is certainly informative. Second, Dowe could
appeal to the notion of a universally conserved quantity. Dowe discusses
this option, but rejects it because of worries about accidentally universally
conserved quantities.12 Given that Dowe is primarily interested in provid-
ing an empirical analysis, it’s not clear to me why this is a problem. If
we restrict our attention to fundamental quantities, it’s not obvious to me
that there are any accidentally universally conserved quantities; whether
there are any universally conserved fundamental quantities that are not
relevant to causation is an empirical question, or is at least as empirical
as the question of whether the conserved quantity theory is true. It seems
to me that this option deserves more attention.
My third worry concerns the alleged intrinsic nature of causation. Many
philosophers have claimed that the causal relation is an intrinsic relation,
i.e., whether the causal relation obtains does not depend on features of
the world that obtain outside of the region in which the causal relation
obtains.13 I am very skeptical about the claim that the causal relation
is intrinsic, but given the widespread acceptance that this claim is true,
it is worthwhile examining the implications that Dowe’s theory has on
this issue. Dowe is willing to grant that the direction of a causal process
262 BOOK REVIEWS

is an extrinsic feature of that process, which may already be cause for

concern.14 However, Dowe claims that ‘whether something is a causal
process depends only on the local facts about the process, namely the
object’s possession of a certain kind of physical quantity. It does not de-
pend on what happens elsewhere in the universe, so in that sense being
causal is an intrinsic property of a process’.15 But this simply is not true.
Whether a quantity is a conserved quantity depends on the global features
of the universe, not simply on the local features inhering in the region
occupied by a causal process. Let us distinguish being an intrinsic feature
of a process from being an actual intrinsic feature of a process. Taking
the concept of a duplicate as primitive,16 let us say that a feature F is an
intrinsic feature of a process iff for any (possible or actual) process that
exemplifies F , any duplicate of that process exemplifies F ; let us say that
a feature F is an actual intrinsic feature of a process iff for any actually
existing process that exemplifies F , any actually existing duplicate of that
process exemplifies F . Given Dowe’s account, being a causal process is
not an intrinsic feature, but it is an actually intrinsic feature. However,
being an actually intrinsic feature is not a very interesting property, and
those philosophers who strongly feel that causation is an intrinsic relation
will not be satisfied by the fact Dowe’s account implies that causation is
merely actually intrinsic. x is a parent of y is clearly an extrinsic relation;
however, given the fact that there are (actually) no intrinsic duplicates of
parent–child pairs, x is a parent of y is an actually intrinsic relation.
Despite the fact that I have reservations about Dowe’s theory, I have no
reservations about recommending this book. There is a lot of interesting
material in this book; in addition to his discussion of causal processes,
causal connections, and causal direction, Dowe provides a stimulating dis-
cussion of the issues concerning identity through time, backwards cau-
sation, and a chapter-long discussion on problems concerning causation
by prevention and omission. Dowe also provides one of the most help-
ful introductions to the puzzling Bell phenomenon in quantum mechanics
that I have seen. In addition, Dowe’s writing style is clear, lively, and
unpretentious. I learned a lot about causation from this book.17

NOTES

1 Dowe does indicate that one might also take the request for an empirical analysis to be
a request for an account that is a posteriori and necessarily true; perhaps the identification
of water and H2 O is one such empirical analysis. See p. 4.
2 And this list is not exhaustive!
3 See p. 90.
 BOOK REVIEWS 263
4 See p. 91.
5 More formally, four-dimensionalism is the thesis that necessarily, for any x, and any
non-empty non-overlapping sets of times T1 and T2 whose union is the time span of x,
there are two objects x1 and x2 such that the time span of x1 is T1 , the time span of x2 is
T2 , and x is the fusion of x1 and x2 . I borrow this account of four dimensionalism from
Ted Sider. See his article ‘Four Dimensionalism’, The Philosophical Review 106 (1997),
pp. 197–231.
6 See p. 98.
7 On four-dimensionalism and relativity, see Yuri Balashov, “Enduring and Perduring
Objects in Minkowski Space-Time”, Philosophical Studies 99 (2000), pp. 129–66 and
“Relativistic Objects”. Noûs 33 (1999), pp. 644–62. On unrestricted composition, see
David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 211–13,
and Parts of Classes (Blackwell, 1991), pp. 72–87, Michael Jubien, Ontology, Modality,
and the Fallacy of Reference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 14–17.
See Dowe pp. 90–109 for a discussion of issues concerning object-hood and persistence.
8 See p. 105.
9 Of course, I have a second reason for rejecting the causal theory of identity, namely that
it is incompatible with unrestricted composition. As I see things, nearly every object is a
part of some persisting whole. But not every persisting whole counts as something that we
care about, for we usually restrict our domain of quantification so that it primarily includes
objects whose parts are causally related. In order for some entity to be a temporal part of a
chair or a person, it must be a temporal part of a causally integrated entity. This is why a
causal requirement is appropriate for chairs or persons, but not for objects simpliciter.
10 See p. 95.
11 See Jonathan Schaffer’s forthcoming review of Dowe’s book in The British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science.
12 See p. 95.
13 On the alleged intrinsicness of causation, see D. M. Armstrong, “The Open Door:
Counterfactual vs. Singularist Theories of Causation”, in Howard Sankey (ed.), Causation
and Laws of Nature, Dordrecht: Kluwer pp. 175–186, and Peter Menzies, “Probabilistic
Causation and the Preemption problem”, Mind 105 (1996), pp. 88–117.
14 See pp. 205–206.
15 See p. 96.
16 See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, New York: Blackwell: 1986, pp. 61–63.
17 I thank Chris Heathwood, Gareth Matthews, and especially Jonathan Schaffer, who
read several drafts of this review and provided much encouragement. I learned a lot about
causation from him as well.

Department of Philosophy KRIS MCDANIEL

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
352 Bartlett Hall
Box 30525
Amherst, MA 01003-0525
264 BOOK REVIEWS

Michael Potter, Reason’s Nearest Kin. Philosophies of Arithmetic from

Kant to Carnap, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, 305 pages, GBP
30.

The title is taken from Frege’s description of arithmetic in Grundlagen

der Arithmetik §105 as the science that deals with objects that are closest
and most transparent to reason. The book reviews the accounts of several
philosophers that dealt with arithmetic, from Kant to Carnap, including
Dedekind, Russell, Hilbert and Gödel, among others, and concentrates
particularly on the fifty years between Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik
(1884) and Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934). It is not meant
to be an all-embracing history of a period, since it leaves out many other
equally important authors such as Cantor, Brouwer and Poincaré. As Potter
explains on the first page, the historic reconstruction of these authors is
guided by two questions: (i) Can we account for the fact that arithmetic
is not dependent on the way the world is? (ii) If we can provide such
an account, how can we also explain the fact that the world conforms to
arithmetic? However, Potter changes a number of times the formulation of
(i) and (ii), thereby producing questions that are not exactly equivalent to
the original ones. On p. 4, for example, he describes the main question of
the book as how to account for our knowledge of arithmetic so as to explain
how it can be applied to the world, while on p. 9 he formulates the main
questions again as how to explain the necessity of arithmetical truths and
their applicability in reasoning about the world. On p. 20 the two questions
become only one, namely, “to reconcile the necessity of arithmetic with its
applicability”.
In the introduction, Potter classifies all plausible strategies for an ac-
count of the applicability of arithmetic in four categories. First, we can
consider arithmetic as grounded on the structure of our perception of
the world. Second, we can locate the source of arithmetic in language
itself. Third, one could see arithmetic as reducible to logic, and logic as
a kind of descriptive science, i.e., as a science concerned with a certain
aspect of the world. And, fourth, arithmetic can be seen as the science
dealing with the objective laws of thought common to all rational be-
ings. Kant’s and Hilbert’s accounts are representatives of the first strategy;
Wittgenstein’s, Ramsey’s and Carnap’s belong to the second; Russell’s to
the third, and Frege’s and Dedekind’s to the fourth. It is less clear how

Erkenntnis 56: 264–268, 2002.

 BOOK REVIEWS 265

exactly Potter classifies Gödel’s account. (There are actually some other
possible strategies such as pure formalism, psychologism and empiricism,
but Potter discharges them from the beginning as highly implausible.)
Potter starts by reviewing Kant’s account of arithmetic and geometry.
His discussion connects some familiar elements of Kant’s views in an in-
teresting way so as to extract from them an explanation of the necessity
and of the applicability of these disciplines. Potter explains Kant’s account
of arithmetic as based on the temporal structure of sensibility, and dis-
cusses the consequent limitation of its applicability to objects of a possible
sensible intuition.
Chapter 2 reviews Frege’s logicism as it appears in Grundlagen, as well
as of the main problems faced by it. Potter starts by explaining Frege’s
thesis that arithmetic is universally applicable because it is just part of
logic, and logic is universally applicable. He also discusses Frege’s ac-
count of the fruitfulness of definitions and of the cognitive value of analytic
statements. Potter emphasizes (p. 62) that the main justification for Frege’s
claim is not simply that he, differently from Kant, has the conception of a
polyadic logic, but rather the fact that his logic uses universal quantifica-
tion. (Actually the evidence quoted by Potter from Grundlagen and from
Begriffsschrift does not support this interpretation. A better place to look
for would be Frege’s essay “Boole’s Logical Calculus and the Begriffss-
chrift”, from 1880–1881.) Potter rightly points out (pp. 70–71) the fragility
of Frege’s arguments for the claim that numbers are objects (instead of
concepts), and for taking the grammatical evidence for the substantival use
of numerals as more reliable than the evidence for the adjectival use. The
chapter concludes with the claim that the Julius Caesar objection (which
Potter thinks Frege fails to solve) poses a problem for his explanation of
the applicability of arithmetic, while the lack of an account of our grasp of
the extensional equivalence (Frege’s axiom V) represents a gap in Frege’s
explanation of the analiticity of arithmetic. Despite of its evident merits,
this chapter meanders at times, since the author goes into several different
considerations about different aspects of Frege’s thought that do not relate
directly to the guiding questions.
In Chapter 3, Potter discusses Dedekind’s foundation of arithmetic. He
describes Dedekind’s approach in Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen as
technically supperior to Frege’s Grundlagen. (This is certainly true, but
to be fair, the proper work to compare with Dedekind’s Was sind would
be Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, where he presents a detailed
development of arithmetic, and reaches essentially the same results as
Dedekind.) Potter ends the chapter concluding that Dedekind’s creationism
266 BOOK REVIEWS

leaves unexplained how arithmetic as something created by the mind can

relate to the world of external things.
Chapter 4 resumes the discussion of Frege, taking up the main point that
he left unfinished in Grundlagen, i.e., a positive account of classes. But be-
fore going into that, Potter presents an argument against Frege’s treatment
of sentences as proper names. The argument does not seem to carry much
conviction, however, since he uses the claim that “thoughts are not the sort
of things that we can grasp without being aware that they are thoughts” (p.
106) without explaining or justifying it. He seems to be mixing semantic
with epistemic considerations here, without arguing substantially for this
move. Potter sees the appearance of the Julius Caesar objection again in
the precisely formulated language of Grundgesetze, in that Frege has to
settle the identity of value-ranges with regard to truth values. He says on
p. 107 that Grundgesetze has “a precisely formulated language, in which
reference to Julius Caesar is impossible”, and he describes this as Frege’s
solution to the Julius Caesar problem for extensions. But this is not quite
correct. As far as Frege’s development goes, there is indeed no name for
anything else in his system except logical objects; but Frege clearly leaves
open at the end of Grundgesetze §10 the possibility of new objects – with
the corresponding names – being introduced in his system.
On p. 111, Potter presents what seems to this reviewer to be a mis-
representation of Frege’s semantics in Grundgesetze. He describes Frege’s
project as “to give sense to the expressions of his formal language merely
by stipulating which are true and which are false”. Apparently as a product
of this misrepresentation, Potter concludes that, for all Frege’s efforts, he
does not succeed in raising his language above “the status of the empty
formalism”, thus frustrating the whole point of his project of a lingua
characterica. This seems to be equally unfair. Potter also criticizes Frege’s
views in connection with the paradox of the concept horse (p. 116). He
claims that the paradox does not show, as Frege thought, an awkwardness
of ordinary language but rather that Frege’s doctrine of concepts as un-
saturated entities is incoherent. His reasons for this claim are not quite
clear, however. Given the complexity of this problem, and the amount of
literature produced about it, it is unfortunate that Potter dedicates only a
small paragraph to it.
There are two chapters dedicated to Russell. In the first (Chapter 5) Pot-
ter perspicuously reconstructs the tortuous way that led to the formulation
of Russell’s theory of types as it appears in Principia Mathematica. This
chapter is indeed a good guide to the many technicalities and problems
faced by Russell in early attempts to solve the paradoxes. The second
 BOOK REVIEWS 267

(Chapter 7) is an account of the changes introduced in the second edition

of Principia mainly under the influence of Wittgenstein’s criticisms.
In the chapter dedicated to Wittgenstein, Potter works out the details
of the theory of arithmetic sketched in the Tractatus. As he explains, one
of the most attractive features of the Tractatus’ account is that it clearly
solves at least one of the original questions: since in Wittgenstein’s eyes
arithmetic is a by-product of language, it is therefore applicable just as
widely. He shows with great clarity the scope and some severe limitations
of Wittgenstein’s arithmetic, in which, for example, inequalities cannot be
expressed. He also discusses the problem that there is no guarantee that
infinitely many numbers exist on Wittgenstein’s account.
The chapter on Ramsey is one of the few detailed expositions of his
thought in mathematics, and of how it evolved from his dialogue with
Russell and Wittgenstein. But the author seems to try to pack too much
in this chapter, providing in only 28 pages an account of the essentials
of Ramsey’s position, of its historic evolution, and of its differences with
the views of Wittgenstein and Russell. At any rate, this, together with
the previous chapter on Wittgenstein, represents perhaps the most original
contribution of the book.
There is a chapter with a neat exposition of Hilbert’s programme, and
of how much it is inspired by or differs from Kant’s original aprioristic ac-
count based on schematism. It is followed by a chapter on Gödel. However,
this latter chapter seems to be rather an extension of or an appendix to the
chapter on Hilbert, since Potter does not discuss Gödel’s own philosophical
views about arithmetic. (I presume that this is so because Gödel’s views
are more salient in his papers from 1944 and 1947; they thus do not be-
long to the chronological period covered by Potter.) There is also no clear
explanation about Gödel’s position regarding the question of aprioricity
and applicability of arithmetic. This chapter is limited to an explanation of
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and of how much they affected Hilbert’s
initial purposes.
The last chapter is a critical review of Carnap’s combination of logi-
cism with formalism. The most substantial part of it presents a systematic
comparison between Carnap’s and Wittgenstein’s notions of language and
analyticity, and Potter clearly shows a Wittgensteinian preference here. He
explains how Carnap places the notion of consequence at the center of
his conception of language, thus differing from Wittgenstein, for whom
the primary aspect of language is the description of the non-linguistic
world. In Wittgenstein’s conception, logic and tautologies are by-products
of the process of describing the world, while for Carnap the opposite
holds. Focussing his review on Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache,
268 BOOK REVIEWS

Potter discusses some difficulties for the Principle of Tolerance repre-

sented by semantic demands on the expressive power of theories. Potter
discusses Carnap’s distinction between logical and descriptive vocabu-
lary, and points out an odd consequence of it, namely, the fact that in
an incomplete theory such as primitive recursive arithmetic the univer-
sal quantifier would have to count as descriptive according to Carnap’s
criterion. Overall, the chapter raises interesting points about Carnap, but
throughout the discussion, the author seems to lose sight of the question
that he himself formulates apparently as a guide at the very beginning of
the chapter, namely, how far the positivists’ account of arithmetic “survives
their denial of metaphysics” (p. 261). No clear answer seems to emerge
from the discussion.
Potter closes the book with the conclusion that no account reviewed is
entirely satisfactory. He also suggests that the way out would be to embrace
what he, following Wittgenstein and Kant, describes as a “confusion”
between the “self of empirical psychology” and the “self as metaphysical
subject” (p. 288). He does not explain how this confusion would help us
out of the troubles reviewed in the book. It is indeed mysterious why he
thinks that something that he describes as a “confusion” could be of any
help in solving philosophical problems.
Overall, the book presents a good guide to the thought on the foun-
dations of arithmetic of the authors reviewed. Potter shows great skill
in explaining and translating the technicalities involved in the different
approaches into modern terms. Each chapter about the individual philos-
ophers has its own interest as a piece of scholarship. This is true espe-
cially of the chapters on Wittgenstein and on Ramsey, since they are most
original. Another positive aspect of the book is that it is not purely histor-
ical: Potter frequently connects the authors reviewed with current issues
in contemporary philosophy of mathematics. One negative aspect is, as I
said, that the author tries to pack too much into some chapters (e.g., in the
chapters on Russell and Ramsey), and it is not always clear how the many
specific topics discussed relate to the main questions of the book.
IFCS – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro MARCO RUFFINO
Rio de Janeiro 20051-070
Brazil