Wisdom, (Arthur) John Terence Dibben (1904–1993)

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WISDOM, (ARTHUR) JOHN TERENCE DIBBEN
(1904–1993)

(Arthur) John Terence Dibben Wisdom, the British analytic philosopher, was closely associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose chair in philosophy at Cambridge he held. Wisdom became professor of philosophy there in 1952. He took his B.A. degree at Cambridge in 1924 and his M.A. there in 1934.

The philosophical problem on which Wisdom wrote the most is the question of what the nature of philosophy is, and his writings reflect his changing views concerning the proper answer to this question. His writings can be divided into two groups: those through 1934, putting forward one answer to the question, and those after 1936, consisting of successive attempts to make clear a quite different view of the nature of philosophy, along with applications of this new approach to a number of familiar first-level philosophical problems.

Logical Constructions

Wisdom's first book, Interpretation and Analysis (1931), compares Jeremy Bentham's notion of a "fiction" with Bertrand Russell's idea of a logical construction—a central notion of British philosophizing in the 1920s and 1930s. According to the theory of logical constructions, to say that a kind of entity X is a logical construction out of entities of kind Y is to say that statements about entities of kind X are translatable into statements about entities of kind Y, the Y 's being "more ultimate," "more fundamental," than the X 's. (It was often said to be less misleading to say, not "X 's are logical constructions," but "'X ' is an incomplete symbol.") Thus, for example, it was said that nations, which are, after all, a kind of "abstraction," are logical constructions out of their nationals, and this meant that statements about, for example, England and France are translatable into statements about Englishmen and Frenchmen. The translation was to be performed not merely by replacement of the words—for "England is a monarchy" does not mean the same as "Englishmen are a monarchy"—but also by changing the predicates, and no doubt the new predicates would be more complicated. Nevertheless, a fact about England is not something "over and above" a fact or set of facts about Englishmen. And other things, too, were said to be logical constructions: propositions were said to be logical constructions out of sentences, people out of mental and bodily events, material objects (including human bodies) out of sense data, and so on. Indeed, Russell and others used the notion very widely; Ockham's razor (according to which "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity") was given the modern form: supposedly transcendent or abstract entities are everywhere to be regarded as logical constructions out of the more concrete entities given in sense experience. This procedure has the advantage of explicitly blocking a mistaken inference that may arise, for example, from George Berkeley's analysis of a material object as a "congeries of ideas" (for "ideas," read "sense data"). Analyzing it in this way suggests, for example, that the apple I hold in my hand is made of sense data and that I would be eating sense data if I ate the apple. But to say that the apple is a logical construction out of sense data is only to say that statements about it are translatable into statements about sense data.

G. E. Moore had written (in "A Defense of Common Sense") that the work of the philosopher was not to find out whether this or that (supposed) matter of fact really was a fact but rather to find the analysis of what we know in knowing the things we do unquestionably know. Thus, I know for certain that I have two hands, but what is the analysis of what I know in knowing this? The followers of Russell and the early Wittgenstein ("logical atomists," as they have been called) saw their task as the analysis of such statements into "atomic statements," which are logically and epistemologically fundamental; they sought to provide translations of statements containing the expression "X " into statements that do not contain "X, " thus justifying the claim that X 's are logical constructions.

The first exhaustive treatment of this central notion is to be found in Wisdom's series of five articles titled "Logical Constructions," which appeared in successive issues of Mind from 1931 to 1933. The first three of these essays discuss the relation between sentences in general and the facts expressed by them; the governing idea comes from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where a sentence (on Wisdom's interpretation) is said to be a picture of the fact it expresses. Wisdom tries to bring out precisely what this comes to, in the case not only of such "simple" sentences as "Wisdom killed Al Capone" but also of negations, generalizations, and compound sentences. The fourth and fifth essays are concerned more specifically with logical constructions: How precisely is the analysandum (for example, a statement about sense data) related on the one hand to the fact it pictures and on the other hand to the analysans (a statement about an external object) and the fact it pictures?

In the last of the five essays philosophy is identified with analysis, which is said to provide the required translations. Philosophical propositions are thus verbal (that is, about words), differing only in aim or intention from those of writers of dictionaries: "The philosophical intention is clearer insight into the ultimate structure" of facts, and "philosophic progress does not consist in acquiring knowledge of new facts but in acquiring new knowledge of facts."

The essays "Ostentation" (1933) and "Is Analysis a Useful Method in Philosophy?" (1934) also deal with logical constructions.

The New Approach to Philosophy

Wittgenstein, who had been away from Cambridge since before World War I, returned there in 1929; his writings from then on show a gradual change in his conception of the nature of philosophy and of language. Wisdom himself returned to Cambridge in 1934 (he had for some years been teaching philosophy at St. Andrews University in Scotland), and his thinking was then strongly influenced by the new view of philosophy being worked out by Wittgenstein. Wisdom's essay "Philosophical Perplexity" (1936) shows that by 1936 a striking change had taken place,

No doubt many within the analytic movement had felt uneasiness about its program, and there had been criticism of the movement from its beginnings, but this was the first appearance in print of an alternative to the earlier reductive account of what philosophers are and ought to be doing. (Wittgenstein's writings of the period were not published until much later, after his death.)

According to the new conception of philosophy (set out briefly in "Philosophical Perplexity" and in greater detail in "Metaphysics and Verification," 1938), philosophical claims are answers to questions of the forms "What are X 's?," "What is it to know that here is an X ?," "Are there any X 's?," "Is there any such thing as knowing that here there is an X ?," where "X " is replaced by some very general term such as "material object," "soul," or "causal connection." Answers to the first pair of questions are of two and only two forms: the reductive (X 's are logical constructions out of Y 's; knowledge that here is an X is really knowledge about Y 's), and the transcendentalist (X 's are unanalyzable, are ultimate; knowledge that here is an X is unique, a special way of knowing appropriate only to X 's). A philosopher's answers to the second pair of questions will be connected with his answers to the first pair—for example, a reductionist is less likely to be a skeptic (although some have been both reductionists and skeptics with respect to, say, material objects), whereas a transcendentalist is more likely to fall into skepticism.

In view of their form, answers to the first pair of questions are apt to appear to be strictly definitional (as when one says "Fathers are male parents"), and answers to the second pair may appear to be making straightforward empirical points (as when one says what goes on inside Earth). But the philosopher does neither of these things. A philosophical question arises out of a dissatisfaction with the "categories of being" (in the formal mode, "kinds of statement") implicit in our ordinary way of talking. Reductive answers to the first pair of questions and skeptical answers to the second pair are disguised proposals of alternative categorizations; transcendentalist answers to the first pair of questions and nonskeptical answers to the second pair are disguised proposals that we retain the categorizations already marked in the language. The various answers all bring home to us the likenesses and differences between "categories of being" that are either concealed by or implicit in our ordinary way of talking.

Consider, for example, a certain kind of skepticism about material objects. The skeptic says, "We don't really know that there is cheese on the table" and "It would be well if we prefixed every remark about material things with 'probably.'" Such skepticism draws our attention to a likeness shared by all statements about material objects and to a difference between all such statements on the one hand and statements about sensations on the other. The skeptic forces us to see that if a man makes a statement about a material object—whatever the object, whatever the circumstances—then it always makes sense for us to say "But perhaps he is mistaken"; whereas if he says he is having this or that sensation or sense experience, it would not make sense to say this of him. Ordinary language conceals this, for we ordinarily mark a difference among material-object statements; we say that some are at best probable (such as reports about what is going on inside Earth) and that others (such as reports about what is going on inside our fists) are as certain as any statement about a sensation or experience. Of course the job remains of showing why it strikes the skeptic—and us—as important to mark what is pointed to in his claim.

Consider the reductionist view of material objects (see "Metaphysics and Verification"). The reductionist says, "Material objects are logical constructions out of sense data." He draws our attention to a likeness between material-object statements and a certain kind of statement about sense data, a likeness in their mode of verification; if you have already found out that this has, does, and will continue to appear to be (say) a bit of cheese, then there is nothing further to do in the way of finding out whether or not it is a bit of cheese. Ordinary language conceals this likeness, for our ordinary use of the words is such that it is simply false to say that "This is a bit of cheese" means the same as "This has, does, and will appear to be a bit of cheese." Or, as it might be put, the reductionist draws our attention to a likeness between the statement "A material-object statement means the same as a certain complex sense-datum statement" and ordinary statements of the form "'X ' means the same as 'Y '" that we would unhesitatingly accept as true; and a difference between it and many ordinary statements of the form "'X ' means the same as 'Y '" that we would unhesitatingly reject as false.

Whether a philosophical claim is true is not the important question; what we should do with respect to a philosophical question about the nature of X 's and our knowledge of X 's is to bring out in full all the features of X 's that incline one to opt for this or that philosophical answer—thereby bringing out the relevant likenesses and differences between X 's (or statements about X 's) and other kinds of entities (or kinds of statements). In this way we obtain that illumination of the category of X 's which alone can answer the dissatisfaction that was expressed in our philosophical question.

Any account of the nature of a philosophical claim is itself a philosophical claim (for example, an answer to the question "What are philosophical claims?") and is itself to be dealt with in this way. In the essays already mentioned Wisdom also tries to bring out the likenesses and differences between philosophical claims and other kinds of claims that have been stressed by those who supposed that philosophical claims tell us facts about the world and by those who said that these claims are merely verbal.

"Other Minds"

The papers mentioned so far are primarily concerned with expounding Wisdom's new view of the nature of philosophy, and the first-level philosophical claims considered there appear for the most part as examples; by contrast, his series of papers titled "Other Minds" (which appeared in successive issues of Mind between 1940 and 1943) is concerned mainly with the first-level questions relating to our knowledge of other minds, and the second-level question on the nature of philosophy is discussed largely in order to shed light on the first-level questions. His aim in these papers is to bring out all the problems that issue in the question "Do we ever know what anyone else is thinking, feeling, experiencing …?" and to give them the sort of treatment he has said a philosophical problem calls for. Roughly, papers I and II bring out the likenesses and differences between statements about other minds and statements about invisible currents flowing through wires; III compares the philosopher's and the plain man's use of "It's at best probable" and "We know by analogy"; IV and V deal with telepathy and extra or extended ways of knowing in general; VI and VII show what considerations rule out the possibility that one should have "direct" knowledge of the sensations of others—that is, knowledge of the kind one has of one's own sensations (this is done by showing what makes a statement be a statement that is not merely about one's own sensations); and VIII deals with the status of the statement "No one has any knowledge at all apart from knowledge as to his own sensations of the moment."

The difference in conception of the nature of philosophy between Wisdom's later work and, for example, the "Logical Constructions" papers has often been discussed. It is therefore worth mentioning that there is also considerable continuity. As previously noted, Wisdom had earlier thought of "the philosophical intention [as] clearer insight into the ultimate structure" of facts; in "Philosophical Perplexity" he still regarded it as a search for "illumination of the ultimate structure of facts." He did not, in this paper of 1936 or in any of his later works, regard philosophy as merely the study either of the workings of language for its own sake or of the confusions of ordinary language. The analogy he later drew between philosophy and psychoanalysis led many people to think he regarded philosophy as strictly a kind of therapy. But this was never his view, and indeed one may regard his successive efforts to characterize the philosophical enterprise as attempts to bring out just what sort of insight and understanding the philosopher does provide (see, for example, "Gods" and "Philosophy, Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis").

Wisdom and Wittgenstein

It is dangerous to talk about the conception of philosophy held by the later Wittgenstein—there are very few remarks on the nature of philosophy in Wittgenstein's posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, and those he does make are obscure. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's manner of dealing with philosophical problems there suggests that Wisdom differs from him at least in his attitude toward philosophy. While Wisdom always acknowledged his great debt to Wittgenstein, he says of him in "Philosophical Perplexity," "He too much represents [philosophical theories] as merely symptoms of linguistic confusion. I wish to represent them as also symptoms of linguistic penetration." And he reminds us repeatedly that we are not to take his work as representing Wittgenstein's own views.

In sum, Wisdom's view is that the goal of philosophy is an understanding of just what philosophers have at all times sought to understand—"time and space, good and evil, things and persons." In making their case, philosophers have always appealed to linguistic usage—in "The Metamorphosis of Metaphysics" (reprinted in Paradox and Discovery ) Wisdom brings out the similarity between contemporary linguistic philosophy and older forms of speculative philosophy. But he also reminds us that good philosophy of any age gives us a clearer view not merely of how we may go wrong in our talking and thinking but of how we may go right.

Bibliography

works by wisdom

Interpretation and Analysis. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931.

"Logical Constructions." Mind 40–42 (1931–1933).

Problems of Mind and Matter. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1934. A work of the same period as the "Logical Constructions" papers; it is concerned with perception and with the relation between a man's body and mind in virtue of which it is true to say that that body and mind are his body and mind.

Other Minds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1952. Contains the eight papers that originally appeared in Mind, 1940–1943, as well as a symposium contribution titled "Other Minds" that was originally published in PAS supp. 20 (1946) and "The Concept of Mind" and "Metaphysics," the presidential address to the meeting of the Aristotelian Society, November 1950.

Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Contains "Ostentation," "Is Analysis a Useful Method in Philosophy?," "Philosophical Perplexity," "Metaphysics and Verification," "Gods," "Philosophy, Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis," and other articles and reviews.

Paradox and Discovery. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. Contains "The Metamorphosis of Metaphysics," "A Feature of Wittgenstein's Technique," "The Logic of God," "Paradox and Discovery," and other short pieces.