The Philosophical Roots of Ernst Mach's Economy of Thought

Abstract

A full appreciation for Ernst Mach's doctrine of the economy of thought must takeaccount of his direct realism about particulars (elements) and his anti-realism aboutspace-time laws as economical constructions. After a review of thought economy,its critics and some contemporary forms, the paper turns to the philosophical rootsof Mach's doctrine. Mach claimed that the simplest, most parsimonious theorieseconomized memory and effort by using abstract concepts and laws instead ofattending to the details of each individual event or experiment. For Mach, theindividual case never truly repeated in all of its uniqueness, nor was all of theindividual detail of a physical element adequately captured in abstract laws andschemata, however necessary these were for the pursuit of science. As can beshown from specific passages, some already published, some not, Mach's elementsincluded physical qualia in nature similar to Russell's unsensed sensibilia, whichexisted even where there were no conscious observers. An argument will be presentedto make the case that Mach believed in the mind-independent elements from the 1870son, while other aspects of his thought evolved over time; I have thus dated the referencesto reflect this historical progression. I concentrate on Mach's ontology, as it bears oneconomy of thought, not his epistemology per se, which might well have been restrictedto observable elements/ sensations. After his own conversion to neutral monism, in the1920s, Bertrand Russell echoed Mach's call for a `future science' capable of handlingthe `intrinsic character' of qualitative data directly without the excessive abstraction ofphysics.