“In most of the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone. America is therefore one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied and where the principles of Descartes are best applied.”

This is quoted from Alexis de Tocqueville by Professor Sidney Hook in his introduction to American Philosophers at Work¹ with the comment that with respect to philosophy as a discipline and a specialized branch of thought, Tocqueville’s opinion remains substantially true. If Professor Hook’s comment implies that the American thinker neither expects nor hopes to have much influence either on his philosophic brethren or on the layman, there is something not altogether unfamiliar about this American picture, and it causes no surprise when Professor Hook continues: “American philosophy is … an integral part of the Continental and especially the English tradition in philosophy.”

But this volume is certainly more comprehensive than any of the similar English collections I have seen over the last few years, and it has wider and more vaguely shaded outlines. This puts a little wistfulness into one’s reading of a further quotation from Professor Hook: “American philosophers, with some notable exceptions, no longer practice philosophy in the grand tradition, essaying wholesale views about the nature of man, existence and eternity. Inspired by the results won in the sciences they do not even seek to practice philosophy in the grand manner, but concentrate on the patient analysis of specific problems, aiming at results which although piecemeal, are more likely to withstand criticism.” Indeed they do, and all honor to them for being so well behaved, but as I take off my hat I want to be sure that I’m not just making the conventional gesture to the corpse.

“Inspired by the results won in the sciences” is in itself an inspiring phrase. But what are these scientific “results” which inspire philosophers, it seems, to competition? There are practical technological results, of course, but it would take us too far along the line of metaphor and speculation to look for any analogous branch of philosophical engineering. On the other hand, one of the results of science is a world picture characterized by increasing co-herence, exactness, and predictability. All that Professor Hook can find in philosophic “results” to balance this is their increased ability to withstand criticism due to becoming more piecemeal. Now that strikes me as no real analogy with what happened in the sciences. Where the sciences advance they don’t do it in so mealy-mouthed a fashion. It is, as Karl Popper recently pointed out, the kind of boldness which seeks refutation rather than proof that distinguishes a science from a pseudo-science like psychoanalysis or Marxism. If philosophy is determined to ape science, it looks as if it may never get beyond the pseudo-scientific stage—seeking “proof,” thereby to “withstand criticism.”

But I must add in fairness that the collection of papers Professor Hook has assembled is less regimented than its British opposite number would be and has a far wider scope. Ethics and social philosophy get at least their fair share: often in the form, immensely welcome to this reader, of the analysis of actual concepts in common use, which seems so much more worthwhile than the logical and structural analysis where a great deal of British philosophy has stuck.

It is true that the book supports Professor Hook’s judgment about the “grand tradition” and the “grand manner,” but when I reconsider the Tocqueville quotation, I begin to wonder if these terms are really the best way of describing what we feel we lack in modern philosophy: whether the “individual exercise of his own understanding” was not after all the sign of a philosopher in the “grand tradition,” and whether the “grand manner” was not just the best means that he found of making the “exercise of his own understanding” a part of literature. It happens that there is no marked attention here to philosophical tradition, nothing on the history of philosophy (and also, to air a prejudice, thank heavens, nothing on the philosophy of history): the great names are used and referred to, rather than reassessed. There doesn’t seem much place allowed for Masters, either in the past or in the present. Certainly if on the evidence of this book alone we were to try and name the prime philosophical virtue, at least in American eyes, we should say it was modesty rather than wisdom, and it would appear that no philosopher here represented is likely to risk biting off much more than he can chew.

This is a philosophic anthology. To look for any kind of “grand manner,” even if one wanted to, would be as absurd as to look for an epic in a contemporary anthology of verse. But in both sorts of anthology you might expect to find what could be called an “eagle’s eye view”: and the more one agrees with Tocqueville and Professor Hook that American philosophy is inevitably anti-traditional and individualistic, the more eagerly one hopes to find something thus boldly and clearly synoptic. Its absence leads one to examine not so much this book as one’s own persistent hope. Is it just an old bad traditional unconscious habit, to which this collection and its like provide a due corrective? Or does such a collection, just in being so widely representative, permit and even provoke the counter-question, What do contemporary philosophers themselves think they are doing? That question subsumes a number of others: What is philosophizing? What starts a philosopher doing it? Even, what sort of person is a philosopher? (I must here quote Mr. Nelson Goodman’s essay—“Altogether too much philosophy these days is like the present article, merely philosophy about philosophy.”)

Not so long ago Professor A. J. Ayer and his logical positivists gave a very sharp answer to the question, What is philosophy? It is, we were told in effect, a technique for deciding between sense and nonsense. The book under review suggests that American philosophers may have developed a resistant strain to this tendency (which now looks somewhat morbid) of linguistic philosophy. I use the term linguistic philosophy to cover the main contemporary trends in England and America, which all have in common a concern with what can be logically said—with language, that is, both as the subject matter and the instrument of philosophic inquiry, and with its fitness for the latter task. But linguistic philosophy has various strands that have to be sorted out.

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The overriding interest of European philosophy since the time of Descartes has been the theory of knowledge: What knowledge if any can I have of the external world? Can judgments which refer to actual, possible, or particular experiences ever have the same certainty as the statements of formal logic (which are certain, of course, because they are “analytic” or tautologous)?

In criticizing our intellectual and perceptual capacities for obtaining certain knowledge, Kant thought that he had found an essential link between empirical apperception and the purely logical faculty, in the “synthetic a priori” truths of geometry and arithmetic: he said, in effect, that we don’t need to go and count apples to know that two and two of them will make four; we know this with absolute certainty before experience, but on the other hand experience will always confirm it. In Russell’s and Whitehead’s great work Principia Mathematica (whose influence has been out of all proportion to the number of people who have actually been able to read it), this special status of mathematical judgments was finally undermined by reducing mathematics to logical relations: the certainty, before or after experience, of mathematical truths, is not the real point; the point is that they are verbal, consisting in the end of definitions which can be analyzed. Russell says that mathematical truths are all ultimately of the same kind as the “great truth” that there are three feet in a yard—they are all extensions of deductive or analytic logic. Here we have one example of an idea which is basic for linguistic philosophy—that many of the problems of philosophy can be solved by simply restating them.

The attempt to find a bridge between logic and the empirical “world,” to give a rational basis for our expectations, had already been subverted by Hume. In a way which has never been comfortably refuted, he showed that particular expectation—and that includes not only the animal faith in which we go to the office in the morning, not doubting that it will still be there, but also the predictions of science—cannot have a certain basis of logical principle. For instance there is no real substantive relation of cause and effect; all we can know is the constant association of two or more events. Similarly with the question of a Principle of Induction; the fact that a thing has always happened is no logical evidence that it will continue to do so: the future cannot be a formal deduction from the past.

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Where they are consistent, those philosophers who have followed or agreed with Russell that all our certain knowledge (including mathematical and scientific) is really only of verbal and logical relations, have in effect given up the attempt to find a bridge between logic and the “world.” This is true of the early Wittgenstein and Carnap. The last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has attained the unlikely honor of becoming a cliché (which has helped it to the much more likely condition of being misinterpreted): “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” And Carnap used a sentence of Russell’s as an epigraph: “The supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.”

These two quotations show extreme implications of the philosophy of linguistic and logical analysis. If philosophy is wholly verbal, and if philosophic language is to confine itself to the exhibition of logical relations, then we must always be refining the subtlety and coherence of this logical web; we must aim at reducing these stubborn “inferred entities”

—which are the stuff of given experience—to logical relations too. But these entities are inferred, they are the experiences from which we make inferences, ordinary people in ordinary reasoning and scientists alike: they are the material of natural and spontaneous logic. What I am suggesting is that there is a genuine hiatus between the “world” of formal logic and the “worlds” either of science or of commonsense experience. To put it in another way, the logic used both by scientists and by you and me—inferential logic, the logic of induction, the way we argue—not only is different from formal deductive logic but must and will remain so.

The fact that they don’t really doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow does not seem to console philosophers, nor to absolve them from the often irritated and anxious need to find proof that it will. In my opinion, the question, Why should we try to justify inductive inference? (I refer now to Alice Ambrose’s essay, “Justifying Inductive Logic”), isn’t asked nearly often enough. The anxiety to “justify a principle of induction,” felt by Miss Ambrose and others, may be a symptom of logical morbidity, of the wish—based on the belief that philosophy consists only of what can be expressed verbally or symbolically—to identify philosophy exclusively with logic and epistemology. Haunted by a delusive desire to keep up with the scientific Joneses, the contemporary philosopher often seems to imagine that the ideal required of him is to make his language exactly fit the “world” which it is supposed to “describe.” His aim is apparently to produce a logical picture of the world which, like many abstract paintings, will look the same upside down, or even back to front. But this is a misconception of the nature of language, both scientific and everyday. Language is primarily a human tool for communication and for engendering activities (in the case of science, very exactly prescribed activities); it is not primarily a means of description, and certainly not in the sense of being a logical “description” approximating to completeness. Those philosophers who have realized that living language (language used as a natural instrument of expression and communication) is not the same as mathematical or analytic or tautologous linguistic, have sometimes gone to what they call “actual usage” to get at the heart of the matter. But this has often produced only further abstraction.

Mr. Nelson Goodman’s clearheaded essay, “The Revision of Philosophy,” is relevant here. He attempts to defend the Aufbau of Rudolf Carnap against its detractors (among whom, as Mr. Goodman points out, is numbered the later Carnap himself). In the Aufbau, Carnap offered a philosophy of “formal definition and artificial terminology, of systematic description and ‘step-by-step’ construction,” which aims at building up a total logical picture of the world: a philosophy, in short, which is accused of trying to make a logical duplicate of experience. “The function of a constructional system [the Aufbau],” says Mr. Goodman, “is not to recreate experience but rather to map it.” But “a map is schematic, selective, conventional, condensed and uniform; and when our map becomes as large and in all respects the same as the territory mapped . . . the purposes of a map are no longer served . . . let no one accuse the cartographer of merciless reductionism if his map fails to turn green in the Spring.”

My point is, on the contrary, that there is a real danger of contemporary philosophers’ confusing the map and the territory: that they will forget that language, like land, is a natural phenomenon, there first.

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Mr. Goodman’s essay is, I think, a weapon that can be turned in more directions than one: against absurd and vitalistic anti-intellectualism which spells Life with a capital “L,” surely, but also against those even more belly-to-earth obsessive stalkers of “actual usage,” who can’t see the grass for the blades and who never hit anything but a clay pigeon: who also forget in fact that language is a natural, living, and therefore spontaneous phenomenon, and that if you are going to say anything scientific about it, you must first surrender to your given material. The useful analysis of actual usage would mean, to my mind, the analysis of something that was actually said by somebody on a given occasion, with intent, conscious or unconscious, to communicate and perhaps even to influence.

The late Professor L. S. Stebbing found innumerable occasions for the profitable examination of actual usage in the utterances of politicians and even of scientists; and American philosophy, too, has been productive in the realm of such semantic analysis, from which one or two good essays (for example, Abraham Kaplan’s “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category” and Arthur E Murphy’s “The Common Good”) in this book result.

And, indeed, what has been generally beneficial in linguistic philosophy is the stress on actuality: What do we actually mean by—?; What do we in practice value?—so that in ethics, we don’t define the Good, we talk about scales of preference, and we analyze, not the nature of Value but the ways in which we evaluate, and why. Maybe it is because American philosophers have been quicker at absorbing this sense of the actual that ethics and metaphysics here seem self-assured enough to take a rightful and ample place.

On the same basis of actuality, metaphysics (once banished as meaningless by the logical positivists) is being allowed in again as the study of generalization, a term which can cover everything from the laws of physics down to OUT most immediate and concrete use of language. Everything that we can classify as a thing or an event or an experience (which means everything we can talk about) is being seen as a “disposition” or as representing a law of continuity. In other words, we can’t help thinking and talking in universals. “If there are no universals, there is no such thing as language,” says Mr. C. I. Lewis.

This is all more significant than it may sound: the main trend of the linguistic schools has been so anti-metaphysical that they have sometimes looked as if they wanted to deny any function to universal and abstract terms, for fear of appearing to admit the existence of a mystical substantive “reality.” There is now at least the start of the pendulum swing. The idea that metaphysics is the study of universals and their linguistic function—like much else that is valuable in contemporary philosophy-was anticipated by the great American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, of whom I shall have more to say in a moment. (It is a comment on the lack of historical-mindedness in American Philosophers at Work that only one paper in the book gives Peirce due recognition.)

What I am suggesting, then, is that the un-easy state of contemporary philosophy—which does, however, look a little less uneasy in America—comes from its attempt to identify philosophy with logic, and logic with deductive or purely analytical logic, and that this is perhaps the consequence of a failure to recognize that language is primarily a means of communication rather than of description. As Professor Hook puts it: “. . . the justification of rules of procedure is not of a different logical order, possessing, so to speak, another or higher type of necessity than the actions of which they are the rule. In the sense in which justification of first principles is an intelligible question the answer will take the same general form of the answers given by those who do the world’s work—the cobblers, the carpenters and gardeners—when they are asked to justify one set of procedures rather than another.”

That is, there is natural logic: it is the way we think for our immediate purposes when not interfered with by maleducation, emotional distortion, or drink. Our “immediate purposes” may arise in a narrower or a wider context. We may be going out duck-shooting tomorrow and have noted the changes of the sky and temperature with an ego-centered interest; or we may be highly trained meteorologists with years of tables in front of us; but what we do in either case is make inferences which are only tested in the event. It is true that as our subject matter becomes more abstract, relations become more ramified and subtle, and we therefore need more practice in seeing the correct inferences. But we don’t need more theory. We learn to think in a way which is analogous to the way we learn to walk and talk.

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Everything which I should like to say here has already been said by Charles Pierce. It is strange and unfortunate that Peirce’s eccentricity and originality, plus the false emphasis which William James set on his views in propagating them, robbed him of his due immediate influence on philosophy in the English language, for he might have spared us from some serious errors, among them even our misconception of the philosophic function itself. To put it broadly, ever since Descartes arrived at what he thought were “certain certainties” on the basis of doubting everything, philosophers have believed that their main business was the quest for certainty. In practice this has meant the attempt to find logical proof of matters which, as living organisms, we are obliged to assume, to take for granted. The result has been total failure: existence is a category which cannot be logically demonstrated beforehand.

Descartes’s famous doubt of his own existence was not resolved by pinching himself (as it would be with you or me) but by assuming that he had certain direct perceptions or intuitions—one of them was of himself as a thinking substance, another was of certain truths as self-evident, for instance, mathematical truths. Subsequent philosophy has been haunted by the idea that direct and perfect knowledge could be acquired, and the search for it has shunted philosophers from the track of speculation about those human problems that arise automatically when we take it for granted (as by nature we do) that there is a world to live and philosophize in, and that there are other people besides oneself; in other words, when we allow our minds to function naturally.

Our minds don’t really begin with doubting the existence of the external world; they begin with making judgments which are useful for living. And it is not a negligible matter that philosophers are generally sitting in chairs while they doubt the existence of tables. Thought at all levels (including the mental processes of scientists) is a matter of inference, and Peirce had the interesting conception that even what looks most direct in our experience—for instance our perceptual judgments—is also inferential, of the nature of hypothesis.

Peirce understood the nature of scientific activity as the logical positivists do not. A science may frame exact definitions and produce mathematical laws and proofs; but that is not its prime characteristic as a science. We must begin at the other end and look upon a science as a method of inquiry which is not distinct in kind from the general human reasoning process. Being over-impressed by the “results” achieved in the exact sciences is one of the many ways in which philosophy can be stood on its head, and Peirce had the insight, the strength, and the originality to make a good shot at standing it on its feet again (a process which is always having to be repeated).

I am therefore happy to note that there are traces of his influence in this book: I have seen none in recent British collections. A short and rather medievally formal paper by Charles Morris called “The Science of Man and Unified Science” refers to Peirce’s Theory of Signs—a theory which boils down to the view that meaning resides in the practical effects of language on an organism. Logical positivism, over-impressed as it was by the possibilities of exact scientific definition, made scientific “truth” the standard of “meaning” and ex-cluded not only all questions of evaluation but even the less exact sciences—for instance, the social sciences—from the canon: strictly, all but the mathematical and physical sciences.

Mr. Morris, on the other hand, thinks that a science of values is both meaningful and possible, and his laudable aim is to integrate the science of man within a framework of unified science.

Such a reunification of philosophy, art, and science seems to me of far more importance than the reunification of the churches. But what caused the split in the first place was not, as is so often suggested, the extraordinary advance of science, but a misconception (generally on the part of other philosophers) of the nature of science itself. And the irony is that the best-intentioned efforts toward healing are also frequently based on misconceptions of science. Mr. Morris’s point is that “appraisals” (estimations or evaluations), since they make predictions which can be tested, are cognitive activities, and so can be regarded as “empirically meaningful and capable in principle of being controlled by scientific methods.” The ideal, then, is still to be perfect prediction, exact knowledge, the map which is the same size as the territory.

All this brings up the tender theme of the plain man’s objection to the difficulty or unintelligibility of modern philosophy. C. J. Ducasse, in a clear and interesting essay on “The Method of Knowledge in Philosophy,” asserts his belief that “metaphysics, or more generally theoretical inquiry in philosophy, can reach results having title to the name of knowledge.” But this partly depends on rejecting the assumption, “widespread even among philosophers, that in philosophy it is possible to reach knowledge through reasonings carried on in the vague terms of ordinary language without bothering to use a technical apparatus of thought.”

But unless the subject matter is itself inherently difficult—as it is for the uninitiated in certain of the sciences—there is no reason why a technical language should be hard to understand if one is given a glossary and told how to use the vocabulary. Philosophers might be allowed a privilege of unintelligibility toward the layman insofar as they were engaged in elucidating the concepts of science, were in fact submitting to conditions imposed from outside by another discipline. But the philosophy of science is only one branch of philosophy; the others are doing something quite different.

Style in philosophy may after all be of the essence. There is no question that philosophy has become more difficult since it began preoccupying itself mainly with logic and epistemology. The causes may not be entirely due to this preoccupation: the British philosophers of the 18 th century, who were all much concerned with logic and epistemology, nevertheless wrote elegant and lucid prose. Professor Brand Blanshard of Yale (who contributes an illuminating essay on “The Nature of Mind” to this volume) wrote some time ago an excellent short essay on philosophical literary style and its importance: he admitted there, however, that philosophical expression is inherently hard. But the real and natural difficulty may be akin to the poet’s who has first of all to make his meaning clear to himself and to find the language which exactly fits this dialectic struggle: or one might even say, which is this struggle, since there seems ground for holding the view, as Peirce did, that speech is consciousness.

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We are forced back to Tocqueville and his individualistic American philosopher and to the implied question, How does anyone start philosophizing? Russell wanted certain knowledge and as a boy of eleven he nearly wept because the axioms of geometry could not be proved. But the first inquiry of a philosopher may properly be not, What can I know? but What, in the circumstances, ought I to do? Although Greek philosophy was not originally distinguishable from science, the early preoccupations of the great masters, Socrates and Plato, were ethical. The real stress should be put on the word inquiry: philosophy is an inquiry into the nature of existence. If you become too interested in, too expectant of, definite answers, you begin to think less about human existence, where the answers are exceptionally difficult to obtain, and more about the non-human, about “existence” as an increasingly abstract but intellectually manageable category.

But philosophizing is really an evaluating activity, and so are science and art, because living is evaluating, choosing from moment to moment. The positivists who claimed that* value judgments, in common with “metaphysical” statements, were emotive and therefore meaningless, were themselves expressing a rigid though unconscious system of values. Charles L. Stevenson (“Persuasive Definitions”) brings out this welcome piece of irony: “Positivism achieved its wide appeal . . . largely through the statement ‘Metaphysics is without meaning’ . . . The truth of such statements is utterly beside the point. Controversy hinges on the emotive words that are used. Shall we define ‘meaning’ narrowly so that science alone will receive this laudatory title and metaphysics the correspondingly derogatory one of ‘nonsense?’”

And Mr. Charner M. Perry too (“Rationale of Political Discussion”) reveals the way in which those who refuse to commit themselves to any positive values are still busy expressing their preferences and standards—“If we have given up beauty, goodness and parts of truth, we believe that linguistic analysis will yet make us free. We are still children of the Enlightenment; and we have a deep faith that removing superstition and error will permit the truth to shine by its own light. Almost all modern sceptics seem convinced that their scepticism, if accepted, would do much to improve life and society.”

This is of course an academic volume: with very few exceptions the contributors are all professors or lecturers in philosophy. But very much is covered and there are more papers than the ones I have been able to mention which suggest to me that some American philosophers have an open eye of their own which is fixed upon the world about them.

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¹ Criterion, 512 pp., $7.50.

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