THEC OLLECTED PHILOSOPHIPCAAPLE ROSF G.E .M .A NSCOMBE VOLUMTEW O Metapahnytdsh iec s Philoofs oMpihnyd BasBilla ck·w eOlxlfo rd Byth sea maeu thor Intention An Introduction to Wittgemtein 's Tractatus Three Philosophers (wiPteht Geera ch) © in this collection G. E. M. Anscombe 1981 Fint published in 1981 by Basil Blackwell Publisher 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF England All rights reserved. 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 otherwi,e, without the prior permission of Basil Blackwell Publisher Limited. Bridsh Library Cataloguing In Publication Data Anscombe, Geruude Elizabeth Margaret The collected philosophical papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. I: Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind 1. Philosophy, English -Addres,es, essays, lectures I. Title 191'.08 81618 ISBN 0-651-11951-4 Type,et in Photon Baskerville Contents Introduction vii PART ONE: The Philosophy of Mind 1 The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature 3 2 The First Person 2 1 3 Substance 3 7 4 The Subjectivity of Sensation 44 5 Events in the Mind 57 6 Comments on Professor R. L. Gregory's Paper on Perception 64 7 On Sensations of Position 7 1 8 Intention 7 5 9 Pretending 83 10 On the Grammar of'Enjoy' 94 PART Two: Memory and the Past 1 1 The Reality of the Past u Memory, 'Experience' and Causation lllO PART THREE: Causality and Time 13 Causality and Determination 14 Times, Beginnings and Causes 15 Soft Determinism 16 Causality and Extensionality 1 7 Before and After 18 Subjunctive Conditionals 196 19 "Under a Description" 1!08 20 AnalyJiJ Competition -Tenth Problem l!l!O 21 A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's Argument that "Naturalism" is Self-Refuting Index Introduction My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topic of causality. I didn't know that what I was interested in belonged to philosophy. As a result of my teen-age conversion to the Catholic Church -itself the fruit of reading done from twelve to fifteen -I read a work called Natural Theology by a nineteenth­ century Jesuit. 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 ifhe had not died a child. I did not know at the time that the matter was one of fierce dispute between the Jesuits 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 I 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 proof of some '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 th� 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, th would be sure it had a cause. ey 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 I could not understand the grounds of his further claim, that it is part of the concept of coming into being. viii lntrod1 .ction The other central philosophical topic which I got hooked on without even realizing that it was philosophy, was perception. I read a book by Fr Martin J ., of D'Arcy, S. called The Nature Belief and got just that out of it.I was sure that I saw objects, like packets of cigarettes or cups or ... any more or less substantial thing would do. But I think I was concentrated on artefacts, like other products of our urban life, and the first more natural examples that struck me were 'wood' and the sky. The latter hit me amidships because I was 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 a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' While still doing Honour 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 of his that I found so good was Humt'J Theory the External World which I read straight on from 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 temporal parts"; and then changing to the conception of "identical" as applying always to a whole, having temporal parts or spatial parts or both, and never 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". I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I 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 classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought "I havegotthiJ, and I define 'yellow' (say)asthiJ" being effec­ tively attacked. -At one point in these classes Wittgenstein was discussing the interpretation of the sign-post, and it burst upon me that the way you go by it is the final interpretation. At another I came out with "But I still want to say: Blue is there." Older hands smiled or laughed but Wittgenstein checked lniroductiun IX them by taking it seriously, saying "Let me think what medicine you need ....S uppose 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 thij wrong with Locke's assimilation of seconda qualities to pain: you can sketch the functioning of ry ''pain" as a word for a seconda quality, but you can't do the reverse opera­ ry 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 on my 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, Miraclej, 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 ( 194 7 ).T he version of that chapter which is most easily available is the second edition, which came out as a Fontana paperback in 1960.T he chapter, which in 1947 had the title "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist", was rewritten and is now called "The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist ".T he last five pages of the old chapter have been replaced by ten pages of the new, though a quota­ tion fromj. B.S . Haldane is common to both. Internal evidence shows that at least some of the rewriting was done after the first Sputnik and even after the hot d summer of 1959.B ut I should judge that he thought rather hard ry 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.ie' and 'the Ground-Consequent becawe', where before he had simply spoken of 'irrational causes'.I f what we think at the end of our reasoning is to be true, the correct answer to "Why do you think that?" must use the latter becauje. On the other hand, every event in Nature must be connected with previous events in the Cause-and-Effect relation. ... "Unfortunately the two systems are wholly distinct" .... And "even 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. (He obviously 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 theo that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems to ry me, is what Naturalism is bound to do." The remaining four and a half pages are devoted to an elaboration of this.U nluckily 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 criticisms ofit, it seems to me that they are just. 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 difficulty of 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 of TheP hilosMoipnhdy 1 The Intentionality of Sensation A Grammatical Feature lntrotional ObjectJ Berkeley calls "colours with their variations and different proportions of light and shade" the "proper" and also the "immediate" objects of sight.' The first at any rate long seemed obvious to everyone, both before Berkeley and since his time. But Berkeley's whole view is now in some disrepute. Sense-data, a thoroughly Berkel an conception given that name by Russell, ey have become objects of ridicule and contempt among many present-day philosophers. That word "object" which comes in the phrase "object of sight" has suffered a certain reversal of meaning in the history of.philosophy, and so has the connected word "subject", though the two reversals aren't historically connected. The subject used to be what the proposition, say, is about: the thing itself as it is in reality-unprocessed by being conceived, as we might say (in case there is some sort of processing there); objects on the other hand were formerly always objects of-. Objects of desire, objects of thought, are not objects in one common modern sense, not indivdual things, such as the obectJ found in the accuJed man'J poclt.etJ. 1 I might illustrate the double reversal by a true sentence constructed to accord with the old meanings: subjectively there must be some definite number of leaves on a spray that I see, but objectively there need not: that is, there need not be some number such that I Jet that number ofleaves on the spray. When Descartes said that the cause of an idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea had objective reality, he meant that the cause must have at least as much to it as what the idea was of would have, ifw hat the idea was of actually existed. The "realitaJ objectiva" of an idea thus meant what we should call its "content" -namely what it is of, but considered as belonging purely to the idea. "What a picture is of" can easily be seen to have two meanings: what served as a model, what the picture was taken from -and what is to be seen in the picture itself, which may not even have had an original. Thus formerly ifs omething was called an object that would have raised the question "object of what?" It is hardly possible to use the word "object" in 1 Throughout this paper I use double quotes for ordinary quotations (and so singies for quotes within quotes) and singles I use aa scare quotes. From R. J. Buder (ed.), Anal,tical Pltilosop'9, second series (Oxford, 1965).