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Authority
- Edited by Anthony O'Hear, University of Buckingham
- Foreword by Rachael Wiseman, University of Liverpool
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- Moral Philosophy
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- 19 May 2022
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- 09 June 2022, pp 354-377
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Summary
As children, we are often told both what to do and what to think. For a child to learn at all, it must in the first instance simply trust those, such as parents, who teach it things; and this goes for practical as well as theoretical learning. Doubting is necessarily something that comes later, for to be able to doubt one must have some beliefs already, e.g. concerning what sort of reasons count as good reasons, and what count as bad. But in growing up, a person does, or should, develop the capacity for rational doubt, and also the capacity for rational resistance to being told what to do. The first capacity constitutes a critical faculty, and the second is an essential constituent of practical autonomy.
Chapter Nine - Ethics and Philosophy: Aristotle and Wittgenstein Compared
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 123-130
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Summary
Preamble
Insofar as Wittgenstein expounded any moral philosophy, what he expounded appears very far removed from Aristotle’s – or Aristotelian – ethics. Wittgenstein’s very notion of ‘the ethical’ is so distant from Aristotle’s as even to suggest that they were just discussing different things; at any rate, we might think this if we have in mind his remarks on ethics in e.g. the Tractatus or the Lecture on Ethics. In these places we find him expressing such thoughts as that ethical statements are a species of nonsense, that ethics concerns the individual’s relationship with the universe (roughly), that no empirical facts can possibly have a bearing on ethics and so on. Whatever these thoughts actually amount to, the concerns which they embody do not seem to come into contact with the concerns motivating Aristotle’s moral philosophy.
However, when we consider Wittgenstein’s later philosophy we begin to see a certain affinity between what he is doing and what Aristotle is doing in the Nicomachean Ethics. This affinity has various aspects, some of which are more clearly visible when we contrast the views of both philosophers with those of certain other schools or tendencies, as we shall see later. It is in any case an affinity existing at quite a deep level. Certainly, it is doubtful whether, had he read Aristotle, Wittgenstein would have felt any cousinship with the Greek. He is reported to have remarked, with more pleasure than discomfiture, that he must be the only Cambridge professor of philosophy never to have read a word of Aristotle; and his felt intellectual affinities lay quite elsewhere.
In this brief essay I want to explore aspects of the affinity which I have alleged to exist between the later Wittgenstein and Aristotle the ethicist. One important theme that will emerge concerns the sense in which the activity of doing philosophy is itself of ethical significance.
Wisdom, Theoretical and Practical
Aristotle takes a life of contemplation to be the highest form of human flourishing, contemplation having as its aim philosophic wisdom. In the Nicomachean Ethics he does not say much about what you are meant to contemplate, and one might worry that Aristotle is in danger of having to praise any old learning, however trivial.
Chapter Five - The Voluntary and the Involuntary: Themes from Anscombe
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 65-82
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Summary
Preamble
I will begin with some remarks about ordinary usage and philosophical usage. Readers who are keen to embark at once on the main argument might want to skip to the next section.
There is a strong prima facie case for being guided by ordinary usage if one is centring a philosophical discussion on certain words, such as ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’. The reasons for this are familiar, or ought to be, having to do with the fact that it is usage – some sort of usage – that determines linguistic meaning. In this context, ordinary usage essentially means non-technical usage. If it were some technical usage that determined the meanings of the words under discussion, a question would arise why the technical meanings should be of more interest, philosophically, than the non-technical. If no good answer could be given to this question, we should have reason to turn back to considering the ordinary use and meaning of the words.
In ‘A Plea for Excuses’, J. L. Austin adopts the method of looking carefully at ordinary usage, a task he executes with characteristically microscopic precision. In the course of the essay, he points out that ‘the “opposite, or rather “opposites”, of “voluntarily” might be “under constraint” of some sort, duress or obligation or influence: the opposite of “involuntarily” might be “deliberately” or “on purpose” or the like. Such divergences in opposites indicate that “voluntarily” and “involuntarily”, in spite of their apparent connexion, are fish from very different kettles’. There is, I think, some truth in this as far as ordinary usage goes, similar remarks being possible in connection with the adjectives ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’. Certain uses of these words do consequently have a queer ring to them, such as Anscombe's calling being pushed out into the river in a punt to one's delight ‘voluntary’. It even sounds a bit odd to say of someone's fiddling with a pencil that it is voluntary. Are such uses therefore to be deemed technical? Or have Anscombe and others simply messed up the conceptual analysis?
I doubt if Anscombe would have wanted her use of these words to be regarded as technical.
Chapter Sixteen - Conceptual Corruption
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 215-230
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Summary
Concept Loss
Concepts can persist, can evolve, can change beyond recognition. But can they simply disappear? Can we lose our concepts?
The idea that it’s possible for us to lose our concepts might be backed up by reference to a concept like phlogiston. ‘Phlogiston’ was the name given to the substance hypothesized by eighteenth-century chemists as existing in all combustible bodies, and released in combustion. This theory of combustion proving to be unsustainable, there was then no use for the term ‘phlogiston’ – other than in such sentences as ‘There is no such thing as phlogiston’.
But doesn’t that last sentence show that the concept did not disappear? We surely couldn’t frame the sentence at all if the concept (as expressed by the word) had disappeared. To this we might respond by pointing out that the role intended for the word ‘phlogiston’ is one which it now does not and cannot fulfil, and that insofar as a word is (meant to be) a tool, any meaning it might possess – any concept it might express – would have to be its role, or function. The counter-response is that the word never could have fulfilled any such role, given that the role related to its use in (good, adequate) explanations of phenomena of combustion; and in that case, we should seem to have to say, not so much that the concept has disappeared, as that it never got off the ground in the first place. But surely ‘phlogiston’ was not a meaningless noise?
We might try interpreting ‘phlogiston’ as ‘the substance released in combustion (etc.)’, adopting a Russellian approach to the definite description, and construing sentences about phlogiston as ‘Ramsey sentences’. If that tactic worked, the statements of the eighteenth-century chemists would come out false (not senseless), and the still-with-us concept of phlogiston would be on a par with that of a unicorn – roughly speaking. But various questions arise about the general motivation for such a manoeuvre. Shall we, for example, attempt a parallel, Ramsey-sentence-involving account of the meaning of the word ‘water’?
Chapter Four - Is Pleasure a Good?
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 53-62
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Summary
‘Good’ and ‘the Good’
If someone says ‘I want some string’, they can be asked what they want it for. They might reply, ‘I want to tie up this present.’ The question ‘But why do you want to do that?’ wouldn’t usually be asked by anyone who knows the ways of the world; but it could for all that be informatively answered. That answer might in turn provoke the question, ‘And why do you want that?’ – and so on and so on. At a certain point we will get an answer to ‘Why?’ that presents an end as simply desirable in itself. This answer will supply what Elizabeth Anscombe called a desirability characterization. The question ‘Why do you want that?’, asked of such an end, will be futile, frivolous or uncomprehending.
Given that there are fairly objective criteria for what shall count as a desirability characterization, it seems clear that one example of such a characterization will be: ‘X is pleasant.’ ‘But why do you want what’s pleasant?’ certainly has the appearance of a silly question. The end presented as thus desirable might be that of drinking another glass of champagne, or of going for a walk on a summer’s day. These are examples of activities, but there are also passive pleasures, such as the pleasure of being driven in a fast car.
Now those philosophers who follow Aristotle and Aquinas would say that whatever is desired is desired under the aspect of the good (‘Quidquid appetitur, appetitur sub specie boni’). A person’s goal or end is what they would give as the final answer in a series of answers to the repeated question, ‘Why do you want that?’ It would thus seem natural for a Thomist to equate the goodness of an end with its desirability, in Anscombe’s sense: for a desirability characterization brings an end to such repeated asking of ‘Why?’ An example of a desirability characterization, as we have noted, is ‘X is pleasant’. So it appears that to desire something because it is or would be pleasant, and not as a means to anything further, is to desire that thing under the aspect of the good, and as good.
Chapter Eleven - ‘An Inculcated Caring’: Ryle on Moral Knowledge
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 143-150
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Summary
A Third Kind of Knowledge
In a number of his writings, Ryle warns us of the ill consequences of regarding knowing how as a species of knowing that. Philosophers have too often, he thinks, taken propositional knowledge as a model for the knowledge of techniques, procedures and practices. Ryle was a great anti-reductionist, a great pluralist; so it comes as no surprise to find that he did not regard knowing how and knowing that as together exhausting the types of knowledge. In ‘On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong’ (1971), he argues that moral knowledge, or certain important species of moral knowledge, represent a third kind of knowledge, one that cannot be reduced to either or both of the other two. The reason for this is that a person who learns what Ryle summarizes as ‘the difference between right and wrong’ is someone who learns to care about and take seriously such things as telling the truth, resisting certain temptations and so on. And this is why, as he writes,
it is ridiculous to say one has forgotten the difference between right and wrong. To have been taught the difference is to have been brought to appreciate the difference, and this appreciation is not just a competence to label correctly or just a capacity to do things efficiently. It includes an inculcated caring, a habit of taking certain sorts of things seriously. (Ryle 1971, 387– 88)
The concept of forgetting is out of place here, Ryle suggests, because we think of forgetting as losing something, e.g. some ‘equipment’, rather than as changing in some way:
If I have forgotten a date or become rusty in my Latin, I do not think of this as a change in me, but rather as a diminution of my equipment. In the same way, a person who becomes less or more conscientious is a somewhat changed person, not a person with an enlarged or diminished stock of anything. (1971, 388)
Part IV - Language
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 169-170
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Chapter Twelve - Are There Any Intrinsically Unjust Acts?
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 151-168
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Summary
Preamble
In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued for three theses: that moral philosophy should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology; that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; and that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day (i.e. 1958) are of little importance.
The reason for her third thesis relates to that trend in modern moral thought which Anscombe dubbed ‘consequentialism’. Consequentialism, she argued, is incompatible both with the ethical tradition at the heart of Western culture, the Hebrew-Christian ethic, and with ancient Greek thought. In both these traditions we find the belief that certain things are ruled out absolutely – such things as killing the innocent, vicarious punishment and treachery. Consequentialism abandons such ethical absolutism, an abandonment which Anscombe regarded as a disaster. Any differences between modern, consequentialist positions must therefore appear trifling in comparison with their ominous similarity; this is the purport of her third thesis.
To say that killing the innocent is absolutely ruled out is not, for Anscombe, to allege an absolute ‘moral obligation’ not to kill the innocent; for (as her second thesis proposes) the language of ‘moral obligation’ is, for various reasons, best avoided. Rather, the typical ground for saying that something is absolutely ruled out is that it is intrinsically unjust. Generally speaking, talk of moral obligation, where by such talk someone is attempting to say something worth saying, can be replaced by talk of justice and injustice. And talk of absolute moral obligation is typically to be replaced by talk of intrinsic injustice.
In this essay I aim to examine what Anscombe means by ‘intrinsic injustice’, and what can be said for her view that there are intrinsically unjust types of act – i.e. types of act which are absolutely ruled out.
Index
- Roger Teichmann
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 233-234
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Chapter Thirteen - The Identity of a Word
- Roger Teichmann
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 171-186
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Summary
Words in Context
Does the word ‘rat’ occur in the sentence ‘Socrates loved Plato’? There is one way of taking this question such that the answer to it is Yes, namely the one whereby the answer is No when we replace ‘rat’ by ‘sausage’. But there is another way of taking it such that the answer is No, and where we would say, ‘Only three words occur in that sentence: “Socrates”, “loved” and “Plato”.’
According to this second reading of the question, and of similar questions, how shall we answer the following: Does the word ‘Plato’ occur in ‘Plato loved if ‘? Of course the letters p-l-a-t-o occur in that order, but that can’t be enough, given that we are denying the occurrence of ‘rat’ in ‘Socrates loved Plato’. There is a gap after ‘Plato’, if we are speaking of the written sentence (or ‘sentence’); but what if our enquiry concerns speech, rather than writing? – Well, if you say those sounds, someone writing down what you say is likely to write ‘Plato loved if ‘, with just those gaps between the words. But their doing so appears a matter of decision on their part, maybe influenced by precise vocal inflexions. For why not write down ‘Play toe loved if ‘?
It’s tempting to put the question here, ‘Did you mean “Plato” or “play toe” when you said it?’ But what would it be for me to have meant ‘Plato’? ‘Plato loved if ‘ is after all meaningless. Is the issue one of whether the word, or the man, came before my mind as I spoke? In that sense I might mean ‘rat’ when I say ‘Socrates loved Plato’. But we are meant to be construing ‘Does X occur in …?’ in such a way that ‘rat’ does not occur in ‘Socrates loved Plato’. Moreover, nothing relevant may come before my mind when I say ‘Plato loved if ‘; or I might have both ‘Plato’ and ‘play toe’ in mind, e.g. if discussing this very question.
I might of course say ‘Plato loved if ‘ – or rather ‘Plato, loved, if ‘ – if I am reading out answers to crossword clues, or saying what the first words on pp. 1, 2 and 3 of a book are.
Chapter Seven - Meaning, Understanding and Action
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 91-104
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Summary
Understanding Stopping and Forcing Modals
When does a child count as understanding the meaning of ‘plus’? Roughly speaking, when she has sufficiently mastered the skill of addition; in other words, when she often enough uses ‘plus’ (‘+’) in the right way, where that especially means: doing correct calculations employing the symbol. ‘Often enough’ is of course vague. We encounter the same vagueness when faced with the question, ‘When can a child play the piano?’ Answer: when she sufficiently often gets things sufficiently right on the piano (playing scales, pieces, etc.).
There is a general point here about language-mastery. As Wittgenstein famously wrote: ‘For a large class of cases […] in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI43). Using a word is a form of activity. To charaterize the use of a word one will often need to locate that use within a certain language-game, i.e. a rule-governed practice in which various words or expressions are used in interlocking ways. The term ‘rule-governed’ here points to the difference between correct and incorrect uses of words. Understanding a word means having the ability to use it correctly, often enough.
Although all word-use may be called ‘activity’, involving various kinds of action (assertion, questioning, exclamation, apology …), there are certain uses of words which are bound up with action in a very direct way. I have in mind two kinds of languagegames: that involving imperatives, and that involving what Anscombe calls stopping and forcing modals. When does a child count as understanding the meaning of such imperative forms as ‘Come here’, ‘Pass the butter’ or ‘Don't do that’? The natural answer is: ‘When she responds appropriately often enough.’ And ‘responding appropriately’ presumably means obeying or complying with the command or request. (Perhaps we should additionally require that she develop the ability to use imperatives herself.)
Stopping and forcing modals are linguistic cousins of imperatives. Anscombe introduces them in the course of explicating, and then jumping free of, a certain circularity that we are liable to encounter when we try to say what a promise is (see e.g. Anscombe 1981a,d). To say what a promise is, we need at least to say this: that if you promise to ϕ, you bring it about that you have to ϕ.
Part II - Action
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 63-64
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Part III - Ethics
- Roger Teichmann
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 121-122
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Chapter Fourteen - Ryle on Hypotheticals
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 187-200
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Summary
Hypotheticals and Inference Precepts
In ‘General Propositions and Causality’, F. P. Ramsey argued that for a large class of general propositions of the form ‘All Fs are Gs’, any such proposition amounts to a sort of rule: ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a G’. For Ramsey, to express a rule of this sort is the same as expressing or reporting a psychological ‘habit’. That wouldn’t rule out genuine disagreement between somebody who uttered the quoted rule and somebody who e.g. uttered the rule ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a non-G’, on account of its being possible for one to be proved right in what he believes (e.g. ‘This F is a G’) and the other wrong. Still, it would arguably be an improvement on Ramsey to infuse proper objectivity into the rule corresponding to ‘All Fs are Gs’ by rephrasing it more impersonally as: ‘If one meets an F, one should regard it as a G.’
Ramsey adopted this account of such general propositions especially because of problems connected with the view of them which he and Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus) had earlier maintained: the view according to which any general proposition is equivalent to the conjunction of all its instantiating propositions, so that ‘Everything is green’ amounts to ‘a is green and b is green and …’ A proposition ‘All Fs are Gs’ turns out to be a conjunction of propositions of the form ‘If x is an F, then x is a G’. The main difficulty Ramsey saw for this view was that it implied the existence of infinite conjunctions when the relevant domain is infinite, which would be the case where the domain is that of the natural numbers, assuming one can ‘quantify over’ numbers – but also, apparently, where the domain is the universal domain, as it is alleged to be for many propositions of the form ‘All Fs are Gs’. The notion of an infinite conjunction seemed to Ramsey to be a fudge, and at odds with the principle enunciated in the Tractatus that whatever can be said at all can be said clearly.
Chapter Eight - Why ‘Why?’? Action, Reasons and Language
- Roger Teichmann
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- Logos and Life
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 105-120
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Summary
Not a Heuristic Device
What distinguishes actions that are intentional from those which are not? The answer that I shall suggest is that they are the actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting. (Anscombe 1963, 9)
This is the famous nub of Anscombe’s account of intentional action. By ‘the question “Why?” ‘ she means such questions as: ‘Why are you doing that?’, ‘Why did you do that?’ and so on. Anscombe proceeds to investigate and explain what sense of the question ‘Why?’ is at issue, by contrasting it with other senses of ‘Why?’, by delineating the sorts of case where the question is refused application, by distinguishing certain forms of positive answer to it, etc.
We may first note that Anscombe’s question ‘Why?’ is in the second person, being addressed to the (putative) agent. This is among other things connected with a certain primacy that, according to Anscombe, is enjoyed by a person’s own statement of his reasons for acting. Now it is no part of Anscombe’s thesis that an action is only intentional if the agent actually does give the requisite sort of answer to ‘Why?’ – after all, it might be that nobody asks him that question. We could if we liked propose a possibly counterfactual conditional statement, ‘Were the agent to be (or have been) asked “Why …?”, he would/could answer (or have answered) such-and-such’ – but only so long as we don’t take ourselves to be giving an analysis or definition of ‘intentional action’. For such an analysis or definition would be no good, for various reasons – such as that brute animals can act intentionally.
How then are we to understand the role of the question ‘Why?’ in Anscombe’s account? I shall be proposing an answer along the following lines. Our use and grasp of the concept of the intentional, and of many of the concepts with which it is connected (voluntary, plan, aim, for the sake of, responsible, desirability …), have their roots in a certain pervasive language-game, that of asking for and giving reasons – reasons for action, as we come to call them.
Chapter Fifteen - Metaphysics and Modals
- Roger Teichmann
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- 13 May 2022
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- 01 March 2022, pp 201-214
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Summary
Metaphysics – Hume and Wittgenstein
Metaphysics as traditionally conceived is concerned with what has to be the case, and also (therefore) with what cannot be the case. An object cannot be in two different places at the same time; a cause must occur before its effect; a pain cannot be felt by more than one person; you cannot access other possible worlds; I must know what I’m thinking about.
Philosophers asserting such things have always faced the question, ‘How do you know?’ Hume’s scepticism as to whether good answers were forthcoming to (various instances of) that question characteristically led him to diagnose the propensity to make metaphysical claims – e.g. as a tendency to project our felt psychological impulses onto the world; or as he put it, the mind’s tendency to ‘spread itself on external objects’. Metaphysics, for Hume, should be replaced by psychology. Volumes of unreconstructed metaphysics may be consigned to the flames. Insofar as we are left with any unexceptionable necessity-claims, these can either be taken as dressed-up expressions of psychological impulse, or as harmless statements of the relations of ideas (what later got called ‘analytic statements’).
Wittgenstein, in both his earlier and later work, likewise rejected the pretensions of metaphysical philosophy. He too was diagnostic in his approach, at any rate in his later writings. To speak in very broad-brush terms, where Hume’s psychological diagnosis had invoked our tendency to project, Wittgenstein’s invoked our tendency to be in the grip of a picture; and where Hume talked of relations of ideas, Wittgenstein mentioned ‘grammar’, as when he wrote ‘Essence is expressed by grammar’.(Philosophical Investigations 371).
These broad similarities or analogies don’t of course mean that there aren’t crucial dissimilarities. Hume would often approach some claim of necessity by asking, ‘Can’t I imagine the opposite?’ – construing that question as a psychological one, an issue to be settled by going in for some introspection. But Wittgenstein writes:
What does it mean when we say ‘I can’t imagine the opposite of this’ or ‘What would it be like, if it were otherwise?’ – For example, when someone has said that only I myself can know whether I am feeling pain, and similar things.
Part 1 - Mind
- Roger Teichmann
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- 01 March 2022, pp 15-16
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Chapter Three - Sincerity in Thought
- Roger Teichmann
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- 01 March 2022, pp 41-52
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Summary
Introduction
A person can be responsible for an outcome, can be held to account for it, despite not having intended it or even foreseen it. The babysitter who brings her Rottweiler along with her and leaves it with the baby while she nips out to buy some cigarettes will be responsible for the baby’s injuries. She didn’t, let us assume, intend the dog to attack the baby. And she may well not have foreseen this outcome either, if that means foreseeing it as likely, since it might not have been a likely thing to happen, merely something made more likely by her absence. Let us imagine that she is asked, ‘Why did you leave the dog with the baby?’, and replies: ‘I assumed the dog would stay still for the short time I was at the shop.’ A question that arises about statements like this is whether they are fully sincere, or bona fide, or genuine.
In her article ‘On Being in Good Faith’, Elizabeth Anscombe (2008) discusses the phenomenon of insincerity in connection with issues of responsibility, voluntariness and so on. It might be thought that insincerity must attach to statements made to, or behaviour directed towards, other people; but, as Anscombe argues, sincerity and insincerity can be features of thoughts themselves. Indeed, a statement can be insincere on account of its expressing an insincere thought of the speaker, rather than on account of its not expressing the thought the speaker really has. One consequence of this for ethics is that when someone’s responsibility for an action or omission depends on the sort of account the person could truthfully give, e.g. in answer to such questions as ‘Why didn’t you do X?’, it is not enough that such possible answers not be lies – for the person may not know that her response is false or dubious, and so may not be lying. But in the case of insincerity, ‘not knowing’ doesn’t supply an excuse, as it might in other cases, but is itself a source of culpability.
Introduction
- Roger Teichmann
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Summary
The essays in this collection were almost all written within the past decade and deal with a range of questions, here brought under the headings ‘Mind’, ‘Action’, ‘Ethics’ and ‘Language’. In reality there is so much interconnection and overlap among the themes addressed that this fourfold division is more aesthetic than taxonomic. But it seemed preferable to a dry chronological ordering.
Many of the essays discuss or elaborate on the ideas of Elizabeth Anscombe, and a number discuss or elaborate on those of her friend and teacher Wittgenstein. Both philosophers have sometimes been lumped in with other representatives of something called ‘linguistic philosophy’, or alternatively ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Lazy classifications aside, it is certainly true that the philosophical work of these two thinkers is characterized by an awareness of that tendency to succumb to confusions and pictures (especially of what must be the case) which arises out of our intimate and therefore squinting perspective on the workings of our language.
Anscombe’s philosophy is explicitly wide-ranging, Wittgenstein’s implicitly so – in the sense that he opened up a large arena of potential philosophical investigation. This isn’t to say that the problems he explicitly deals with don’t cover a lot of ground, for these include problems in philosophy of mind, language, logic, mathematics and epistemology – a broad enough sweep. But out of what he wrote and said many paths lead, and these paths were followed after his death into areas he himself never approached, or into which he ventured only a little way. Anscombe was one of the philosophers to go down some of those paths, as well as exploring the paths off those paths and the paths off those. Her writings on intention and action clearly show the influence of her teacher, picking up some of his discussions where he left off. The same is true of her work in ethics, if only because of the central importance for ethics of intention and action; and this is something worth pointing out, given the great dissimilarity between Anscombe’s moral philosophy and Wittgenstein’s (such as it is). Here we have an illustration of the ‘implicit’ philosophical range of Wittgenstein’s work to which I’ve referred.
Frontmatter
- Roger Teichmann
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