Showing papers in "Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume in 1977"

Riddles and Anselm's Riddle

Abstract: By "look", Wittgenstein meant "look with a systematic method". The interesting questions in mathematics don't have such methods of solution. Are they then not questions? They are spurs to mathematical activity, stimuli for the mathematical imagination. (Z 696-7). Trying to solve them is like trying to move one's ears when one has never done so, like trying to unravel a knot which one doesn't even know is actually a knot-and setting someone such a problem is like asking him how white can win in twenty moves in a game whose rules have still to be invented. (PG 363, 393, PR 182-5)One can, however, say "I shall know a good solution when I see it"-and in that respect these problems are like riddles. (L 84). They are of an utterly different sort-problems in a different sense-from those one gives a child, and for which it gets an answer according to rules it has been taught. Again Wittgenstein used the comparison with a riddle to make this clear. The ones given to the mathematician without a method of solution are

Scepticism about Scepticism

Abstract: be-like to "look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another". So, to take a mixed bag, do Sextus Empiricus, Hegel and-though with less intensity-Descartes. Many philosophers would, I think, insist that, however great the incidental, psychological interest of their reports, they are doing nothing of the kind. Their insistence could take more than one form, or at any rate more than one emphasis. Thus, they might argue than one cannot, whatever one may suppose, look upon opinions in this way, and so the matter of what it is, or would be, like to do so does not arise; or again, that the view taken, though real enough, is philosophical, metaphysical, and as such is not of a kind to be like anything, to have embodiment or practical consequences. States of mind and forms of behaviour may indeed go along with such a view, but merely by way of external accompaniment, like a background noise. Other varieties of hostile response are possible, too. These counter-responses, and what they are responses to, are at once generalizable and formulable with special reference to sceptical doubt. There is no call to restrict them to, say, the Pyrrhonian scepticism by which Hume is intermittently beset. For while there are problems and paradoxes peculiar to this or that school of philosophical scepticism, it is still possible to concern oneself with basic questions about the intelligibility of philosophical, epistemological doubt without attending to doctrinal differences. Such a concern may be gross, but that does not make it unreal. It is real because all philosophical scepticisms make presuppositions about the intelligibility of certain wholesale doubting exercises-presuppositions common to Pyrrhonian, Cartesian and Humean scepticisms, along with comparatively indeterminate sceptical postures of the sort which Moore wished to expose and refute.

The Causal Theory of Perception

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