The Collected Papers of G. Anscombe Vol 2 - Methaphysics And The Philosophy of Mind, stooges (hasło - stooges), ...
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By
the same
author
THE COLLECTED
PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS OF
G.
E. M. ANSCOMBE
Infenlion
An Introdudion to Wiltgenstein's Traclalus
Three Philosophers
(with
Peter
Geach)
VOLUME
TWO
Metaphysics and the
Philosophy
of
Mind
Basil Blackwell
.
Oxford
@
in this collection
G.
E. M. Anscombe 1981
Contents
First published in 1981 by
Basil Blackwell Publisher
108 Cowlcy Road
Oxford OX4 IJF
England
Introduction
vii
PARTONE:The Philosophy of Mind
1
The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature
9
The First Person
3
Substance
4
The Subjectivity of Sensation
All rights resewed. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission
of
Basil Blackwell Publisher Limited.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Anscombc, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret
The collected philosophical papers of
G.
E.
M.
Anscombe
Vol.
t
:
~eta~h~sics
5
Events in the Mind
6
Comments on Professor R. L. Gregory's Paper on Perception
7
On Sensations of Position
8
Intention
g
Pretending
lo
On the Grammar of 'Enjoy'
Typeset in Photon Baskerville
PARTTWO:Memory and the Past
11
The Reality of the Past
i 9
Memory, 'Experience' and Causation
PARTTHREE:
Causality and Time
i
3
Causality and Determination
14
Times, Beginnings and Causes
15
Soft Determinism
16
Causality and Extensionality
1
7
Before and After
18
Subjunctive Conditionals
ig
"Under a Description"
no
Analysis
Competition -Tenth Problem
Y
i
A Reply to Mr
C. S.
Lewis's Argument that "Naturalism" is
Self-Refuting
Index
and the philosophy of mind
1.
Philosophy, English
-
Addresses, essays,
lecture
1.
Title
1gs1.08 81618
Introduction
My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topicofcausality. I didn't
know that what 1was interested in belonged to philosophy. As a result of my
teen-age conversion to the Catholic Church -itself the fruit ofreading done
from twelve to fifteen
-
I read a work called
Natural
Theology
by a nineteenth-
centuryJesuit. I read
it
with great appetite and found
it
all convincing except
for two things. One was the doctrine of
scientia media,
according to which
God knew what anybody would have done if, e.g., he hadn't died when he
did. This was a part of theodicy, and was also the form in which the problem
of counter-factual conditionals was discussed.
I
found
I
could not believe
this doctrine:
it
appeared to me that there was not, quite generally, any such
thing as what would have happened if what did happen had not happened,
and that in particular there was no such thing, generally speaking, as what
someone would have done if.
. .
and certainly that there was no such thing
as how someone would have spent his life if he had not died a child. I did not
know at the time that the matter was one of fierce dispute between theJesuits
and the Dominicans, who took rather my own line about it. So when I was
being instructed a couple of years later by a Dominican at Oxford, Fr
Richard Kehoe, and he asked me if I had any difficulties,
I
told him that I
couldn't see how that stuff could be true. He was obviously amused and told
me that 1 certainly didn't have to believe it, though I only learned the
historical fact I have mentioned rather later.
But
it
was the other stumbling block that got me into philosophy. The
book contained an argument for the existence of a First Cause, and as a pre-
liminary to this
it
offered a proofofsome 'principle of causality'according to
which anything that comes about must have a cause. The proof had the fault
of proceeding from a barely concealed assumption of its own conclusion. I
thought that this was some sort of carelessness on the part of the author, and
that
it
just needed tidying up. So
I
started writing improved versions of it;
each one satisfied me for a time, but then reflection would show me that I
had committed the same fault. I don't think I ever showed my efforts to
anyone; I tore them up when I found they were no good, and I went round
asking people
why,
if something happened, they would be sure
it
had a cause.
No one had an answer to this. In two or three years of effort I produced five
versions of a would-be proof, each one of which I then found guilty of the
same error, though each time it was more cunningly concealed. In all this
time I had no philosophical teaching about the matter; even my last attempt
was made before I started reading Greats at Oxford. It was not until then
that
I
read Hume and the discussion in Aquinas, where he says that it isn't
part of the concept of
being
to include any relation to a cause. But 1could not
understand the grounds of his further claim, that it
is
part of the concept of
coming into being.
Introduction
ix
Theother central philosophical topic which
I
got hooked on without even
realizing that
it
was philosophy, was perception.
I
read a book by Fr Martin
D'Arcy, S.
J.,
called The Nature ojBeliefand got just that out of it. 1was sure
that
I
saw objects, like packets of cigarettes or cups or
. .
.
any more or less
substantial thing would do. But I think 1was concentrated on artefacts, like
other products of our urban life, and the first more natural examples that
struck me were 'wood' and the sky. Thelatter hit me amidships because 1was
saying dogmatically that one must know the category of object one was
speaking of
-
whether it was a colour or a kind of stuff, for example; that
belonged to the logic of the term one was using.
It
couldn't be a matter of
empirical discovery that something belonged to a different category. The sky
stopped me.
For years I would spend time, in cafes, for example, staring at objects
saying to myself: 'I see apacket. But what do I really see? How can 1say that 1
see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' While still doing
r on our
Mods, and so not yet having got into my undergraduate philosophy course,
I
went to H. H. Price's lectures on perception and phenomenalism.
I
found
them intensely interesting. Indeed, of all the people I heard at Oxford, he
was the one who excited my respect; the one
I
found worth listening to. This
was not because I agreed with him, indeed, I used to sit tearing my gown into
little strips because I wanted to argue against so much that he said. But even
so, what he said seemed to me to be absolutely about the stuff. The only book
of his that I found so good was
Hum's
Theory ofthe External World which I
read straight onfrom first sentence to last. Again, I didn't agree with some of
it;
he offered an amended account of identity to rewrite Hume, in a way that
seemed to me to miss the force of Hume's thoughts about identity as seeming
to be "midway betwixt unity and diversity": he wanted to amend Hume into
starting with the idea that identity really belonged just to atomic sense-
impressions
-
which won't work because "every sense-impression contains
teniporal parts"; and then changing to the conception of "identical" as
applying always to a whok, having temporal parts or spatial parts or both,
and nwer to a single indivisible entity, if such there be. That is, he wanted to
smooth Hume out. But he was really writing about the stuff itself, even if one
did not accept his amendment. It was he who had aroused my intense interest
in Hume's chapter "On scepticism with regard to the senses".
1 always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. 1 couldn't see my
way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties
about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The
strength, the central nerve of
it
remained alive and raged achingly. It was
only in Wittgenstein's claues in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the
central thought "I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say)asthis" being effec-
tively attacked. -At one point in these classesWittgenstein was discussing the
interpretation of the sign-post, and it burst upon me that the way you goby it
is the final interpretation. At another I came outwith "But I still want to say:
Blue is there." Older hands smiled or laughed but Wittgenstein checked
them by taking it seriously, saying "Let me think what medicine you
need.
. . .
Suppose that we had the word 'painy' as a word for the property of
some surfaces." The 'medicine' was effective, and the story illustrates
Wittgenstein's ability to understand the thought that was offered to him in
objection. One might protest, indeed, that there is this wrong with Lockr's
assimilation of secondary qualities to pain: you can sketch the functioningof
"pain" as a word for a secondary quality, but you can't dothe reverse opera-
tion. But the 'medicine' did not imply that you could. If "painy" were a
possible secondary quality word, then wouldn't just the same motive drive
me to say: "Painy is there" as drove me to say "Blue is there"? I did not
mean "'Blue' is the name of this sensation which I am having," nor did
I
switch to that thought.
This volume contains the earliest purely philosophical writing onmy part
which was published: the criticism of C. S. Lewis' argument for 'the self-
refutation of the Naturalist' in the first edition of his book, Miracles, chapter
111. Those who want to see what the argument was, without relying on my
criticism for it, should take care to get hold of the first edition
(
1947).The
version of that chapter which is most easily available is the second edition,
which came out as a Fontana paperback in 1960.Thechapter, which in 1947
had the title "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist", was rewritten and is
now called "The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist". The last five pages of
the old chapter have been replaced by ten pages of the new, though a quota-
tion from J. B. S. Haldane is common to both. Internal evidence shows that
at least some of the rewriting was done after the first Sputnik and wen after
the hot dry summer of 1959. But I should judge that he thought rather hard
about the matter in the interval. The rewritten version is much less slick and
avoids some of the mistakes of the earlier one: it is much more of a serious
investigation. He distinguishes between 'the Cause-Effect becau~e'and 'the
Ground-Consequent becawe', where before he had simply spoken of
'irrational causes'. If what we think at the end of our reasoning is to be true,
the correct answer to "Why doyou think that?" must use the latter because.
On the other hand, wery event in Nature must be connected with previous
events in the Cause-and-Effect relation.
.
. .
"Unfortunately the two systems
are wholly distinct".
.
.
.
And "wen if grounds do exist, what exactly have
they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological
event?"
These thoughts lead him to suggest that being a cause and being a proof
must coincide
-
but he finds strong objections
to
this. (Heobviously had
imbibed some sort of universal-law determinism about causes.) After some
consideration he reverts to the (unexamined)idea he used in the first edition,
of 'full explanation': "Anything which professes to explain our reasoning
fully without introducing an act of knowing, thus solely determined by what
is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems to
me, is what Naturalism is bound to do." Theremaining four and a halfpages
are devoted to an elaboration of this. Unluckily he doesn't explore this idea
x
Introduction
of 'an act of knowing solely determined by what is known', which is ob-
viously crucial.
Rereading the argument of the first edition and my criticismsof it,
it
seems
to me that they arejust. At the same time,
I
find them lacking in any recogni-
tion of the depth of the problem. I don't think Lewis' first version itself gave
one much impression of that. The argument of the second edition has much
to criticize in it, but
it
certainly does correspond more to the actual depth and
difficultyof the questions being discussed. I think we haven't yet an answer to
the question
I
have quoted from him: "What is the connection between
grounds and the actual occurrence of the belief?"
The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote
it
so that
it
now has
these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the
Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his
friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much.
Neither Dr Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later)nor
Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis' part. The
paper that I read is as printed here.
My
own recollection is that
it
was an
occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms,which Lewis'
rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined
to
construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends
-
who seem
not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter- as
an interesting example of the phenomenon called "projection".
Part
One
The Philosophy
of
Mind
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