Distinguishing two theses in Anscombe's reply to C. S. Lewis

 From an essay I am writing on the Anscombe legend. 

Now most of Anscombe’s argumentation is aimed at establishing what I will call thesis A:

A) The argument Lewis presents in the third chapter of the first edition of Miracles overlooks some crucial distinctions, and therefore fails to show that naturalism is incompatible with the validity of reasoning.

However, at the end of her piece Anscombe goes on to say the following:

I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the “naturalist” hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

In other words she asserts what I will call thesis B:

B) You cannot refute the naturalist position by saying his position is inconsistent to say that naturalism is true, that human reasoning is valid, and that humans reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

This goes beyond saying that Lewis didn’t refute naturalism because he overlooked the distinctions Anscombe insisted upon, this is to say that you can’t refute the naturalist on the basis of the validity of reasoning, because of these distinctions. 

            Did Lewis concur with A? Almost certainly he did. I have known some philosophers who have thought that Lewis really didn’t need to revise his chapter at all, including the late philosopher Richard Purtill, but Lewis did not concur. (Neither would I).  Even in his initial brief response to Anscombe’s critique, which was published in the same issue of the Socratic Digest in which her essay appeared, he acknowledged the difficulty surrounding the use of the term “valid” and employed one of Anscombe’s central distinctions, between the cause and effect because, and what  he called the ground and consequent because. He indicated in his reply to Norman Pittenger that the third chapter of Miracles contained a “serious hitch” and that it “needs to be rewritten.” Establishing A is a good day’s work for a philosopher, particularly in that she persuaded the very person to whom she was responding that one of his central arguments, as stated, had serious problems and needed to be reworked.

            Now, if this is what winning the debate amounts to, Anscombe won, and Lewis agreed that she did. But she did go on to assert B, and if winning the debate requires establishing B, Lewis dissented. He wrote in his short response in the Socratic Digest:

It would seem, therefore, that we never think the conclusion because GC it is the consequent of its grounds but only because CE certain previous events have happened. If so, it does not seem that the GC sequence makes us more likely to think the true conclusion than not. And this is very much what I meant by the difficulty in Naturalism.

Lewis would go on to make this claim the centerpiece of his argument when he revised the chapter. He wrote:

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

            I am inclined to be resistant to talking about winning and losing in philosophical debates. They are not football games.  The Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig often does public debates on apologetical issues, and usually comes out looking better than his opponents. But skeptics have complained, with some justification, that doing well in a public debate format is not the same as proving one’s central thesis to be true from a philosophical standpoint. Now, if we are going to assess a winner in the exchange, there are, as Bassham notes a few different ways this can be assessed. Do we look just at the exchange on that day in at the Oxford Socratic Club, or do we look at the overall exchange between the two parties over time? Do we go by what the audience thought had happened? In a couple of important senses, Anscombe was the clear winner, especially if you look only at what happened on Feb. 2, 1948. There is no reason to doubt Carpenter’s report that many in the audience thought that a conclusive blow had been struck against one of Lewis’s fundamental arguments. On the narrow question of whether Lewis’s formulation of the argument is philosophically adequate, Anscombe contended that it wasn’t, and Lewis agreed. However, the most interesting philosophical question of whether or not you can refute naturalism based on the validity of reasoning cannot be settled the outcome of a particular exchange at a debating club. When Walter Hooper asked Lewis if he said he lost the debate with Anscombe, and Lewis said he didn’t, Lewis was probably thinking in terms of the question of whether Anscombe had shown that B is true. He was convinced that she had not. And looking at Anscombe’s responses to Lewis’s revised work, both in the introduction to her collected papers, and in her longer response given to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society in 1985, she does not reassert B. So far as I can tell from her responses, she does not think that Lewis had established that B is false, but she no longer confidently asserted that B is true. I would summarize this by saying that I think Anscombe won a significant, but only partial, victory, and in this I believe Lewis would concur.

Anscombe's final response to Lewis's revised chapter in Miracles

 This is a paper Anscombe did for the Oxford C. S. Lewis society, which I have not seen until recently. 

Reasons, causes and ontological commitments.

A redated post. 

Explanations, causal or non-causal, involve ontological commitments. That which plays an explanatory role is supposed to exist. Therefore, if we explain the existence of the presents under the Christmas tree in terms of Santa Claus I take it that means that Santa Claus exists in more than just a non-realist “Yes, Virginia,” sense. What this means is that even if reasons-explanations do not exclude physical explanations, even if reasons-explanations are somehow not causal explanations, the naturalist is not out of the woods. The naturalist maintains that the universe, at its base, is governed by blind matter rather than reasons. So if reasons-explanations are true, we still need to know why they are true and why reasons exist in a world that is fundamentally non-rational.

My essay on Narnia and Anscombe

Can be read at this site.

Lewis v. Anscombe: The Documents that Might be Hard to Find in Borders

This doesn't include the revised Lewis chapter which is in everyone's copy of Miracles these days, (not when I first heard about the AFR in 1972, when the copy of Miracles at my local library was the original edition), but that's here, and Tim McGrew has told me he just cleaned that one up, here.

The Third Chapter of Miracles in online

This is the locus classicus of the argument from reason. It is Lewis's revised paper, in response to Anscombe.

A layman examines the Lewis-Anscombe controversy

I am redating this post for the benefit of BDK, who asked about the texts on which the Lewis-Anscombe exchange is based.

This is a philosophical layperson, obviously well-disposed toward Lewis, who has attempted to analyze and reconstruct the Lewis-Anscombe controversy. Please see "notes" and "appendices."

He is not a fan of mine, as can be seen by these comments from "notes."

Reppert, 59-60. This book is certainly not the “gem” perceived by one reviewer who was perhaps describing what he and I hoped to see rather than what actually lay before him. The title is clever and the opening chapter is inviting; and I guess there is an important truth in the assertion that Lewis is not a provider of finished philosophical products but, rather, of ideas which deserve further devel­op­ment in view of his “outstanding philosophical instincts”. The book contains a couple of useful ideas and distinctions; and it is my abiding impression that the author has the kind of brains and training required for the job and which I lack. Yet I cannot doubt that this book will for most of its readers turn out to be an exercise in “finding out what the author says in spite of all the author does to prevent you” – as C. S. Lewis once described another book whose author had “no order, no power of exposition, no care for the reader”. At any rate, the chapter about the Anscombe affair is a botched job; it was in fact what made me decide to make an attempt myself.

Ouch!

The appendices are very valuable, since they include the original Anscombe critique, and the first edition chapter 3 argument, which are not the easiest things in the world to get a hold of.

On the Anscombe experience: a crisis of faith?

I had something like Lewis's experience when I presented a paper at Notre Dame on eliminative materialism. My commentator was Bill Ramsey, a UCSD graduate who actually did most of his work with Steven Stich rather than the Churchlands. In the exchange that ensued, I think the general consensus was that he had gotten the better of it. Did that tempt me to become an eliminativist? Certainly not. Did I ever cease to think that some kind of self-refutation argument could be made to work against eliminativism? No. But what it did show me was that I had failed to get fully "inside" the eliminativist perspective to be able to bring up objections that would draw iron. Ramsey subsequently published his reply in Inquiry, and I responded to that, I thought, reasonably well in that same journal. I also wrote another paper which came out in Metaphilosophy examining the eliminativism debate in light of an analysis of the fallacy of begging the question.

The overall reaction in the Oxford community might have been embarrassing and hard on Lewis. Lewis has said that one thing he didn't like about these Socratic sessions was that the credibility of Christianity seemed to hang on his performance in some particular debate. The fact that his adversary was young, female (Oxford in 1948 was less than fully converted to gender equality), and hitherto unknown didn't help. I take it when he later says "She obliterated me as an apologist" what he was saying was that he thought she had damaged his reputation amongst people who went to the Socratic meetings.

I know there was a subsequent discussion of the exchange between Lewis and Anscombe at the home of Lewis's physician Havard, who knew both of them. I'd give my eyeteeth for a record of what was said at that meeting. I also know that Lewis published a rebuttal in the Socratic Digest that same year. So if there was a time when he thought he actually thought the argument might have been refuted, it didn't last long.

Lewis came to reject naturalism in favor of absolute idealism as a result of an argument of this type in the course of his disputations with Owen Barfield prior to his conversion. However, if you read Surprised by Joy (and there is even more to the story than he recorded there), there were lots of factors in his conversion. It's unlikely that this would have triggered a crisis of faith.

The False Anscombe Legend Again

kbrowne: While I would agree that, as a result of his exchange with Anscombe, Lewis came to believe that his formulation of his argument was flawed, the claim that he believed the argument to be fully refuted is an urban legend, which I have dubbed the Anscombe legend. Anscombe herself attributed reports of Lewis's dejection over the exchange to the psychological phenomenon of "projection." Lewis in fact produced a short response to Anscombe's argument that appeared in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe's own essay had appeared. In 1960, the Fontana edition of Miracles appeared, in which Lewis produced a revised and expanded version of the third chapter of Miracles, which he wrote in response to Anscombe, and which expanded on the ideas in his short response that appeared in the Socratic Digest. Anscombe thought that this effort was considerably improved, but pointed out a couple of areas where the argument needed further development if it were to succeed.

My own efforts, starting with my 1989 doctoral dissertation, through my book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and the Blackwell Companion article, has been to defend Lewis's overall argument. I think as an attempt to refute Lewis's overall argument, (as opposed to showing that it had been inadequately formulated) relies on some assumptions, popular amongst Wittgensteinians (that explaining the reasons for someone's belief can be done in a way that is completely separate and independent from the question of how that belief is produced and sustained), that most people, naturalists or otherwise, would not endorse, and which have unacceptable consequences.

It is of some interest to note John Beversluis, who is the leading critic of Lewis's apologetics, concludes that Lewis did not consider his argument refuted and did not give up apologetics after the exchange, as biographers such as Humphrey Carpenter and A. N. Wilson have claimed. He differs from me with respect to the merits of Lewis's argument, and does think it can be refuted on broadly Anscombian lines, but he has completely abandoned the Anscombe Legend with respect to the psychological impact of the exchange.

Concealing the fallacy: A quote from "Mr. Anscombe"

When we hear of some new attempt to explain reasoning or language or choice naturalistically, we ought to react as if we were told that someone had squared the circle or proved the square root of 2 to be rational: only the mildest curiosity is in order-how well has the fallacy been concealed?[1] P. T. Geach


[1] Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 52.


I wonder if his wife agreed with that statement. 

An exposition of Anscombe's Causality and Determination

A famous Anscombe essay.

Anscombe's part of the exchange with C. S. Lewis

Can be found here. You can read Anscombe's original response to Lewis's first edition of miracles, her brief response to the revised edition, and Lewis's initial reply to Anscombe which appeared in the Anscombe's book, and formed the basis for his revised argument.

The Woman Who Stood Up to C. S. Lewis---And Harry Truman

Although Elizabeth Anscombe is best known in Lewis circles for her challenge to the early form of the argument from reason, she also is known as the woman who challenged Harry Truman's honorary degree because of his dropping of the atomic bombs. Read her remarks in the link below.

Were we right to drop those bombs?

A Broader look at Anscombe

Who certainly was far more that just The Woman Who Stood Up to C. S. Lewis.

The Anscombe Debate and the Anscombe Legend

I think some notes need to be made with respect to the relationship between the Anscombe debate and the Anscombe legend. It seems to me that one can maintain that the exchange between Anscombe and Lewis must, in the last analysis, be adjudicated in Anscombe's favor, without subscribing to what I have been calling the Anscombe legend. The legend says that, as a result of his debate with Anscombe, Lewis realized that he had been completely wrong and gave up on Christian apologetics. Further, this caused Lewis to abandon the "adult" world of rational discussion of religion in favor of the emotional, childlike world of Narnia. It was the legend that Philip Pullman was alluding to in the interview I quoted.

John Beversluis, in the first edition of his book on Lewis, wrote that "the arguments that Anscombe presented can be pressed further, and Lewis's revised argument does nothing to meet them." In a later paper reviewing A. N. Wilson's book, he took Wilson to task for overestimating the psychological impact of the Anscombe incident but his comments did not indicate a change in his views on the success of Lewis's actual argument or the philosophical effectiveness of the Anscombe critique. So he withdrew his previous acceptance of the Anscombe legend, but not the Anscombe critique.

In the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe essay appeared, Lewis presented an argument against naturalism which he thought could meet Anscombe's objections.
I think the Anscombe critique is decisive only if certain Wittgensteinian doctrines that she presupposed are true, doctrines that I consider to be highly counterintuitive, to say the least, and which would be rejected by most people on the naturalist side. But even if pursuing Anscombe's points further completely refutes Lewis's arguments, the Anscombe Legend would still be completely bogus.

More on the Lewis-Anscombe controversy: a further reply to anonymous

The question, of course, is whether Anscombe thought Lewis had adequately formulated the argument against naturalism, or whether the she really thought the argument fundamentally wrongheaded. Her response to Lewis's revision suggests to me that this was not her response to the revised argument. So long as we don't have an answer to Lewis's question, we cannot rule out the possibility that the naturalist is stuck with saying:

"Nothing. Beliefs (if they exist at all given naturalism--of course this is denied by eliminativists) are strictly epiphenomenal. It seems to us that we hold beliefs for good reasons, but if we examine how these beliefs are produced and sustained, we find that reasons have nothing to do with it. We think they do, but this is just one more example of the 'user illusion.'"

If this is the only answer the naturalist can give, the Lewis-style argument against naturalism hasn't fallen yet. There are principled reasons for thinking that that is where the naturalist is forced to go, if the naturalist is consistent. I have a number of arguments, having to do with the nature of intentionality, truth, mental causation, logical laws, the unity of consciousness, and the reliability of our rational faculties that suggest to me that these questions are genuinely open. It isn't just a matter of our not happening to have a naturalistically acceptable solution right now (but we will have it as soon as we do enough brain science) it is that there is a logico-conceptual gap between the mental and the physical that looks for all the world to be unbridgeable.

There's still a problem of mental causation that, so far as I can tell, has not been satisfactorily solved by naturalists. Look at Jaegwon Kim's extensive work on the subject if you doubt me. Absent some antecedent confidence that a solution exists, we can't say that there we can confidently await a solution.

Anscombe's final response lacks the firm confidence of this statement in the original critique:

EA: But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinions.

The most she claims is that it hasn't been refuted by the revised argument as formulated. There is absolutely nothing in Anscombe's final comments to suggest that no such argument could be formulated.

Anscombe's concession to Lewis

Anscombe: "It appears to me that if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they are genuinely his reasons, for thinking something - then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements we make about him.

This seems to me to be a puzzling statement. To say that something is genuinely someone's reasons just is to make a claim about how those beliefs are produced and sustained. If the reasons have nothing to do with how one actually not only comes to hold but also continues to hold a belief, then we've got problems.

That means naturalists need a solution to the problem of mental causation, (a problem that has gotten a lot of discussion in the philosophical literature) or we can't say that the evidence for evolution convinced Darwin or Dawkins to accept evolution. This is why Anscombe rightly noted that the answer to this question is crucial.

CSL: But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief's occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

Now suppose the only answer consistent with naturalism is "Nothing. Beliefs are strictly epiphenomenal. It seems to us that we hold beliefs for good reasons, but if we examine how these beliefs are produced and sustained, we find that reasons have nothing to do with it. We think they do, but this is just one more example of the 'user illusion.'"

If that were true, then naturalists would be implying that we are all, including naturalistic philosophers and scientists, are in the same boat with Steve the dice man. So when Anscombe says "We haven't got an answer" to Lewis's question, she is implying that her critique of Lewis's argument is incomplete, even though she might have some legitimate questions about how the argument was formulated in the revised chapter.

Anscombe's response is inconclusive as to whether, in the last analysis, Lewis's argument is good or bad. On the one hand she doesn't think Lewis has given a complete argument for the incompatibility of reason with naturalism. On the other hand, she doesn't think the naturalist has a successful answer for the central question that Lewis presents. She seems to think she won a battle, but not necessarily the war.

I am linking to the revised third chapter by Lewis.

Steve the dice-man

A passage from my response to the Anscombe controversy, which shows up in several pieces of mine.

If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might be inclined to consider him a very rational person. However, suppose that on all disputed questions Steve rolled dice to fix his positions permanently and then used his reasoning abilities only to generate the best-available arguments for those beliefs selected in the above-mentioned random method. I think that such a discovery would prompt you to withdraw from him the honorific title “rational.” Clearly, we cannot answer the question of whether or not a person is rational in a manner that leaves entirely out of account the question of how his or her beliefs are produced and sustained.

It seems to me that how beliefs are produced and sustained is crucial to assessing whether someone is rational. If it is a consequence of the fact that everything in the universe occurs as a result of the motions of a fundamentally non-teleological substrate that reasons never really affect the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event, then there has to be something wrong with a world-view according to which everything in the universe occurs as a result of the motions of a fundamentally non-teleological substrate.

Lovell on the Causal Role of Reasons--Why Anscombe's critique is not decisive

 This is because such an account of what it means to hold a belief rationally allows for no distinction between reasons for holding a belief and rationalisations of that belief. Suppose that chancy Charlie decides what to believe on a certain subject through a game of chance (by associating the various positions that might be held on the subject with the different possible outcomes of the game). Even though Charlie, being an intelligent and creative fellow, can produce formidable arguments for the position he adopts he surely does not hold that belief rationally. The problem here is that the reasons that Charlie offers in support of his belief are not really his reasons. To count as his reasons those reasons must at least partially explain why Charlie believes as he does. That is to say, the reasons are to justify Charlie’s belief those reasons must be part of what brings it about that Charlie believes as he does. It may have been something like this concern that Lewis was voicing in the central passage, quoted above. What does it take for a person’s reasons to be a part of what brings it about that they believe as they do? It seems to me to take, at least, the truth of both P₄ and P₅, which to remind the reader, ran as follows.

P₄) The apprehension of logical laws plays an explanatory role in the acceptance of the conclusion of the argument as true.

P₅) The state of accepting the truth of a proposition plays a crucial explanatory role in the production of other beliefs, and propositional content is relevant to the playing of this role.

Reply to Anonymous on Lewis and Anscombe

Anscombe's final comments are the beginning point of my discussions of the argument. Anscombe thought that there were flaws in the revised formulation of the argument, she also thought that Lewis asked a question "Even if grounds do exist, what have they got to do with the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event," to which she said "we haven't got an answer." These are not the words of someone who thinks they have slam-dunked their opponent.

I've often wished that the Anscombe original critique, and the Anscombe final comments. I wrote a brief review of the volume for Amazon. Getting the appropriate permission, in this case, might be difficult. I tried to get a volume together of Lewis-related philosophical essay along with another Lewis scholar, but was not able to pull together such a complex project. One of my plans was to include all the original texts from the Anscombe exchange (though there is a new volume of Lewis essays coming out edited by Walls, Habermas, and Baggett--unfortunately no Anscombe appendix).

As an attempt to show difficulties with Lewis's original argument, the critique works nicely, as Lewis surely admitted. That's a good day's work for a philosopher. If that's all you mean by winning, the Anscombe won. If winning means getting the better of the session at the Socratic, then that's probably right, though reports are mixed. But invariably, "winning" is thought to be a good deal more than that; it is thought to be showing the argument to be fundamentally mistaken and misguided. But in order to hold that Anscombe achieved this, you would have to agree with her that reason-explanations not only can be distinguished between causal explanations, they can be divorced completely, and therefore a "S believes P for reason R" can be answered in a way that leaves completely out of account how the belief is produced and sustained in S. That was popular amongst Wittgensteinians, and I sometimes hear it being defended, but even naturalistic philosophers from Davidson to Dretske to Jaegwon Kim don't want to go that way, and I think (for reasons I give in some detail in my book), they have good reason for so doing.

But yes, I would love to include an appendix to my book with the original documents in it, or make it available online. But it isn't the sort of thing you can include in a monograph without a lot of hassle. I understand that even the Lewis estate can be difficult to deal with for permissions.

Does anyone think that I failed to give an adequate summary of the relevant arguments?

I am linking to the Amazon page on Anscombe's book, which may be out of print but it's still available.