If A Philosophical Claim Is Wron1.pdf

1 (Although I have tried to make it intelligible on its own, this paper is best read in conjunction with ‘Nagel, McGinn and Stove on the limits of human understanding’, also on academia.edu. The latter provides a fair amount of background to what I say about Nagel and McGinn here.) If A Philosophical Claim Is Wrong, What Makes It Wrong? The Metaphilosophy/Antiphilosophy Of David Stove. In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies1 the Australian David Charles Stove (1927-94)2 takes a challenging view of philosophy that has not received the attention it deserves. This is doubtless partly, even mainly, due to his numerous dogmatic assertions and assumptions about, for example, religion and politics, which pretty well ensure that most readers will be in constant danger of being sidetracked. But it is perhaps also because Stove himself does not realise what his book’s most important contribution to philosophy is or at least does not highlight it sufficiently. His philosophy is very much a metaphilosophy, a philosophy of philosophy but it is equally an antiphilosophy, a philosophy against philosophy. He is concerned with where philosophers go wrong. But whereas most philosophers think they know where other philosophers go wrong, Stove only thinks he knows that they go wrong, not where (an unusual combination, one might think, of dogmatism and its opposite). Judging by the titles of some recent books, there is considerable interest in both metaphilosophy and antiphilosophy at present.3 This alone would make an investigation of Stove’s work timely. But to my mind it is his inquiry into the nature of philosophical error that really demands our attention. The structure of this essay is as follows: Part One makes some general comments on the book as a whole. Part Two focuses on the final chapter, where Stove asks what is wrong with philosophical and indeed most human thinking (at least on abstract matters). Part Three attempts an assessment of his ‘positivism’, his antiphilosophy and his (tentative) scepticism about our ability to get to the bottom of ‘what is wrong with our thoughts’. Part Four defends the view that Stove has made an important contribution to philosophy by forcefully raising a neglected question. Part One: The book as a whole. In the preface Stove writes: [A]ll great philosophers attract a reverence which is far stronger and more widespread than that which, by any rational estimate, they are entitled to.4 There is, it is clear, some powerful force at work, especially among philosophers, though not only among them, disposing people to overvalue great philosophers, or those who are taken to be such … This force has always been a mystery to me, and I have never felt the reverence for great philosophers to which it disposes so many other people. As there is certainly too much of that reverence, I would gladly see it lessened, and I hope that this book will do something to lessen it.5 These passages may be taken as a clear (though comparatively restrained) expression of Stove’s assessment of most philosophy and most philosophers.

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The following generalisation is, I think, justified. A few of the philosophers of the past whom Stove mentions only once are referred to favourably (Montaigne, Bishop Butler, Frege) but no philosopher who is mentioned more than once escapes criticism, though some get a little praise as well, usually for their criticisms of other philosophers (Berkeley, Hume6, Bernard Bosanquet, Moore, A.C. Ewing, the Logical Positivists). Here I shall only illustrate the tone of the book with a few snippets, since many of the passages I quote in Parts Two and Three will also serve. I begin with two that are, by Stove’s standards, expressed with moderation: Quine argued, with enough plausibility to satisfy some unexacting folk, that philosophy is continuous with empirical science …7 Epicurus was one of the few great philosophers whom anyone but their mothers could love …8 It will be a relief to turn from that pathological windbag Schopenhauer to …9 Plato – that scourge of the human mind …10 But let us never forget … as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what ‘the great thinkers’ really are: proper objects, indeed of pity, but even more of horror.11 In fact the reverence which has been and is accorded, by pre-Positivist man, to such two-legged plagues as Plato, Kant and Hegel is merely insane.12 Of course, the reader will say, whether the book is worth reading will depend upon what arguments Stove can muster in support of judgments such as these. For the present let me just mention a few things that impressed me: a) It is very clearly written. There is only one passage that really had me wondering what he could possibly mean.13 b) It is often amusing: [E]ntrust yourself to Augustine’s mighty intellect, and you too must agonize, as he does, over the ‘problem’, for example, whether Jesus is still bleeding from hands and feet. Or has he lost by now all trace of the scars of the Crucifixion? Or, does he retain some scars but only faint and not unattractive ones? It is this third alternative, Augustine concludes, which will recommend itself to every rational mind.14 [Prof. H. S. Harris] does not actually say that Hegel’s philosophy can cure wooden legs, but I do not think he would like to hear it denied.15 As these examples illustrate, the humour is mainly ironic and over two hundred pages of sustained irony may be indigestible to some. c) Stove unearths many unfamiliar facts in the history of philosophy. At least I think they will be unfamiliar to most readers. Did you know this, for example? Jeremy Collier, almost at the same time, published a world-view almost the same as Berkeley’s, [though] he had the minimal decency to admit that he was in the most violent possible collision with common sense.16 Or that Bernard Bosanquet makes the following Tractatus-like claim? [A] consistent materialist and a thorough idealist hold positions which are distinguishable only in name.17 d) Many of Stove’s interpretative judgments about particular philosophers are shrewd or at least thought-provoking. For example: Wittgenstein [defended realism] by arguments which are so subtle that the non-elect can never even grasp what they are, and which, by a natural consequence, defeat their own purpose.18

3 If this refers to the complex of considerations that has come to be known as ‘the Private Language Argument’, and I would be surprised if that is not at least one of the things Stove has in mind, I suspect that even some professed Wittgensteinians will reluctantly agree. On the debit side, Stove’s book is marred for me by the expression of dozens of mere opinions, supported by nothing in the way of argument, with which he can hardly expect immediate, unhesitating agreement from all readers – opinions on, for example, William Blake, Tolstoy, psychoanalysis, socialism, the Vietnam War, the African National Congress, modern art, modern architecture, modern literature, modern music (not forgetting jazz), modern education (you name it, as they say). But, all things considered, the book strikes me as being an important contribution to metaphilosophy and deserves to be better known. Unfortunately, it is not at the moment in print. Part Two: The trouble with our thoughts. It is with the final chapter of the book that I shall be mainly concerned: ‘What is wrong with our thoughts? – A neo-Positivist credo’. Let me first attempt a summary of its main theses: Most philosophy is intellectual rubbish and good philosophy is a matter of finding what has gone wrong in such philosophy. If the errors of bad philosophy were ever fully diagnosed, this would be ‘the extinction of philosophy’19. But even our non-philosophical thinking is prone to lead us into confusion and absurdity and there is in fact a connexion or at least a parallel between philosophy and madness. What is wrong with most philosophical theses is internal to the theses themselves and not simply a matter of the faultiness of the inferences by which they are reached. They are (in some sense) nonsense and to this extent the Logical Positivists were right. But the Positivists lacked an adequate nosology of philosophical disease and we are no better off today: we cannot, or can hardly ever, say what it is that makes a particular mistaken philosophical claim mistaken. There are probably many, many ways in which claims can go wrong and to date we have successfully identified only two: contingent falsity and self-contradiction. What sort of case does Stove make for these radical claims? Are they even consistent with each other? a) Most philosophy is intellectual rubbish. Stove opens with a discussion of the filioque dispute in Christian theology: The Orthodox theory [i.e. that of the Eastern Orthodox Church] was that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone. The Western bishops, however, were equally adamant that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father filioque – ‘and the Son’. It is obvious enough that these two opinions could not both be right, though both could be wrong. It is equally obvious that both opinions are wrong, or at least, that they each have got something dreadfully wrong with them, and the same thing. They both have some fatal congenital defect, whatever the exact nature of this defect may be. And it is equally obvious too, that this defect

4 will also be shared by any other answer to the question, what or whom the Holy Ghost proceeds from. It does not matter much how you answer this question: something has already gone fatally wrong with your thoughts, once you find yourself so much as asking it.20 But that is theology, the reader might say; what about pure philosophy, untrammelled by religious dogma? Stove goes on to cite passages from Plotinus, Hegel and Foucault that are equally cases in which human thought has gone wrong, not in some superficial or curable way, but in some way which is evidently deep and beyond hope of cure.21 Since Stove’s book is somewhat inaccessible, I suppose I ought to quote some of what he quotes. I have selected part of the Plotinus example, because of the three philosophers in question he is by far the least read today (I also transcribe the references Stove gives to the others22): When we affirm the reality of the Real Beings and their individual identity of being and declare that these Real Beings exist in the Intellectual Realm, we do not mean merely that they remain unchangeably self-identical by their very essence, as contrasted with the fluidity and instability of the sense-realm; the sense-realm itself may contain the enduring. No; we mean rather that these principles possess, as by their own virtue, the consummate fullness of being. The Essence described as the primally existent cannot be a shadow cast by Being, but must possess Being entire; and Being is entire when it holds the form and idea of intellection and of life.23 My reaction to this sort of thing is much the same as Stove’s. At the end of the chapter he gives some more examples of Hegelian gobbledygook to drive the point home.24 But what is the point, the reader might ask? Surely not much could be concluded from our own incomprehension. Perhaps the fault lies with us or at least not with the authors of the passages. Stove gives a partial answer. They cannot be excused by saying that they have been ‘taken out of context’, since ‘the context just consists of more of the same sort of thing’, nor by saying that they are bad translations, since the originals are just as ‘baffling’.25 I very much doubt whether this answer will satisfy everyone; but let us press on. b) Good philosophy is finding out what has gone wrong in bad philosophy. Stove, it is fair to say, assumes that there is something abysmally wrong with the passages he quotes and the thinking that has gone into them; and, addressing himself to those who share this assumption, he asks what has gone wrong. If this seems utterly questionbegging, then reflect that it is unlikely that any reader will be equally happy with all his examples – that she will find the filioque disputants and Plotinus, Hegel and Foucault all equally intelligible. Perhaps we can proceed on the assumption that something has gone wrong in at least some of them.26 Whether Stove is committed to the view that there is nothing for good philosophy to do other than diagnose what has gone wrong in bad philosophy I am not sure. Could it perhaps also have the sort of ancillary role the Positivists allowed it, that of making clear the logic of scientific discourse? Stove does not raise the question.

5 c) The end of philosophy. At one point Stove appears to admit that his neo-Positivist programme would, if successfully pursued, lead to ‘the extinction of philosophy’27, but he goes on to maintain that the day of philosophy’s demise is distant and will probably never come: The jungle will reclaim the clearing (even without heavy infestations of conservationists), darkness will beat the light, not quite always on the local scale, but absolutely always on the large scale.28 In this he is perhaps not the typical antiphilosopher, one who believes that ‘a method has been found’29 that will finally dispose of philosophy and its problems but is more akin to ‘mysterians’ like Chomsky and McGinn (of whom more in Part Three) who suspect that we will never achieve enlightenment about certain matters. d) Non-philosophical thought can be even worse than philosophical thought. It soon becomes evident, reading his book, that Stove thinks that human thought almost inevitably generates drivel and this is one reason, probably the main reason, why the task of eradicating philosophy is unlikely ever to be completed. At one point he says that even the worst examples of philosophical thought are superior to what is found outside philosophy: I am not interested here (or anywhere else, much) in thoughts of primitive people, or of ignorant or stupid people, or of people of no importance for the history of thought, or of people who are, even by ordinary standards, mad. My specimens above [Plotinus and co.] were not drawn from the voodoo religion, for example, or from the medicine of Paracelsus, or from the ‘philosophy’ of William Blake, or from the ‘psychotherapy’ of Wilhelm Reich. Indeed, in this essay, I will hardly stray at all ‘below the belt’, that is, to the rank under-parts of human thought: numerology, magic, lives of the gods, lives of the saints, lives of the demons, necromancy or lives of the dead, astrology, spiritualism, Freudianism, etc, etc. Together, of course, such things as these make up in fact the great bulk of past and present human thought …30 In spite of the first sentence, Stove seems to see a special connexion or parallel between philosophy and madness, though it is not clear to me what he thinks that connexion or parallel31 is and at one point he deems it unhelpful to dismiss Plotinus, Hegel, Foucault and the filioque disputants as simply mad.32 e) Positivism and nonsense. Stove is prepared to describe himself as a neo-Positivist and on occasion adopts the Positivist practice of dismissing discourse he dislikes as ‘nonsense’ or as ‘unintelligible’. For example: We will know what is wrong with our thoughts … when we can write a computer programme which, by combining (perhaps) eleven different nonsense-producing ingredients in just the right ways, will enable us to print out at command a page of pseudo-Hegel which is absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing.33 Now it is not clear to me that his talk of ‘nonsense’ here is consistent with some of the other things he says in the book and trying to work out what his position on the question of philosophical nonsense is (or ought to be) will be an important part of our task in Part Three. But one reason for his resorting to accusations of talking nonsense is surely that he holds that: f) What is wrong with philosophical theses is internal to the theses themselves. Let us ponder this passage:

6 What is wrong with our thoughts is hardly ever logical falsity … This is so, at least, if the word ‘logical’ is used in its usual sense. Take the controversy about the filioque. I have not read any of this literature, but since philosophy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was, if anything, over-attentive to logic, it is safe to assume that on both sides of this controversy the logic was impeccable. You would search the controversialists’ writings in vain for invalid inferences, or concealed contradictions. And the reason is obvious. Logic is concerned only with the relations between propositions, but everything that has gone wrong in the filioque dispute has gone wrong inside propositions: in the terms which are common to both sides, such as ‘Holy Ghost’, ‘Father’ and ‘proceeds’. And this state of affairs is typical. The logicians’ net is too coarse-meshed to catch the fish that matter.34 I am no more an expert on the filioque literature than is Stove, but it seems to me unlikely that there will be no identifiable fallacies to be found in it.35 After all, the theologians involved disagreed with each other and would surely have tried to convict each other of fallacious reasoning. Why otherwise were they ‘if anything, overattentive to logic’? Is it not likely that some of their accusations and counteraccusations were well-founded? But there are of course deeper issues here. If the filioque utterances were sheer nonsense, utterly devoid of meaning, they could not have any logical properties whatsoever. They could not contain overt or concealed contradictions and they could not entail or (in the usual sense) fail to entail each other. But, as will become clear in Part Three and probably before, it is unlikely that Stove does think that the filioque utterances or those of other philosophers, however benighted, are strictly nonsense, blessed with no meaning whatsoever. g) A nosology of thought. Stove holds that we have as yet little idea what goes wrong in most philosophical thinking (or indeed in the various kinds of radically defective non-philosophical thinking he mentions in the passage quoted in (d)): So painfully far are we from being able to answer the question which is the title of this essay [‘What is wrong with our thoughts?’]. What is needed in order to answer it, but what we have as yet scarcely the faintest glimmerings of, is a nosology of human thought. (A nosology is a classification of diseases.) We will know what is wrong with our thoughts when, and only when, we have identified (for example) all the five different things (or however many there are) which go wrong in a paragraph of Berkeley intended to prove that physical things cannot exist ‘without the mind’36 There are two types of error that we can sometimes identify with fair certainty: contingent falsity and self-contradiction. But beyond these we are in uncharted territory, territory that few have even attempted to explore: The Logical Positivists, to their credit, at least tried to frame a nosology of thought less pitifully inadequate than the common one. They acknowledged three ways in which thought can go wrong: contingent falsity, selfcontradiction, and meaninglessness. A proposition is meaningless, they said, if it is not a tautology and not verifiable either … And verifiability, they said, consists in standing in a certain logical relation to observation-statements.

7 But, of course, they never did succeed in making out just what logical relation that is, and the story of their successive attempts to do so forms a justly famous episode of black comedy in twentieth-century philosophy.37 The Positivists at least attempted a step in the right direction yet there are philosophers, and beneficiaries of Logical Positivism at that, who actually propose, not to enlarge the Positivist nosology, but to contract it, to the point where it contains only one category! Now I ask you: what ought to be thought of a doctor, even in the most primitive state of medicine, who acknowledges the existence of only one disease? I am referring, of course, to Quine, who wants us to make do just with the category of contingent falsity: an excess of Positivist pedestrianism which deserves … an essay to itself.38 h) The sheer, unmanageable variety of the ways in which our thinking goes wrong. Stove seeks to exhibit the manifold diversity of intellectual error by listing forty (mainly philosophical) claims about the number three all of which are in some way wrong-headed. He claims that we only really know what is wrong with two of them, these two: 1.) ‘Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.’ 2.) ‘Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson, and it is not the case that between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.’39 The rest – all thirty-eight of them – are ones concerning which, although we may be confident enough that there is something wrong with them, we are as yet unable to say just what it is: … thirty-eight ways for thought to come absolutely to grief, other than by contingent falsity or self-contradiction, and we know absolutely nothing about any of them.40 We don’t even know what is wrong with this: 13.) ‘Three is a lucky number.’41 (‘one of the few slum-dwellers that I have let in’42) And certainly not with these: 3.) ‘God is three persons in one substance, and one of these persons is Jesus, which is the lamb that was slain even from the foundations of the world.’ 7.) ‘Three lies between two and four only by a convention which mathematicians have adopted.’ 15.) ‘Three is a real object all right: you are not thinking of nothing when you think of three.’ 19.) ‘Three is not an object at all, but an essence; not a thing, but a thought; not a particular but a universal.’ 20.) ‘Three is a universal all right, but it exists only, and it exists fully, in each actual triple.’ 35.) ‘We get the concept of three only through the transcendental unity of our intuitions as being successive in time.’ 36.) ‘One is identity; two is difference; three is the identity of, and difference between, identity and difference.’ 37.) ‘The number three is not an ideal object of human contemplation, but a concrete product of human praxis.’ 38.) ‘The unconscious significance of the number three is invariably phallic, nasal and patriarchal.’43 Stove is pessimistic about our ever having an adequate nosology of thought but he does not rule out the possibility.

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I hope that by now the reader has a reasonably clear picture of Stove’s antiphilosophy and will agree that he has as good a claim to be regarded as an antiphilosopher as anyone else.

Part Three: How are we to assess Stove’s neo-Positivism? My perspective on Stove’s work may not be everyone’s but to me the outstanding questions it raises are these: a) To what extent is Stove really in the Positivist tradition? In particular, is he what I would call ‘a nonsensicalist’?44 Does he think that philosophers suffer from illusions of meaning? b) Whether or not Stove is a Positivist, is he an antiphilosopher? c) Stove’s own question, which is one that has also long intrigued me, about the nature of philosophical wrongness or error. d) Is he right about the seemingly inexhaustible variety of philosophical error and to suspect that it will probably resist definitive classification? Let us consider them in turn. a) Stove on ‘Positivism’ and ‘nonsense’. I have already quoted one of Stove’s references to philosophical nonsense.45 If it were not for his repeated insistence that he stands in the Positivist tradition46, I would probably have dismissed his occasional talk of nonsense as simply a matter of loose, rhetorical formulations that should not be taken literally. When he does discuss what the Positivists have to say about meaninglessness he is usually very critical: Certain Logical Positivists, in their early days, actually had the cheek to imply that metaphysical statements are defective in the same way as the string of words 'Lenin or coffee how'. What can one say in response to such silliness, except that it is silly? More generally, the Positivists were often justly criticised for calling statements meaningless - 'The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone', for example - which, quite obviously, you have first to understand, that is, know the meaning of, before you can tell that they have got something unspeakably wrong with them. Expressed in Turkish, say, the proposition that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone would indeed be meaningless to me, and probably to you.47 It cannot be an accident … that thought and language arrive together, in Hegel, at the highest degree of corruption of which either is capable. But it is merely ridiculous to try to condense the whole cloud of ways in which language can be abused into the single drop of bad grammar. Hegel’s grammar is all right. Why try to convict him on the one charge of which he is innocent?48 This way of talking about grammar is more associated with the later Wittgenstein than with the Logical Positivists but the context strongly suggests that Stove sees a continuity between it and positivist diagnoses of nonsensicality and believes that both face the same difficulties.49

9 Still, I feel unhappy about simply dismissing Stove’s references to ‘nonsense’ and ‘unintelligibility’ and mentally replacing them by such words as ‘absurd’ or ‘ridiculous’. In an earlier paper I suggested that he simply had a hunch that if we did know all that went wrong in a passage from Hegel, say, we would see the appropriateness of calling it nonsensical.50 Well, maybe; but I now prefer to content myself with suggesting that a reference to nonsense should be taken as one way in which Stove tries to make his point that what is wrong with a sentence he condemns is internal to that sentence and not a matter of its failure to stand in the right relation with other sentences. In what follows, I shall, like Stove, be mainly concerned with what is wrong with theses, claims, conclusions (and also questions), not with faults in the reasoning by which they are arrived at. b) Is Stove an antiphilosopher? There can be little doubt that the answer is Yes, and not just because antiphilosophy is something of a broad church either. He is in no way a borderline case and one could reasonably say, ‘If Stove is not an antiphilosopher, then I don’t know who is’. He is as anxious to puncture the pretensions of philosophy as any Logical Positivist or Wittgensteinian. Should this not already be obvious from the foregoing, then consider some additional evidence. Stove rejects various standard problems of philosophy as pseudo-problems: the problem of universals, that of the external world, that of other minds and that of induction.51 I wondered whether to discuss this aspect of his work when asking how seriously to take his talk of ‘nonsense’. After all, one frequently encounters the words ‘nonsensical’ and ‘meaningless’ before ‘pseudo-problem’. But not, I think I am right in saying, in Stove’s book. And in fact a pseudo-problem could be one that rests entirely upon a false assumption. Take the question ‘Are our actions free or are they causally determined?’. A compatibilist will (rightly or wrongly) reject this question as involving a false dichotomy based on the assumption that if an action is causally determined, it cannot also be free. And he might well call it a pseudo-problem. But he need not call it a meaningless pseudo-problem. Indeed he would be extremely illadvised to do so. Of the four problems that Stove rejects as pseudo-problems the only one he discusses at length is that of other minds52 and it is clear that, although he thinks solipsism53 absurd, he thinks it is a doctrine with logical properties and not an utterly meaningless concatenation of words that somehow creates the illusion of expressing a doctrine. Another manifestation of Stove’s antiphilosophical stance is his repeated suggestion that philosophy is closely related to madness; but what he thinks that relationship is escapes me.54 If he had been a nonsensicalist, he might have said that philosophers resemble schizophrenics and those who are delirious in that they literally talk nonsense. At least one Wittgensteinian, Rupert Read, does say this.55 But, as we have seen, Stove does not think philosophical utterances are meaningless. Finally Stove stresses the non-rational motivations of philosophers. Consider this passage: Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe.56

10 And this: Some of the best philosophers never argue at all, or even pretend to. Santayana, for example. He simply tells you how he thinks the world is, and delicately makes fun of some other philosophers, almost always unnamed, who think there is more to the world, or less, than he does. Bentham is another philosopher who is entirely innocent of arguments, as distinct from satire, against his opponents. Other philosophers, it is true, are almost always arguing: Leibniz, for example. Others, again, are always pretending to argue, but never do: Spinoza is such a one. By nature he was a pure world-portraitist, like Santayana, but current intellectual fashion had unluckily afflicted him with Euclidean ambitions. The result is that, though on the surface his philosophy swarms with arguments, these arguments are all of the form, rigorously valid indeed but otherwise without merit, ‘p, so p’. It is not to be simply assumed, then, that the currency of an opinion among philosophers owes anything to argument in its favour.57 Comments like these naturally attract accusations of the genetic fallacy: ‘You may be right about the non-rational origin of a belief but it does not follow that that belief is false’. Stove is clearly worried about this and devotes part of the Preface to denying that he is guilty of any such fallacy: ‘[T]here is no intellectual vice that is less attractive to philosophers than that one’.58 Obviously only someone who has read and pondered the entire book will be in a position to form a balanced judgment about his guilt or innocence. I should perhaps say explicitly that Stove does not think that philosophers are often consciously dishonest, mere charlatans. They are self-deceivers, but not, except unintentionally, other-deceivers. For example, he regards the British Idealists as motivated largely by a desire to see the Universe as congenial, but he also says: [A]mong the British idealists there is, as far as I know, only one intellectual fraud: William Wallace, who succeeded Green as Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford … In general, the British idealists were not only not frauds, but were good philosophers. Green, Bosanquet, Bradley, and Andrew Seth, in particular, were very good philosophers indeed.59 I think however that I have by now said enough to show that Stove is taking, or trying to take, a stance outside philosophy in order to deliver a generally unfavourable verdict on it. c) What makes a wrong or mistaken philosophical thesis wrong? This question is in my experience very rarely asked. Answers to it are often assumed, of course: it is necessarily, rather than merely contingently false, perhaps, or it is nonsense and thus not a genuine thesis at all. Stove deserves much credit for seeing that the answer is not obvious and moreover that there may not be just one way or even a manageably small number of ways in which philosophical theses go wrong. Some philosophers have asked what amounts to a counterpart to Stove’s question, one about correctness in philosophy. In ‘Nagel, McGinn and Stove on the limits of human understanding’60 I discuss Thomas Nagel’s suggestion in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’61 that we cannot yet see how mental phenomena could be identical with physical phenomena. He does not say that they could not be identical, nor that we will never be able to see how they could be identical; only that we cannot yet see how

11 they could be. I also discuss Colin McGinn’s suggestion that perhaps we are fated to remain in ignorance of how the mental relates to the physical, simply because our mental capacities are not geared to this kind of problem.62 More generally, McGinn wonders whether philosophical problems might be a recalcitrant residue of problems that the human intellect is un- or at least ill-fitted to handle. Nagel and McGinn are thus concerned with our ability or inability to grasp the correct answers to certain questions. Let us assume for the sake of argument that mental states, processes and events are identical with physical states, processes and events. But let us also assume for the sake of argument that we will never be able to see how this is so – how such identities are possible.63 Presumably, in that case, we could never know but at best suspect the truth of the Identity Theory. That however is not the aspect of the matter that I wish to emphasise here. What I want to suggest is that we could never have much idea what was wrong with rivals to the Identity Theory – with Dualist or Idealist Theories. This is not to deny that we might be able to demonstrate the falsity of some rivals. It might be possible to convict some particular Dualist theory of self-contradiction, for example, though I suspect that this would be a matter of something amiss with its formulation, something superficial that could be corrected.64 And the fact that it is unlikely that any latter-day Dualist would defend Descartes’ view that the pineal gland is the site of mind-body interaction suggests that empirical discoveries can dispose of particular Dualist claims. But it seems to me that if we could not see how the mental could be identical with the physical we could not have much insight into what was really wrong, deep-down, with theories that denied this identity. This is no proof, of course, and I would be interested to know what others have to say. To return to Stove then, I do not know of any other philosopher who has so forcefully drawn attention to our ignorance of what goes wrong in our philosophical thinking, though the questions he asks are at least implicit in the work of those who have stressed the limits, possibly permanent and ineradicable, of human understanding. d) The many ways in which our thinking can go wrong. Stove has a good deal to say about this. He inclines to the view that there is little underlying unity here and that it is unlikely that we will ever have a comprehensive theory of philosophical error. He is not dogmatic about this and points out a couple of glimmers of hope. I shall not discuss the details of what he says65 since it seems to me that he is making a familiar philosophical error, though in a less reprehensible form than is usual. I name no names but it often happens that a philosopher tells us that something is unknowable or ineffable and then proceeds to tell us all about it or has already told us something about it. Stove is not guilty of this blunder.66 He doesn’t say that we can’t know what is wrong with, for example, the thirty-eight intellectual atrocities involving the number three (or that, if we could, it would be impossible to systematise our knowledge). But he does say that we don’t know. So how is he in a position to say much about whether there is one error underlying them all? Or a few errors? Or a large number of errors that can be helpfully classified?67 Or a chaotic plethora? The problem emerges quite clearly from the following passage: Whatever it was that went so dreadfully wrong with Berkeley’s thought about the possibility of things existing ‘without the mind’, it certainly cannot have

12 been what went wrong with Meinong’s thoughts on the same topic. What went wrong with Parmenides’ thoughts about how many things there are must have been very different from whatever went wrong in Leibniz’s Monadology. The way that Moore’s thoughts went wrong about ethics cannot possibly have been the same way as Kant’s thoughts about ethics went wrong. How Ryle went wrong about the mind, and how Plotinus went wrong about the mind, must have been very different things. Spinoza’s way of getting the relation between the actual and the possible wrong cannot possibly be the same as David Lewis’s way. And so it goes on, right down the line; and we do not know what any of those ways are.68 This is very well put and, I think, broadly correct. But we must distinguish between the psychology of error and its product. A Positivist or a Wittgensteinian might say, ‘Yes, the mental aberrations of these thinkers must have been very different but they all have the same terminus, the utterance of nonsense: the thinkers all end up saying things, believing they mean something by them when they mean nothing’. And a more traditional philosopher might say (assuming she agrees that all the philosophers mentioned have indeed gone wrong), ‘Yes, the fallacious inferences of these thinkers must have been very different but they all have the same terminus, the assertion of necessary falsehoods’. I am endorsing these two responses only to this extent: I agree that one can accept that the thinkers have gone wrong in many different ways and yet maintain that they all end up in the same place. ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction’. But surely Stove is right to point out that we do not know much about what is wrong with where these thinkers end up. So it could be that there is great variety here, and moreover a variety that resists systematisation. We are not in a position to rule this out.69 Part Four: The importance of what Stove is saying. I had originally intended to call this essay ‘David Stove: A neglected antiphilosopher’ but a search on the Internet has convinced me that he is not quite as neglected as I had thought (even quâ antiphilosopher). Furthermore that title would not have sufficiently emphasised what I take to be Stove’s main contribution to philosophy in The Plato Cult. William F. Vallicella takes issue with Stove’s antiphilosophy in a way that seems to me to miss the point almost completely.70 He characterises ‘this guy’ as ‘a philistine with no understanding of philosophy whatsoever’71 and coins the word ‘philosophistine’, a philosophical philistine, to describe him.72 He also calls him a ‘two-bit positivist’ who is ‘dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece’.73 I can see why these things might be said, but they are purblind all the same. I have noted Stove’s dogmatism, his tendency to pepper his writings with opinionated asides that seem deliberately provocative. One quickly learns that he is an atheist in religion, a positivist (in some sense) in philosophy, a conservative in politics and an ultra-conservative (though the term hardly seems strong enough) in the arts. Few people will be able to read more than a few pages without finding something to annoy them.74 And this has had predictable results.

13 It is easy to say that one could have predicted something. After all, unless one is on record as having predicted the opposite, who is there to gainsay one? But it certainly isn’t surprising to find that Vallicella is aghast at Stove’s ‘positivism’ but thinks it ‘a good thing about him’ that he is politically conservative75, any more than it would be surprising to find someone else applauding his ‘positivism’ but regretting his conservativism and someone else again who judged his political and his aesthetic conservativism quite differently. And it is not surprising that any philosophical points Stove makes that are unfamiliar or moderately subtle are drowned out by the jeering and the cheering. Vallicella, as far as I can ascertain, only discusses the Preface to Stove’s book and a short passage from Chapter Two, although he clearly intends his condemnation of Stove’s antiphilosophy and ‘positivism’ to apply to the work as a whole. Surely the final chapter would have been the one to focus on. In what he does say Vallicella makes two reasonable points and one that, even if it has some slight force, has none whatsoever against Stove. These are: a) As Vallicella notes, Stove consistently writes about Berkeley as though he is making Dr Johnson’s mistake of thinking that Berkeley is denying the existence of tables and chairs, and sticks and stones.76 I find it hard to believe that any trained philosopher could make this mistake, let alone someone with Stove’s evident expertise in the history of philosophy. Yet I do not know how to defend him against this imputation and seem to recall that G. E. Moore has been accused of trying in his argument for the existence of physical objects77 to make Dr Johnson’s mistake respectable. b) Stove tells us that ‘two statements can be inconsistent without either being intelligible’78 and Vallicella soberly explains why, if the words ‘inconsistent’ and ‘intelligible’ are used in their normal senses, this cannot be so.79 Perhaps Stove meant that two statements can look inconsistent in virtue of their form, without either being intelligible, for example ‘All glarks are green’ and ‘Some glarks are not green’. But discussion of intelligibility really leads on to the next point. c) Vallicella spends time telling us why verificationism is unacceptable80, even though Stove, as we have seen, makes it quite clear that he is not a verificationist and gives what is, for my money, the best argument against verificationism. The argument that Vallicella himself gives is not a strong one81, though it is one that is still often repeated. To be fair to Vallicella, Stove is less than clear about why he calls himself a ‘positivist’ and about what he means by ‘nonsense’ and ‘unintelligible’; but he is explicit enough about the shortcomings of verificationism. Vallicella, as I say, misses what really matters in Stove’s book. And Stove himself is partly to blame for this. Yet I would have thought that anyone who read the final chapter at all attentively would have paused at some point to ask himself, ‘Well, what do I think makes a philosophical claim wrong? Do I think there is just one kind of philosophical wrongness? Or several? Or many?’ If Vallicella was stimulated to ask himself this, he gives no indication of it. Stove picks on Berkeley as a philosopher who goes wrong in a way that it might be possible for other philosophers to fathom:

14 I must admit, though, that … the case of Berkeley is not typical: he is an unusually favourable specimen of a great philosopher. It seems, by contrast, entirely out of the question that anyone should ever get to the bottom of what is wrong with Hegel’s thoughts, say.82 Presumably it is the clarity of Berkeley’s writing that makes him such a favourable specimen. It so happens that before I ever read Stove I chose Berkeley to illustrate a related point and I chose him for similar reasons. I wanted an example of an important philosopher who writes clearly, is still widely read and puts forward what is by any standards a metaphysical thesis. I could have chosen Plato, perhaps, or Descartes; but I chose Berkeley. I suggested that, though there can be few philosophers today who think that Berkeley successfully proves his case, this does not mean that his conclusions are wrong. Then I asked: Supposing his idealism is wrong, what would make it wrong? And I expressed the view that there would probably not be much agreement about that. I was assuming only for the sake of argument that there was something wrong with Berkeley’s idealism and I like to think I made this clear.83 It seems to me that Stove would have done well to insert the phrase ‘for the sake of argument’ at quite a few places in the final chapter of his book. His point is that we need to ask what goes wrong in mistaken philosophical views and his claim is that we have very little idea what goes wrong; and he more tentatively suggests that there may be very many ways, which may resist systematisation. To say these things he does not need to commit himself on the subject of which philosophical views are wrong. Indeed, one might wonder how he can be so sure which are wrong, if, on his own admission, he does not know what is wrong with them.84 Perhaps even some of the despised thirty-eight are defensible. Instead of taking it for granted that there must be something wrong with Berkeley’s idealism, Stove could have asked in what way it might be wrong, if it is wrong. He could even have asked us to assume for the sake of argument that Berkeley is right and then asked about views incompatible with Berkeleyanism – dualism, materialism, atheism, the view that esse non est percipi – and asked what would make them wrong. I don’t say that this would have completely undone the effect of his pervasive dogmatism but it might have been enough to make his question stand out against the dogmatic background. Well, what do we know about philosophical wrongness? I venture to say that Stove has got the answer right and it is: Not much. Here I allow myself to be a little dogmatic and simply challenge those who think otherwise to make suggestions and argue for them. In fact, very few suggestions have been made, let alone argued for. Perhaps the two commonest are that philosophical wrongness consists in asserting necessary falsehoods and that it consists in talking nonsense. The former might limit necessary falsehood to self-contradiction (and perhaps the pragmatic self-defeating) or it might embrace some meatier de re notion of necessity (falsity in all possible worlds). One might think of it as the rationalist conception of philosophical wrongness. The latter goes back at least to Hobbes and continues through the classical empiricists down to the Logical Positivists and Wittgenstein.85 One might think of it as the empiricist conception of philosophical wrongness, were it not for the fact that it survives today mainly in the work of Wittgensteinians, who are not usually classified as empiricists and do not usually think of themselves as such. Then there is

15 Quine’s view that philosophical wrongness is just contingent falsity. (There is nothing else for it to be.) And there is Kant’s view that philosophical, or at least metaphysical, wrongness is whatever it is that goes wrong in the Antinomies. (I suspect from what Stove says that he would deny that Kant’s view is anything more than bluff.86) What else is there? I can think of two other ideas that require mention. A view, fashionable in the Fifties and developed most fully by Morris Lazerowitz, was that metaphysical theses are disguised linguistic recommendations. This idea seems to have its origins in Wittgenstein, which is odd since it is clearly inconsistent with his official view that putative metaphysical theses are nonsense.87 The other, also Wittgenstein’s, is that metaphysical theses (or some of them) are distorted reflexions of grammar. I believe that this too is inconsistent with his official view but admit that this is less obvious and will not discuss the matter further here.88 And that’s about it. But ought we to add ‘incoherence’ to our list? Can philosophical theses go wrong by being ‘incoherent’? I have complained elsewhere89 about the slipshod way in which philosophers use the words ‘incoherent’ and ‘incoherence’, as though ‘incoherence’ were a well-defined technical term connoting a definite, generally recognised type of error, when in fact philosophers use the words in several different ways and some in ways that one can only guess at. Would such a state of affairs be allowed to exist if there were a proper, ongoing debate about what wrongness in philosophy consists in? And I do not mean: if there were anything approaching general agreement about the answer. I just mean: if the question were clearly in focus. To return to Vallicella, I suggest that what is important in Stove’s book has passed him by completely, though this is in part Stove’s fault. Both philosophers seem to be strikingly lacking in what one might call ‘philosophical empathy’, the ability and willingness to – or at least to try to – get inside the minds of philosophical opponents and to explore the possibility that they might conceivably have good reasons for saying what they say.90 It would be a truism to say that chess players need to try to understand their opponents’ thinking but it seems that it is not always superfluous to utter a parallel truism about philosophy. Vallicella concludes one of his posts by saying that the great philosophers will be remembered long after Stove has been forgotten.91 I do not know whether Stove is destined to be remembered but, if he is, I believe it will most likely be for his perspicuous raising of the question: If a philosophical claim is wrong, what makes it wrong?

Notes. 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 2. Biographical details can be found on Wikipedia. 3. S. Overgaard, S. Burwood, P. Gilbert, An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge: C. U. P., 2013; Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008; Paul Horwich, Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy, Oxford:

16 Clarendon, 2013; P. Frascolla, D. Marconi, A. Voltolini (eds.), Wittgenstein: Mind, Meaning and Metaphilosophy, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. 2010; Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy, ed. S. Elden, tr. D. Fernbach, London: Verso, 2016; A. Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, tr. B. Bosteels, London and New York: Verso, 2011; B. Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, tr. D. Fernbach, London and New York: Verso, 2012; J. Clemens, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy, Edinburgh: E. U. P., 2016. Do I need to define the term ‘antiphilosophy’? I take any philosophy that dismisses most previous philosophy as worthless and calls for the end of philosophy as traditionally conceived to be an ‘antiphilosophy’. Whether every antiphilosophy must itself be a philosophy of sorts I shall not enquire. It will soon be evident that there is no reason to deny that Stove’s antiphilosophy is a philosophy, and one of a not entirely unfamiliar sort. 4. Stove, op. cit., p. xiii. 5. Op. cit., p. xiii. My own attitude is similar to Stove’s but not quite the same. I would emphasise that philosophers are only human and therefore should never be revered (nor should anyone else). This way of looking at things ought to make for greater tolerance and better manners than Stove’s way: philosophers make mistakes but so do we all. If this strikes you as a little too conciliatory, taking tolerance and good manners a little too far, then leave it for now and return to it after you have read the rest of the paper, particularly Part Four. 6. Hume receives as many favourable mentions as anyone, yet an oft praised passage in Hume is condemned as ‘tripe’ (p. 66) and the problem of induction, which he is usually credited with discovering, is dismissed as a pseudo-problem (p. 199). 7. Op. cit., p. 187. 8. Op. cit., p. 188. 9. Op. cit., p. 157. 10. Op. cit., p. 185. 11. Op. cit., p. 185. 12. Op. cit., p. 201. 13. He writes of the claim ‘that there is no opinion so absurd but that some philosopher has held it’: This was repeated by Cicero after Varro, by Hobbes after Descartes, by Hamilton, and by a thousand others before and since. In fact this silly slander has always been such a favourite with the victims of it that it could almost serve as its own sufficient counter-example. (Op. cit., p. 135) Given his general attitude towards philosophy, I am rather surprised that Stove does not heartily endorse this ‘silly slander’. But what I simply don’t understand is how an opinion that Stove thinks absurd could be a counter-example to the generalisation in question. 14. Op. cit., p. 185. 15. Op. cit., p. 203. 16. Op. cit., p. 109. 17. Op. cit., p. 115. Tractatus, 5.64 is formulated in terms of realism and solipsism but the parallel is still striking: ‘Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism’. 18. Op. cit., p. 66. 19. Op. cit., p. 199. 20. Op. cit., p. 179. Not everyone will accept Stove’s assessment, of course. I take up this point in (b). 21. Op. cit., p. 182.

17 22. They are from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and F. H. Simson, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892-96, Vol. III, p. 550 and M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock Publications, 1972, p. 154. 23. Stove, op cit., p. 180. The passage is from The Six Enneads, Fifth Ennead, VI, 6, p. 237. 24. Op. cit., pp. 203-204. 25. Op. cit., p. 183. 26. The Wittgensteinian, O. K. Bouwsma seems to me to exaggerate when he says that ‘to some readers everything makes sense’, Philosophical Essays, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, p. 196. 27. Stove, op. cit., p. 199. 28. Op. cit., p. 202. I wondered whether to suppress the bracketed phrase but have decided to let it stand as an example of the kind of unsupported judgment I mentioned in Part One. 29. I am thinking of Wittgenstein’s remark, as reported by Moore in ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-33’, reprinted in J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (eds.), Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Occasions, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, p. 113. He said that the method would make it possible for there to be skilful philosophers in future, so we would no longer be reliant on the occasional great philosopher. 30. Stove, op. cit., p. 182. 31. Here is a good place to issue a warning. I have said that Stove writes very clearly yet, as the reader will discover, I have to admit with embarrassing frequency that I have only a vague idea of how he is using certain terms: ‘madness’, ‘nonsense’, ‘Positivism’ in particular. I remember reading a commentator on Hume who contrasted his ‘local lucidity’ with his ‘global obscurity’ and something similar can be said of Stove: the overall picture of what he is saying tends to be out of focus. He has some excuse in that he does not know – and admits he does not know – what is really wrong, deep-down, with what he is criticising and this is bound to affect his characterisation of what he believes and what he rejects. I do not think that this excuses everything though, in particular his exceedingly slapdash use of the word ‘nonsense’ (of which more later). 32. Op. cit., p. 185. 33. Op. cit., p. 187. 34. Op. cit., pp. 188-89. 35. What of ‘concealed contradictions’? On p. 66 Stove makes the surprising statement that ‘[i]dentifiable contradictions are vanishingly rare in philosophy, and are something of a badge of honour when they do occur’. I would agree that it is doubtful whether any major philosophical thesis, say a view of the mind/body problem, is self-contradictory, but I would have thought that careless formulations sometimes do involve their authors in inconsistency. Does it not often happen when one is writing philosophy that one asks oneself, ‘Is what I say here going to look inconsistent with what I say there?’? My guess is that there will be some inconsistencies in the filioque literature but they will depend upon injudicious formulations and will not to go to heart of what is problematic about the utterances in question. I have a little more to say about contradictions in Part Three (p. 11 and n.64) 36. Op. cit., p. 187. 37. Op. cit., p. 194.

18 38. Op. cit., p. 195. There might well be peoples who traced all diseases back to the same ultimate causes, say evil spirits, but this would be quite compatible with having an elaborate classification of diseases: the various ways in which the malice of these entities was manifested. Compare what I say at the end of Part Three about whether there are few or many ways of going wrong in philosophy. 39. Op. cit., p. 191. 40.) Op. cit., p. 194. Since he deals with the matter in Chapter Four, Stove presumably thinks there is another way in which claims can go wrong, namely by being pragmatically self-defeating. It may be that he thinks such claims are too close to contradictions to be worth separating off. (They are sometimes called ‘pragmatic contradictions’.) If he does think this, he never mentions it. 41. Op. cit., p. 192. 42. Op. cit., p. 195. 43.) Op. cit., pp. 191-93. My selection is somewhat arbitrary but I have tended to favour theses, claims, assertions or whatever one should call them that I seem to recognise. 44.) In Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? – An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning, New Romney: Teller Press, 2005 (DPTN?), and The Problem of Philosophical Nonsense – A Short Introduction, Rellet Press, 2015 (available from the author) and various papers on academia.edu. Another way of putting the question is: Does Stove employ ‘a coercive theory of meaning’? (See Charles Pigden, ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’, Logique et Analyse, 210, 2010, and on academia.edu.) 45.) This is in fact the only use of the word in the chapter on which I am focusing but in the book as a whole there are a few (pp. 14, 33, 70) - and several of ‘unintelligible’ and ‘incomprehensible’, which are also favourites of those who really do think that philosophers talk without meaning anything (pp. 28 30, 32, l07, 115, 116). At one point Stove confusingly calls a contradiction ‘nonsense’ (p. 14). It is an illustration of how difficult it is to pin Stove down on the subject of nonsense and unintelligibility that he is capable of writing this: [Thomas Kuhn] will not talk himself, or let you talk if he can help it, of truth in science or … of falsity: he claims he cannot understand that class of talk. (You have to be very learned indeed to find things as hard to understand as Kuhn does.) (Stove, op. cit., p. 10) An elegant swipe at the idea that it can be an achievement to fail to understand something. It can be an achievement to see that something is vague or ambiguous or to realise that one has failed to understand something one thought one had understood. But simply to fail to understand? I wonder, incidentally, whether Stove was influenced here by this: Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer. (Ernest Gellner, Words and Things, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968, p. 68.) 46.) I have only a vague idea of what Stove means by ‘Positivism’ and can only direct the reader to those parts of the book where he himself offers some guidance (the preface and the final chapter, particularly pp. 194-204). What he has to say about religion (pp. 83-87) and materialism (pp. 98-99) is also relevant. Auguste Comte was, I think, the first to call himself a ‘Positivist’, but it is abundantly clear that Stove does not consider himself a Comtean (see pp. 32-33, 172-73, 184-85). It would probably be true to say, however, that Stove would find the company of most of the

19 philosophers discussed in Leszek Kolakowski’s Positivist Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972) not utterly uncongenial. That is the best I can do by way of helping the reader to understand what Stove means by describing himself as a (neo-)Positivist. (Insofar as Stove is an antiphilosopher, he will find himself in company that he would consider decidedly uncongenial – Pascal, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan for example. See the works by Badiou and Groys mentioned in n. 3.) 47.) Stove, op. cit., p. 189. 48.) Op. cit., p. 190. Stove has just said (p. 189) that he is not denying but is ‘most anxious to affirm’ that ‘philosophers’ errors are usually most intimately connected with their abuses of language’. What he is denying is that we can correctly identify their errors by accusing them of meaning nothing or of speaking ungrammatically. 49.) I would like to know more about what he thinks of Wittgenstein. The only comment about him in the entire work is the one I quote in Part One, though there are allusions to him here and there. 50. In ‘What is philosophy’s most preposterous notion? – A suggestion’, on academia.edu, p. 52n.23. 51. Stove, op. cit., pp. 185, 199. 52. Op. cit., Chapter Four. 53. Taken here in its ‘other minds’, not in its ‘external world’, sense. 54. There are references to madness, some of them possibly rhetorical, on pp. 26, 29, 30, 32, 57, 68, 71, 72, 107, 108, 110, 115, 184, and 204. 55. ‘On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein’, Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 14, 2001, and on academia.edu. See also P. M. S. Hacker, Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Oxford: Blackwell, Vol.III, 1990, pp. 400-401. 56. Stove, op. cit., p. 188. In Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 112) Peter Hacker speaks of Wittgenstein’s ‘daunting remark that every philosophical error is the mark of a character failing’. Does anyone know where he makes this remark? Hacker has just referred to a passage in the Big Typescript but it does not seem to be there. 57. Op. cit., p. 100. 58. Op. cit., p. viii. 59. Op. cit., p. 97. 60. On academia.edu. 61. Philosophical Review, LXXXIII, 1974, reprinted in Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge, C. U. P., 1979. 62. Problems in Philosophy – The Limits of Inquiry, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Chomsky anticipated McGinn on this but I first came across the idea in McGinn and on the whole find him clearer on the subject. Chomsky gives his recent thoughts on it in Chapter Two of What Kind of Creatures are We?, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 63. In Chapter Three of The Plato Cult Stove condemns ‘How is X possible?’ questions, claiming that, insofar as they are not mere mystification, they collapse into ‘Is X possible?’ questions. I cannot go into the matter in detail here but I will say two things. First, I would agree that questions thus formulated can themselves look question-begging: ‘How is weakness of will possible?’, for example, should really be ‘How if at all is weakness of will possible?’ Second, is not, ‘How is it possible for a mental state to be a brain-state?’ a perfectly legitimate question? Said with a certain intonation it might be an expression of scepticism about mind-brain identity: ‘How on

20 earth could a mental state be a brain-state?’ But, said by Nagel, or perhaps by McGinn, it would mean something like: ‘I don’t at present see how a mental state could be identical with a brain-state but I know of no conclusive argument that rules the possibility out and indeed am aware of arguments that they must be identical’. 64. It is difficult to think of any major philosophical thesis that looks as though it might conceivably be self-contradictory. Philosophical theses just don’t seem to be that sort of thing. Does the history of philosophy record a single example of a successful reductio ad absurdum argument of the sort that is commonplace in logic and mathematics? No doubt it is occasionally possible to show that the way A has formulated X-ism involves an inconsistency of some kind but this never seems to dispose of X-ism for good. (It is worth remembering how often it is that philosophers protest that their opponents are deliberately interpreting what they say so as to make it inconsistent.) 65. For the record, his reasons for suspecting that the ‘desideratum of surveyability’ (p. 195) is not to be had are: i.) ‘the alarming ease’ with which he was able to put together his variegated list of misguided utterances concerning the number three (p. 196); ii.) his experience with students’ essays and the variety of errors to be found there (p. 197). And his reasons for not abandoning all hope are: i.) that some relatively clear-headed philosophers have successfully diagnosed what has gone wrong in the work of some relatively clear writers of philosophy (e.g. Berkeley on Locke), which is the main reason some philosophers are still worth reading (pp. 198-99). ii.) the tendency of philosophers to clump together in schools (pp. 198-99). 66. He in fact condemns it vigorously in Chapter Four, pp. 62-64 especially. 67. He mentions as an example of the systematisation of what at first sight seems formidably diverse the Periodic Table of the Elements. 68. Stove, op. cit., p. 186. 69. I have contrasted our extensive knowledge of what can go wrong in inferences with our meagre knowledge of what can go wrong in their premises and conclusions in ‘What do philosophers mean by “incoherent”?’, pp. 8-9, on academia.edu. See also ‘Louis Sass and Rupert Read on schizophrenia’, Part Two, pp. 8-9, on academia.edu. 70. His comments are to be found on the ‘Maverick Philosopher’ blog, in ‘David Stove, Anti-Philosopher’ (DSAP) and ‘David Stove on the Logos’ (DSOTL). He also talks about Stove in ‘Kimball on the Philistinism of the Nagel Bashers’, but this is distastefully ad hominem and adds nothing new philosophically. 71. DSAP. 72. DSOTL. Perhaps my own coinage will appeal to some: ‘philosophoclast’, a philosophical iconoclast. I have not had it vetted by a classicist but it seems to me employ Greek roots correctly. 73. DSOTL and DSAP. The only way in which these two judgments could be consistent, so far as I can see, is if he thinks that Stove is dangerous for some reason other than his philosophical views. 74. Roger Kimball in a very pro-Stove article in The New Criterion (Vol. 35, no. 2, October 2016, also to be found on the Internet), ‘Who was David Stove?’, admits that ‘there is a certain amount of calculated outrage in Stove’s polemical essays’ and ‘there is something to offend nearly everyone’ in them. 75. DSAP. 76. DSAP.

21 77. ‘Proof of an external world’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 1939. 78. Stove, op cit., p. 32. 79. DSATL. 80. DSATL. 81. It is that the Verification Principle condemns itself as meaningless because it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. For one reason why this argument is suspect see Pigden, op. cit., pp. 174-175, 178-79 (24-25, 28-29). Remember too that the earliest versions of verificationism equated the meaning of a proposition with the method of its verification. The argument that Stove gives against verificationism is not only far stronger than Vallicella’s, it is of much wider applicability: it tells against any criterion of meaningfulness, not just that of the Positivists. How do you apply it to an utterance without first ascribing a meaning to that utterance? (See DPTN?, pp. 36-38, 109-112.) 82. Stove, op cit., pp. 199-200. 83. DPTN?, p. 122. 84. I earlier mentioned Wittgenstein’s claim reported by Moore that a method had been found (n.29). The full sentence reads: ‘As regards his own work, he said that it did not matter whether his results were true or not: what mattered was that “a method had been found”’. This is odd in the opposite way to Stove’s claims. Stove thinks he knows that there is something wrong with all sorts of utterances without claiming to know what is wrong with them. Wittgenstein is surely saying that he knows what is wrong with mistaken philosophical claims – they are nonsense and his method will reveal this* – but seems to be admitting that he does not yet know what the results of his method, when correctly applied, will be and so presumably does not yet know which philosophical utterances are nonsense. On the other hand, elsewhere he seems pretty confident that sceptical doubts and all metaphysical claims are nonsensical. So perhaps the remark in question does not represent his considered view or perhaps Moore somehow got him wrong. * I take it that no one is going to say that Wittgenstein thinks something else is wrong with them. 85. See Pigden, op. cit. and Chapter Three of The Problem of Philosophical Nonsense – A Short Introduction, op . cit. 86. See Stove, op. cit., pp. 49-58, 103-107, 128. I have my own problem with understanding what Kant thinks is wrong with the utterances of speculative metaphysicians. It is reasonably clear how Kant thinks they go wrong. But what is the status of the claims they come out with, having gone wrong? Are they false, meaningless, meaningful but truth-valueless, meaningful but unknowable by us or something else? As I said at the end of Part Three, the question of the route that led to the mistaken conclusions needs to be distinguished from that of the status of the mistaken conclusions themselves. I raise this question about Kant in ‘The idea of philosophical nonsense from Hobbes to Wittgenstein – Notes and queries’, Query 9, on academia.edu, and would welcome suggestions. 87. Morris Lazerowitz, The Structure of Metaphysics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955. The passages in Wittgenstein that I know that suggest something like the ‘disguised linguistic recommendation’ view are PI, I, 400-403 and BB, pp. 56-60. I do I do not know for certain that Lazerowitz got the idea from him, though he did attend Wittgenstein’s lectures. He might have thought it up himself or it might been generally ‘in the air’ in the mid-Twentieth Century.

22 88. I discuss it in some detail (though a little inconclusively) in DPTN?, pp. 53-56 and in ‘Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism , Part One: Three Strands (and a probable fourth) in Wittgenstein’s mature conception of nonsense’, on academia.edu, pp. 8-10. 89. In ‘What do philosophers mean by “incoherent”?’, on academia.edu. 90. Wittgensteinians have their own ‘take’ on this. They are likely to tell those they accuse of talking nonsense, ‘ We don’t understand what you say (because it is nonsense); but we do understand your wanting to say it (because we have felt the same temptation ourselves’. Is this philosophical empathy? 91. DSOTL.