Ayer’s Place in the History of Philosophy

Anthony Quinton
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines A. J. Ayer's place in the history of philosophy. Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. In the first post-war decades, philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.

Keywords:   A. J. Ayer, philosophers, philosophy, empirical tradition, rational discourse

When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell’s Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell’s successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression, and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.

Ayer avoided the full rigour of an Oxford training in the classics, devoting one term only to the acquisition of a minimal requirement in them. So, at the beginning of 1930, he started on the formal study of philosophy. The philosophical scene in Oxford at that moment was, for the most part, drab and wintry. Adherents of Cook Wilson, who had died in 1915, exercised a fairly oppressive intellectual authority: H. A. Prichard from the chair of moral philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph as an overwhelmingly energetic college tutor. (For what it is worth, at least as an index of their subsequent reputations, neither is honoured with an article in Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and Joseph does not even secure a mention.) British Hegelianism, in opposition to which the school of Cook Wilson originally defined itself, was represented by H. H. Joachim. He, like most Oxford philosophers of that time, had given himself over to the historical study of the subject. There was also the wayward and defiantly isolated R. G. Collingwood. The only notable books published by Oxford philosophers in the 1920s were Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, of which nobody took any notice, in 1924 and, in 1926, Statement and Inference, the posthumous compilation derived from the lectures of Cook Wilson and used by his followers as a kind of textbook.

(p.138) By the 1920s orthodox idealism was more or less extinct outside Scotland. The Cook Wilsonians had turned their antiquated artillery on to what they saw as the even worse errors of the Cambridge philosophers, who had done so much more than they had to undermine it. Prichard had vehemently criticized Russell’s theory of knowledge in an article in Mind in 1915 and he and Joseph were persistently hostile to Russell’s logic. Moore, as an ethical consequentialist, was one of those who, in Prichard’s view, had committed a fundamental mistake in moral philosophy. The only book Prichard published in his lifetime, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, had come out in 1909: Joseph’s main work, his Introduction to Logic, as long ago as 1906.

There were, however, signs of renewed life. H. H. Price, Prichard’s favourite pupil, in a disconcerting betrayal, had been converted to the theory of sense-data advanced by Russell and Moore. Ayer, as an undergraduate, attended the lectures that were to be published by Price in 1932 as Perception. The more influential of Ayer’s philosophy tutors was Gilbert Ryle. After an early interest in the phenomenological movement, revealed in a respectful, if finally suspicious, review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1929), Ryle was, by the beginning of the 1930s, showing marked Russellian tendencies. ‘Are there Propositions?’ of 1930 presents a reductionist account of propositions that was to be echoed in the second chapter of Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge ten years later and in his London inaugural of 1946: Thinking and Meaning. Ryle then laid out a comprehensive programme of analysis on Russellian lines in 1932 in his ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.

Cambridge was unquestionably livelier as a philosophical centre, in spite of its comparatively minute population of philosophers. From 1922 it had Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to discuss and, until 1927, Ramsey to discuss it with. Also in 1922, Moore’s Philosophical Studies had brought together a number of influential essays. C. D. Broad published his Scientific Thought a year later and in 1925 The Mind and its Place in Nature. At a geographical distance, but not at a very large spiritual one, Russell brought out his Analysis of Mind in 1921 and Analysis of Matter in 1926.

Not much was going on in other British philosophy departments. The most imposing product came from Manchester: Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity in 1920. Exported fruitfully to Australia by John Anderson, it was respectfully ignored in its country of origin. Kemp Smith’s Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (1924) and some elegantly written works by Laird were all that Scotland had to offer. The United States supplied little in the way of exact or minute philosophy in the 1920s. It was an era of massive constructions: Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929), and The Quest for Certainty, the first volume of Santayana’s Realms of Being (1928).

The disparaging tone of these judgements of the philosophy of the English-speaking world in the 1920s calls for justification. The decade surely does look weak when it is compared with the effectively preceding period from 1900 to 1914. That roughly Edwardian epoch had contained the early and best works of Russell and Moore. Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge and electrified it. McTaggart’s Hegelian Cosmology (p.139) (1901) and Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) had provided exemplary displays of argumentative rigour. In Oxford idealism was still quite lively with Joachim’s The Nature of Truth in 1906 and Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in 1914. Prichard and Joseph, as has been mentioned, published their most substantial work at that time. In the United States William James was copiously productive up to his death in 1910. The early, less amorphous, Dewey was at work. Santayana’s five-volume Life of Reason (1905) belongs to this period, as do Royce’s The World and the Individual (1900) and the collective volume The New Realism.

The large and altogether more adventurous philosophical activity of the Edwardian age as compared with the 1920s is to be explained—to the extent that it can be or needs to be explained—by the general spiritual devastation of the First World War. That suggestion is confirmed if one looks further afield to continental Europe. It was in the Edwardian era that the main and characteristic works of Croce and Bergson were published, as were the earlier and better works of Husserl, Vaihinger’s Als-Ob (1911), Cohen’s System der Philosophie (1915), and Cassirer’s Erkenntnisproblem (1906). By the 1920s Croce and Bergson had moved to the margins of the subject and the orthodox academic philosophers of importance were Husserl, Cassirer, and, perhaps, Nicolai Hartmann. Only near the end of the decade did Heidegger sound a new, arresting note.

From an Anglo-Saxon point of view a more promising publication than Sein und Zeit came a year later in 1928 with Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt. In the United States a sign of a livelier period to come was C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order in 1929. These two books coincide approximately with the return of Wittgenstein to philosophy, and Cambridge, and the emergence of Price and Ryle in Oxford. Ayer’s philosophical career, then, began after a period of comparative sterility, but at a moment when, in Britain, the United States, and Europe, the first indications of renewal are to be discerned.

It might also be said that not only had the recent philosophical past been comparatively sterile, but the immediate philosophical present was, to vary the image, a bit of a vacuum. Russell’s best work was behind him and, so far as philosophy is concerned, he was a spent force. Readers of Raymond Chandler will remember Big Willie Magoon, head of the vice squad of the Bay City police. He failed to come across with something for which he had been paid and was seriously worked over by some heavies. As a result he was never much use afterwards. Something of the same kind happened to Russell when Wittgenstein demolished the ideas in his large and ambitious manuscript of 1913 on the theory of knowledge, in the course of a series of painful conversations in May and June of that year. ‘I saw’, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell three years later, ‘that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.’ Moore had little new to say, however emphatically and persuasively he said it, as was shown by the publication in 1953 of lectures he had given as far back as 1910 and 1911. Broad confined himself to elaboration and criticism of the ideas of Russell, Moore, and, in the 1930s, McTaggart. Wittgenstein had been invisible for more than a decade. Ramsey was dead. The Vienna Circle had only just come into being. The field was wide open.

(p.140) Ayer’s account of his philosophical education in the first volume of his autobiography is rather sketchy. He recalls being introduced to the Tractatus by Ryle. He read Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). The origins can be discerned in these three books of his later central doctrines about necessity, perception, and the mind. He also read Ramsey and Broad, James’s Pragmatism (1907), Poincaré and Nicod. He does not say what problems preoccupied him. Nor does he say anything much about the development of his thinking up to the point in 1936 of its first, strikingly finished and comprehensive expression.

There is little echo in his writings of any influence of the thought of Prichard and Joseph, apart from two negative reactions. The first of these is his repeated insistence that, as he puts it in The Problem of Knowledge (p. 15), ‘from the fact that someone is convinced that something is true, however firm his conviction may be, it never follows logically that it is true’. That is hardly consistent with his conclusion in the following chapter that statements in the present tense about one’s own immediate experience are incorrigible. For that is to say that, if I genuinely believe I am in pain or aware of a red patch, it follows that I am. The original thesis seems to be aimed at the Cook Wilsonian doctrine that knowledge is something unique and indefinable and such that we must know when we have it. Another echo is to be heard in Ayer’s treatment of the doctrine of internal relations. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge it is examined in connection with an argument quoted from Joseph (pp. 200–2).

In November 1932 Ayer went to Vienna and was courteously invited to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle. It was what he learnt there and from the pages of Erkenntnis, which had started publication, under the editorship of Carnap and Reichenbach, in 1930, that he was inspired to the extraordinary tour de force of Language, Truth and Logic. A good way of bringing out the depth of Ayer’s involvement is to compare the impact of a similar visit by an American contemporary at much the same time.1 Ernest Nagel, a few years older than Ayer, spent the academic year 1934–5 in Europe, his principal stops being Cambridge, Vienna, and Warsaw. News of the existence of logical positivism had already been brought to American philosophers by an article about it in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931 by Albert Blumberg and Herbert Feigl. Nagel’s report of his intellectual expedition is, as one might expect, thorough, serious, and reliable. He became a recognized associate of the Circle, but more as a fellow-traveller than as a fully committed zealot. He had contributed a boiled-down version of his doctoral thesis on the logic of measurement to Erkenntnis three years earlier and also an article on reduction in the sciences around the time of his European trip. Perhaps he was already, in his mid-thirties, too much involved with American naturalism to undergo a major conversion.

Ayer, on the other hand, completely ingested the four main doctrines subscribed to by the Vienna Circle: the identification of meaning with verifiability; the reductionism (p.141) which that implies if subjective experience is taken to be the basis of knowledge; the theory that necessity is analytic, a matter of linguistic convention; and a radically non-cognitive account of judgements of value. In taking on these views he was not content simply to report them. He had even in his mid-twenties an established intellectual allegiance to the philosophical analysis of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. The special achievement of Language, Truth and Logic was the remarkable, almost seamless unification of his initial philosophical inheritance with the whole range of the main ideas of the Vienna Circle. Where he differed with the orthodoxy of Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel, rejecting what he labelled as its ‘formalism’, it was with ideas developed by Schlick. Where Carnap and his allies denied that statements can be compared with extra-linguistic fact and so took basic statements to be adopted by convention, Schlick saw them as direct reports of the facts of experience.

A survey of the contents of Language, Truth and Logic will show how comprehensive Ayer’s reliance was on the doctrines of the Vienna Circle. The title of the first chapter is ‘the elimination of metaphysics’. That phrase is a translation of the first words of an article by Carnap in Erkenntnis: Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache (1932). There Carnap identifies the meaning of a sentence, first, following Wittgenstein, with its truth-conditions, and then with its method of verification or, in the case of a word, with the criteria of its application. He goes on to say ‘in the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless’.2 That and a few other references to value in Carnap were developed, with the aid of some apparatus from Moore, into the notorious sixth chapter of Language, Truth and Logic: ‘Critique of Ethics and Theology’.

In his Überwindung Carnap admits that the problem of the given, of the empirical basis of knowledge or, as he would prefer to put it, of the nature of protocol statements, is not yet solved. He soon went on to opt for the conventionalist view that they are statements about what is observed that are agreed upon by that shadowy, but quite cosy-sounding group, the ‘scientists of our culture-circle’. In 1934 in ‘Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis’, Schlick effectively criticized that position.

Although Ayer agreed with Schlick that basic statements are to be verified by the experiences to which they demonstratively refer, he denied that they are absolutely certain and incorrigible. His reason was ‘that a sentence cannot merely name a situation, it must say something about it. And in describing a situation one is not merely “registering” a sense-content: one is classifying it in some way or other, and this means going beyond what is immediately given.’ He goes on to say that to apply a word such as ‘white’ to an element of one’s experience is to say that it is similar to other contents of experience: ‘those which I should call, or actually have called white’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 126, 128–9). He did not support this view for very long. In ‘Verification and Experience’, (p.142) within a year of Language, Truth and Logic, he was expressing doubts about it and in the second chapter of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940 and in the introduction to the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic in 1946 he explicitly rejected it.

In claiming that all necessity is analytic Ayer depends as much on the Tractatus as on the Vienna Circle. But like Carnap, and unlike Wittgenstein, he took the truths of mathematics as well as those of logic to be tautologies. He wisely did not follow Carnap in defining ‘tautology’ in a narrowly truth-tabular way. The idea that logic and mathematics are useful because we, as finite intelligences, cannot trace all the implications of our thoughts was, as a footnote shows, derived from Hans Hahn’s Logik, Mathematik and Naturerkennen of 1933. Ayer’s refutation of Mill’s account of mathematical truths as empirical generalizations of the widest possible scope was not dependent on Frege, whom, by 1936, he does not appear to have encountered. He unfortunately ascribes to Mill the view that the truths of logic, as well as those of mathematics, are empirical, fixing that mistake firmly in the heads of several generations of students. Mill, in fact, acknowledged what he called ‘propositions merely verbal’; held that all essential propositions are identical propositions; and that deduction gives no new knowledge, says no more in its conclusions than is already contained in its premisses.

Ayer’s fifth chapter, on truth and probability, follows Ramsey on truth. It advances the theory about the corrigibility of all empirical statements whatever which he soon came to doubt and eventually to drop altogether. In a few concluding pages he had some suggestive things to say about probability. He defines it as the degree of confidence with which it is rational to entertain a hypothesis. He does not specify criteria of rationality, but says they are conventional and vary through time. That is to embrace the kind of conventionalism he rejected in the case of basic statements. Our old friends, the scientists of our culture circle, whose practice determines for Ayer what rationality currently is, are called back from epistemological retirement. The conception of probability as an intrinsic property of a hypothesis and Keynes’s view of it as an unanalysable logical relation between hypothesis and the evidence for it are dismissed without argument. The frequency theory is not mentioned.

The significance of his brisk aside about probability is that it sustains the only solution he admits to the problem of induction. It is rational, he says, to be guided by the past in forming expectations about the future because that is what rationality is, by definition. No doubt the current practice of those we should ordinarily describe as scientists is rational in that sense. But (as Ayer would surely have insisted) we can guarantee their rationality only by defining ‘scientist’ so that no one who deviates from being guided by the past counts as one.

His dealings with God and the immortal soul in chapter 6 derive fairly directly from Carnap’s Überwindung. But the insistence that neither metaphysical sentences nor their negations can be asserted since both are equally devoid of sense is Ayer’s own. It has, as he saw, the consequence that neither atheism nor even agnosticism is any better off than theism, a concession that was not much appreciated by its adherents.

(p.143) The main business of chapter 6 is the thesis that judgements of value are expressions of feeling and not statements of fact, natural or non-natural. Ayer relies heavily on Moore to dismiss naturalism, although he rephrases Moore’s argument. The intuitive non-contradictoriness of ‘this is pleasant but not good’ is appealed to instead of the intuitive substantiality of the question ‘is this pleasant thing good?’ The verification principle is invoked to deal with Moore’s positive view about the nature of goodness.

Ayer’s own positive account of the matter is a sharper edged version of Carnap’s Überwindung (1932) contention that metaphysics (including value judgements) ‘serves for the general expression of the attitude of a person towards life’.3 In his Philosophy and Logical Syntax of 1934 Carnap interprets moral affirmations as imperatives, a more plausible view than Ayer’s, as subsequent developments in moral philosophy have shown. It seems probable that the main source here was the celebrated distinction of scientific from emotive language in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards of 1923. They say, in terms Ayer takes over almost word for word, ‘ “(this) is good” serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to action of one kind or another’ (p. 125). Ayer’s account of moral disagreement is taken from W. H. F. Barnes’s ‘Suggestion about Value’ of 1933.

In the four chapters so far considered the main borrowings have been from the Vienna Circle. The balance tilts towards Ayer’s British, predominantly Cambridge predecessors, in chapters 2 and 3, where a conception of the nature of philosophy is set out, and in the two final chapters which are about mind, matter, and the self and three ‘outstanding philosophical disputes’.

The idea that philosophy should be a business of analysis was affirmed at some length in the last chapter of Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and it was consistently practised as analysis, with a slightly different inflection, in the writings of Moore. In his neutral monist period from about 1918 onwards, Russell tried to analyse material objects and minds into what he called ‘events’. He took material objects to be constructions out of sensations and sensibilia, these being gently reified equivalents of Mill’s ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’. Minds and their states were seen as constructions out of sensations and images, eked out with bodily behaviour where that seemed desirable.

Ayer drew on Price’s Perception (1950) in his firmly phenomenalist account of our knowledge of material objects in chapter 3. But he restates Price’s theory of objects as ‘families’ of actual and possible sense-data in linguistic form: sentences about objects are translatable into sets of sentences, categorical and hypothetical, about sense-data. No place is found for Price’s ‘physical occupant’, that ghostly vestige of the substratum of Locke.

(p.144) He follows Russell in holding that sense-data are neither physical nor mental, these being properties of logical constructions. But for the detail of his account of mind he draws, not on Russell, but on Carnap and Hume. In his Aufbau Carnap had distinguished the eigenpsychisch from the fremdpsychisch, the mental states I experience directly from those I ascribe to others on the basis of their bodily behaviour. Ayer was driven to this by his belief that the argument from analogy is unacceptably metaphysical. He was to question that four years later in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge and abandon it altogether in 1953. The argument from analogy was rehabilitated by the consideration that, since it is only a contingent fact that I have the experiences I do, there is no logical or necessary obstacle to the possibility that the experiences of others might have been mine. The way out he followed was suggested to him by Ryle’s article of 1936 ‘Unverifiability by me’.

Ayer’s Humean view of the self as a series of experiences contained one wholly original element. Hume had been baffled in his attempt to find a relation which could connect a series of experiences into a self. Ayer’s suggestion was that the experience of oneself must all ‘contain organic sense-contents which are elements of the same body’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 194). That, as he saw, rules out the possibility of the survival by the self of bodily dissolution. It also ensures that no experience can belong to more than oneself, which the resemblance and continuity which Hume was inclined to favour failed to do. It makes my identification of my body (under some other description, of course) prior to my identification of myself, which is not too bad. But it also requires that every total momentary experience of mine should contain a veridical organic sensation of my body. That is a very questionable proposal, but I shall not pursue the matter here. It may be noted that later theorists of personal identity—Bernard Williams and Sidney Shoemaker, for example—who have claimed that it entails bodily identity have not done so in Ayer’s way.

A final thesis of Language, Truth and Logic which was soon dropped was also borrowed. From C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order Ayer took the thesis that statements about the past are really hypotheses about future experience, on which we shall have to rely on in order to verify them. It implies, I suppose, that our memories are really thoughts about the future. It can be circumvented by the consideration that it is a contingent fact that my experiences occur at the time that they do.

Language, Truth and Logic, then, is almost wholly composed of pre-existing material. It was brilliantly presented, with astounding concision, and its content fitted very well together, despite the geographical remoteness of its two main sources. That is not surprising when one reflects that the philosophers of Cambridge and Vienna continuously interacted. Russell and Wittgenstein were, in a turbulent way, teachers and pupils of each other. The Vienna Circle studied them both and as intently as they studied anyone.

A special virtue of the book, over and above its excellences of style, its force, lucidity, and euphony, is its intellectual order. The elements may be borrowed but they are admirably arranged. After Our Knowledge of the External World Russell’s books became (p.145) increasingly loose and casual in construction. That can presumably be attributed to the loss of self-confidence caused by Wittgenstein’s ruthless criticism. Moore’s laborious repetitiveness and his confinement to a minute range of topics, however strategically important, was unsatisfying in a different way. The Tractatus, with pretty well all the argument left out, hovers about on either side of the frontier of intelligibility. Ramsey’s small, brilliant Nachlass was, in its more philosophically interesting parts, largely rough notes. Broad and Price were admirably lucid and thorough and Price’s writing had a particular kind of charm. But they were not, as Ayer unquestionably was, exciting.

Presenting the ideas of Vienna Circle in British costume he extricated them from the lavish use of symbolism, the off-putting technical terms, and the computer-like detachment of Carnap’s writing. More in the manner of Schlick he conceived the philosopher to be, however doctrinally subversive, a citizen of the republic of letters. Also like Schlick, who wrote an article on the Vienna Circle and traditional philosophy, he drew attention to the many anticipations in the philosophy of the past of the ideas he was expounding. Berkeley was invoked for his phenomenalism, so long as its theistic attachments were removed. Ayer was also in sympathy with his slogan: ‘Mem, To be eternally … recalling men to Common Sense’ (Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Clarendon, 1871, p. 455). The task of philosophy is not to justify our beliefs but to analyse them. In fact, Ayer probably absorbed that idea from Moore. He saw Hume as right in what he said about meaning, the two kinds of significant proposition, causation and, broadly speaking, the self, even if his thoughts were couched in too psychologistic an idiom. But Ayer’s attention to the philosophy of the past faltered when he came to consider examples of metaphysical illusion. Carnap in his Überwindung had illustrated his thesis with a short passage from Heidegger and a single sentence from Hegel. Ayer made do with a single sentence from Bradley.

It was the fact that Ayer’s revolutionary message was expressed in the literary form of a discursive essay and not in the manner of a scientific textbook, together with its elegance and brevity, that gave it such an impact. It was addressed to intelligent readers in general, from the then radical publishing house of Gollancz, and in an attractively up-to-date physical form: dumpy in shape with wide margins and a wholly non-Victorian typeface: Aufbau by Bauhaus. (The move to Macmillan for his next book in 1940—they were to be his publishers for the next thirty-two years—was a turn towards academic respectability and exclusiveness.) Many of the intelligent readers aimed at took it up. No British philosophical book since Russell’s Problem of Philosophy (1912) a quarter of a century earlier can have been as widely read.

Ayer’s later books—Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Problems of Philosophy, and Central Questions of Philosophy—and his five essay collections are, by and large, confined to the topics treated in Language, Truth and Logic. That is as much a tribute to the superb economy with which they were treated there as a criticism. The book’s philosophical agenda covered a wide enough range for anyone’s philosophical career. And there are new thoughts presented and new fields explored in the later works. But he did not move far from his starting point.

(p.146) The main novelty of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, apart from the limited changes of mind about incorrigibility and the argument from analogy already mentioned, is the contention that theories of perception are not competing substantive doctrines but, rather, proposals of ‘alternative languages’. It is not very clear what that amounts to. Does someone who rejects the sense-datum language have to say that some material objects exist only for one person, or intermittently, or have different properties for different people? The arguments used to show that only sense-data are directly perceived could then be mobilized to show that all direct perception is of private material objects and that public material objects, spatiotemporally and causally interconnected in a common world, must somehow be constructed out of them. In that case the alternative offered is of the most trivial, merely typographical kind. What is clear is that nobody seems to have paid much attention to it until J. L. Austin criticized it in Sense and Sensibilia (1962). By that time Ayer had explicitly, if quietly, dropped the whole idea. In his essay of 1945 on the terminology of sense-data he accepts the criticism of it by H. H. Price.4

Thinking and Meaning, Ayer’s London inaugural of 1947, is very properly dedicated to Ryle. For it is a thoroughgoing exercise in dereification, in which the thinking self, the instrument with which it thinks, the process of its thought, conceived as a sequence of mental acts, and the object of thought, its reference or meaning, are all resolved into the expression of thought in significant sentences. Particularly Rylean is the insistence that what have usually been conceived to be mental acts, such as believing and doubting, are really dispositions to come out with certain sentences or to act in certain ways. There is also a distinct echo of Ryle’s ‘systematically misleading expressions’ in the assertion that for an expression to have a meaning there does not have to exist a thing which is its meaning.

Ayer’s remarks about meaning in this lecture indicate a much closer attention on his part to philosophical logic. In his Philosophical Essays of 1954 it is the topic of the first three items: on individuals, the identity of indiscernibles, and negation. Then four epistemological items rehearse, with minor modifications, the familiar topics of sense-data, basic propositions, phenomenalism, and our knowledge of other minds. Finally Quine’s ontology is considered, Ayer’s ethical theory is presented with greater suavity but without substantial alteration, Bentham’s principle of utility is sympathetically explored, and the view that freedom and determinism are compatible, affirmed in pellet form in the footnote of Language, Truth and Logic, is defended and modified. In its 1946 version, as reprinted in Philosophical Essays, freedom is defined as absence of constraint, not as having no cause at all. A group of factors is brought together as constraining causes and thus as cancelling responsibility, but no account is given of what principle links them together and distinguishes them from other, non-exculpating causes of action.

The essay on individuals tentatively puts forward arguments for the eliminability of singular terms and the possibility of a purely predicative language implied by Quine’s (p.147) extension of the theory of descriptions to all referring expressions. The issue is taken up again in an essay on names and descriptions in The Concept of a Person, but now what was earlier suggested is categorically affirmed.

Quine’s use of his regimented language, in which all reference is carried out by quantifiers, to reinstate ontology in a new, logically respectable form, set Ayer thinking generally about what there is. In his study of William James ( in The Origins of Pragmatism) and again in an essay ‘What there Must Be’ in his Metaphysics and Common Sense of 1969, Ayer turns to the question. Against Quine and Russell he concludes that reducibility does not imply some kind of inferior existential status, as ‘mere constructions’ or fictions, in the items to which it applies as contrasted with the unassailably real existence of the elements from which they are constructed. Analysis may eliminate singular terms. It does not fictionalize material things. Here again I think there is a distinct echo of the Vienna Circle, particularly of Carnap’s Scheinprobleme (1928) and Schlick’s ‘Positivismus und Realismus’ (1933).

They had maintained that the reducibility of material things to sense-experiences casts no shadow whatever on the reality of the material world. It simply makes clear what the empirical reality of material things consists in. For such things to exist the course of sense-experience must exhibit certain kinds of regularity. If it does there is no further question about the real existence of the material things defined in terms of these regularities. To infer that, as Schlick puts it, ‘only the given exists’ (Es gibt nur das Gegebene) is to fall into unacceptable metaphysics.

In his positive views about ontology Ayer takes an exactly opposite position to Russell. Sense-experiences are not ontologically prior to material things since their occurrence is absorbed into a comprehensive theory of a material world. There they occupy a very modest place, as parts of the histories of sentient organic bodies. Priority for knowledge is one thing: priority of existence another. Ayer takes ordinary material things and the theoretical entities of sciences as competing for the status of being the real components of the material world. He vacillates between the two claimants—intellect urging electrons, sentiment pressing for tables—and concludes that it is a matter for choice and not very important anyway.

The Problem of Knowledge of 1956 has an excellent chapter on memory. It dispels the influence of a radically misguided chapter of Russell’s Analysis of Mind (1921) on the subject. Memory is having beliefs about the past that do not depend on inference or testimony. It is not images accompanied by feelings of familiarity and pastness, whatever they may be. Some interesting points are raised in the final chapter on myself and others. If a person is simply a contingently related series of experiences, why should an experience not occur on its own, unrelated in a person-constituting way to other experiences? Why, in other words, should there not be unowned experiences? Personal identity is addressed once more, in a guarded, hesitant way. Perhaps Hume’s accusation of a circularity in the definition of personal identity in terms of memory can be circumvented. Survival of bodily dissolution seems conceivable. Yet purely psychological criteria of identity seem insufficient.

(p.148) There are three substantial novelties in the book. First, there is the neat account of what is needed to turn true belief into knowledge as the ‘right to be sure’. The question has not been pressed as to why Ayer does not take the ethics of belief to be as non-cognitive as the ethics of conduct, as he did by implication in his account of rationality in Language, Truth and Logic.

Secondly, there is the helpful schematization of problems in the theory of knowledge, about perception, other minds, the past, induction and so on as arising from the scepticism generated by a gap between certain kinds of belief—about material things, past events, the minds of others, the laws of nature—and the only evidence that is available for them—sense-data, memories and traces, behaviour and observed regularities. That was not new. It was present in the pre-war writings of John Wisdom and set out clearly in an article about Wisdom by Douglas Gasking in 1954. Something along the same lines had also been worked out by Friedrich Waismann. These sources make one wonder if it was not something casually let fall in conversation by Wittgenstein.

Ayer, like the other exponents of the scheme, recognized four standard ways of dealing with the gaps. First, intuition, which claimed direct access to the other side of it. Secondly, the theory of a general principle which could serve as a bridge across it. Thirdly, reductionism, which closed the gap by defining the things concluded to in terms of the evidence for them. Fourthly, the melancholy option of scepticism. Ayer conjured up a fifth contender, grandly called ‘the method of descriptive analysis’, which seemed to be a matter of admitting the gap and then blithely doing nothing about it.

In fact, once more confronting the question of our knowledge of material objects, he does something rather different, and offers a kind of watered down reductionism. Our beliefs about the material world are not translatable into statements about sense-data. They should be understood as a theory which draws all its support from the evidence of sense-data. There is an air here of trying to settle an overdraft with a cheque drawn on the same account. It shifts the problem to that of the relation of a theory to the evidence for it: is it like the detective’s theory that the injury to the deceased was caused by a blunt instrument (later found in the shrubbery) or like Newton’s theory that the fall of apples and the orbiting of the sun by the planets are manifestations of the same gravitational force? For better or worse, Ayer stuck to this position until his final treatment of the topic in Central Questions of Philosophy in 1973.

By carrying out the ungracious task of tracing most of Ayer’s original ideas, and many of those he came to express later, to external sources, I am not suggesting that there is no more to his achievement than the communication of these borrowings. He wrote some lively pieces of philosophical polemic: defending the sense-datum theory against Austin’s often captious objections, setting ferociously about Malcolm’s view that dreams are stories we are disposed to tell when we wake up, and arguing against Wittgenstein’s view that a private language is impossible. He expounded Peirce and James, Russell and Moore, with thoroughness and distinction. His special kind of clear-headedness proved valuable in his work on probability, a subject often liable to be swamped by fruitless technicalities.

(p.149) An unstated assumption behind this excavation of Ayer’s intellectual borrowings is that a thinker’s place in the history of philosophy is determined by the originality of the interesting or influential things that he says. I do, indeed, believe that assumption to be broadly correct. No doubt the more one learns of the history of philosophy the more one realizes that what one had supposed to be the proprietary great thoughts of those commonly reckoned to be great philosophers had often been thought by someone else first. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, one learns, is an echo of Augustine’s si fallor sum. Locke drew heavily on Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. Nevertheless Descartes put his cognito to uses of which Augustine had no conception and, although there are identifiable fragments of other men’s ideas in Locke’s encyclopedic Essay (1690), the plan and basis of the whole great undertaking were his own. The special greatness of Kant is surely for the most part due to the novelty of his ideas.

Rather than considering the question in general terms it will be better to try to fix Ayer’s place in the scheme of things by comparing his achievements with those of his contemporaries who qualify for such a comparison. Broad and Price were lucid and persevering exponents of ideas put into circulation in the first years of the century by Russell and Broad. Broad had the advantage of knowing a good deal about natural science and about the history of philosophy. Price’s great merit was his cautious deliberation, his extremely high standard of what the clear understanding of a problem and its proposed solutions consists in. Their main service was to domesticate the inchoate innovations of others. That is something that Ayer accomplished with greater force and comparable distinction.

Two more obviously appropriate comparisons are with Ryle, ten years his senior, and Austin, his near-contemporary. Ryle, too, was an extensive borrower. His philosophical logic derives from Russell and the Tractatus, his philosophy of mind from intimations that had come to him of the thinking of the later Wittgenstein. But he put his own stamp very markedly on what he took. That is in part a matter of his breezy, epigrammatic, resolutely non-technical style. That style was in tune with a mode of proceeding that relied heavily on analogy and, in general, avoided the laborious protection of these from all possible objections. Oddly, in the light of their respective ways of life—collegiate in Ryle’s case, metropolitan in Ayer’s—it is Ryle who is the less academically respectable and conformist. He steered clear of all the standard etiquette of philosophical writing: the identification of aims, the footnotes, the polite references to Professor This and Doctor That. In the end I think I should accord him a larger place on the philosophical map than Broad, Price, or Ayer, but I admit that it is a close-run thing.

The main reason for it is that, whether by accident or design, his own versions of late Wittgensteinian doctrine are really very different from the original. The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that was an insight of great value, however easy it is to take it for granted once it has been pointed out. The boldness with which he dismissed Cartesian dualism, by interpreting all mental life in terms of dispositions to behaviour, has the merit of providing something definite to discuss, rather than endlessly puzzle over.

(p.150) Austin was the critic who got furthest under Ayer’s skin as is clear from the indignant tone of Ayer’s response to his criticism of the sense-datum theory. Like Prichard and Moore he was a rigorously minute philosopher whose scrupulous pursuit of exactness gave him an extraordinary personal command over his contemporaries. He went further in that direction than his acknowledged master, Prichard, because of his greater intelligence and general mental agility. But his reputation has not survived him. A later generation finds it difficult to understand. Apart from ‘speech acts’ his innovations in the philosophical vocabulary are seldom heard.

The two philosophers with whom Ayer is most appropriately to be compared are Quine and Popper. Both, like Ayer, are intellectual by-products of the Vienna Circle; in Quine’s case gratefully (Word and Object (1960), after all, is dedicated to Carnap), in Popper’s with a constant determination to emphasize his differences from it. I think it is fair to say that there is no new idea in Ayer that deserves to receive or has received the kind of attention that has been given to the innovations of Quine and Popper.

Quine’s multifarious assaults on the notion of meaning as the chief instrument of philosophical explanation, on the analytic–synthetic distinction, on modal and intentional discourse, on assumptions about translatability, his revival of ontology, and his naturalistic account of the theory of knowledge, add up to a major change of direction in philosophy. Not all that many have chosen to follow him very far down the path he has pointed out but his ideas have proved to be inexhaustibly discussable.

Popper’s fundamental idea that science progresses by adventurous conjectures, controlled by attempts to overthrow them, is not without forerunners. Something like it is crucial in the philosophy of science of Whewell and it plays a part, if not such a commanding one as for Popper, in the brilliant chaos of the writings of Peirce. But there is no reason to suppose that Popper had the least familiarity with either of them at the time in the early 1930s when he was writing his Logik der Forschung (1935). Whewell had been obliterated by Mill in the English-speaking world and was quite unknown anywhere else. As for Peirce, M. R. Cohen’s pioneering selection, Chance, Love and Logic had come out in 1923 but it did not contain any of Peirce’s more Popperian pieces and was anyhow almost certainly unknown to him.

Secondly, and more to the point, Popper’s very various developments of his fundamental thought go in directions altogether unexplored by Whewell and only partially by Peirce. Peirce, like Popper, adopts a comprehensively fallibilistic theory of knowledge and rejects determinism. Of Popper’s own invention are his attack on the view that there are general laws of historical change, his account of probability as objective propensity, his defence of science as an account of the real nature of things against instrumentalism and essentialism, his application of evolutionary ideas to the theory of knowledge, and the connected doctrine of ‘World 3’, over and above the realms of matter and consciousness.

Quine and Popper arrived at their main new ideas early on: Quine by 1936 in ‘Truth by Convention’ and 1939 in ‘Designation and Existence’, Popper by the date of his first book, 1935. Holding firmly on to them ever since, they have established their fertility by (p.151) the substantial and interesting body of extensions and applications they have made of them. Ayer, on the other hand, tended to circle round a number of topics, varying his attitude towards them, sometimes opting for one view or another, sometimes concluding that it is a matter for decision, sometimes simply confessing doubt as to what the right answer is. The one thing he never questioned is the primacy of sense-experience, even if, with his later replacement of sense-data by ‘qualia’, he tried to mitigate the subjectivity of his preferred foundations for knowledge. For all the bold iconoclasm of Language, Truth and Logic the abiding impression is one of doctrinal indefiniteness. (It is interesting that he never responded to Quine’s rejection of analyticity except in a couple of non-combative pages of Central Questions of Philosophy.)

It is that, I think, that must explain the fact that his influence has been so much less than that of the two major contemporaries with whom I have been comparing him. I speak here of influence on philosophers, since Quine is unknown to the part of the general reading public which thinks it would like to know something about philosophy. As every teacher of the subject knows, Ayer has enormously influenced beginning students of philosophy. Since most of them do not go far with the subject, that influence must be, with many, a persisting one. As a paradigm of a philosopher for educated people he is surely exemplary for his unswerving dedication to argument, to explicit reasoning concisely expressed in the clearest language.

It is noticeable that his influence has been comparatively small in the United States. In the post-war years when this country was a net importer of visiting philosophers they crossed the Atlantic to learn about Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. That must be partly due to the fact that, from the late 1930s on, the Americans did not need an intermediary to convey the message of the Vienna Circle, since most of its leading exponents were coming to be installed there in university posts. Furthermore Ayer’s ideas about necessary truth and phenomenalism had been anticipated in the United States, seven years before Language, Truth and Logic, in C. I. Lewis’s more substantial, if less exciting, Mind and the World-Order.

Another possible factor is that philosophers in the United States, as in Cambridge in its greatest days, typically know more mathematics and natural science than philosophers in Oxford. Ayer was always an enthusiast for science, but the enthusiasm was of a generalized, rather ideological kind. I believe it was essentially secondary to his animus against religion. The sensationalism to which he always remained faithful was something he shared with the great generation of late nineteenth-century unbelieving philosophers of science: Mach, W. K. Clifford, Karl Pearson. Present-day philosophers of science—Popper, J. J. C. Smart, the Reichenbach of Experience and Prediction (1938), even Carnap after the mid-1930s—take for granted the objectivity of the basis of empirical knowledge. Ayer’s distaste for religion seems to be the central vision and object of emotional commitment which it is the office of the brilliantly deployed dialectical manoeuvres to protect, rather as a conviction of the immortality of human souls, related by spiritual love, is the soft centre in need of fascinating ingenuities of argumentative defence in the case of McTaggart.

(p.152) Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. But in its most vigorous form at the present time that tradition has moved beyond the doctrinal constraints he accepted from it about necessity, perception, and the nature of science.

Although I have come to think his place in the history of philosophy is not as large as I had thought before settling down to write this essay, I think I understand why I should have thought I did. In the first post-war decades philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.

Notes:
(1) Ernest Nagel, ‘Impressions and Appraisals of European Philosophy’ (first published 1936), in Nagel, Logic Without Metaphysics (1956).

(2) Translated in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 60–1.

(3) Carnap in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 78.

(4) A. J. Ayer, ‘The Terminology of Sense-Data’, in Philosophical Essays, 103–4.

Francis Bacon

How Was He Possible?

Anthony Quinton
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
As a figure in the history of philosophy Francis Bacon is doubly problematic. In the first place, he seems in most accounts to emerge from nowhere, to be without intellectual ancestors and intellectual debts. Secondly, although a recognized member of the general empirical tradition in British philosophy, and not without a long series of admirers for whom he fills an essentially symbolic role, he has no true followers and disciples. This chapter argues that the appearance of absolute originality in Bacon is an illusion. It results from confining attention to purely British sources for his ideas. But, despite his own practice, at least in his earlier years, Latin was the universal language of learning and Bacon, of course, could read and write it. If the net is cast a little wider in the sea of European thought than the small and somewhat stagnant creek occupied by Bacon's immediate British predecessors, a large array of lines of thinking can be hauled up which correspond to nearly all the main themes of Bacon's philosophy.

Keywords:   history of philosophy, British philosophy, originality, Latin

1. Francis Bacon in the History of Philosophy
As a figure in the history of philosophy Francis Bacon is doubly problematic. In the first place, he seems in most accounts to emerge from nowhere, to be without intellectual ancestors and intellectual debts. Secondly, although a recognized member of the general empirical tradition in British philosophy, and not without a long series of admirers for whom he fills an essentially symbolic role, he has no true followers and disciples.

The first of these problems will be my principal topic in this essay. It assumes its starkest form in histories of British philosophy considered on its own. There, two and a half centuries of almost complete inactivity seem to separate the Black Death from the publication of The Advancement of Learning in 1605. The Black Death is significant in the history of British philosophy for causing the deaths of William of Ockham, sheltering from papal wrath in Munich, and of Thomas Bradwardine, leader of the Mertonians and Ockham’s passionate opponent. The only important British thinker in the later fourteenth century was John Wyclif. Earlier in his career he abandoned abstract philosophy for political and ecclesiastical controversy. The determination of the authorities to stamp out his subversive doctrines, continuing long after his death in 1384, had a generally repressive effect which must explain the intellectual infertility of fifteenth-century Britain.

In the early sixteenth century intellectual life in Britain revived in the circle of humanists whose chief ornament was Thomas More. These friends of Erasmus shared his indifference to philosophy strictly so called. More died for his refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s decision to make himself supreme head of the English church. The religious disturbances that persisted well into the reign of Elizabeth continued to stifle original thought. The philosophy taught in the universities was conservative and Aristotelian.

Bacon exploded into this scene at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the most violent imaginable contrast to its stagnant repetition of past ways of thinking. The Advancement of Learning was his first properly philosophical publication. Unlike nearly all previous philosophical writing, it was written in English, in the same glittering, concretely imaginative style as his Essays whose first edition had come out eight years (p.4) earlier. It surveyed the entire range of actual, and also possible, intellectual activity, suggesting new disciplines as well as finding a place for existing ones. On the negative side, it attacked the three prevailing styles of philosophy which he picked out as worthy of condemnation. Positively, it consisted of an unprecedentedly systematic outline of the kinds of knowledge and of the kinds of practice that could arise from that knowledge. These were all to be corrected, advanced, and, in some cases, inaugurated by the application of the method set out in detail in the Novum Organum fifteen years later. That method is conventionally taken to be Bacon’s greatest original contribution to philosophy.

I shall suggest that this appearance of absolute originality in Bacon is an illusion. It results from confining attention to purely British sources for his ideas. But, despite his own practice, at least in his earlier years, Latin was the universal language of learning and Bacon, of course, could read and write it. If the net is cast a little wider in the sea of European thought than the small and somewhat stagnant creek occupied by Bacon’s immediate British predecessors, a large array of lines of thinking can be hauled up which correspond to nearly all the main themes of Bacon’s philosophy.

To do that is not, of course, to deny Bacon’s very considerable originality. But his, like most other, works of human creation largely consist in the arrangement and emphatic deployment of materials fashioned by other hands. He himself insisted that, at its best, the advancement of learning, the growth of knowledge, is a cooperative undertaking. That cooperation is not exclusively synchronous. It extends also in the historical dimension. All original thinkers are engaged in intellectual commerce with their predecessors. Even in repudiating them they stage their refutations on a platform of common assumptions.

To show that it is not gratuitous to find the appearance of Bacon’s absolute originality problematic, it may be helpful to follow a more or less Baconian or inductive procedure. There are several philosophers of the post-medieval period—a period in which individuality has always been valued and applauded—whose responsibility for giving a substantially new direction to the course of thought is in no way undermined by tracing the connections between their ideas and those of previous thinkers.

It would, I imagine, be a matter of common consent that the largest original contribution made to philosophy since Plato and Aristotle is that of Kant. But there is no doubt or obscurity about the nature, and the very large extent, of his philosophical affiliations. Brought up in the neatly systematized version of the philosophy of Leibniz that had been developed by Wolff, Kant was propelled in the construction of his Critical Philosophy by reading Hume. He was fully aware of this himself, describing Hume as the one who woke him from his dogmatic slumbers. To bring philosophers as disparate as Leibniz and Hume together—one for whom reason could do everything and one for whom reason could do very little indeed—was inevitably to generate an explosion of inconsistencies which could be reduced to the calm of coherence only by massive exclusions and adjustments. An entirely original conception of the powers of (p.5) reason was arrived at, in between Leibniz’s omnipotent penetrator of all truth and Hume’s formal registrar of evident contradictions.

Kant’s combination of the highest originality with dependence on previous thinkers has never been questioned. Descartes adopts a more Baconian posture, both by making little or no allusion to any sources of his thinking outside himself and by a congruously elegant and unacademic style of writing. Nevertheless his ‘cogito ergo sum’ is barely distinguishable from Augustine’s ‘si fallor sum’, and Descartes’s existence-proving definition of God as the possessor of all perfections is only a weaker version of Anselm’s account of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Descartes was right to believe that no one before him had so emphatically asserted the ‘real distinction of mind and body’. The extremity of his dualism was evident in an intellectual atmosphere that was still to a large extent Aristotelian. All the same it had Platonic precedents which had been reanimated by a long line of Renaissance philosophers.

Locke—perhaps the most publicly influential thinker since Aristotle—owed a great deal of his fundamental thinking about the role of sense-impressions in knowledge to Gassendi. He owed some of it, as well as the framework of his political theory, to Hobbes, despite his embarrassed disavowals. He derived his moderate, rationalistic theology from Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists. In every history of philosophy Hegel is seen to emerge smoothly from Fichte and Schelling. Nietzsche rightly acknowledged Schopenhauer as an educator. Even the most flagrantly innovative of philosophers has an ancestry. Wittgenstein, for example, was initially inspired by Schopenhauer. His thinking acquired its characteristic initial direction from Frege and Bertrand Russell. An admiration for William James, human and literary rather than strictly philosophical, prepared him for receptiveness to the ideas of C. S. Peirce. That led on, in his later philosophy, to a conception of mind and language as essentially public and social which he shared with a legitimate intellectual descendant of Peirce, John Dewey. The convergence of their opinions, concealed under a total difference of style and, so to speak, social status, has been frequently pointed out, with gentle malice, by W. V. Quine.

The evidence of these particular examples, which could be augmented indefinitely, can be strengthened by a general argument. Wittgenstein somewhere remarked that if a lion were to speak to us we could not understand it. That is not because the lion, for geographical reasons, would speak Swahili. It is because the lion’s mode of access and form of response to the world must be utterly different from our own.

Analogously a philosopher who came out with doctrines of which there had been no previous intimation would appear to be, and almost certainly would be, a charlatan. There have always been plenty of such desperately autonomous thinkers and we are right to pay them little attention. An idea will first appear in a tentative, parenthetical fashion before anyone envisages it as a serious possibility. Only when it has survived a measure of critical handling will it have established its claim to serious, systematic development. A philosopher is not a Zeus from whose head can spring a fully grown Athena of theory. Philosophy, as much as any other intellectual discipline, is a socially (p.6) conducted tradition of discourse, a scene of gradual development, not a sequence of explosive novelties.

2. Bacon’s Negative Criticism: False Philosophies and the Other Idols
The usual conception of Bacon’s philosophy is derived from the two great works he published in his lifetime that are at once of straightforward intention and of articulate organization: The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum. The De Sapientia Veterum, a series of far-fetched, but intrinsically interesting, interpretations of classical fables, was much read in Bacon’s own time but afterwards neglected. Recently Paolo Rossi has pointed out that it can be seen as a curiously, but not gratuitously, encoded way of expressing his views about a number of fundamental topics. The most important of these concern the nature of the physical world, but there are also opinions about the necessity of separating science and religion, about the need for method in the pursuit of knowledge and about realism in politics. Other smaller and equally neglected works, such as his early Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, written in 1607, convey the same, broadly atomistic, account of the underlying nature of the physical world. The extensive albums of purportedly factual materials, such as his Sylva Sylvarum and his books on the winds, on life and death, and on the dense and the rare, are only historical curiosities.

The two major works are both composed of critical and of constructive material. In the Advancement of Learning there is criticism of prevailing false philosophies. In the Novum Organum this reappears, with some adjustments, as part of his doctrine of the idols of the mind, along with causes of error in the general nature of the human mind, in individual propensities, and in language. On the constructive side the Advancement of Learning provides a systematic classification of the sciences; the Novum Organum a detailed account of the new method of eliminative induction.

The refutation of false philosophies, in each of the versions in which it is given, identifies three mistaken bodies of doctrine. That of the Advancement of Learning consists of the disputatious learning, in other words Aristotelian scholasticism; the delicate learning, rhetorical and dilettantish humanism, together with the kind of comprehensive scepticism to which it typically led; and the fantastic learning of cabbalists, alchemists and astrologers, students of magic and mystical correspondences. That of the Novum Organum associates the disputatious, or, as he now calls it, sophistic learning with two differently demarcated styles of thought. These are the empiric philosophy of Gilbert and the alchemists, and the superstitious philosophy which confuses religion and science so as to corrupt the first and to destroy the second.

In criticizing Aristotle Bacon is, of course, very far from being unique in his age. The philosophy of the Renaissance can be taken to begin with Gemistus Pletho. His comparison of Plato and Aristotle, very much to the advantage of the former, prepared the way for the Florentine Academy. More to the present point is the criticism (p.7) of Aristotelian logic. That had been inaugurated by Laurentius Valla, continued by Nizolius, and had culminated in the work of Ramus. Ramus’s dissertation for the degree of master of arts had defended the thesis that everything written by Aristotle is false. He went on, in writings of a less ritualized nature, to maintain that the logic of Aristotle is unnatural and pointlessly complicated.

In the works of the less cursory historians of philosophy Bacon does not emerge absolutely ex nihilo. Høffding, Sorley, and Copleston, for example, all mention a controversy in Cambridge in the 1580s, not long after the time of Bacon’s residence there, between William Temple, an adherent of Ramus, and the orthodox Aristotelian, Everard Digby. All trace their knowledge of this fact to an article written in 1892 by a German scholar, J. Freudenthal. Bacon could have learnt about Ramus, although from a hostile point of view, through attendance at Digby’s popular lectures. He could have had a more direct contact with Temple, whose edition of Ramus’s Dialectica was the first book published by the university press at Cambridge, and who became a fellow of his college in 1576, shortly after Bacon left Cambridge. Bacon’s mature doctrine does not agree with that of either of the disputants. Ramus came from a humanist tradition which set Cicero and an ideal of gentlemanly cultivation against the crabbed professionalism of Aristotle. Digby contended, against the Ramist Temple, that knowledge required inductive ascent from the particular to the universal, so that the engines of deduction should have some raw material to work on, but his idea of induction was Aristotle’s not Bacon’s.

Probably the most that can be said with confidence is that the atmosphere in which Bacon grew up was propitious for the criticism of Aristotle. His own very far-reaching criticism of the disputatious learning remitted deduction to the subsidiary task of organizing knowledge for expository purposes, not for acquiring it in the first place. His reason for that conviction was, consistently enough, inductive. Centuries of Aristotelian deduction had yielded no real fruit, no usable knowledge. It had simply reared a mountain of verbal distinctions on top of a handful of common-sense truths. Congruous with this way of criticizing mere disputation is Bacon’s call, in the Advancement of Learning, for a history of the sciences, to supply a factual record from which conclusions about the conditions of its success could be inductively derived.

In Bacon’s view, the knowledge that had transformed the circumstances of human life was embodied in the inventions of craftsmen, based on the observation and handling of material things, notable among them being Cardano’s familiar trio: gunpowder, printing, and the navigator’s compass. The repetitious frivolities of the schools were revealed in all their emptiness by the direct physical involvement of men with the material world. For him that was all the refutation that scholasticism required. To dispute dialectically with its exponents would be to concede the central point at issue. The validity of a mode of enquiry can be established only by its success in practice, not by logical reasoning alone. Rossi observes that very much this point of view is to be found in the writings of George Agricola, the founder of metallurgy, in the early sixteenth century. Agricola argues for close observation in person, rather than reliance (p.8) on often fable-bearing testimony, and for clarity of language in recording it. Against the classical tradition of contempt for manual work as suitable only for slaves and mechanics, he defends it, in the active form of experiment and technology, as essential to science.

It is the same spirit of distrust of linguistic refinement for its own sake and of the uncritical reception of striking items of testimony that underlies Bacon’s rejection of the delicate learning of the humanists and the fantastic learning of the occultists. The empirical and superstitious attitudes objected to in the Novum Organum raise some points of interest. The empirics and alchemists are associated in Bacon’s critique with Gilbert, the theorist of magnetism. That fact, along with his rejection of Copernicus and his failure to mention Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often mentioned to his discredit. The self-proclaimed champion of natural science, it is said, failed to appreciate the major natural scientists of his own time.

Urbach has replied convincingly to these objections. So far as Gilbert is concerned, his De Magnete contains in its sixth and final chapter a long and ill-considered argument for the perfectly sound conclusion that the earth has a diurnal motion. Included in it is the thesis that the earth, since it is a magnet, has therefore been equipped by God with a purpose and a soul. That is directly opposed to Bacon’s materialistic account of nature and his connected repudiation of final causes as a topic for science. Like the alchemists, in Bacon’s view, Gilbert has leapt too precipitately to a very large conclusion from very limited investigations. In what he says about the earth’s soul and purpose he has committed the further intellectual crime of mixing science and religion. It is this again which is the main fault in his eyes of those he describes as the superstitious, those who ‘have with extreme levity indulged so far (in this vanity) as to attempt to found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, or the book of Job and other parts of the sacred writings’ (Nov. Org. aphorism 1xv).

The confusion of science and religion might seem to be something inflicted on Aristotle by the incorporation of his thought in a Christian philosophy in need of a theory of nature, rather than to be something practised by him. But Aristotle’s God, as the prime mover, the final cause of all motion and, indeed, all change, is a clear instance of it. Bacon may have had his opposition to Aristotle fostered by much in the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and, in particular, by being exposed to Ramus while a young student at Cambridge. His insistence that science and religion must be kept absolutely distinct from each other, however, can most plausibly be accounted for by derivation, direct or indirect, from Ockham.

Human reason, for Ockham, including its intuitive power of apprehending individual things, is competent only to explore the realm of nature. The supernatural world, the realm of grace, is impenetrable to us as active enquirers. Our knowledge of it is provided by the divine gift of revelation. That and his view that abstract entities are constructions of the mind and have no real existence outside it are Ockham’s fundamental doctrines. Ockham’s school of productive followers did not last long in England. Roger Holcot died in 1349, as did Ockham himself; Adam Wodham in 1358. Only William Heytesbury the logician survived to become chancellor of Oxford (p.9) in 1371. Ockham’s ideas were most actively influential in Paris: first in the work of those premature Humeans, Jean de Mirecourt and Nicolas d’Autrecourt, then in the natural philosophy of Buridan and Oresme.

But there is reason to suppose that his doctrines were accessible to students long after his death. Oxford college libraries contain handsome printed editions of his works of the late fifteenth century. There are also interesting relics in the writings of English philosophers later than Bacon, in particular in Locke. At the beginning of the discussion of abstract ideas in his Essay on Human Understanding he asserts, as if it were beyond question and in defiance of by far the greater part of tradition, ‘everything that exists is particular’. Also it has always been puzzling that Locke should have denied the independent reality of relations. They are not, he says, ‘contained in the real existence of things, but [are] something extraneous and superinduced’. Because of that view he tries to analyse all relations into qualities of their terms. He takes causation, for example, to reduce to an active power in the cause and a passive power, or susceptibility, in the effect. This comes directly from an argument of Ockham’s that if relations were real features of the world it would absurdly follow that every time I move my little finger the infinite number of spatial relationships between that finger and everything else in the world would change and so I should bring about an infinite number of changes in reality. The persistence of Ockham’s ideas is even more evident in Hobbes. So it is reasonable to suppose that Bacon was aware of a precedent for his principle of the separation of science and religion. It is not necessary to go on to suppose that Ockham’s and Bacon’s purposes were the same. Ockham anticipated Kant in limiting reason to make room for faith. Bacon seems to be engaged in the complementary opposite of that: sequestering faith in order to set reason free.

The other important, negatively critical part of Bacon’s thought is the theory of idols. The refutation of false philosophies is the fourth and final element of the theory. Labelled the idols of the theatre, it follows the idols of the tribe, the cave, and the marketplace. His account of the idols of the tribe, of the tendency of the human mind in general to error, has some affinity to the kind of scepticism that prevailed in Bacon’s age. It had been encouraged by the recovery of the works of Sextus Empiricus. Having been virtually unknown in the Middle Ages, these had been published in Latin, in part in 1562, the year after Bacon’s birth, and in full seven years later.

Bacon was not a sceptic, at least in any radical sense. He regarded thoroughgoing scepticism as exaggerated and frivolous. But he thought scepticism therapeutically valuable in moderate doses. He was fully aware that the senses are unreliable. But he thought that could be remedied by cautiously attentive observation and with the assistance of instruments. Greek scepticism had been essentially objective. The senses mislead us because of unsatisfactory conditions of observation. Reason misleads us because of its need for premises it cannot itself supply and because of the inescapable circularity of deduction. Bacon’s idols of the tribe are of a more emotional, subjective sort: a desire for order and regularity that leads us to suppose that there is more of it than there actually is, a parental fondness for our own theories that leads us to ignore (p.10) disconfirmations and to protect them from criticism by various questionable devices. The idols of the cave, the personal biases of particular individuals, are, naturally, even more subjective.

In his account of the emotional and subjective sources of error, then, Bacon gives an original slant to the widespread scepticism of the age. His Essays, both in their content and their title, show his dependence on Montaigne and, at a further remove, on Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae.

Finally, there are the idols of the marketplace. These are the errors generated by language, by the unconscious acceptance of theories that is caused by words. Some words, such as ‘fortune’ or ‘prime mover’, are simply fictional and refer to nothing real. Others, arrived at by ‘unskilful abstraction’, classify things on the basis of superficial and unimportant likenesses. In doing so they fail to take account of important underlying differences. A familiar example is the use of the word ‘fish’ to cover all creatures that mainly live in the water, which mistakenly runs together herrings and whales.

Bacon’s view here falls in with a persisting English tradition. It stretches back beyond Ockham, its most distinguished member, to Bacon’s namesake, Roger Bacon. He listed four ‘hindrances to the understanding of truth’ which have more than their number in common with Francis Bacon’s idols. It continues after him through Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham to the linguistic philosophy of recent times. It may owe something to the peculiar qualities of the English language, an inextricable mixture of Teutonic and Romance ingredients and notable for its absence of inflection and its richness of idiom.

3. Bacon’s Theory of Natural Knowledge
Bacon’s theory of natural knowledge is his distinctive contribution to philosophy according to convention. It is not a judgement I should dispute, although I think that his theory has been too much identified with one of its parts: the formal procedure of eliminative induction by the use of his celebrated tables. I suspect that this excess of attention is due to the fact that the doctrine of the tables is much more pedagogically usable than most of Bacon’s writing. It approximates to the ideal of a textbook and provides material for exercises. It is thus unlike most of his writing, which is rhetorical and suggestive, any underlying skeleton of argument being concealed by literary ornamentation.

His account of natural knowledge can be distilled into eight main theses, themselves falling into two groups. Five of them concern the intellectual core of the scientific process. The three that remain concern its social, external aspects.

1. Knowledge of nature must be based on observation by the senses.
2. The senses must be assisted and corrected by instruments and the use of experiment.
(p.11) 3. The laws of nature must be derived from extensive and varied records of critically sifted observation by the procedure of eliminative induction.
4. Induction must proceed by gradual ascent from the directly apparent surface of nature, to the forms.
5. Firmly separated from religion, science must search for efficient and, in the sense of the fourth thesis, formal causes, but not for final causes.
The theses about the social and external aspects of science are

6. that it must be conducted cooperatively,
7. that it is cumulative and progressive, and
8. that it is for use, for ‘the relief of man’s estate’, and not for merely contemplative enjoyment.
The first thesis, that science must be founded on careful and extensive observation, is implicit in Ockham’s theory of our knowledge of individual things. Called intuition, it must precede any reasoning about general ideas, which have to be derived from our acquaintance with individuals. But observationalism is much more explicit in the work of Telesio. Bacon was familiar with his writings, and in some respects critical of them. Nevertheless he described Telesio as ‘the first of the moderns’.

Against the Aristotelian doctrine that matter is merely potential, Telesio maintained that it is a concrete actuality, although passive and inert. It can be perceived by the senses from which all knowledge must be derived. Observations are stored in the memory and allow for the anticipation by analogy of what has not yet been observed. Vives had earlier stressed the importance of observation, but principally as applied to the life of the mind. In Telesio it is observation of the physical world that is taken to be fundamental.

Despite his laudatory label for Telesio and agreement with his observationalism, Bacon criticized him forcefully. He objected to Telesio’s amorphously speculative thesis that two large principles, of heat and of cold, are responsible for all that happens in nature. That is a conspicuous departure from the gradual ascent on which Bacon insisted. Also deficient, in Bacon’s view, was what he described as the pastoral character of Telesio’s philosophy, its indifference to the practical uses to which natural knowledge can be put. But a substantial area of agreement remains. No one before Bacon had given such a definitive form as Telesio had to Ockham’s doctrine of intuitive knowledge. One feature of Telesio’s philosophy Bacon would not approve is its instrumentalist conception of natural knowledge as providing, not an insight into the inner nature of physical things, but analogical anticipations of the course of future or possible experience.

Bacon’s second thesis is to be found clearly expressed in George Agricola. He held that only by the close observation, actual handling, and clear description of material things can reliable knowledge of nature be secured. Bacon had read Agricola, according to Paolo Rossi. But probably the main source for Bacon’s second thesis was his own induction from those investigations of his age which had actually borne fruit. Further back in time there is the influence of Roger Bacon to be taken into account. Although (p.12) he put forward the idea within a hermetic framework, he took natural knowledge as something to be acquired by experiment, by operations on and interaction with natural objects, and not by merely contemplative observation alone.

The third thesis, that the laws of nature must be arrived at by eliminative induction, using the tables of presence, absence, and degrees, is often seen by those well-disposed to Bacon as having something of the same status as Aristotle’s doctrine of the syllogism. In one swift movement, it appears, an array of unreflective practices was made explicit and ordered into a system. At any rate it has remained authoritative since its creation. It was given renewed life through its rather exact transcription by Mill, and has subsequently formed part of comprehensive logic textbooks of an old-fashioned kind. The common practice of calling Bacon’s tables ‘Mill’s methods’ abets Mill’s historically misleading concealment of his debt to Bacon.

But if Mill is indebted to Bacon, Bacon is also an inheritor. There are the first intimations of the need for methodical comparison of instances as far back as Robert Grosseteste. In Duns Scotus there is a first, but definite, sketch of the method of agreement (Bacon’s table of presence) and in Ockham a similar sketch of the method of difference (Bacon’s table of absence). As British philosophers Scotus and Ockham may have been accessible and have appealed to Bacon. Both were critical of the Thomist project of incorporating the largely secular philosophy of Aristotle into Christian theology. That did not make them anti-Aristotelians in natural philosophy. But it led them to oppose the followers of Aristotle who ignored the admittedly modest attention he had accorded to induction. Aristotle himself at least affirmed some connection between the first principles of science and experience. His disciples in the High Middle Ages tended to take them on trust, either as self-evident or as items of traditional common knowledge. The formal rigour with which Scotus and Ockham had become familiar through their logical studies, applied to the inductive aspect of the search for knowledge, may well have supplied Bacon with an example.

Bacon’s support of eliminative against enumerative induction was also anticipated by Grosseteste, in a particular argument about the sun’s propagation of heat, and by Buridan, in an argument about the motion of a projectile. Both were aware of the distinctiveness and importance of falsification, but no one before Bacon made the ‘major force of the negative instance’ such a central and explicitly general principle. It is ironical that Popper should have regarded Bacon, who is close to him in many ways, as the paladin of simple enumeration.

Bacon’s fourth thesis, the doctrine of gradual ascent, seems original to him. But an indirect source for it can be found in his high opinion of the achievements of craftsmen, mechanics, and inventors, as compared with cloistered and over-precipitate speculators. The doctrine of gradual ascent, like other aspects of his method, is based on an inductive generalization about the necessary conditions for the successful pursuit of natural knowledge. Its primary target is the tendency of theorists to generalize too comprehensively on too narrow a basis of evidence. It also draws strength from his realistic, or anti-instrumentalist, insistence on the insufficiency of laws that concern (p.13) only the straightforwardly observable surface features of the world. These need to be supplemented by laws about the fine structure of matter, the forms, or simple natures, of the particles of which ordinary things are composed.

The study of superficial causes, material and efficient, Bacon calls physics. The corresponding practice or art that it makes possible he calls mechanics, in effect craftsmanship. Metaphysics as he understands it, distinguishing it from philosophia prima and, of course, from theology, makes possible what he calls natural magic. This choice of phrase has misled Bacon’s interpreters into supposing him to be some kind of occultist. What he actually had in mind is the kind of technology which uses an understanding of the fine structure of physical things to bring about really radical changes in them. It was on this, and not on a surface empiricism, that he rested his hopes for a far-reaching improvement of the human condition. It was a reasonable anticipation of nineteenth-century chemistry. He arrived at it by combining his own version of the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus with his conviction of the empirical basis and technical utility of natural knowledge.

I can move on to the three social and external theses, as I have called them, since the fifth thesis about the essential distinctness of science and religion has already been considered. These are much the more original part of Bacon’s contribution to the philosophy of science. But they have precedents. George Agricola and, as Rossi points out, the potter Bernard Palissy firmly agreed with his final thesis about the utility of science, as, among philosophers proper, did Cardano. His sixth thesis, that it should be cooperative, imaginatively embodied in the New Atlantis, had been advanced with some elaboration in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon. His seventh thesis, that it is cumulative and progressive, not just a recycling of established truths, has no very obvious earlier exponent. It is significant that the historian of progress, J. B. Bury, begins his story with Bacon (and also, in a different dimension, Jean Bodin).

That is not surprising so far as the post-classical world is concerned. Even if only the earliest Christians seriously expected the end of the world in their own lifetime, the notion that the entire terrestrial drama will eventually be wound up by its divine impresario has always been an integral part of Christian belief. Together with the doctrine of the fall of man it is hardly encouraging to the theory of progress. Bacon’s uncomplicated enthusiasm for progress, conceived in exclusively earthly terms, may throw some light on the depth of his professed commitment to the religion he was so anxious to wall off from science. It should, however, be added that the indisputably devout Pascal, writing twenty years after Bacon’s death, was quite unequivocal about the cumulative and progressive nature of science, contrasting it in this respect with theology as ardently as Bacon.

The classification of the sciences, which is the main topic of the Advancement of Learning, and its enlarged version, the De Augmentis, is an important procedural supplement to the substantive account Bacon gives of natural knowledge. It falls within a long tradition which began with the example of Aristotle’s encyclopedic range of writings and with his explicit distinction, and further subdivision, of theoretical, (p.14) practical, and productive sciences. A remark in his Topics, distinguishing propositions as ethical, physical, and logical, was made the basis of a division of sciences under these heads by Stoics and Epicureans. In the Middle Ages the system of seven liberal arts and three philosophies (natural, metaphysical, and moral) prevailed. Certainly with Bacon a new era in the history of this kind of classification begins. Reflecting the enthusiasm and initiative of the liberated enquirers of his time, he devised a system incomparably more detailed and penetrating than anything that had preceded it. The particular stimulus was his lively sense of what was actually going on and his lack of respect for established intellectual authority.

4. Bacon’s Theories of Nature and Mind
The conventional view of Bacon sees him as essentially a methodologist and, more generally, as a prophet or propagandist of natural science. Critics have seized on his own admission that he had established only the preliminaries of his ‘Great Instauration’. Its sixth and final part, ‘the new philosophy or active science’, the application of his method to the data, much in need of augmentation, which he had assembled, remained to be carried out by others. The critics’ position is strengthened by Bacon’s apparent incomprehension of the genuine scientific progress of his own age. But Bacon’s faults in this respect are, as I mentioned earlier, less culpable than they are supposed to be. In particular, I drew attention to Urbach’s point that Bacon praised Gilbert’s work on magnetism, and attacked only his concluding speculations about the soul and purpose with which God had endowed the world by making it into a magnet. Bacon opposed Copernicus because of the interpretation of his heliocentrism as a calculating device. And he was, chronologically, in no position to know of Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood: it was not published until after Bacon’s death.

Bacon’s illustrative application of his method to the example of heat shows him to have been too modest in his estimate of his own achievements. In taking heat to be a type of motion he rightly rejected the ancient theory of fire atoms which persisted long after his own time in the form of the theory of heat as caloric, a fire-constituting fluid. Bacon’s conclusion was substantially correct, but it was not generally recognized to be so until some two centuries after his death.

The distinction Bacon draws between physics and metaphysics, between comparatively superficial explanations in terms of what can be directly observed and more fundamental explanations in terms of underlying structure, presupposes the truth of theoretical realism, the doctrine that there is more to nature than meets the unassisted eye. In Bacon’s version theoretical realism assumed its most familiar form: atomism. To reject the idea that what ultimately constitutes nature is a continuous, relatively fluid stuff is not to embrace a particular view of the nature of the atoms: whether they are all identical or whether they differ in shape or size or other intrinsic properties. Nor is it necessarily to conclude that the atoms are, or are not, separated from each other by empty space. Bacon, always ill at ease with the vacuum, thought that the expansion and (p.15) contraction of matter could be accounted for by the incorporation in or the extrusion from bodies of relatively fine atoms.

Perhaps as early as 1604, in his Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, Bacon had praised Democritus in general terms for his atomism. But he dissented from Democritus’s view that the variety of nature is to be explained by reference to the different shapes of atoms. Always doubtful about the vacuum, late in life he came down definitely against it. Nevertheless he always remained some kind of atomist. In the examination of the myth of Cupid, in his De Sapientia Veterum, he reaffirms it as the hidden content of a piece of ancient wisdom.

More important than his difference with Democritus about the shape of atoms is his account of the cause of motion. Democritus left the origin of motion unexplained. Epicurus ascribed a natural downward motion to atoms, modified by his celebrated swerve. Bacon maintained that motion is intrinsic to matter. It was not imparted to the physical world either by an Aristotelian God, drawing all things towards it teleologically, or by a Newtonian God, setting the whole machine going with an initial push. That idea is so clearly expressed in Telesio as to make it exceedingly likely that Bacon got it from him. It is entirely appropriate to his doctrine of the separation of science from religion.

I suggested earlier that Bacon was influenced by Telesio in combining empiricism with materialism. Telesio had held that matter is not an Aristotelian potentiality, but an actual, even if passive, constituent of the real world. Aristotle’s metaphysically extreme, quasi-atomist doctrine of minima represented them as merely potential, that is to say, as the limits of the furthest theoretically possible process of division. In Averroës atoms are conceived as actually and physically indivisible entities and it is to that kind of atomism to which Bacon subscribed. It had been affirmed earlier in Renaissance by the Averroist Agostino Nifo and, at a greater remove from Averroës, by Scaliger.

Bacon gave little attention to the philosophy of mind. It is accommodated rather perfunctorily in its place in his classification of the sciences. He distinguishes two broad natural sciences of mind, logic and ethics, both very broadly conceived. They deal with the two great fields of mental activity, the exercises of the intellect and of the will. But in addition to these faculties there is the soul itself to be considered. Bacon’s view is that the soul itself is not part of nature since it is literally inspired or breathed into human beings by God. It is thus not subject to the laws of nature and not a proper object of inductive study.

That is not a very coherent position. If the soul is not part of nature then its operations must be understood to have a supernatural cause and so they too are beyond the reach of inductive enquiry. Bacon’s view may be a somewhat confused relic of another doctrine of Telesio’s. He had held that, as well as spirit, present in both men and animals, of a material, even if very refined, composition, and responsible for sensation and for the reasoning that it based on it, human beings have also a forma or mens superaddita, which is wholly immaterial and immortal. Spirit is motivated by the instinct of self-preservation; the higher forma superaddita is pointed towards God. This (p.16) theory satisfies the requirements of orthodoxy while keeping science and religion apart. By turning Telesio’s two souls into the soul considered in itself and the soul’s operations Bacon tried to pursue the same ends, but less successfully.

In this survey of the possible sources of Bacon’s leading ideas the chief contributors I have identified are William of Ockham and Bernardino Telesio. It is clear that Bacon had read Telesio. The criticisms he advances of Telesio are forceful but limited in scope, specifically to Telesio’s over-speculative reliance on his principles of heat and cold. But Bacon followed Telesio closely in his empiricism and his materialism and also in his account of the soul.

The main problem with the idea that Bacon was influenced by Ockham is to trace the connection. The fact that there are some very close affinities of doctrine, and even of wording, between Ockham and Locke, who was born several years after Bacon’s death, suggests that Ockham’s ideas survived as part of the normal university course of instruction.

Ockham and Telesio are also very notably echoed in Hobbes, whose account of motivation is very much like Telesio’s. But after Hobbes, with Locke and his successors, empiricism in Britain abandoned the materialism with which it had been originally associated for conceptions of nature which enforced the assumption that all we know directly is our own sense-impressions. That was an inheritance from the kind of radical scepticism Bacon rejected, and also from Descartes. Locke still thought that there really are material things and speculated that God might have chosen to attach the power of thinking to a material substance. But the assumption that the only certain knowledge is self-knowledge led inexorably to the subjectivist extravagances of Berkeley, Hume, and Mill and, in our own time, of Russell and Ayer. In connecting Bacon to Ockham I mean to do him honour, by affiliating him legitimately to the philosopher I suspect of being the greatest of British empiricists.

The Possibility of Metaphysics

A positive answer to Kant's famous question, ‘How is metaphysics possible?’, is given—one that represents metaphysics as being an autonomous and indispensable intellectual discipline whose task is to chart the domain of real possibilities. The notions of ‘real’ or ‘metaphysical’ possibility and necessity are defended and distinguished from those of various other species of modality, such as physical, logical, and conceptual possibility or necessity. The enemies of metaphysics, from relativists to those who seek to subordinate metaphysics to empirical science, epistemology, or the philosophy of language, are argued to hold positions that are either incoherent or self‐defeating.

Keywords:   Kant, metaphysics, modality, necessity, possibility, reality, relativism, science

In the Preface, I explained that the overall objective of this book is to help to restore metaphysics to a central position in philosophy as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, with its own distinctive methods and criteria of validation. But if such a project is not to be stifled even before its inception, we need to have some assurance that its aim is a coherent and legitimate one. To provide such assurance is the purpose of this first chapter, which will also serve as an introduction to some of the book's main themes.

1. What Is Metaphysics?

It was Immanuel Kant who first asked ‘How is metaphysics possible?’ ¹ But Kant supposed the subject‐matter of metaphysics to comprise a priori synthetic truths, and we have since come to doubt whether there is such a class of truths, not least because the analytic/synthetic distinction has itself become doubtful following W. V. Quine's attack on it. ² The a priori/a posteriori distinction, on the other hand, is still taken seriously, and indeed has had new life breathed into it by the work of Saul Kripke. ³ But Kripke's work, too, undermines Kant's epistemological assumptions by implying that necessary truths need not be a priori nor contingent truths a posteriori. In the light of these reconceptions, Kant's question ‘How is metaphysics possible?’ needs to be asked anew, and even to be understood in a new way. But the question is quite as pressing for us as it was for Kant. Metaphysics is under assault from many sides, both from within the ranks of philosophers and from various external forces. Despite these attacks, metaphysics has been enjoying something of a revival amongst so‐called analytic philosophers, after a barren period during which first logical positivism and then ordinary language philosophy (p.2) prevailed, both of them hostile to metaphysical speculation. Analytic philosophers are no longer antipathetic to arguments concerning the nature of substance, the reality of universals or the existence of abstract entities. So we need to understand what can legitimate such inquiries and what epistemological status their conclusions can justifiably lay claim to.

As a preliminary, we need to fix upon some reasonably uncontentious characterization of what metaphysics should be understood to have as its main concern. Traditionally, metaphysics has been thought of as the systematic study of the most fundamental structure of reality—and, indeed, that is the view of it which I should like to support. Understanding the aim of metaphysics in this way makes defending the possibility of metaphysics a substantial and problematic task, and for that reason one well worth exploring. By contrast, to understand the aim of metaphysics as something less ambitious than this—for instance, as the attempt to analyse our currently accepted ways of talking about what we unreflectively take to be certain general features of the world we live in—would make its justification less difficult, but only at the expense of making metaphysics less interesting and less worth doing. Should metaphysics as traditionally conceived turn out to be impossible, we may still be able to pursue these less ambitious projects; but let us not pretend that in doing so we would be doing anything worth dignifying by the name ‘metaphysics’.

I confess that characterizing metaphysics as the systematic study of the most fundamental structure of reality hardly sounds very precise. But I am not offering a definition, imprecision in which would indeed be a defect. I do not think it would be at all profitable to pursue a definition of ‘metaphysics’, because the danger would be that it would be framed in a way which favoured one metaphysical position over others—for instance, in a way which presumed the reality of space, or of causation, when the reality of these things may be denied by some metaphysical systems. A similar defect would attend any attempt to specify the subject‐matter of metaphysics by means of a list of topics it supposedly embraces. One has only to look at the highly varied contents of modern textbooks of metaphysics to see how arbitrary such an approach would be. Of course, a consequence of not providing an absolutely clear‐cut delineation of the province of metaphysics is that metaphysics may not appear clearly distinct from certain other enterprises, such as those undertaken in the name of the empirical sciences. However, although I shall later argue that all empirical science presupposes metaphysics, I do not in fact believe that a clear‐cut distinction should be made between metaphysical concerns and some of the more theoretical concerns of science. Drawing sharp boundaries in such matters is unhelpful, and is not needed in order to maintain (p.3) that metaphysical concerns are sufficiently distinctive to form the core of a relatively independent discipline—one whose intellectual credentials are worthy of exploration. In any case, my hope is that when I come, in due course, to attempt to argue on my own account for the possibility of metaphysics, my conception of the subject‐matter and methods of metaphysics will emerge more clearly. In effect, I shall be filling out my preliminary characterization of metaphysics by characterizing metaphysics as the discipline made possible by the sort of defence that I shall offer.

2. How Is Metaphysics Possible?

Before I present that defence, I want to look briefly at some rival answers to the question ‘How is metaphysics possible?’ which are currently popular in various quarters. Some of these answers are frankly antimetaphysical whilst others, in my opinion, downgrade the status of metaphysics to that of something unworthy of the name and are thus covertly antimetaphysical too. An antimetaphysical answer to our question is, then, either one which simply denies that metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, is possible, or else one which defends the possibility of something else under the name of ‘metaphysics’, while implicitly abandoning the real thing. Other answers which I shall reject do attempt to defend the possibility of something recognizably akin to metaphysics as traditionally conceived, but do so in ways I consider to be unsatisfactory. The four positions which I shall consider—only to reject—I shall call (somewhat tendentiously) relativism, scientism, neo‐Kantianism, and semanticism. These are all ‘modern’ views, though some obviously have historical precedents. I shall not examine, here, certain more traditional positions—such as ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, as supposedly exemplified by such historical figures as Descartes and Locke—because these were positions developed before Kant raised his momentous question, ‘How is metaphysics possible?’

The answer of relativism—for instance, in its latest ‘deconstructionist’ guise—to this question is, quite simply, that metaphysics is not possible, because metaphysics is the misbegotten product of western intellectual hubris, the mistaken search for a non‐existent ‘objective’ and ‘total’ truth, guided by supposedly timeless and universal principles of logic. Truth and reason, according to this view, are culture‐bound concepts of strictly limited utility. The notion that there could be a ‘fundamental structure of reality’ for us to discern is deemed absurd and paradoxical, because what we call ‘reality’ is (supposedly) always just some human construction saturated (p.4) by interest‐driven interpretation. My reply to antimetaphysical claims of this sort is as follows. First, to the extent that they amount to mere assertions, unsupported by reasoned argument, they do not merit serious attention. The fact that their proponents are often contemptuous of the value of reasoned argument itself—this being one of the prime objects of their attack—by no means obliges the defenders of metaphysics to take them seriously. If the relativists wish to decry the notion of reasoned argument as a parochial cultural artefact, then they deny themselves any basis for their own assertions but ingrained prejudice, and we should be content to let them wallow in it if it gives them satisfaction. Secondly, if these claims are alleged to be supported by evidence—for instance, of a sociological or anthropological sort—then it has to be pointed out that in fact such evidence as is available supports nothing so extreme: it does not, and cannot, show that human beings are incapable of escaping from culture‐bound and interest‐driven conceptions of their world, but at most that they often fail to do so. Indeed, the very fact thatsomehuman beings have discovered that many human beings fail to do this shows, if it shows anything, that we are not incapable of making such an escape. Thirdly, it is characteristic of the relativist attack on metaphysics that it deliberately distorts what it seeks to denounce. It represents metaphysicians as laying claim to infallible insight into eternal and universal truths, uncoloured by any human perspective. But only the most naive or dogmatic metaphysician would make such bald claims. One of the primary aims of metaphysics is precisely to understand, in some measure, our own relation to the rest of reality, and of necessity it undertakes to do this from the position in which we find ourselves. The fact that we cannot stand outside ourselves to study that relation need not imply that it cannot be studied by us at all.

A second popular response to the question of how metaphysics is possible is to claim that it is so because, to the extent that there is a legitimate province of metaphysical inquiry, it is one entirely catered for by the empirical sciences. On this view, it is these sciences, if anything, that can tell us about the fundamental structure of reality. This being so, there can be no scope for a distinctly ‘philosophical’ approach to the questions of metaphysics, conceived as an approach different in its methods or objects from those already embraced by the empirical sciences. For instance, if there are fundamental questions to be raised about the existence and nature of space and time, it seems to follow that these can only be answered by such sciences as cosmology and quantum physics. There can be no room for ‘armchair’ philosophical speculation or ‘conceptual analysis’ as routes to addressing such questions. To the extent that metaphysical questions are genuinely answerable, it will be said that they are being (p.5) answered by people working in departments of physics, not by people working in departments of philosophy.

A view like this is often to be found expressed, either explicitly or in a barely disguised form, in modern books of popular science, designed to convey to a lay audience the arcane deliverances of the latest theories in physics—theories claiming, for instance, that space ‘really’ has many more than three dimensions or that the universe is the result of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum and so came from ‘nothing’. In a subtler form, a devotion to scientism—as I call the doctrine that such legitimate metaphysical questions as there are belong to the province of the empirical sciences—is even to be found, ironically enough, in many departments of philosophy. A version of it has there become dignified under the title of ‘naturalized epistemology’. This is the view that all human knowledge—including any metaphysical knowledge that we may lay claim to—is a product of our biological nature as cognizing animals, and is hence to be studied by the methods of the life sciences, including psychology and evolutionary theory. Thus we see a bizarre situation arising in which popularizing scientists denounce the pretensions of philosophers while many of the people whom they are criticizing have in fact already abdicated any claim to know better than the scientists how to address the questions of metaphysics.

In my opinion, both types of devotee of scientism—those drawn from the ranks of scientists and those drawn from the ranks of soi‐disant philosophers—exhibit a blinkered dogmatism which is the very antithesis of genuine philosophy. Both fail to see that science presupposes metaphysics and that the role of philosophy is quite as much normative as descriptive—with everything, including science, coming within its critical purview. Scientists inevitably make metaphysical assumptions, whether explicitly or implicitly, in proposing and testing their theories—assumptions which go beyond anything that science itself can legitimate. These assumptions need to be examined critically, whether by scientists themselves or by philosophers—and either way, the critical philosophical thinking that must be done cannot look to the methods and objects of empirical science for its model. Empirical science at most tells us what is the case, not what must or may be (but happens not to be) the case. Metaphysics deals in possibilities. And only if we can delimit the scope of the possible can we hope to determine empirically what is actual. This is why empirical science is dependent upon metaphysics and cannot usurp the latter's proper role.

A third response to our question ‘How is metaphysics possible?’ is, unlike the first two, genuinely philosophical, drawing its inspiration from Kant—whence I call it neo‐Kantian. According to this view, metaphysics (p.6) does not and cannot tell us anything about objective reality ‘as it is in itself’, if indeed the notion of such a reality even makes sense. But it can tell us something about certain fundamentally necessary features of our thought about reality. For instance, it may be able to establish that we must think of the objects of perception as being situated in space and time and as being related causally to one another—perhaps on the grounds that, as Kant himself held, a recognition of ourselves as self‐conscious beings whose thoughts and experiences are ordered in time requires us to make reference to such a world of perceptible objects. By opting for a less ambitious aim, it is hoped that the possibility of a suitably modest metaphysics may be secured. However, such a position is fatally flawed, if its intention is to render ‘metaphysical’ claims legitimate by construing them as not venturing to speak of how things really are, as opposed to how we must think of them as being. Forwe, if we are anything, are part of reality ourselves, as are our thoughts, so that to purport to make claims about allegedly necessary features of our thoughts while simultaneously denying that anything is being claimed about the nature of ‘reality’ is to contradict oneself. Trying to make metaphysics safe by drawing in its horns in this way is an exercise which is doomed to failure.

Still more unsatisfactory is any attempt to legitimate metaphysics by enfeebling it yet further, by construing its claims as being merely descriptive of a conceptual scheme we find ourselves possessed of, without even purporting to establish the inevitability of that scheme. Metaphysical inquiry must at least be critical, so that to the extent that it deals in ‘concepts’ it cannot rest content to describe or analyse the concepts that we happen to have, but should, rather, seek to revise and refine these concepts where necessary. ⁴ But the point of such revision, if it has a point, can only be to render our concepts truer to reality—ensuring the mere internal consistency of a conceptual scheme is too modest an aim, because many mutually incompatible schemes could equally possess this feature. ⁵ If it is suggested that choice between such schemes can be rationally made by selecting what does least violence to our ‘natural’ beliefs or ‘intuitions’, leaving us in a condition of ‘reflective equilibrium’, then again it must be objected that an exercise of this sort does not deserve to be dignified by the name ‘metaphysics’, because we have no right to suppose that our natural beliefs reflect the fundamental structure of reality. It is one of the few (p.7) virtues of scientism that it recognizes this fact, because it recognizes that our natural beliefs are products of evolutionary processes which are geared to the practical demands of survival rather than to the theoretical demands of metaphysical truth.

The fourth and final response I wish to criticize is what I call semanticism. This is the view, notably subscribed to by Michael Dummett, that metaphysical questions can in principle be resolved by recourse to (and only by recourse to) the theory of meaning. ⁶ Thus, whether we are entitled to take a ‘realist’ view of some area of discourse, such as talk about set theory, or quantum physics, or the past, is to be decided by whether or not an adequate theory of meaning for that area of discourse will assign ‘realist’ truth‐conditions to its sentences, that is, truth‐conditions which reflect a commitment to the principle of bivalence as far as those sentences are concerned. In fact it seems that semanticism of this sort does not differ fundamentally from what I have been calling neo‐Kantianism, because its proponents such as Dummett regard the theory of meaning as providing the only legitimate basis for a theory of the structure and content of thought. ⁷ Thus semanticism only gives a linguistic dress to a kind of approach to metaphysics which we have already considered and rejected. If anything, semanticism threatens to reduce metaphysics to something even more parochial, by making answers to its questions turn on the linguistic practices of an arbitrarily chosen human community. No doubt the semanticist will claim that the features of the theory of meaning which are pertinent to metaphysical concerns are ‘deep’ ones, which transcend differences between different human speech communities. But what sort of basis would such a claim have? If merely anthropological, we are back to scientism or to some sort of relativism. Nor can the theory of meaning itself determine what counts as ‘deep’.

The basic problem with semanticism is that, to the extent that one can legitimately appeal to considerations of meaning in order to answer metaphysical questions, the considerations in question must not be merely ones of what we do mean—for there is no guarantee that we mean anything very precise or coherent by what we say—but, rather, they must be considerations of what we should mean. This is to reiterate the point that metaphysics must be critical and potentially revisionary of our currently accepted concepts and beliefs. However, questions of what we should mean cannot be answered wholly from within the theory of meaning, but require recourse to independent metaphysical argument. An illustration (p.8) of this is provided by the debate over what constitutes an object—a metaphysical debate if ever there was one, and one to which we shall return in detail in Chapter 2 . The semanticist will say, typically, that an object is to be understood as a possible referent of a singular term, and will contend that the notion of a singular term is one which can be explicated in a way which does not depend on a prior notion of what constitutes an object—for instance, by reference to the characteristic logical behaviour of singular terms as exhibited by the patterns of valid inference sustained by sentences containing them. ⁸ However, it is readily apparent that our existing language contains expressions which qualify as singular terms by any such criterion and yet which it would be extravagant to suppose make reference to objects of any sort. An example would be a definite description such as ‘the grin on John's face’. Ordinary language even gives the appearance ofquantifying over such spurious ‘objects’, as in a sentence like ‘John is wearing a broad grin’. Of course, such a sentence is satisfactorily paraphrasable by one avoiding a quantifier, namely, ‘John is grinning broadly’. But paraphrase is a symmetrical relation, so that there are no resources wholly within one's theory of meaning for the language wherewith to decide which of these two sentences is to be regarded as more accurately reflecting the ontology of its speakers. Much less does such a theory enable us to decide what an ‘object’ is, or what objects the world really contains. These questions can only be addressed by independent metaphysical argument, if they can be legitimately addressed at all. ⁹ The linguistic, or semanticist, approach to questions of metaphysics inevitably leads to a doctrine of extreme ontological relativity, as some of its proponents have realized. ¹⁰ In this guise, therefore, it collapses into a version of the first approach considered above, which I called relativism.

3. Metaphysical Possibility and the Possibility of Metaphysics

The time has now come for me to offer my own answer to the question of whether, and if so how, metaphysics is possible. My view is that it is indeed (p.9) possible: that is, I hold that it is possible to achieve reasonable answers to questions concerning the fundamental structure of reality—questions more fundamental than any that can be competently addressed by empirical science. But I do not claim that metaphysics on its own can, in general, tell us what there is. Rather—to a first approximation—I hold that metaphysics by itself only tells us what there could be. But given that metaphysics has told us this, experience can then tell us which of various alternative metaphysical possibilities is plausibly true in actuality. The point is that although what is actual must for that very reason be possible, experience alone cannot determine what is actual, in the absence of a metaphysical delimitation of the possible. In short, metaphysics itself is possible—indeed necessary—as a form of rational human inquiry because metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality. Stated in this highly abstract and condensed way, my answer may appear obscure and even gnomic, so my task in what remains of this chapter will be to unfold its implications.

So far I have begun to forge a link between the possibility of metaphysics and the notion of metaphysical possibility. The idea is that the realm of metaphysical possibility is a genuine one which needs to be explored, or at least assumed, before any claim to truth in actuality can be legitimated by experience. And this is a realm which cannot, of course, be explored solely by the methods of the empirical sciences, precisely because they merely purport to establish what is true in actuality on the basis of experience, and hence presuppose metaphysics. But it may be objected here that the only sort of possibility which the empirical sciences presuppose is logical possibility—and that this can be established without recourse to a distinct discipline of metaphysics, because logical possibility is simply a matter of compliance with the a priori laws of logic. In short, it may be urged that the only precondition which needs to be met by the theories of empirical science, before they are tested in the court of experience, is that they should not entail a logical contradiction. However, in the first place, the deliverances of experience itself can only be assessed in the light of metaphysical possibility and, in the second, such possibility is not simply tantamount to mere logical possibility as characterized a moment ago. I shall develop the latter point more fully in the next section when I discuss how metaphysical possibility may be defined, but some preliminary observations concerning it are appropriate here.

The logical possibility of a proposition or set of propositions, as characterized a moment ago, is simply a matter of its (or their) not entailing a logical contradiction. But metaphysical possibility is something quite distinct from this. In the first place, it is not—or, at least, is not merely—the possibility of aproposition (or set of propositions), but rather the (p.10) possibility of a state of affairs (one which isrepresentable, no doubt, by a proposition): and so in this sense it is a ‘real’, or de re, possibility. The notion of a state of affairs, of course, is itself a metaphysical notion, just one of a large family of such notions, some more basic than others. Other notions in this family are the notions of an object, aproperty, a relation, an individual, a kind, a part, a substance, existence, identity, instantiation, and indeed possibility, along with its correlative, necessity. Some of these notions are definable in terms of others, though precisely how they should be defined is itself a matter for metaphysical debate. Thus—as we shall see more fully in Chapter 6 —a substance might be defined to be an object which does notdepend for its existence upon any other object (where dependency is defined in terms of necessity). ¹¹These metaphysical notions are not purely ‘logical’ notions: they are ontological. ¹² They concernbeing and its modes, whereas logic, properly understood, does not concern being in general but, rather, the formal properties of and relations between propositions (which constitute only a small part of what there is). Moreover, these metaphysical notions are in a certain sense transcendental, in that they are not derivative from experience but are on the contrary to be invoked in construing what experience reveals of reality. Clearly, they are closely related to the categories of Aristotle and Kant, but my account of them crucially differs from Kant's (and is thereby closer to Aristotle's) in that I regard them as being genuinely applicable to reality and not merely to our thought about reality. They are not categories of thought, but categories of being. This is not, however, to say that the applicability of a given category to reality can, in general, be determined wholly a priori—only its possibleapplicability may be thus determinable. For instance, we may not be able to establish a priori that there actually are any substances, only that there could be. Only by recourse to experience, perhaps, can we have reason to believe that there are.

Of course, the ‘semanticist’ will claim that these ‘categories’ are just reflections of, and entirely derivative from, semantico‐syntactic features of the natural languages which we happen to employ—the notion of an ‘object’ corresponding to that of a singular term, the notion of a ‘property’ corresponding to that of a predicate, and so on. But I have already explained why I consider this view to invert the proper order of explanation. Such correspondences of this sort as may exist do so because any language which has evolved as a means to expressing truths about reality (p.11) must embody some recognition, however partial and distorted, of the metaphysical categories in terms of which the fundamental structure of reality is to be articulated. Since there is room for debate about that structure, it is unsurprising that different natural languages reflect some metaphysical categories more prominently than others. Such differences reflect, in all probability, differences in the tacitly held metaphysical beliefs of different human speech communities. But although linguistic structure can perhaps serve to reinforce and entrench those beliefs, the ‘Whorfian’ view that linguistic structure is the source of them is, I consider, quite unsustainable. ¹³

I began to talk about metaphysical categories in the course of introducing the notion of metaphysical possibility and urging that it differs from that of mere logical possibility. The metaphysical possibility of a state of affairs is not determined simply by the absence of contradiction in the propositions used to describe it—though, of course, such an absence of contradiction is a minimal requirement of metaphysical possibility. Consider, thus, an example par excellence of a question of metaphysical possibility: the question of whether there could be vague objects, that is, objects for which there could fail to be a fact of the matter as to their identity or diversity in certain circumstances. (We shall return to this and related questions at much greater length in Chapter 3 .) Now, it is true enough that a number of philosophers, notably Gareth Evans, have argued against this possibility by attempting to derive a contradiction from the supposition that a given identity statement is of indeterminate truth‐value, a supposition which may be expressed by a proposition of the form ‘∇(a = b)’. ¹⁴ As it happens, I consider that this argument is flawed, and consequently that a contradiction cannot be derived from the supposition in question. ¹⁵ It doesn't follow, however, that I must consider the existence of vague objects to be metaphysically possible. Indeed, I have grave doubts about this, because—as I shall explain in Chapter 2 —I consider that the only metaphysically defensible notion of an object is precisely that of an entity which possesses determinate identity‐conditions. ¹⁶ Thus, although I have, elsewhere, referred to the domain of subatomic particles as providing putative examples of ‘objects’ whose diachronic (p.12) identity may, in certain circumstances, be vague, ¹⁷ at a deeper level I am sympathetic to the view that what the relevant empirical evidence shows is that it is wrong to think of electrons and the like as really being objects at all. (Let it not be supposed, however, that this is just a verbal issue about the meaning of a word, ‘object’: the deeper point is that a satisfactory system of metaphysics needs to mark a fundamental division between those entities that do, and those that do not, possess determinate identity‐conditions—and appropriate use of the term ‘object’ serves precisely this purpose.) Thus we see that the validity of a claim that a certain state of affairs is metaphysically possible does not simply hinge on the question of whether or not the propositions used to describe it entail a contradiction, but rather on the question of whether acceptable metaphysical principles and categories permit the existence of that state of affairs. And this is a matter for distinctly metaphysical debate. A general comparison might be drawn here with questions of what is morally possible or permissible, which again cannot be settled purely by considerations of logic since at some stage distinctly moral notions must be brought in to play a substantive role in any argument for the moral permissibility of a given state of affairs.

Let us look at another group of examples in order to reinforce this conclusion. Metaphysicians have long debated about the possibility of change and the reality of time—and we too shall be exploring these questions in some depth in Chapters 4 and 5 . However, they are neither purely empirical nor purely logical questions. How we should conceive of time is itself a metaphysical question—a question of how, if at all, the notion of time is to be related to more fundamental metaphysical notions, including the categories. For instance, one view (the ‘Aristotelian’ view) is that time is the dimension in which alone a substance can receive contrary qualities, and this, if correct, would seem to imply at least three things: that substances must be able to persist identically through qualitative change, that there cannot be time without change, and that the unity of time rests upon the persistence of substances. Although I happen to agree with these claims, ¹⁸ I readily concede that they are controversial. But what I want to insist on just here is, first, that these issues are potentially capable of resolution through rational debate, and, secondly, that the kind of argument involved in such debate is distinctly metaphysical. Showing that time is metaphysically possible is not just a matter of demonstrating the logical (p.13)consistency of temporal discourse—by, for example, rebutting McTaggart's arguments to the contrary¹⁹ —nor is it simply a matter of formulating a consistent physical theory of time, along the lines of, say, Einstein's special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory makes certain fundamental claims about time—for instance, that simultaneity is relative and that the velocity of light cannot be surpassed—but that it does indeed concern time, and that in having such a concern it concerns something whose reality ispossible, are metaphysical questions which no merely scientific theory of this sort can settle.

While on the subject of time and change, here is one final, and quite specific, example which will serve to illustrate my general point. The example concerns the ‘possibility’ of one thing's becoming two, without thereby ceasing to exist—the intended implication being that in such a situation we would supposedly have, at a later time, two numerically distinct things which were formerly numerically identical. Although, very arguably, one can describe such a situation without logical contradiction, metaphysical reasoning appears to rule it out, on the grounds that no change in the objects concerned could occur at an appropriate time to effect their separation. (We are assuming, then, that the separation could not simply occur uncaused—itself a metaphysical assumption.) For if the putatively effective change were to occur prior to the supposed separation, it would be too early—since then it would have to affect both of the supposed objects in exactly the same way, they being, ex hypothesi, identical at that time. On the other hand, if the change were to occur subsequently to the supposed separation, it would obviously occur too late to have caused it, barring the possibility of backward causation. (This is not, of course, to deny that one thing can become two new things by ceasing to exist, nor that one thing can continue to exist while giving birth to another, as in ordinary cases of division or fission: it is only to deny that two things which, allegedly, were formerly one and the same can have been made to become separate and thereby non‐identical.)

4. The Nature of Metaphysical Necessity

The time has now come for me to present a more rigorous characterization of metaphysical possibility than is provided by the illustrative examples supplied above. Of course, notions of possibility and necessity are interdefinable. With that in mind, I shall approach the task in hand via (p.14) the notion of metaphysical necessity. Here, then, is the question that I should like to focus on for the time being: what exactly is logical necessity and how, if at all, does it differ from metaphysical necessity? For so far I have been implying that metaphysical necessity is quite distinct from logical necessity—and, indeed, in an important sense I think that this is true—but, at the same time, I must now acknowledge that there is one perfectly acceptable conception of ‘logical’ necessity which represents it as either coinciding with or embracing metaphysical necessity. It will be seen, however, that this acknowledgement does not in any way undermine the general thrust of my remarks in the previous section.

In the previous section I was content to characterize logical possibility somewhat vaguely in terms of compliance with the laws of logic, with logical necessity understood correspondingly. But in fact one can distinguish three different grades of logical necessity, as follows. First there is the strictly logically necessary—that which is true in virtue of the laws of logic alone. Secondly there is the narrowlylogically necessary—that which is true in virtue of the laws of logic together with definitions of non‐logical terms. And thirdly there is the broadly logically necessary—that which is true in every logically possible world, that is, in every possible world in which the laws of logic hold true. Now, one might very reasonably contend that this last grade of logical necessity is in fact coextensive withmetaphysical necessity—indeed, that these are just two different names for the same thing. In characterizing ‘broadly’ logical necessity in this way and associating it with the notion of metaphysical necessity, I am just following in an already well‐established tradition ²⁰ —although I am sensible of the danger that this tradition may lead incautious philosophers to overlook the very division between logic and metaphysics which I was concerned to identify in the previous section. Some philosophers, of course, also speak of ‘conceptual’ necessity as being synonymous with some kind of logical necessity. I can agree with this, so long as the conceptually necessary is identified with what I have just called thenarrowly logically necessary. For I take it that the ‘conceptually’ necessary is that which is true solely in virtue of concepts together with the laws of logic.

Of course, what the laws of logic are is a matter for dispute, but we need not go into that here. There are some fairly uncontroversial candidates, such as the law of non‐contradiction: for any proposition P, it is not the case both that P and that not‐P. Thus, ‘It is not the case both that Ferdy (p.15) is a female fox and that Ferdy is not a female fox’ is strictly logically necessary, because it is an instance of that law. By contrast, ‘It is not the case both that Ferdy is a vixen and that Ferdy is not a female fox’ is onlynarrowly logically necessary, in my terms, because it can only be turned into an instance of that law by drawing on the definition of ‘vixen’, which is a non‐logical term. (What is a logical term is, of course, once again open to dispute, but no sensible account will treat ‘vixen’ as a logical term.)

What about an example of broadly logical necessity—more specifically, an example of such a necessity which is not also either a strictly or a narrowly logical necessity? A well‐known and plausible candidate would be ‘Water is H2O’. It may be objected that this proposition cannot be true in every logically possible world, because water does not exist in every such world. However, this difficulty can be circumvented fairly easily, in one way or another: for instance, one can distinguish between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ necessity, saying that a proposition is weakly necessary (in the broadly logical sense) just in case it is true in every logically possible world in which its referring expressions are non‐empty. Then, assuming that ‘Water is H2O’ is to be analysed as an identity statement flanked by two referring expressions or names, it will turn out to be only weakly necessary (in the broadly logical sense). Notice, though, that if ‘Water is H2O’ is analysed instead as meaning ‘For any x, x is water if and only if xis H2O’, the difficulty goes away by itself, because ‘Water is H2O’ then turns out to be vacuously true in all worlds in which water doesn't exist (that is, in which nothing is water and in which, by the same token, nothing is H2O). What is crucial, however, is that it is not in virtue of the laws of logic plus definitions alone that ‘Water is H2O’ is true in all logically possible worlds (or, alternatively, in all such worlds in which its referring expressions are non‐empty)—and so it is neither strictly nor narrowly logically necessary, as I use these terms. Other possible candidates for the status of broadly logically necessary truths which are neither strictly nor narrowly logically necessary would be ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, ‘God exists’, ‘Nothing is both red and green all over at the same time’, and ‘This pain is mine’.

So, in virtue of what is ‘Water is H2O’ broadly logically necessary? Why, in virtue of the nature of water! Not, thus, in virtue of the laws of logic together with the concepts or definitions of water and H2O. It seems perfectly appropriate, then, to call this kind of necessity metaphysical necessity, since its ground is ontological rather than formal or conceptual. This might be a reason, indeed, for reserving the term ‘metaphysical necessity’ for those broadly logical necessities which are not also narrowly or strictly logically necessary. We could then also legitimately say, as many philosophers do, that it is a frequent (though not necessarily universal) feature of (p.16) metaphysical necessities that they are not knowable a priori—in contrast with strictly and narrowly logical necessities, which characteristically are knowable a priori. However, these epistemological and semantic matters are not our real focus of concern just here. Whether to define ‘metaphysical necessity’ as synonymous with ‘broadly logical necessity’ or as synonymous with ‘broadly logical necessity which is neither strictly nor narrowly logical necessity’ is ultimately just a matter for decision. Either definition will do, provided we stick to it. However, for the sake of simplicity and out of respect for the usage of other philosophers, I shall adopt the first option. But I should just emphasize that although I happily concede that the metaphysical necessity of a proposition such as ‘Water is H2O’ (or of the state of affairs which that proposition represents) is not knowable a priori—because it rests upon the nature of water, which is not thus knowable—I still want to insist that, as I put it in the previous section, experience alone cannot determine what is actual, in the absence of a metaphysical delimitation of the possible. Typically, such a delimitation will appeal to the metaphysical categories, which are indeed knowable purely a priori, unlike natural kinds such as water. (This is a point which I shall develop in much greater detail in Chapter 8 .)

5. Hale's Dilemma

It has to be acknowledged that not all philosophers are happy with the notion of metaphysical necessity. Thus, in a recent paper, Bob Hale presents what appears to be a serious dilemma for the friends of metaphysical necessity, based on an appeal to what he calls the generalized form of McFetridge's Thesis, that is, the thesis that if it is logically necessary that P, then there is no sense of ‘possible’ in which not‐P is possible. ²¹ Hale sees the dilemma as arising as follows:

the argument for McFetridge's Thesis, if sound, does establish that if it is logically necessary thatp, then it is in no sense possible that not‐p, and so, in particular, that it is not metaphysically possible that not‐p, i.e. that it is metaphysically necessary that p. But then either the converse entailment holds quite generally, or it does not. If not, then it can be metaphysically necessary that p but logically possible that not‐p, so that metaphysical necessity is not, after all, absolute. If, on the other hand, whatever is metaphysically necessary is also logically necessary, then even if we have two notionally distinct kinds of necessity, both of them absolute, (p.17) they coincide in extension. Neither alternative is—or so it seems—congenial to the friends of metaphysical necessity. (p. 98)

However, setting aside the question of the soundness of Hale's argument for McFetridge's Thesis, I should like to query his reasons for thinking that each of the horns of the supposed dilemma should be uncongenial to the friends of metaphysical necessity. At the root of my objections is a dissatisfaction with Hale's conception of logical necessity.

Hale seems to be following orthodoxy in distinguishing between two kinds of logical necessity: ‘narrowly or strictly logical necessity’ and ‘broadly logical necessity’:

We may distinguish between narrowly or strictly logical necessity and broadly logical necessity; I take the former to be a special case of the latter, and make no distinction between [the latter] and conceptual necessity. Hereafter, when I speak of logical necessity without further qualification, it is broadly logical necessity that I intend. (p. 94)

However, while this terminology is familiar, Hale's interpretation of it is idiosyncratic. For Hale, as we see, quite explicitly identifies ‘broadly logical necessity’ with ‘conceptual necessity’, whereas the orthodox tradition—exemplified by Plantinga and Forbes and by myself in the previous section—understands ‘broadly logical necessity’ to mean ‘truth in all logically possible worlds’: and the lattercannot be identified with ‘conceptual necessity’ because it is not, as a perfectly general rule, knowable a priori. Indeed, according to the tradition, as I understand it, ‘metaphysical necessity’ just is ‘broadly logical necessity’ as just defined, or at least is a sub‐category of the latter. Hale himself remarks, at one point, that

supposedly metaphysically necessary truths are typically held to be knowable only a posteriori, while [broadly] logical necessities are . . . knowable a priori—so there cannot, on pain of contradiction, be extensional coincidence [between them]. (pp. 98–9)

And this is more or less correct—on his understanding of the notion of broadly logical necessity. But it is not correct if, as the orthodox tradition has it, broadly logical necessity is identified with truth in all logically possible worlds.

Now let us see how these considerations affect the cogency of Hale's attack on the notion of metaphysical necessity. I shall set aside any doubts about his argument for McFetridge's Thesis, because I accept that, on his understanding of what constitutes ‘broadly logical necessity’, the thesis is nearly enough correct. I shall focus, then, on the dilemma that this is supposed to create for the friends of metaphysical necessity. The first horn of the dilemma is supposed to arise if the metaphysician allows that it can be (p.18) metaphysically necessary that P and yet logically possible that not‐P—for then, Hale says, it must be conceded that metaphysical necessity is not ‘absolute’ but ‘relative’. Now, whether the metaphysician should indeed allow this depends on whether we understand the notion of ‘broadly logical possibility’ in Hale's sense or in the orthodox sense, that is, as being equivalent to conceptual possibility or as being equivalent to truth in some logically possible world. But, setting that matter aside for the moment, what is supposed to be the problem, for the friends of metaphysical necessity, about conceding that metaphysical necessity is not ‘absolute’ but ‘relative’, in Hale's terms?

At this point we need to understand exactly what Hale means by ‘relative’ necessity. This is what he says:

By saying that a notion of necessity—φ‐necessity—is relative I mean that there is some body of statements Φ such that to claim that it is φ‐necessary that p is to claim no more and no less than that it is a logical consequence of Φ that p. (p. 93)

According to Hale, then, the metaphysician who concedes that metaphysical necessity is relative must concede that to claim that it is metaphysically necessary that P is to claim no more and no less than that, for some body of statements M, it is a logical consequence of M that P. But why should this not be congenial to the friends of metaphysical necessity? I see no harm whatever in conceding the point in question. No doubt there is some set of true statements or propositions M—roughly, the ones that characterize the ‘natures’ of all the entities that populate the world—such that every metaphysically necessary statement or proposition P is a logical consequence of M (that is, could be deduced from M). Thus ‘Water is H2O’ would be a consequence of M, in virtue of M's including a characterization of the nature of water. Of course, in this case, at least, the consequence is a trivial one, since the best way to characterize the nature of water is in terms of the very proposition in question, ‘Water is H2O’. However, we should not be tempted to think that any of this implies that metaphysical necessity has a status akin to, say, that of physical necessity. For—by my account, at least—every statement in M will itself express a broadly logical necessity, that is, will be true in every logically possible world. So it is not as though we are saying that ‘It is metaphysically necessary that P’ is analysable as meaning, ordefinitionally equivalent to, ‘P is a consequence of M’ (where M is defined as being something like the set of all truths about the natures of all entities). For we cannot define the notion of something's ‘nature’ independently of the notion of metaphysical necessity. (Moreover, we already have a definition of ‘metaphysical necessity’, in terms of truth in all logically possible worlds, and this definition doesn't mention ‘natures’. Of course, it may be debated how illuminating (p.19) our definition ultimately is—and that will depend on how illuminating one takes talk about ‘possible worlds’ to be. I shall not, however, pursue that issue just now, though we shall return to questions concerning possible worlds in later chapters.)

So what I want to say is that the friends of metaphysical necessity can quite happily concede that, technically speaking, metaphysical necessity qualifies as a species of ‘relative’ necessity, in Hale's terms. Here I observe that, concerning the ‘relativity’ of ‘relative’ necessity, Hale remarks:

The relativity of φ‐necessity consists in the fact that, whilst no φ‐necessary statement can be false, provided that all the members of Φ are true, it is not excluded that there are other senses of ‘possible’ in which the members of Φ may be false. (p. 93)

But, whereas in the case of physical necessity it is clear that members of the relevant set Φ may be false in some logically possible worlds, this is not so, by my account, in the case of metaphysical necessity. Metaphysical necessity, by my account, is as ‘hard’ as any kind of necessity could be.

Why, however, does Hale think that conceding the relativity of metaphysical necessity should be uncongenial to the friends of metaphysical necessity? For the following reason:

To accept that metaphysical necessity is not absolute is to acknowledge that while it is, say, metaphysically necessary that heat is mean kinetic energy of molecules, there are possible worlds—logically possible worlds—in which this is not so [and yet] . . . what the metaphysicians wanted to maintain is that, given that heat is mean kinetic energy of molecules, there are no possible worlds in which heat is not so constituted (p. 98)

What Hale is saying here is that if metaphysical necessity is not ‘absolute’, then it can be metaphysically necessary that P and yet still be the case that not‐P is true in some logically possible world. But Hale is not at all entitled to claim this, given that what he means by ‘broadly logical possibility’ is conceptual possibility, rather than (as the orthodox tradition has it) truth in some logically possible world. All that Hale is entitled to claim, on his own terms, is that if metaphysical necessity is not ‘absolute’, then it can be metaphysically necessary that P and yet still be the case that not‐P is conceptually possible. But to concede the latter should be by no means uncongenial to the friends of metaphysical necessity. For instance, they should quite happily allow that, while it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O, it is none the less conceptually possible that water is not H2O—for the very point that the metaphysicians want to make is that the necessity of that identity is grounded in the nature of water rather than in ourconcepts of ‘water’ and ‘H2O’.

Having disarmed the first horn of Hale's supposed dilemma, let us turn (p.20) to the second, which is supposed to arise if the metaphysician contends that logical and metaphysical necessity are extensionally coincident. What is supposed to be the problem in this case? This is what Hale says:

accepting that metaphysical and logical necessity are extensionally coincident is scarcely less unattractive. How could it be held that e.g. the identity of heat with mean kinetic energy of molecules is logically necessary? Furthermore, such supposedly metaphysically necessary truths are typically held to be knowable only a posteriori, while logical necessities are . . . knowable a priori—so there cannot, on pain of contradiction, be extensional coincidence. (pp. 98–9)

Once again we have a ready answer to Hale's worries. Certainly, the metaphysician should not concede that metaphysical necessity coincides with what Hale calls ‘broadly logical necessity’, that is, withconceptual necessity, but he can happily allow that it coincides with what the orthodox tradition understands by ‘broadly logical necessity’, namely, truth in all logically possible worlds—for, as I pointed out earlier, the latter is not, as a perfectly general rule, knowable a priori.

To conclude: I do not believe that Hale's arguments pose any real threat to the friends of metaphysical necessity. McFetridge's Thesis is correct (or nearly enough so), but innocuous, if construed as a thesis concerning conceptual necessity. The metaphysician should be prepared to agree that metaphysical necessity is not ‘absolute’, in Hale's terms, in as much as it can be metaphysically necessary that P and yet conceptually possible that not‐P. But this doesn't imply that the metaphysician must agree that it can be metaphysically necessary that P and yet not‐P be true in some logically possible world. For what is crucially overlooked by Hale is the fact that to say that not‐P is conceptually possible is not equivalent to saying that not‐P is true in some logically possible world. In a perfectly good sense, then, metaphysical necessity is ‘absolute’—namely, in the sense that if P is metaphysically necessary, there is no logically possible world (and so no world whatever) in which not‐P is true.

Our original question (first posed in section 4 ) was: what is logical necessity and how, if at all, does it differ from metaphysical necessity? My answer is: the term ‘logical necessity’ is multiply (three‐way) ambiguous and in one, but only one, of its senses can it be said to coincide in meaning with the term ‘metaphysical necessity’. A proposition is necessary in this sense just in case it is true in every logically possible world, that is, in every world in which the laws of logic hold true. This is, in a perfectly good sense, as ‘hard’ a kind of necessity as there can be—even though it is consistent with saying that a proposition P is necessary in this sense to say that not‐P is none the less possible in another sense, namely, in the sense that the truth of not‐P is not ruled out by the laws of logic together with any (p.21)non‐logical concepts which P involves. This kind of necessity is not, in many cases, knowable a priori, precisely because it is not, in many cases, grounded in logic and concepts but, rather, in the ‘natures’ of things.

6. Logic and Metaphysics

I say above that P is ‘strictly’ logically necessary just in case P is true ‘in virtue of the laws of logic alone’. However, this may seem to raise the spectre of a regress problem of the kind which Hale himself investigates towards the end of his paper. To say that P is true in virtue of the laws of logic alone is, seemingly, to say that P either is a law of logic itself, or else follows from—is a logical consequence of—such laws. But, in the latter case, what about the status of the proposition stating that P is a logical consequence of the laws? Should we regard that proposition, too, as being strictly logically necessary? If so, then we must say either that that proposition is itself one of the laws, or else that it is a consequence of those laws. And in the latter case, we shall then have to consider the yet further proposition that the proposition in question is a consequence of the laws—and so it goes on.

Is there really a problem lurking here? Let us consider a specific case of a strictly logically necessary proposition, such as ‘It is not the case both that Ferdy is a female fox and that Ferdy is not a female fox’. This is not itself a law of logic, because it contains non‐logical terms. But it is a logical consequence—because it is an instance—of the logical law of non‐contradiction: ‘For any proposition P, it is not the case both that P and that not‐P’. What we then have to consider is the status of the further proposition: ‘The proposition that it is not the case both that Ferdy is a female fox and that Ferdy is not a female fox is an instance of the logical law that for any proposition P, it is not the case both that P and that not‐P’. Call this proposition ‘X’. Ought we to say that X, like the two propositions to which it refers, is strictly logically necessary? Clearly, X is not itself a law of logic. So is it then a logical consequence of the laws of logic—and if so, what are the relevant laws? The answer seems to be that we would do well not to look for such laws, because even if we found some, a structurally similar problem would arise one level up.

But what makes X true, and necessarily so, if it is not strictly logically necessary? Well, what Xexpresses is a relationship between certain propositions, that is, between certain abstract entities which exist in every possible world. And that relationship obtains in every logically possible world, so that X is broadly logically necessary. Isn't that enough? Strictly logically necessary propositions are ones that are true in virtue of the laws (p.22) of logic alone—and sometimes this is a matter of the propositions in question being logical consequences of those laws: but true propositions stating the existence of logical consequence relations between other propositions are only broadly logically necessary—they express metaphysical necessities. The lesson would seem to be that logic, in the strict sense, is undergirded by metaphysics—as indeed is every other intellectual discipline. This serves to reinforce our earlier conclusion that logic by itself cannot be called upon to do the work of metaphysics.

7. Metaphysics, Actuality, and Experience

Having now explained why I hold that the realm of metaphysical possibility constitutes a distinct arena of rational inquiry, I want to return to the issue of what metaphysics can tell us about reality. I have suggested that metaphysics by itself can only tell us what is metaphysically possible, not which of various alternative metaphysical possibilities actually obtains. But this claim clearly needs some refinement. First, it would be unwise to rule out altogether the possibility of metaphysics by itself (or at most in conjunction with logic) establishing the existence of some metaphysically necessary states of affairs. Indeed, it would seem incoherent to attempt to rule this out, given that one can establish that some states of affairs are not metaphysically possible, by deriving a contradiction from the supposition that they are: for to establish, thus, that it is not metaphysically possible for S to exist is to establish that it is metaphysically necessary for S not to exist. However, what can be established by such purely logical means will not be a substantive metaphysical necessity, but rather just a logical impossibility (in the strict or narrow sense). A substantive metaphysical necessity, such as the necessary existence of God or of time, would be very much harder to establish. Second, the conclusions of metaphysical arguments will often have the form of conditional statements, which are themselves shown by such arguments to be unconditionally true. For instance, such a conclusion might be that if time is real, thensome persisting substance must exist. The fact that metaphysics often delivers conclusions of this form in no way conflicts with the claim that the primary object of metaphysics is to establish the metaphysical possibility of various states of affairs and that it does not, in general, tell us by itself that such‐and‐such a state of affairs actually obtains. Indeed, establishing the possibility of a state of affairs is often done precisely by showing that it necessarily would obtain if some other state of affairs, which has already been shown to be possible, were to obtain.

How, then, are we to form rational judgements as to which of various (p.23) metaphysically possible alternatives do actually obtain? In a word: by experience. Knowing how the world could be in respect of its fundamental structure, we must judge as best we can how it is by determining how well our experience can be accommodated with this or that alternative metaphysical possibility as regards that structure. ²² This may appear to give metaphysical theorizing a status similar to that of scientific theorizing, but the similarity is only superficial. A judgement that the world actually exhibits a given metaphysical feature—for instance, that it contains substances or that time is real—will indeed be an a posteriori judgement, being responsive to the evidence of experience. But the content of the judgement still retains its modal character as expressing a genuine metaphysical possibility, albeit one judged now to be actualized. This view of the epistemological status of metaphysical claims, as being at once a posteriori and modal, is obviously akin to the view commonly associated with Kripke. He claims, for instance, that some truths of identity and constitution are metaphysically necessary and yet knowable only a posteriori. ²³ What can be known a priori, according to Kripke, is only that if an identity between objects a and b obtains, then it obtains of metaphysical necessity—but that it obtains can only be known a posteriori. As it happens, I am not entirely convinced by this particular Kripkean claim—or, at least, by his argument for it—nor by his connected claim that the original constitution of an object is metaphysically necessary. ²⁴ But I wholeheartedly endorse his insight that metaphysics can at once be concerned with modal truths and yet deliver answers to questions about actuality which are, and have to be, a posteriori in character.

Kant, of course, thought otherwise. He thought that to the extent that metaphysics can tell us anything about actuality, it must issue in a priori judgements. It must tell us, independently of any recourse to the evidence of experience, that the world must be thus‐and‐so. And its deliverances must not be mere analytic truths, which would reveal only logical connections between certain of our concepts, without any guarantee of those concepts answering to reality. It must then deliver a priori, substantive, and necessary truths—a tall order. No wonder that Kant concluded that (p.24) the ‘actual’ world of which metaphysics speaks can only be the phenomenal world as humanly experienced, not reality ‘as it is in itself’. But if we give up the vain hope that metaphysics can provide absolutely certain and unalterable insights into the fundamental nature of things, we can retain the conviction that metaphysics itself is a viable a priori discipline, and moreover one which deals in real possibilities—that is, possibilities for reality ‘as it is in itself’.

Kant would object here that the ‘categories’ are only capable of legitimate employment when restricted to objects in space and time, which he regarded as phenomenal. But such a restriction is wholly unwarranted and the attempt to impose it leads Kant into self‐contradiction. Whether space and time are ‘phenomenal’, and thus not features of reality independently of the way in which we experience it, is itself an important metaphysical question—so that, to the extent that Kant himself attempts to offer a reasoned answer to this question, he cannot consistently claim that metaphysics is or should be concerned only with how things are in the phenomenal world. When we examine his arguments for the phenomenal status of space and time, we find that he says, for instance, that if space were real, it would have to be a real ‘non‐entity’, apparently because it could not be a substance nor a relation between substances. ²⁵ But this is (p.25) just a metaphysical argument: not one which I find very compelling, indeed, but still one which conforms to the conception of metaphysics which I have been defending. And the telling point is that it does not respect the official Kantian restriction to speak only of objects in the phenomenal world of human experience. (How could it respect that restriction, given that it is an argument for the phenomenal status of that world?) It is indeed possible that space and time are ‘unreal’, in the sense that our best judgement as to how in actuality reality is fundamentally structured will not find an application for these notions. But if so, that judgement will have been arrived at in part through metaphysical argument in which the categories (not precisely Kant's categories, of course) have been deployed in a way unhampered by Kant's attempted restriction.

The question remains as to precisely how, on my view, experience may enable us to advance from a judgement of metaphysical possibility to a claim that such a possibility is actualized. But there is no general algorithm to be discovered here. Each case must be assessed individually, on its merits. This is one reason why the Dummettian vision of resolving the outstanding problems of metaphysics by the general strategy of examining the applicability of the bivalence principle seems somewhat facile. The sorts of empirical consideration which will bear on the question of whether time is real, and the way in which they will bear upon it, can be expected to have little similarity with the corresponding issues to do with the question of whether the self is real, for instance. However, a simple example will illustrate how, in a particular case, empirical considerations can interact with a priori metaphysical argument to motivate a claim about actuality.

Consider, as a case study, David Lewis's claim that persisting objects perdure rather than endure—that is, that they persist by virtue of having successive temporal parts at successive moments of time. He argues for this on the grounds, inter alia, that only thus can we explain the possibility of such objects undergoing intrinsic change, that is, undergoing a change of their intrinsic or non‐relational properties, such as a change (p.26) from possessing a bent shape to possessing a straight shape. ²⁶Lewis holds that it is different temporal parts of the persisting object which must possess the different shapes, so that the persisting object only possesses them derivatively, by virtue of consisting of a succession of such parts some of which possess different shapes. To this it may be replied that if all objects capable of undergoing intrinsic change are ultimately composed of intrinsically unchanging objects—‘atoms’ of some sort—upon whose properties the properties of those changeable objects supervene, then we need not after all suppose that any persisting objects have temporal parts. ²⁷ The atoms need not have, because, ex hypothesi, they do not undergo intrinsic change. Nor need the intrinsically changeable objects which are composed by the atoms, because on the proposed account an intrinsic change in the properties of a composite object is ultimately just a change in the relations between its atomic constituents. Now, whether one is convinced by this reply is not relevant here (though we shall be looking into the issue much more deeply in Chapter 5 ). What is of interest now is that it presents us with an opportunity to combine metaphysical argument with empirical scientific theory in order to reach a judgement as to whether or not a certain metaphysical view is plausibly true in actuality—in this case, the view that persisting objects have temporal parts. If the metaphysical argument just given is sound and it is also the case that empirical science gives us good reason to believe that atomism (in some appropriate form) is correct, then we shall have grounds—partly a posteriori ones—for claiming that persisting objects do not in fact have temporal parts.

Oddly enough, many philosophers feel distinctly uneasy about combining empirical and metaphysical considerations in this way: they make remarks about the dangers of ‘giving hostages to fortune’—that is, opening oneself up to the possibility that one's claims about the metaphysical features of actuality will be undermined by developments in empirical scientific theory. This, I think, can only be because they still hanker after the impossible ‘rationalist’ dream of being able to determine the fundamental structure of reality wholly a priori and with absolute certainty. Kant taught us that this is indeed a dream. But, regrettably, rather than continuing to trade in reality, he opted for the comforts of certainty and empirical inviolability. The message that I have been trying to convey in (p.27) this chapter—and hope to reinforce throughout the book—is that metaphysics can indeed be about reality, and can avoid collapse into empirical scientific theory, provided we can learn to be content with the fact that, as far as actuality is concerned, metaphysics cannot provide us with certainties.

Notes:

(1) See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929 ), B 22.

(2) See W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in his From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961 ).

(3) See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 ).

(4) By implication, I mean here to challenge both P. F. Strawson's distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’ metaphysics and his rejection of the latter: see his Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959 ), 9 ff.

(5) I do not share Donald Davidson's scepticism about this, as expressed in ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’: see his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984 ).

(6) See Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London: Duckworth, 1991 ), Introduction.

(7) See Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993 ), ch. 13.

(8) See Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1981 ), ch. 4. See also Crispin Wright, Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983 ), 53 ff., and Bob Hale, Abstract Objects (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 ), ch. 2.

(9) I explain this more fully in my ‘Objects and Criteria of Identity’, in Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997 ), and in Chapter 2 below.

(10) I have in mind here what W. V. Quine says in ‘Speaking of Objects’ and ‘Ontological Relativity’: see his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969 ).

(11) I examine various definitions along these lines in my ‘Ontological Dependency’, Philosophical Papers, 23 ( 1994 ), 31–48, and in Chapter 6 below.

(12) Compare Barry Smith, ‘Logic, Form and Matter’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 55 ( 1981 ), 47–63.

(13) See Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956 ). For criticism of Whorf's view, see Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny, Language and Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 ), chs. 10 and 12 .

(14) See Gareth Evans, ‘Can There Be Vague Objects?’, Analysis, 38 ( 1978 ), 208.

(15) See my ‘Vague Identity and Quantum Indeterminacy’, Analysis, 54 ( 1994 ), 110–14, and also Chapter 3 below.

(16) See also my ‘The Metaphysics of Abstract Objects’, Journal of Philosophy, 92 ( 1995 ), 509–204, and Chapters 2 and 3 below.

(17) See again my ‘Vague Identity and Quantum Indeterminacy’, and Chapter 3 below.

(18) See my ‘Substance, Identity and Time’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 62 (1988 ), 61–78, and Chapter 5 below.

(19) See my ‘The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time’, Mind, 96 ( 1987 ), 62–70, and Chapter 4 below.

(20) See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 ), 2, and Graeme Forbes, The Metaphysics of Modality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985 ), 2. As we shall shortly see, however, some philosophers—such as Bob Hale, in a paper to be discussed in the nextsection—do not follow in this tradition.

(21) See Bob Hale, ‘Absolute Necessities’, in James E. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 10:Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 ), 98. See also Ian McFetridge, ‘Logical Necessity: Some Issues’, in his Logical Necessity and Other Essays (London: Aristotelian Society, 1990 ).

(22) Here it may be objected that circularity—or at least relativism—is threatened by my concomitant claim that experience itself is, as it were, metaphysically laden. But in fact this need no more create a problem than does the theory‐laden nature of observation in the case of empirical scientific theory. At most, all that needs to be abandoned is any simple‐minded foundationalism in either realm of inquiry, and an acceptance of some form of fallibilism.

(23) See Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 97 ff.

(24) See my ‘On the Alleged Necessity of True Identity Statements’, Mind, 91 ( 1982 ), 579–84.

(25) See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 39–40, B 56–7. That such a ‘non‐entity’ [Unding] cannot exist in reality is, of course, itself a metaphysical claim, whose truth requires to be established for the success of Kant's argument. The relevant passage of the Critique reads, in Kemp Smith's translation, as follows: ‘Those . . . who maintain the absolute reality of space and time, whether as subsistent or only as inherent . . . [either] have to admit two eternal and infinite self‐subsistent non‐entities (space and time), which are there (yet without there being anything real) only in order to contain in themselves all that is real [zwei ewige und unendliche für sich bestehende Undinge (Raum und Zeit) . . . welche dasind (ohne dass doch etwas Wirkliches ist), nur um alles Wirkliche in sich zu befassen] . . . [or] are obliged to deny that a priori mathematical doctrines have any validity in respect of real things (for instance, in space).’

Kant's targets are, of course, the views of Newton and Leibniz respectively. His objection here to the relational theory of space presupposes the correctness of his view that geometrical truths have an a priori synthetic status—a view which can no longer be taken seriously. But even if that view of geometry were correct, it cannot be valid to argue for the phenomenal status of space on such purely epistemological grounds; one must in addition at least establish that it is impossible for us to have substantive a priori knowledge of a mind‐independent reality, and this is a metaphysical claim. Elsewhere, of course, Kant uses the argument from incongruent counterparts against the relational theory, though this is, once again, a straightforwardly metaphysical argument in my sense. (See, especially, Kant's pre‐critical work, Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Regions in Space, in Kant: Selected Pre‐Critical Writings, trans. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968 .)

I have, incidentally, included the original German at one point in my quotation above from theCritique, where Kemp Smith's translation is not entirely perspicuous. By wirklich I take Kant to mean here not just ‘real’ in the sense of being objectively existent, for that would make his relative clause [welche dasind (ohne dass doch etwas Wirkliches ist)] express something little short of a contradiction. (There can't be something ‘there’—not even a ‘non‐entity’—without there being something existent.) Thus—here, at least—I take Kant to mean, by wirklich, ‘real’ in a more substantial sense, perhaps one which implies being efficacious (wirksam, in German). It is, of course, a familiar complaint against the Newtonian conception of absolute space that it is hard to see how the existence of space thus conceived could make any difference to the behaviour of physical things. (This, again, is a metaphysical point.) For a related discussion of Frege's use of the word wirklich, see Michael Dummett,Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London: Duckworth, 1991 ), 80–1.

(26) See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 ), 202 ff.

(27) See further my ‘Lewis on Perdurance versus Endurance’, Analysis, 47 ( 1987 ), 152–4, my ‘The Problems of Intrinsic Change: Rejoinder to Lewis’, Analysis, 48 ( 1988 ), 72–7, and Chapter 5 below.