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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
In this paper I shall be principally concerned with three points arising from Professor Austin's British Academy Lecture on ‘Ifs and Cans’.1 These points only concern that use of ‘can’ where it is used in the general sense of ‘to be able’ and applied to human beings in respect of actual or possible actions.2 To some extent, of course, the basic problem is simply what sense of ‘can’ it is which is involved when we talk of possible but not actual human actions, i.e. when we say that a person could do or could have done what he does not or did not do (this was Moore's original problem).
page 245 note 1 Philosophical Papers (1961), pp. 153 ff.
page 245 note 2 For a discussion of other uses of ‘can’ see Taylor, in The Philosophical Review, 1960. On the present topic see Moore, Ethics (Home University Library), Nowell Smith, Ethics (Penguin Books; Blackwells), Austin, ‘Ifs and Cans’ (Proceedings of the British Academy 1956, reprinted in Philosophical Papers, Oxford), and Nowell-Smith's reply in Theoria 1960.
page 254 note 1 Philosophical Papers, p. 170.
