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.
