it from the very beginning. There is as little danger of solipsism in it as in any 'realism', and it seems to me to be the chief point of difference between idealism and positivism that the latter keeps entirely clear of the egocentric predicament. I think it is the greatest misunderstanding of the positivist idea (often even committed by thinkers who called themselves positivists) to see in it a tendency towards solipsism or a kinship to subjective idealism.
We may regard Vaihinger's Philosophy of As If as a typical example of this mistake (he calls his book a "System of Idealistic Positivism"), and perhaps the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius as one of the most consistent attempts to avoid it. It is rather unfortunate that Carnap has advocated what he calls "methodological solipsism", and that in his construction of all concepts out of elementary data the "eigenpsychische Gegenstande" (for-me entities) come first and form the basis fro the construction of physical objects, which finally lead to the concept of other selves; but if there is any mistake here it is chiefly in the terminology, not in the thought. "Methodological solipsism" is not a kind of solipsism, but a method of building up concepts. And it must be borne in mind that the order of construction which Carnap recommends — beginning with "for-me entities" — is not asserted to be the only possible one. It would have been better to have chosen a different order, but in principle Carnap Was well aware of the fact that original experience is "without a subject" (see Lewis loc. cit. 145).
The strongest emphasis should be laid on the fact that primitive experience is absolutely neutral or, as Wittgenstein has occasionally put it, that immediate data "have no owner". Since the genuine positivist denies (with Mach etc.) that original experience "has that quality or status, characteristic of all given experience, which is indicated by the adjective 'first person' " (loc. cit. 145), he cannot possibly take the 'egocentric predicament' seriously; for him this predicament does not exist. To see that primitive experience is not first-person experience seems to me to be one of the most important steps which philosophy must take towards the clarification of its deepest problems.
The unique position of the 'self is not a basic property of all experience, but is itself a fact (among other facts) of experience. Idealism (as represented by Berkeley's "esse = percipi" or by Schopenhauer's "Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung") and other doctrines with egocentric tendencies commit the
