Philosophical Investigations 29:1 January 2006 ISSN 0190-0536
REVIEWS
Tim Thornton, John McDowell, Acumen: 2004, pp vi + 261, £40.00/£14.95
Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford Although the recent publication of two volumes of collected papers has brought the main body of John McDowell’s work within easy reach, it has not simplified the task it invites – that of critically evaluating the work as a whole, particularly in the light of the possibility (signalled by his John Locke Lectures, Mind and World) that the variety of its topics concealed an underlying unity of purpose, even a single project. The first philosopher to take up this invitation was Max de Gaynesford, with his Polity volume on McDowell published last year; now Tim Thornton has entered the lists for Acumen. Thornton’s volume presents McDowell’s work as attaining a kind of culmination in Mind and World, and hence as being what he calls a philosophy of nature – a project that aims to reconcile reason and nature, the normative and the nomological, and thereby to overcome a Cartesian opposition between mind and world in favour of a postKantian conception of that world as constitutively apt for conceptualization.The final chapter of the book gives a detailed description and analysis of those lectures; and the preceding five chapters look successively at McDowell’s treatments of normativity, moral value, meaning, mind and knowledge, with a view to seeing how his specific claims about these matters at once support and are supported by the more general vision of human openness to reality that is laid out in Mind and World. On another level, however, Thornton is keen to emphasize that everything in McDowell’s philosophy of nature must be seen in the light of his essentially Wittgensteinian conception of the nature of philosophy. For McDowell’s unremitting hostility to reductive or bare © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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naturalism in whatever domain he finds it is rooted in a therapeutic conception of the philosopher’s business – one which does not aim to replace reductive naturalism with some other, better theory, but rather to identify and extirpate the mistaken or confused assumptions which lead us to think that we face difficulties of the kind which might be resolved by the construction of a theory. Thornton shows very clearly how often criticisms of McDowell fail to take this aspect of his self-conception with due seriousness, although he sometimes exhibits that same lack of seriousness himself – as when he persistently talks (‘for convenience’! [p 65]) of McDowell’s moral philosophy as ‘moral realism’, despite noting McDowell’s repeated refusal of this label. Thornton is also well aware that, if one does take this therapeutic self-conception seriously, one will be uncomfortable with the idea that McDowell might possess anything worth calling a ‘philosophy of nature’. For that sounds very much like the name for a theory, in competition with bare naturalism and rampant Platonism, and hence embodying philosophical theses about mind, meaning and reality with which others might disagree. But Thornton brings out quite forcefully the aspects of McDowell’s writings that suggest that his methodological manifesto is not always congruent with his practice. For his thinking is not only guided by his unusually wide and deep knowledge of the history of philosophy (working its way through and out of writings by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Gadamer); it is also deeply engaged with the arguments that dominate contemporary analytical philosophy of language, mind and morality. This is most clearly evident in McDowell’s long-standing efforts to make use of a Fregean conception of sense as revised in the light of (what McDowell finds in) Davidson and Evans. Thornton’s third chapter focusses on this particular aspect of his work, and he does a creditable job of showing how McDowell might at least think that his work here is genuinely therapeutic. For it presents his reading of Davidson’s project as modest in ways perhaps undreamed-of by its founder. McDowell’s Davidsonian theory of meaning not only eschews any perspective on language from the outside, and any claim to identify that in which our everyday understanding of words really consists; it also purports to illuminate the concept of meaning by taking for granted the concept of truth, but without thereby taking for granted anything philosophically controversial with respect to truth. The idea is rather that this kind of © 2006 The Authors
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Tarskian theory simply displays in formal and technical mode a range of internal relations between a number of resolutely intentional and normative concepts; it offers conceptual clarification by placing the concepts to be clarified in the broader field of their mutuallysupporting use, by which McDowell simply means human linguistic and non-linguistic activity in the world – the human form of life. It is as if Thornton sees McDowell as risking the taint of tools forged for theoretical purposes very different from his own in order to show how the deepest insights and sources of attraction in the best of contemporary philosophical theory in fact ultimately lead to the supercession or subversion of the theoretical impulse itself. To find this perception immensely helpful does not, of course, entail concluding that McDowell always comes away untainted by his tools; Thornton points out the dubiousness of his conception of the ineliminable subjectivity of secondary qualities, as that functions in his critique of Mackie’s view of ethics, although he does not underline the same difficulty in McDowell’s central invocation of an Aristotelian idea of ‘second nature’ in Mind and World. It surely needs to be shown that this idea really can be displayed as a truism about the human capacity to acquire capacities, particularly when it is associated with a strong claim about nonhuman animals’ lack of openness to the world. One might say that by giving his position the patently contradictory label of ‘Platonic naturalism’, McDowell all-butdeclares that that position is not in fact to be found on any familiar maps of the terrain, and so that it is not a position at all. The problem is that such formulations in fact all-but-ensure that he will be accused of trying (incoherently) to occupy a position that blends the virtues and expel the vices of necessarily opposed theoretical stances. Unfortunately, Thornton’s awareness of, and desire to do justice to, McDowell’s embeddedness in contemporary philosophical theorizing creates a serious obstacle for his readers. For it tempts him to sketch in complex theoretical contexts for every aspect of McDowell’s own work; and the space constraints under which he is operating make it impossible for anyone unfamiliar with (not only the general shape but in many cases also the specific details of) these contemporary debates fully to understand what is going on in them, and hence what is going on in McDowell’s response to them. This forces Thornton to leave certain fundamental issues tantalizingly under-described – for example, McDowell’s position in relation to © 2006 The Authors
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the question of whether, how and why rule-following is an inherently communal phenomenon; and it decisively restricts the audience for whom this book will be genuinely useful. Fellow-academics and graduate students will certainly be in a position to learn something; but even advanced undergraduates may find that just too much prior acquaintance with the field is being assumed. In this particular respect, I believe that de Gaynesford’s competing introduction to McDowell is superior. Without lacking any of Thornton’s detailed knowledge of these contemporary debates, he succeeds in finding a more intuitively natural point of access for his readers into the questions that preoccupy McDowell; he sketches in the relevant terrain in terms of more general theoretical tendencies rather than the detailed views of particular theorists; and, at least in my judgement, he writes with more elegance and wit. On the other hand, Thornton’s account covers the broad range of McDowell’s writings with a more even distribution of attention between its various aspects than does de Gaynesford’s; for example, Thornton devotes a full and elaborate chapter to McDowell’s work on ethics, and places it early on in his discussion so as to bring out its indebtedness to certain broader Wittgensteinian themes, whereas de Gaynesford rather rushes his treatment of that material, squeezing it into a brief chapter at the end of his account. Overall, however, both are valuable works, and will contribute to advanced debates about McDowell’s work, as well as helping students who are as yet unfamiliar with his challenging, and sometimes opaquely-formulated, but deeply stimulating and humane essays. New College Oxford OX1 3BN
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John Cook, The Undiscovered Wittgenstein:The Twentieth Century’s Most Misunderstood Philosopher, Humanity Books, 2005, 437, price $55 hb.
Ronald E. Hustwit Sr., The College of Wooster, Lt. Ronald E. Hustwit Jr., USAF The Undiscovered Wittgenstein is John Cook’s third book aimed at explaining Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The first, Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics, presented and defended Cook’s claim that, in spite of denials, Wittgenstein has a metaphysical theory – neutral monism – that he maintained early and late. The second, Wittgenstein: Language and Empiricism, elaborated and further explained Cook’s claim by asserting that Wittgenstein’s neutral monism amounts to a phenomenalism like Berkeley’s. And further, what has been read as Wittgenstein’s “ordinary language philosophy” should more accurately be called “metaphysical ordinary language philosophy,” because Wittgenstein reduces ordinary language to sense-data language, i.e. phenomenalism. Ordinary language philosophers such as Malcolm and Bouwsma misunderstood Wittgenstein to be the successor to G.E. Moore’s common sense philosophy. In doing so, they blindly followed Moore to uncritically believe that ordinary language held no metaphysical assumptions, when actually they presupposed that it reflects reality. Only Cook’s view, which he calls “investigative ordinary language philosophy,” uncovers philosophical confusions by returning words to their everyday use. This, the third book in the ongoing attempt to elucidate the misunderstood Wittgenstein, begins with the same theses about Wittgenstein: that he was a neutral monist, phenomenalist, empiricist, and behaviourist. In the first of three sections of this book, Cook presents some additional support for these theses, but does not provide much new beyond this support. He does add that Wittgenstein is a verificationalist. While that idea is consistent with his supposed empiricism, it is one more startling claim to make and defend. Cook’s claims are elaborated, defended, and supported by numerous passages from the Wittgenstein texts and by Cook’s reading of other readers of Wittgenstein. But the results are always the same – that Wittgenstein holds all these forms of empiricism. We must add that Cook seems to have worked tirelessly to make all these “isms” fit together © 2006 The Authors
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and has supported them with passages from an impressive knowledge of Wittgenstein’s texts.The support passages, however, are often taken out of context and given the oddest interpretations to make them fit Cook’s reading. The Cook theory of reading Wittgenstein looks to us like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. When a fact of what Wittgenstein said or meant does not fit with Cook’s thesis, he reads it in a way that shows how it does fit. (For a thorough examination of Cook’s ideas in Wittgenstein: Language and Empiricism, see Ronald Hustwit Jr.’s doctoral dissertation, Meaning As Use: Why Wittgenstein Is Not An Empiricist.) Having reiterated the claim that Wittgenstein is an empiricist in the first section, Cook sets out in the second section of his book to “investigate” certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s “practice” – aspects that Wittgenstein’s philosophy has raised among various readers. In each of these cases, Cook considers what other thinkers have said about Wittgenstein. Cook either cites them approvingly, if they agree with his empiricist reading or disapprovingly, if they do not. About neither group, however, does he believe that they have grasped Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism. These issues of “practice” are: unconscious thought, conceptual relativism, language-games, and objectivity in science. If one reads Wittgenstein as an empiricist, phenomenalist, etc., Cook argues, each of these difficult and misunderstood issues in Wittgenstein will become clear. The following is a brief sketch of Cook’s discussions of these issues, corresponding to the chapters in which he presents them, with occasional editorial comments: Unconscious thought. Cook takes up Wittgenstein’s interest in William James and Freud on unconscious thought. He pays particular attention to Wittgenstein’s analysis of “the word was on the tip of my tongue,” in which James too had an interest. Wittgenstein’s analysis of this expression, according to Cook, can be reduced to feelings (phenomena) and behaviour. The same is true of Wittgenstein’s analysis of Freud’s unconscious thought. Cook, however, ignores the context in which Wittgenstein’s analysis of unconscious thought takes place. Wittgenstein, in fact, takes both up as objections to his work against meaning as hidden and unspoken thoughts. In this context, his noticing, for example, that we feel as if we “know the word we can’t think of ” is done to show that an analysis can be made that does not require some hidden stream of words that parallel our spoken sentences. © 2006 The Authors
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Conceptual Relativism. Cook claims that Wittgenstein is a conceptual relativist – that members of one conceptual community cannot grasp what it is like to be a member of another conceptual community. Further, he says that this relativism is implied by Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism. Such an account of Wittgenstein is patently false and Cook’s argument for this view is impossible to follow. On the one hand, he credits Wittgenstein with saying that trees and tables are not “encountered prior to the formation of our concepts.”While not expressed clearly, this is an acceptable account of Wittgenstein. But then Cook attributes the following confused idea to Wittgenstein: “our senses are flooded with sense-data, and we, by means of the concepts we invent, organize certain collections of sense-data to suit our needs and interests.” Wittgenstein would not say such a thing. But if he had, is this evidence for his empiricism? How does it follow from his starting with sense-data that he is a conceptual relativist? The claims of the chapter are confused and unsupported. Language games. Cook interprets Wittgenstein’s “language-games” as presupposing his empiricism and behaviourism. His evidence for this is that Wittgenstein often compares human linguistic behaviour to the behaviour of animals and, further, the remark in PI § 5 where Wittgenstein says, “the teaching of language is not explanation, but training.” So, allegedly, Wittgenstein thinks that humans learn to play language-games by being trained like animals. Further, Wittgenstein often invents language-games that are not played, but might be, in order to shed light on some problem. Cook refers to them as “bizarre.” [Showing different ways of reasoning in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein invents a language-game in which people treat the same amount of wood differently because one is stacked and the other is not.] These language-games, too, are reducible to behaviourism. About this language-game Wittgenstein comments: “they go through the motions of buying and selling firewood, albeit according to a logic different from our own.” From this Cook concludes that Wittgenstein’s view of language is that speaking “involves two things: bodies making noises and the behaviour accompanying those noises.” Hence, language-games are based on behaviourism. It remains a mystery to us how someone who has read as much Wittgenstein as Cook could make such a claim. Objectivity in science. In the most interesting chapter in the book, Cook examines and objects to Wittgenstein’s “relativistic” picture of science. He focuses on remarks of Wittgenstein on causality.Wittgen© 2006 The Authors
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stein notices that science presupposes causal explanations. Scientists do this without considering what they are doing and have no grounds for doing it. Cook calls Wittgenstein’s observation about the scientist’s attitude “curious” and “optional.” He contrasts this scientific attitude with a religious attitude, which he defends over against the scientific. Wittgenstein thought that primitive religious people could be quite rational within their framework – not simply bad scientists as Frazer suggests. Cook disagrees. Primitive people can be convinced that their views are wrong (falsified by evidence) and thereby persuaded by objective standards to adopt a scientific worldview. Cook asserts that in a day when pseudo-scientific nonsense is abundant, Wittgenstein’s relativistic views are dangerous as they offer aid to the enemy. In reality, his conclusions about Wittgenstein’s relativism are themselves off the mark and dangerous. While his organization of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on causality are basically accurate, Cook’s misguided conclusions follow from the attribution of the word “optional” to Wittgenstein’s description of scientific thinking. “Optional” suggests that Wittgenstein meant that one makes a choice from several options in accepting the causal-scientific worldview, while in fact he was merely taking notice of a presupposition of the scientist’s thought. The issues of objectivism and relativism are carried over to the third main section of The Undiscovered Wittgenstein, subtitled, “Belief, Superstition, and Religion.” As the subtitle suggests to Cook explores Wittgenstein’s various remarks on religious belief. In aid of this study, he examines the work of three prominent philosophers who have made use of Wittgenstein in their work on religious belief: Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips, and O. K. Bouwsma. Each, according to Cook, suffers from a blindness to Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism, which determined the course of Wittgenstein’s thinking on religious belief and religious language. Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism, Cook says, meant that he believed in nothing beyond phenomena, hence there is no transcendent God. Religious language – the language of those who do believe in a transcendent God – is therefore the expression of an “attitude” towards life. Accordingly, religious language is specific to those communities, and idiosyncratic to them (i.e. fideism results from Wittgenstein’s views). And, though Wittgenstein claims that he discovered this by examining the use of the language of religious believers, he failed in this regard. Had he actually examined their language, he would © 2006 The Authors
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have seen that they talk of a transcendent God and His appearance in time – miracles. In his remarks on the primitive practices of people, Wittgenstein held an emotivist view rather than an instrumentalist view. Cook means that Wittgenstein did not understand those primitive practices as primitive science, but rather as making those who performed those practices feel good. He ascribes these views to Peter Winch as well. Cook counters this emotivist view by citing ethnologists who describe primitive peoples as instrumentalists – that primitives thought they were actually affecting changes in the natural world. Though he accuses Wittgenstein and Winch of deciding this issue a priori, we fail to see how his favouring the ethnologist’s instrumentalist account is anything other than an a priori decision itself. On the long misunderstood subject of the applicability of Wittgenstein’s language–games to religious language, Cook adds to the confusion rather than subtracting from it. He claims that Wittgenstein was wrong in his view that religious people do not have beliefs about the world. They do, and their language reflects these transcendental beliefs. Wittgenstein, Cook says, interprets religious language as merely about the believer, but if he had actually looked at their language, he would have seen that it was about a transcendent God and His presence in the world. The language of religious belief, therefore, is no different from any other language. It is intended to put forward a belief about some object and should be verified like any other language of belief. We take it that Cook’s unstated conclusion is that religious language is false or nonsense. Both Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips have recommended that we not take a realist view of religious language. If we do not take a realist view, i.e. that it refers to some real object, then we reduce it to something about the way we feel – phenomenalism. But what then becomes of the future and past tenses in religious language? – “God will do . . . and God did. . . .” The phenomenalist view then must deny that there is any meaningful use of future and past tenses in religious language. This is, according to Cook, exactly what Wittgenstein and Phillips do. And again, if they had followed Wittgenstein’s own advice and actually examined the language of religious believers, they would have given up this view. Consider the believer’s language of the last judgment – that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Wittgenstein says, according to Cook, that this is not a statement about what will happen in the © 2006 The Authors
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future. It looks like: “I believe that I will be fined, if I do not pay my taxes on April 15th,” but though it looks like this on the face of it, it is not. Cook, in contrast to Wittgenstein, believes that it is like it. Finally, Cook takes up the essays of O. K. Bouwsma on religious language. As Bouwsma involves Kierkegaard in his essays, Cook takes up Kierkegaard and Bouwsma together. Bouwsma reads Kierkegaard as returning us to “the language of scripture” to understand the philosophically absurd language of Christianity. The language of scripture becomes Wittgenstein’s ordinary language to which we must return for philosophical clarity. But Cook says of Kierkegaard too that he did not actually do this. Like Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard supposes that the ordinary language of the Bible, which seems to be temporal language, has a non-temporal meaning, hence Kierkegaard’s “Absolute Paradox.” Kierkegaard, as a result, denies that miracles are grounds for belief in God. Cook says that Bouwsma makes the same mistake: miracles can’t – logically can’t – be evidence for belief. Both Kierkegaard and Bouwsma are wrong. An actual study of biblical language shows that miracles are not merely “attention getters,” but the basis of belief for those who witness them.Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Bouwsma are wrong on this matter. Each has denied that biblical language and generally the language of believers is about the transcendent and is tensed in ordinary ways. Each has been deceived by his own respective metaphysical views to asserting that miracles are not grounds for belief in the transcendent and to denying what is plainly in front of them in the actual language of believers. (Cook: Bouwsma’s metaphysical belief is that ordinary language presents the real world.) The Undiscovered Wittgenstein, like Cook’s first two books, is a fantasy – an elaborate philosophical fantasy, created, no doubt, on the basis of an extensive reading of Wittgenstein. Armed with his fantastical theory that Wittgenstein was a neutral monist-phenomenalist, Cook, with painstaking determination, interprets every passage of Wittgenstein and of his followers as evidence for his theory. His theory, like all metaphysical theories, is irrefutable. This is the great fault of the book. One could catch Cook in contradictions – for example, how can the conceptual relativist be a neutral monist? But pointing out contradictions overlooks and excuses the great fault of the book. Cook’s book is ordinary philosophy treating Wittgenstein’s radical break with ordinary philosophy as more ordinary philosophy. © 2006 The Authors
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The ordinary philosophy Wittgenstein urges that we give up, Cook takes up. What Wittgenstein writes with practiced indirection, Cook reads as direct claims.What Wittgenstein offers as method for uncovering the hidden analogies that produce our philosophical discomfiture, Cook treats as more theory making. When Wittgenstein offers a grammatical distinction as a way of treating a philosophical malady, we are told that Wittgenstein somehow reduced grammar to phenomena, the explanation of which is never given. He leaves us with a cold, dead Wittgenstein who treated consistency flippantly. Nevertheless, we recommend this book to those serious readers who would understand Wittgenstein. There are two reasons for this commendation. The first is that if one returns to read the passages from Wittgenstein that Cook uses to support his theory, one could make progress in understanding Wittgenstein. If, that is, one can say how Cook has misunderstood Wittgenstein, one can come to understand something of Wittgenstein for oneself. Further, Cook’s misreadings of Wittgenstein are common ones. Each has been made before. But Cook is better at presenting and defending those misreadings than others. The second commendation for reading Cook’s book is that it may call attention to the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s project by providing a striking contrast to it. Cook sees Wittgenstein as presenting theories rather than as presenting a philosophical method. Cook’s reading of Wittgenstein can serve as a warning label to be attached to each of Wittgenstein’s books: “Do not read this book, as I have, as a book of theories: it may cause illusions of understanding and aspect blindness.” Ronald E. Hustwit Sr. Philosophy Department The College of Wooster Scovel Hall 944 College Mall Wooster, OH 44691
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Sara Ellenbogen, Wittgenstein’s Account of Truth, Suny Press, 2003, vii–xv + 148.
Randy Ramal, Claremont Graduate University Due to the complexity of its subject matter, this book is not easy to read and the repetitious nature of its main arguments, which is perhaps necessary for this kind of work, makes it even difficult to enjoy.Yet it is an important book in that it challenges certain dominant views of Wittgenstein’s account of truth in a sober and solicitous way. I agree with most of Ellenbogen’s logical points, especially her rebuttal of the semantic anti-realism associated with Michael Dummet and Crispin Wright. But I question her need to interpret Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘meaning is use’, ‘language-game’ and ‘form of life’ as epistemological concepts, even for the purposes of her project. Ellenbogen’s main argument is that we should reject the antirealist interpretation of Wittgenstein’s account of truth as the only viable alternative to the supposedly bankrupt realist accounts of truth. The anti-realists seek to replace the correspondence theory of truth, and any methodology that relies on truth-conditions, with a theory of meaning that defines truth on the basis of justifiable assertibility conditions.They claim that our statements do not acquire their truth-values from the way things are in the world because many of these statements, for example, those about the past and the future, or those about the mental states of other people, are beyond absolute recognition. This inability to recognize the states of affairs that guarantee the correctness of our statements, the anti-realists’ claim, justifies us in simply asserting them as true on the basis of common or public criteria of use that are defeasible in nature. Ellenbogen makes the powerful argument that the move itself to abandon the language of truth conditions in favor of assertibility conditions demonstrates the anti-realists’ commitment to a realist methodology that presupposes the correspondence theory of truth. After all, it is mainly the negative claim that we are unable to guarantee the truth of our statements in the world, that leads the anti-realists to be satisfied with assertibility conditions. For Ellenbogen, this shows both the incoherence of the anti-realist perspective © 2006 The Authors
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and its proponents’ misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘meaning is use’. Furthermore, the negative claim reveals some confusion about the use of the predicate “is true”, since the criteria we use to determine truth vary from one language-game to another, whereas the anti-realists seem to want to apply “is true” systematically across our language-games (See pp. 70–71). The criteria we use to say of a certain Jones, for example, that he is in pain, are different from those that we use to assert that the weather is about to change, but the anti-realists sublime the meaning of “is true” when they insist on one account of truth. Ellenbogen rejects the anti-realist claim that Wittgenstein himself replaces realism with an anti-realist account of truth that dispenses entirely with the discourse of truth-conditions. She believes that Wittgenstein has a third, revisionist alternative to the realistanti-realist viewpoints, and she defends a version of his account of truth according to which truth conditions are revisable, not defeasible. She argues, for example, that although Wittgenstein shares the antirealist view that if a statement ‘p’ is true it must be possible for us to know that ‘p’, he explicitly affirms that statements about the past have truth-conditions. Her explication is based on a vital distinction that she makes between truth-values and truth-conditions. The latter, she rightly claims, change whenever new and relevant factual discoveries emerge whereas the former do not change at all. For instance, the statement that the earth is flat was always false because, as we now know, the earth is round, but people were justified in believing the earth was flat because the truth-conditions that were available to them at the time allowed them to have that belief.The truth conditions that determine what truth-value people use to describe the earth, change, but the truth-value of the earth, its roundness, does not change. The distinction Ellenbogen makes between truth-values and truthconditions is quite commanding because it shows that although the way things are is independent of what we say about them, the truth itself is not semantically independent of the conditions under which we say of a statement that it is true.We do not abandon our methods of testing the truth of our statements when the truth-conditions change; we simply revise our criteria of judging the truth. For Ellenbogen, the truth-conditions are themselves determined by criteria under which we assert the truth of our sentences, and these criteria, she argues, are the variety of our language-games. She describes the notion of a language-game doubly as a criterion of knowledge © 2006 The Authors
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and as a collection of conventional rules of language (See, for example, p.106). Unfortunately, this description makes it seem as if our language-games are arbitrary and epistemic in nature, and Ellenbogen testifies at least to the latter point, albeit in a footnote (p. 117, f.n.1). Ellenbogen’s emphasis on the epistemological basis of Wittgenstein’s account of truth is very puzzling considering that she makes special use of paragraph 94 in On Certainty where Wittgenstein clearly states that our world pictures are the inherited background against which we distinguish between true and false premises.Wittgenstein is interested in the relations that logic has to both language and reality, but his interest and the relations he discusses are logical for him, not epistemological. I obviously cannot develop this theme in a book review and will refer the reader to a recent publication by Rush Rhees, edited by D. Z. Phillips.1 Rhees forcefully argues that Wittgenstein’s interest was always logical, not epistemological. It seems, however, that Ellenbogen seeks an epistemological emphasis in order to show that truth and knowledge for Wittgenstein are internally related (p. 59). She knows all too well that the temptation to think of truth as something beyond knowledge is strong, and she puts great weight on OC 378 – “knowledge is based on acknowledgment” – in order to show that what makes it correct to predicate truth of a statement does not outrun our current ways of establishing knowledge. She locates this temptation, very perceptively in my view, in the confused identification of “is true” with “is real” (p. 111). The Wittgensteinian anti-realists, she claims, including some pragmatists in this tradition, are subject to this confusion because of their implicit reliance on a realist methodology. This is particularly relevant to statements about the past and future, but also concerning other people’s experiences. For example, the anti-realists fear that if we rely on behavioural criteria to determine whether someone is really in pain rather than simply simulating pain, we would be lost. How would we really know that a person who behaves as if she is in pain is truly in pain? Yet the question itself clearly shows the tendency to conflate the logical status of ‘is true’ with that of ‘is real’, and I think Ellenbogen is right to downplay the fear that the anti-realists have about 1. Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein’s on Certainty: There – Like Our Life, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). © 2006 The Authors
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being deceived. As she argues, behavioural criteria are the symptoms of events such as having pain, not the real criteria for judging that people are in pain. We normally rely on many factors when determining whether someone is in pain, not merely the behaviour of the person involved, for example, what we know about the veracity of that person or the likelihood of deceit if there are circumstances that would make us suspicious. In other words, the criteria we use to establish truth have to be met, not simply manifested, in order for us to say of something that it is true. Furthermore, Ellenbogen rightly says, pretending to be in pain could not be the norm because we would not have had criteria for identifying pain at all if people always simulated pain (p. 87). I mentioned at the outset of this review that I agree with most of Ellenbogen’s arguments and I truly recommend this book for the reader who wants a complex and deep account of the main controversial perspectives on Wittgenstein’s account of truth. Ellenbogen also relies substantially on On Certainty and makes valuable use of Wittgenstein’s important discussion of the relation between logical and empirical propositions. I have suggested, however, that her emphasis on the need for an epistemic understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion of language-game, albeit understandable, is something that is unnecessary. I also have reservations about her understanding of the notion of ‘form of life’.When she addresses the possible charge that she might be endorsing linguistic idealism and relativism, for example, she states that her revisionist account of the truth does not entail that language creates truth or that the world picture that sets up the truth-conditions are immune from being wrong. Of course, Wittgenstein never says that language creates truth and, given Ellenbogen’s distinction between truth-values and truth-conditions, the point is well taken. However, I think that she walks on thin ice when she discusses relativism. Ellenbogen makes it clear that an entire form of life cannot be called into question at one time, but then she says that this restriction is limited to criticism from within the form of life itself. She believes that an entire form of life could be shown to be wrong when another world picture does a better job of explaining the world. I cannot see how this could make sense since, for Wittgenstein, a form of life is not a practice in a sociological, but a logical, sense. There could be no form of life for him if the possibility of error exists at the level of the entire form of life. This is not to deny © 2006 The Authors
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that certain actual practices, in the sociological sense of lived experience, may be confused but these, it seems to me, are not forms of life in the way Wittgenstein used the term. This may be a minor issue, but I think Ellenbogen could have avoided a weakness in an otherwise excellent book. 602 South College Avenue Claremont, CA 91711 USA
Hans-Johann Glock, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge University Press, 2003; xi + 311 pp. £45.00, $60.00 (hardcover).
Dale Jacquette, The Pennsylvania State University W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson have occupied a place of unparalleled influence in contemporary analytic philosophy. The impact of Quine’s Word and Object, in particular, and the essays collected in From a Logical Point of View, are still required reading for anyone interested in understanding current developments in theory of meaning and ontology. Davidson, a student of Quine’s, through an interconnected series of essays, emerged thereafter as another wing of Quine’s school, having enjoyed an almost legendary underground reputation for many previous years. Davidson’s work in action theory and philosophy of mind, and more especially his attempt to extend Alfred Tarski’s truth semantics from formal to natural languages, complemented Quine’s program, despite important differences, and cemented the Quine-Davidson vanguard as foundation stones of post-WWII American logico-linguistic philosophy. Hans-Johann Glock’s book, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality, critically examines major themes in the philosophy of these two thinkers. He focuses, as appropriate, primarily on Quine, devoting roughly two-thirds of the study to his work, and the remainder to interspersed discussions of Davidson. The book © 2006 The Authors
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begins with a short Introduction, in which Glock explains his motivations and critical orientation, and outlines the contents and conclusions of the nine chapters to follow. There are detailed treatments of the topics anyone with even a passing familiarity with Quine’s and Davidson’s ideas would naturally expect, sprinkled with a few interesting surprises. One such unusual topic is taken up in the final chapter, where Glock delves into the question of the mental states of nonhuman animals, given their apparent inability to express concepts linguistically. The problem arises naturally as a way of challenging the limited third-person perspective of Quine’s behavioristic account of stimulus-meanings and the problem of radical translation, morphed by Davidson into the problem of radical interpretation. Glock writes lucidly and entertainingly. His arguments are penetrating and deserving of serious reflection, and he has an enviable talent for bringing together the disparate elements of these philosophers’ standpoints on various issues to make them understandable as a target of criticism. Glock begins with a comparative discussion of Quine and Davidson’s philosophies as a convergent product of logical positivism, especially through the writings of Rudolf Carnap, and American pragmatism from the standpoint of William James and C. S. Peirce. Glock attacks Quine’s syntactical criterion of ontological commitment as irreducibly intensional, and hence at odds with Quine’s preference for a purely extensional semantics. He offers a close reading of Quine’s efforts to dissolve the analytic-synthetic distinction in the latter’s landmark essay, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, arguing that Quine’s early attack on analyticity is the source of his longstanding naturalism in epistemology and ontology. He criticizes Davidson’s efforts to make Tarski’s concept of truth in closed formal languages the basis for a theory of meaning in open natural languages, leading to Davidson’s more recent declaration that the concept of truth is so basic as to be indefinable. The problem of radical translation in Quine’s philosophy and of radical interpretation in Davidson is examined by Glock in three extensive chapters. Quine introduces radical translation as a way of undermining intensional entities in the theory of meaning, but Glock argues that the behavioristic model of radical translation is unsuited for this task, as the actual practice of field linguistics effectively demonstrates. He concludes that the need to make anthropological assumptions in any radical translation or interpretation scenario invalidates the purely behavioristic assumptions of Quine’s thought experiment and the © 2006 The Authors
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restriction to purely physical data in Davidson’s version. The related but distinct theories of meaning in Quine and Davidson are criticized by Glock in a final chapter that focuses on Davidson’s implausible thesis that non-linguistic animals are incapable of having beliefs and desires. Glock refutes Davidson’s arguments for the inference on a variety of grounds, leaving the field free for a return to commonsense attributions of simple thoughts to non-linguistic animals. Although I am substantially in agreement with many of Glock’s objections to Quine and Davidson, I find the organization of topics and narrative thread in Glock’s book confusing and hard to follow. There is a back and forth interplay of discussion of Quine and Davidson on a variety of related topics without any overarching thematic plan, and I did not always have a clear view of the segues by which one chapter followed another.The book, indeed, presents itself as largely a treatment of the problems of radical translation and radical interpretation – fully a third of its content – to which ancillary topics are attached. We learn that Quine and Davidson, especially, shifted ground considerably over the years, but we are not given any clear roadmap at the outset to help understand when and why such changes of position occurred.The Introduction could have served this purpose, but the space was devoted instead to a cursory summation of conclusions and attitudes about Quine and Davidson that I found lacking in context at that early juncture and more useful to reread only after I had worked through the rest of the book. Glock picks up traction once he enters Chapter 1, but thereafter it is hard again to keep Quine’s position in focus as talk of Davidson distracts from the account of how Quine’s ideas evolved. The same is true in trying to follow the account of Davidson, interrupted thereafter by intrusions of Quine. Overall, I had the sense of trying to watch two different movies on television, switching back and forth between them with the zapper every half-hour or so, not being able to follow either as a result with any satisfying continuity. My further criticisms of Glock’s exposition for the most part are not objections as such, but regrets that he did not elaborate further on some of the implications of his reasoning. What I find interesting about the transition from Quine to Davidson is that Davidson shows the first signs of a greening of American analytic philosophy. Quine, like Russell after 1905, aspires to make the theory of meaning purely extensional and purely a matter of reference. Davidson seems sympathetic in principle to some version of Quine’s program, and © 2006 The Authors
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wants to see it advanced as far as possible, but he is considerably less sanguine than Quine about the prospects of its success. Accordingly, he introduces what he hopes will be the minimum of intensionality that will yet enable a Tarskian theory of truth to underwrite a semantics of natural language. As Glock rightly argues, Davidson’s attenuated intensionality is not enough to provide the foundation for an adequate theory of meaning. It was not madness for theorists in the pioneering days of analytic philosophy in the United States to have experimented with a strict extensionalism, and their efforts enable us to see how far it might be pressed. It would, however, be an inexcusable failure of judgment for continuing generations not to appreciate the inherent limitations of such an approach, and not to correct the explanatory deficiencies in a purely extensional theory of mind and meaning by recognizing the need to supplement old school extensionalism with a robust ontic intentionality and linguistic-semantic intensionality. Davidson was beginning to move in the right direction. He should be applauded for perceiving the limitations of Quine’s too austerely extensional and hopelessly third-person behavioristic semantics. The problem of radical translation, as John R. Searle has acutely observed, is the reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s theory of meaning. Glock does not quite agree with this assessment, but it is possible that this is because he does not understand radical translation as radically as Quine. Davidson’s several formulations of a sort of property dualism or anomalous monism in the metaphysics of mind, another anathema to Quine’s philosophical behaviorism, is a further indication that Davidson has sensed the limitations of Quine’s pure extensionalism applied to psychology, and casts about for the most conservative way possible to repair the defect by opening the door to intensionality and a limited place for the intentionality of thought. The alliance of Quine’s semantics and behavioristic psychology appears particularly atavistic in this light. At the time in the early 1960s it may have seemed like a way to dovetail cutting edge scientific psychology with philosophical semantics.The decision to link the fate of his theory of meaning with what soon turned out to be a theoretically passé way of doing psychology was undoubtedly an unfortunate judgment call on Quine’s part. If in the 1950s we had expected dogma-less philosophy from the author of ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, we were fated to be disappointed in a rather spectacular way. The fact is that while positivism had run its course in © 2006 The Authors
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physics and other hard sciences, the newly emerging discipline of experimental psychology sought to establish its scientific credentials by being more positivistic than physics had ever actually been.While psychology eventually has liberated itself from the strictures of positivistic methodologies, several generations of Quine’s followers who have wanted as Quine did to make semantic philosophy scientific have adhered to a narrow conception of science that has been abandoned by virtually all of the rest of its practitioners, and whose inconsistencies and inadequacies to the data appear in many places throughout Quine’s philosophy. Glock calls attention to some of the most glaring of these; but there are many other examples that plague Quine’s extensionalist account of meaning, some of which, including the problem of radical translation, he touts, not as embarrassments, but as interesting implications of the theory. Among the topics on which I would have liked to see Glock enlarge is the extent to which his critique of Quine and Davidson reflects back on the more fundamental assumptions that have provided the underpinning for analytic philosophy from its inception. How much remains intact if Glock’s criticisms are correct? In the Introduction, Glock writes: ‘If [Quine and Davidson] suffer from the shortcomings I diagnose, this has far-reaching methodological and substantive implications’ (11). True that. But how far-reaching are they, and who bites the dust, if Glock is right, along with Quine and Davidson? Tarski? Carnap? Peirce? Russell? Frege? How far does the damage extend? And what if anything are we left with that is still recognizably a part of analytic philosophy? Just how ambitious is Glock’s critique, and what does he propose to offer in place of the ruins after his demolition work is complete? Glock (5) hints at a return to Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein arguably inherits many of the same difficulties as Quine. Radical translation is not much different from the problem of ostensive underdetermination of reference to which Wittgenstein calls attention in Philosophical Investigations § § 28–30; 33–35; 38. Here he considers the inability of pure behavioral ostension to explain the reference of a name in the absence of a shared form of life. Is the teacher pointing at an object, its color, the space surrounding it? Where, exactly, is the finger pointing? What is the significance of extending a finger? Compare: Does verbal behavior in uttering ‘Gavagai’ name a rabbit or sequence of undetached rabbit parts? A possible defect of Glock’s discussion of Quine and Davidson on © 2006 The Authors
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radical translation and radical interpretation arises in this connection, in that Glock considers only conspecific translation challenges. He refers exclusively to fieldwork involving other human speakers whose language we do not yet know, but whose behavior, including facial expressions and body language, we believe ourselves to understand as in some sense universally human. Here, obviously, the theoretical problems of radical translation are overcome in practice.The nagging theoretical question that remains concerns the standards of meaning equivalence that we can and should be satisfied with philosophically as opposed to practically. Even with a completed linguist’s field manual in hand, one that enables us to communicate with remote language users to all practical intents and purposes, we can and probably always should still wonder whether and to what extent our conceptual and grammatical categories positively reflect those of the speakers whose languages we are trying to translate. Arguably, the problem of radical translation in Quine and radical interpretation in Davidson is not supposed to be limited to language use by other human beings, for which Quine at least acknowledges that there are practically expedient solutions that are good enough for jazz and government work.We can always ratchet up the problem by considering how we could possibly understand the linguistic and other behavior of intelligent non-human language users, such as extraterrestrials. Here we do well to remember and reflect on Wittgenstein’s cautionary remark: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (PI II, p. 223). Quine, of course, cannot avail himself of Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen or of his concept of rulefollowing in language game playing, since Quine will be hard-pressed to make room in his behavioristic framework for Wittgenstein’s essential concept of the point and purpose of a game by reference to which its rules have application.The later Wittgenstein, moreover, however equivocally, unlike Quine, staunchly disavows (PI § 307) being a behaviorist. So there is hope, but no obvious solution to Quine’s and Davidson’s constraints in Wittgenstein. Exactly how Wittgenstein might be able to rescue analytic philosophy from the Quine-Davidson straightjacket is something for which other readers of Glock’s book I am sure would also appreciate a few more substantial hints. In another hundred years, perhaps, the early extensionalist phase of analytic semantic philosophy and metaphysics will be looked back upon with something like the bemusement now reserved for thinkers © 2006 The Authors
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like Berkeley. It will be considered important to study their work, not because what they offer points toward complete and correct solutions to the problems with which they were preoccupied, but because they so instructively and decisively but at the same time disastrously demonstrate the consequences of making too restrictive a philosophical starting-place.They will be worth reading because they show through the failure of their projects just how wrong things can go when those limited resources are pushed to the extreme in trying to accomplish more than they can possibly hope to achieve. At least we know in retrospect today not to adopt an empiricism as epistemically austere as Berkeley’s if we also want to avoid his radical idealism and philosophical reliance on the existence of God. With Glock’s and other critics’ help we may also be prepared sooner rather than later to see that we should not try to make do in logic, semantics, philosophy of language, philosophical psychology and ontology with an extensionalism as rarified as Quine’s. Davidson seems to recognize these limitations, and moves away from what for many years had come to be established as authoritative mainstream analytic philosophy in much of the Anglo-American philosophical community; not a flight, by any means, but at least a few baby steps, toward intension. Glock, in his desire to convince us that Davidson has not distanced himself from Quine’s project far enough or in the right sort of ways to establish a satisfactory theory of meaning, does not praise Davidson sufficiently for this accomplishment; yet Glock also has not pointed us in a more promising direction. Perhaps that will be the subject of Glock’s next book; perhaps in due course we will learn that the greater part of the history of analytic philosophy needs to be worked through and then cast aside like Wittgenstein’s ladder, in order to see language, thought and reality aright, and to proceed beyond the instructive limitations of Quine and Davidson to a more fruitful future of philosophical analysis. Department of Philosophy The Pennsylvania State University 246 Sparks Building University Park, PA 16802 / USA
[email protected] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dlj4/ © 2006 The Authors
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Geoffrey Scarre, After Evil, Responding to Wrongdoing Ashgate. Aldershot. 2004 pp. vii + 202 Price 42.50
R. A. Sharpe, University of Wales, Lampeter Geoffrey Scarre’s new book focuses on ideas so central to the Christian tradition and to the post-Christian world in which most of us live that it is a pity that this lucid survey is not immediately available in paperback. For, before I list some of the inevitable reservations and disagreements that another philosopher will have, let me commend it as a clear, readable and thorough account of the very considerable quantity of work recently published on these topics, in particular on forgiveness. Scarre seems to be au fait with pretty well all the relevant material and his survey is, as far as I can judge, accurate and his objections well-argued. Scarre is a Utilitarian, which surprised me a little since I regard Utilitarians with something of the astonishment I reserve for creationists from the American south, but he is a very enlightened Utilitarian and on most issues, such as the treatment of punishment, his Utilitarianism seemed very mild indeed. The centre of this study is the concept of evil and of our responses to it, viewed in secular terms; he follows a discussion of evil with a substantial analysis of forgiveness and continues with discussions of mercy, revenge and resentment, and, at some length, punishment. My own interest is currently in the concept of forgiveness and, inevitably, I have more to say on this topic. By parity of reasoning I suspect other readers will find more to disagree with in the section on punishment than I could find. He begins with a very broad definition of evil – too broad, I thought. There is something to be said for reserving the term for really gross wrong-doing. As against this, however, as he says, there is no doubt that cancer, earthquakes and floods have been traditionally treated in theodicies as ‘natural evils’. A more circumscribed definition would follow Eve Garrard in treating evil as moral action where the considerations against the act have been silenced not simply outweighed. They have been put out of court altogether and such an analysis might have the very considerable advantage of connecting evil with the unforgivable, though this would have to be argued, and it would remain to be settled whether © 2006 The Authors
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actions which are unforgivable overlap with actions which are evil or whether one is a sub-class of the other. There is going to be an element of stipulation here. Against Garrard, Scarre points out that many agents perform evil actions by allowing other considerations to outweigh those which militate against them. Macbeth or Raskolnikov offer examples. Scarre thinks that both the notions of evil and of forgiveness are multi-faceted or multi-form, by which I think he means ‘systematically ambiguous’. Rather different forms are gathered together under one heading. I was not convinced that evil is multi-form. It is, it seems, what used to be rather simplistically termed an ‘evaluative concept’; Scarre acknowledges this when he says that it has little explanatory value and is no substitute for a close moral analysis. Perhaps we might agree that somebody who refused to call the holocaust evil might have a less than adequate grasp of the concept, though this is by no means clear – an anti-Semite with a racist ideology might use the word ‘evil’ much as we do in other contexts but we would presume, until we know the worst about him, that he is ignorant of certain facts about the matter. For in general people who use the word ‘evil’ to describe very different events reveal differences in moral judgement but not differences in the content of the word. Forgiveness, however, does seem to be multifaceted. To take only the most striking feature, often noted and discussed here, forgiveness is regularly treated as if it were a speech-act but there are many cases where it seems not to be an act at all. The question arises directly when we consider whether forgiveness requires overcoming resentment. The process involved is likely to be lengthy, to involve focusing attention away from the offence and it is hard to see that this could be an action in any direct way. Even if we treat ‘I forgive you’ as a performative which commits the speaker not to seek revenge, a theory which has been suggested by those who think it can be a speech act, still it does not seem on all fours with a speech act such as promising. If you forgave and then sought revenge, the offender would be entitled to say not ‘But you forgave me’, thus paralleling ‘You promised me’ but ‘You said you forgave me’ (but you did not.) Consequently, there seems no logical difficulty with forgiving being subsequently withdrawn or with the offended thinking she has been forgiven when she has not. Indeed, in so much as forgiveness can be an act it seems to collapse into the notion of pardoning and par© 2006 The Authors
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doning might certainly co-exist with continued resentment. And yet one can imagine fairly trivial contexts where it could be a speech act. The alternative to an act of forgiveness will be something like the following. (It is a view which Scarre comes close to at points in his discussion of ‘letting go’ – and is hinted at by other writers on the topic such as Norvin Richards). A friend says something cutting and unfair to you. You feel injured and resentful. But the weeks go by; neither mentions the matter to the other and relations return to their former equable ways.The sense of injury fades. An apology from the offender might have helped along the process but none was forthcoming.You have not forgotten but the injury no longer matters. At no point have you ‘decided to forgive’; there was no ‘act of forgiveness’. Indeed if you were now to make explicit the forgiveness you would be making a song and dance about it which might well damage any rapprochement.You have decided that it would be petty to persist. ‘Life is too short’, or ‘Let bygones be bygones’, you may say. It would not be accurate to describe this as ‘forgetting’. The offended party has not forgotten. Neither is this simply pardon for ‘pardon’ has the same implication as ‘forgive’. It suggests that an act has been performed. Nor is this necessarily ‘reconciliation’. The offender may be hostile towards the offended and so there is no coming together. There may be forgiveness by one party without reconciliation. The opposite to forgiveness is ‘nursing a grudge’. ‘Nursing’ a grudge suggests a deliberate nurturing of the resentment. It means keeping it alive by a deliberate reflecting on it, feeding it by constantly returning to it. I incline to the view that ‘letting go’ is both more common than an act of forgiveness and that it is honourable. Better to allow injuries to fade and resentments to die. This has some of the features we intuitively think of as involved in forgiveness but some, too, are missing. At its best it is an unconsidered process free from striving. However context has a bearing on all of this. If somebody injures your child and you merely feel sad at their wrong-doing, something is wrong. It suggests a detachment which does not reflect well upon you. A proper care and affection for those you love means that you are protective of them and that means that you feel both angry and resentful at their ill-treatment. If you are angry and resentful, as you should be, then it will take time to deal with this and this process of a progressive, developing neglect is what © 2006 The Authors
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replaces forgiveness conceived as an act. Then ‘I have forgiven’ seems more idiomatic than ‘I forgive’. I have said that Scarre comes near embracing ‘letting go’. It seems to me one of the best ideas in his book. But I don’t think he fully endorses it. For him it is one form of forgiveness whereas I suspect that it is at its heart, (without wanting to deny that forgiveness has other usages). A reason perhaps why he does not place it at the centre of the concept is that it is difficult to handle in Utilitarian terms. For Utilitarianism is primarily an ethical theory about action and forgiveness as described here is a process and not an act. A second consideration is that if forgiveness is beneficial in utility and recommended in those terms it could not be, as it seems often to be, an act of supererogation, a concept which is notoriously difficult for Utilitarians to handle. For if it is beneficial it will always be a duty. There are many insights and acute reflections here and any philosopher interested in these topics could not fail to benefit, as I have done, from reading it. There is much else of interest to which a review cannot do justice.
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