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In an essay which is due to appear in a volume of which I am the subject in The Library of Living Philosophers,1 Professor O’Connor defends a form of determinism which he takes to be inconsistent with the freedom of the will. As he first presents it, this form of determinism is said by him not to be scientific; it does not entail that any event is precisely predictable. It clearly cannot be the case that every event is actually predicted, and while we know enough to dismiss the possibility of our predicting every microscopic event, we do not know enough to be able to claim that we could predict every macroscopic event, if we took enough trouble. To say that every macroscopic event is predictable in principle, or, in other words, that we could predict it if we knew enough is a mere tautology, since ‘knowing enough’ in this context means ‘knowing enough to predict’. On this point O’Connor and I are agreed. He adds the further argument, that ‘any scientific prediction requires measurements; and measurements can only be made within certain specifiable limits of accuracy’. I should prefer to say that scientific measurements of a particular quality covered a range of values, rather than imply that they are bound to be inaccurate, but, however one phrases it, the argument does show that precise prediction even of macroscopic events, is not attainable.

My excuse for initiating a fresh discussion of what many regard as the stale topic of the causal theory of perception is that I do not believe that the various questions which it raises have been sufficiently distentangled or that satisfactory answers to all of them have yet been found. The background to the theory, in all its forms, is the scientific account of the ways in which physical objects come to be perceived by us. To take a simple example, it is accepted that at least part of the causal explanation of my seeing what I identify as this piece of paper is that light proceeding from a physical object of the appropriate sort irradiates my eyes and that certain processes consequently take place in my brain. It may be disputed whether a set of sufficient conditions for the perception to occur would need also to include an irreducibly mental factor, but it is agreed that such physical conditions are necessary. The truth of the scientific account is nowadays not put in question. What comes up for discussion is its philosophical implications. Let us begin then by considering what these implications have been thought to be. I distinguish eight different theses which have either been taken for the causal theory of perception or thought to be comprised in it. Some of them may be held in combination but not all of them are mutually compatible. i. It has been asserted that what we must mean by saying that someone perceives a physical object of such and such a sort is that he is undergoing some sense-experience which the object in question causes. This is the thesis which Professor Price, for example, takes the causal theory to consist in when he discusses the theory in his book Perception. He expresses it in his own terms by making the causal theorist maintain that the relation of 'belonging to' which obtains between a 'sense-datum' and the physical object which the sense-datum 'presents' is the relation of 'being caused by'.' A variant of this

Wittgenstein's book On Certainty which was first published in 1969, eighteen years after his death, is a collection of notes which he composed during the last eighteen months of his life. As his editors explain in their preface, these notes, which were written at four different periods, are all in the form of a first draft. They are more repetitive than they no doubt would have been if Wittgenstein had been able to revise them. Even so, they are characteristically succinct and penetrating, and the argument which they develop is easier to follow than that of the general run of Wittgenstein's later work.

The view, now prevalent in England, that philosophers should investigate the ordinary use of language, has its source mainly in the work of Moore and Wittgenstein. Moore's defence of common sense seems to lead to the conclusion that philosophy consists in analysing meanings. Wittgenstein, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 04:49:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PHILOSOPHIE ET LANGAGE ORDINAIRE 129 in his later work, holds that philosophical problems arise through our failure to understand the workings of our language. One example is the tendency to postulate fictitious inner processes. His disciple, John Wisdom, stresses the neurotic character of philosophic doubt. The attack on inner processes is continued by Ryle in his campaign against Cartesian dualism. The leader of the ordinary language school in the strict sense is J. L. Austin, who has drawn special attention to the performative use of words. In general the main achievements of this school come from its exploration of non-narrative forms of discourse. There remain philosophical problems which its technique does not seem adequate to solve.

THE views expressed in this paper are not original. The work of Wittgenstein inspired it. The arguments which it contains are for the most part such as have been used by writers in Erkenntnis, notably by Moritz Schlick in his Positivismus und Realismus and Rudolf Carnap in his Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache. But some may find my presentation of them 'the clearer. And I hope to convince others by whom the work of Wittgenstein and the Viennese school has so far been ignored or misunderstood.

Wittgenstein’s book On Certainty which was first published in 1969, eighteen years after his death, is a collection of notes which he composed during the last eighteen months of his life. As his editors explain in their preface, these notes, which were written at four different periods, are all in the form of a first draft. They are more repetitive than they no doubt would have been if Wittgenstein had been able to revise them. Even so, they are characteristically succinct and penetrating, and the argument which they develop is easier to follow than that of the general run of Wittgenstein’s later work.

“Things are identical if and only if they have the same properties.” This definition of identity stems from Leibniz and is nowadays commonly known as Leibniz’s law. Does it state both a necessary and a sufficient condition of identity? It is at least doubtful whether it states a sufficient condition, since it is not obvious that things are logically incapable of being numerically different without differing in any other respect. The question turns in part on what is allowed to count as a property. Clearly if properties like “being identical with me” are admissible, it will follow trivially that no two different things can have all the same properties. No one who is not identical with me can be identical with me. On the other hand, if we consider only general properties, as we must do if the question is to be of any interest, then, as I have argued elsewhere,1 there are grounds for thinking that the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is not a necessary truth. For instance, it would not be a necessary truth, if we allowed the possibility that things which are not descriptively distinguishable may yet be distinguished demonstratively.

It is characteristic of philosophers that they exercise their scepticism not so much upon particular statements or beliefs, as upon whole classes of them. They are, indeed, inclined to dispute the particular statements that are made by other philosophers; but apart from these special cases they are interested in particular statements only as examples. The weaknesses which they detect in them are those that they are supposed to share with all the members of the class of which they are taken as typical representatives. And it is this lack of discrimination that gives to philosophic doubt both its frivolity and its strength. A scientist may come to doubt some general hypothesis because the evidence for it does not meet his requirements, but his standards are not so rigorous that no hypothesis can satisfy them. It is left to the philosopher to put in question the validity of any generalization whatsoever, to cast doubt upon a general statement not because of any special weakness of its own but simply because it is a generalization. In their relations with one another men often display a lack of understanding; one does not always know what another person is thinking or feeling.

When I am said to have done something of my own free will it is implied that I could have acted otherwise; and it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held to be morally responsible for what I have done. For a man is not thought to be morally responsible for an action that it was not in his power to avoid. But if human behaviour is entirely governed by causal laws, it is not clear how any action that is done could ever have been avoided. It may be said of the agent that he would have acted otherwise if the causes of his action had been different, but they being what they were, it seems to follow that he was bound to act as he did. Now it is commonly assumed both that men are capable of acting freely, in the sense that is required to make them morally responsible, and that human behaviour is entirely governed by causal laws: and it is the apparent conflict between these two assumptions that gives rise to the philosophical problem of the freedom of the will.

Peirce began to develop his Pragmatism in the eighteen-seventies. He brought it to the notice of the world in the first two of a series of papers, entitled ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’, which he started contributing to the Popular Science Monthly in 1877. The first of these papers is called ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ and the second ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. Since they lay down the central lines which Peirce continued to follow, I shall summarize them in some detail. We shall in fact find that all his later philosophy, at least in its pragmatic aspect, is a development or modification of the ideas which they contain.

‘Most of us would agree’, said F. P. Ramsey, addressing a society in Cambridge in 1925, ‘that the objectivity of good was a thing we had settled and dismissed with the existence of God. Theology and Absolute Ethics are two famous subjects which we have realized to have no real objects.’ There are many, however, who still think that these questions have not been settled; and in the meantime philosophers of Ramsey’s persuasion have grown more circumspect. Theological and ethical statements are no longer stigmatized as false or meaningless. They are merely said to be different from scientific statements. They are differently related to their evidence; or rather, a different meaning is attached to ‘evidence’ in their case. ‘Every kind of statement’, we are told, ‘has its own kind of logic.’

In a famous passage in the first of his lectures on Pragmatism, James declares his opinion that ‘the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’.1 He has in mind a fundamental difference in outlook which he thinks is also exhibited in other fields, such as politics or literature. In philosophy it comes out as the distinction between Rationalists and Empiricists, or as James more picturesquely puts it, between the tender- and the tough-minded. The tender-minded philosopher is not only Rationalistic, going by ‘principles’, whereas the tough-minded is Empiricist, going by ‘facts’, but also Intellectualistic while the other is Sensationalistic, Idealistic as opposed to Materialistic, Optimistic as opposed to Pessimistic, Religious as opposed to Irreligious, Free-Willist as opposed to Fatalistic, Monistic while the tough-minded is Pluralistic, and Dogmatical while the tough-minded is Sceptical. Though it is doubtful whether any great philosopher satisfies all the criteria on either side, this is a fair summary of two persistently opposing tendencies in philosophy, going back to the almost wholly tender-minded Plato and the tough-minded Sophists whom Plato sought to discredit. No doubt the models whom James chiefly had in mind were Hegel and his followers on the one side and Hume, James Mill and John Stuart Mill on the other.

My remarks on Professor Williams’ paper will be relatively brief, both because I think that the opener of the discussion should be brief, and because I am in substantial agreement with what Professor Williams has said. In the first place, I accept his distinction between propositional and practical knowledge, and I too shall have nothing to say about practical knowledge. I agree with him that the labels which Ryle used to mark this distinction are not quite satisfactory, and I think that his use of the formula “A knows wh-p,” in the propositional case, is an improvement on Ryle’s “knowing that.” I think he is right in saying that one narrows the problem unduly, if one concentrates only on true assertions of the form “it is known that p,” and I agree that from the fact that a person A knows that some proposition p is known it does not follow that A himself knows that p.

In a quite ordinary sense, it is obvious that there can be private languages. There can be, because there are. A language may be said to be private when it is devised to enable a limited number of persons to communicate with one another in a way that is not intelligible to anyone outside the group. By this criterion, thieves’ slang and family jargons are private languages. Such languages are not strictly private, in the sense that only one person uses and understands them, but there may very well be languages that are. Men have been known to keep diaries in codes-which no one else is meant to understand. A private code is not, indeed, a private language, but rather a private method of transcribing some given language. It is, however, possible that a very secretive diarist may not be satisfied with putting familiar words into an unfamiliar notation, but may prefer to invent new words : the two processes are in any case not sharply distinct. If he carries his invention far enough he can properly be said to be employing a private language. For all I know, this has actually been done.

In the ordinary way, we do not talk of the meaning of a proper name. If I say ‘Napoleon died at St. Helena’ and someone fails to understand me because he does not know what the word ‘died’ means, he may be said to be ignorant of the English language. But if it is my reference to Napoleon or St. Helena that he fails to understand, he is thought to display ignorance, not of English, but of history or geography. We say that he does not know who Napoleon was, or that he does not know that St. Helena is an island, not that he does not know what the words ‘Napoleon’ or ‘St. Helena’ mean. Indeed, in the sense in which a dictionary may give a list of English words, these are not counted as words at all. It would not be thought a defect in an English dictionary that it did not contain them. On the other hand, it also seems incorrect to say, with John Stuart Mill, that proper names have no meaning, that they are ‘simply marks’. For they help to determine the meaning of the sentences into which they enter. If in the sentence ‘Napoleon died at St. Helena’ I substitute the name ‘Wellington’ for ‘Napoleon’, or ‘Elba’ for ‘St. Helena’, I obtain a sentence with a different meaning. But if we admit that a change of name can produce a change of meaning, it seems odd to insist on saying that the names themselves have none.

The problems which I intend to discuss are excessively familiar to students of philosophy. They are concerned with persons in the broad sense in which every individual human being can be counted as a person. It is characteristic of persons in this sense that besides having various physical properties, including that of occupying a continuous series of spatial positions throughout a given period of time, they are also credited with various forms of consciousness. I shall not here try to offer any definition of consciousness. All I can say is that I am speaking of it in the ordinary sense in which, to be thinking about a problem, or remembering some event, or seeing or hearing something, or deciding to do something, or feeling some emotion, such as jealousy or fear, entails being conscious. I am not at this stage committing myself to any view about the way in which this notion of consciousness should be analysed.