Max on Moore by Avrum STROLL

I.

I first met Max Black in 1952 when 1 was teaching at the University of Oregon, and though we corresponded a bit during the next two decades, it was only in the period 1973-1986 that I began to interact with him regularly. To a great extent, Henri Lauener was the catalyst that made this association pos- sible by inviting us to be participants in the international conferences held in Biel every two years. Independently of our Biel relationship, I also arranged for Max to visit the University of California at San Diego twice during this period. We frequently talked philosophy together on these occasions, inter- changes that I both enjoyed and learned from. Max was sharp, mordantly witty, irreverent, deeply committed to the philosophical enterprise, and with a genuine talent for finding just the right word or phrase to characterize some concept or notion.

It was Max, for instance, who hearing me describe the role that surfaces play in helping ordinary human beings organize the world in proto- topological ways’ recommended that I call this notion “the geometry of ordinary speech”. I am pleased to say that when my book, Surfaces, was pub- lished just before his death in 1988 it did prominently display his suggestion.

The last conversation we had was in 1986 in Biel and was about G. E. Moore. It was a long discussion that I still remember well, and it has inspired, for reasons that will quickly become clear, the paper that follows. Max had known Moore and admired him, but not without serious reservations. He felt that Moore’s work exhibited a tension whose components were profound insights deriving from common sense, on the one hand, and a surprising phi- losophical naivete, on the other. At the end of our discussion, he mentioned

University of California, San Dicgo.

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that he had written something along these lines in 1950. Recalling his remark, I recently tracked down the passage, and here is what he had said:

One reason for Moore’s great influence upon the younger philosophers may have been the refreshing contrast between his simplicity and clarity and the pretentious tech- nicality of some of his predecessors. After the intoxication of metaphysics, it is good to look upon the world again as a child might - to be told “After all. this i s a hand. I have a body, SO have you, and there are many other people like both of us who can say the same.” *

Moore’s disposition to “look upon the world again as a child might,” was one of the factors in the tension Max was describing. The other, pulling in an opposite direction, was, of course, Moore’s stalwart and powerful defense of common sense’s capacity to provide us with indisputable pieces of knowledge. About this second, opposing factor Max had written in that same essay:

Moore can make us see that there is nothing better to do with common-sense’ truisms than to ussert them: if an inveterate metaphysician is consistent enough to deny them - to say it is not certain that he sees a hand, or has a body, or ate breakfast yesterday - argument is not going to help. A man may be convicted of “abusing ordinary language,” but if he glories in the offense, further persuasion is futile. This is a lesson of great importance; if those who learnt it from Moore remain excessively shy of metaphysics, respect for the “Common Sense view of the world” will at least protect them against some kinds of metaphysical extravagance.

These two factors - the powerful affirmation of common sense knowl- edge claims and a child-like philosophical naivete - gave rise to what Max thought was a serious difficulty in Moore’s work. He continued to emphasize the liability in our 1986 conversation, but he had already made the point clearly in 1950. As he put it then:

Yet there is a kind of dogmatism in his work which will continue to bother some of his readers. Careful examination of his essays shows again and again that he fails, or rather, does not try, to urgue; on crucial issues, he seems to attack his opponents by vehement affwmation and reiteration.

In saying that on crucial issues Moore does not argue but attacks his oppo- nents by vehement . affirmation, Black was consciously exaggerating. He knew, of course, that in some of his papers, such as in “Certainty,’? and in “Four Forms of Scepticism,” Moore did produce arguments that do not beg the question and indeed offer compelling grounds for rejecting sceptical chal- lenges. But setting such hyperbole aside, one must agree that Black’s over-all assessment has merit. Even these articles exhibit Moore’s characteristic rheto-

1 Max Black, PhifmophiculAnolysh (Ithaca. 1950), p. 7. 2 Ibid., 8. 3 Ibid..7.

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rical technique of flatly asserting some propositions as being indisputably true. And there is no doubt that Max’s account is an accurate description of Moore’s two most famous papers, “A Defense of Common Sense”, and “Proof of an External World”.

For example, after listing a number of propositions that form what he calls “The Common Sense View of the World”, Moore asks:

But do I really know all the propositions in (1) to be true? Isn’t it possible that I merely believe them? Or know them to be highly probable? In answer to this question, I think I have nothing better to say than that it seems to me that I do know them, with certainty.‘

Max is not the only philosopher who has found Moore’s refusal to argue his case disturbing, or puzzling - or even just plain wrong. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein says:

Moore wanted to give an example to show that one really can know propositions about physical objects. If there were a dispute whether one could have a pain in such and such a part of the body, then someone who just then had a pain in that spot might say: “I assure you, I have a pain there now”. But it would sound odd if Moore had said: “I assure you, I know that’s a tree”. A personal experience simply has no interest for us here.

And with respect to Moore’s refusal to argue his case, Wittgenstein remarked:

If someone believes something we needn’t always be able to answer the question “why he believes it”; but if he knows something, then the question “how does he know?” must be capable of being answered.‘.

More specifically, what bothered Max - as it did Malcolm, Wittgenstein and many others - is Moore’s constant refrain that while he knew certain propositions to be true with certainty, he did not know how he knew these propositions to be true, or at least that he was less sure how he knew them to be true than that he did know them to be true’. For Black and Wittgenstein it was just as if a child were making a simple-minded avowal, saying such things as “Here is one hand”, and “Here is another”, thinking that these remarks proved there is an external world. We can thus understand the irony in Witt- genstein’s comment about Moore’s “Proof of an External World”.

4 0. E. Moore, “ADefense of Common Sense”. in PhilosophicalPapern (London. 1959). 44. s Ludwig Wittgenstein. On Certainty (Oxford, 1969). entry 389, SO. 6 Ibid., entry JSO. 72. 7 G. E. Moore. PhilosophicalPapets. 44,149,150: also seep. 226.

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1 Moore’s mistake lies in this - countering the asserting that one cannot know that by saying “I do know it”. *

Wittgenstein and Black thus see Moore as a kind of latter-day Samuel Johnson. Johnson thinks he can prove that matter exists by kicking a stone and Moore thinks he can prove that matter exists by holding up a hand. But in their judgment Moore has failed to comprehend both the depth and the oddity of the moves that traditional philosophers are making. Bishop Berkeley, of course, knew that if he had held up what Moore is calling a hand he would have seen the same kind of thing that Moore saw; so that was not the issue for him. What he wished to deny was that seeing what Moore saw entailed that material objects exist. Berkeley was thus making a philosophical point. This is why it has seemed to some commentators that Moore’s mode of dealing with such metaphysicians seemed to beg the question. Traditional metaphysicians, like Berkeley, are asking us to go beyond the obvious and to see the world in a different light. Wittgenstein was well aware of this. As he says:

When one hears Moore say “I know that that’s a tree”, one suddenly understands those who think that has by no means been settled.

The matter strikes one all at once as being unclear and blurred. It is as if Moore had put it in the wrong light.

’ In particular what Black’ and Wittgenstein are objecting to is the notion that someone can claim to know a proposition to be true without being able to- give the grounds or supporting reasons for the claim. Unless one can give such grounds there is no reason for others to believe that the speaker knows what he claims to know. Madmen, religious zealots, and charlatans have vigorously asserted that they know this p or that q without being willing (or able) to provide support for their claims. But for rational human beings vigor is no substitute for argument. Max averred that Moore’s child-like belief in the power of emphatic assertion was susceptible to just this sort of response.

As we spoke about Moore at that time, Max’s exegesis seemed to me to be correct; but in thinking about Moore - and about Max - recently, I now believe there is more to be said on behalf of Moore than the critical tradition has allowed. The rest of this paper thus amounts to a new interpretation and defense of Moore’s practice.

Op. cit.. entry 521.68. 9 Ibid.. entry481.63.

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11.

Our question is: Why did Moore not argue his case? We have seen that Max and many others answer this question by pointing to a kind of naivete in Moore’s approach. They see him as believing that by asserting that he knows such and such, and by asserting this vigorously, he will manage, as it were, to shout down his opponents. I disagree.

First of all, it is important to recognize who Moore took his opponents to be. Moore was unquestionably opposed to what Max described as “metaphysical extravagance”. In his autobiography Moore gives an account of his first meeting with the idealist J: E. McTaggart, and of his reaction to McTaggart’s claim that Time is unreal.

What must have happened, during this second year in Cambridge, was that I found I was very keenly interested in certain philosophical statements which I heard made in conversation. One such occasion I can remember. Russell had invited me to tea in his rooms to meet McTaggart; and McTaggart, in the course of conversation had been led to express his well-known view that Time is unreal. This must have seemed to me then (as it still does) a perfectly monstrous proposition, and I did my best to argue against it. lo

Moore’s mode of arguing against such claims was to “translate them into the concrete”. If Time is unreal what does this concretely imply? Does it imply, for instance, that I cannot be late or on time for an appointement? But if it does, then the view obviously cannot be correct. It is not a matter for dis- pute; for I know that I arrived punctually for an appointment yesterday. But if the view does not have these concrete applications, what can it possibly mean? How can we understand it apart from seeing what its implications would be? So Moore rejected McTaggart’s thesis - and indeed any form of Idealism, i.e., the view that reality is mental, Now it is important to stress that views of this sort are not forms of scepticism - though of course they may have sceptical implications, for example, that one could not know that one had been late or on time for an appointment,

Idealisms of these kinds were the targets of Moore’s early work, exem- plified by his “Refutation of Idealism” of 1903. But though Moore never stops inveighing against Idealists, this theme becomes submerged in his later epistemological writings and scepticisms of various kinds surface as the main targets. Thus in “A Defense of Common Sense” (1925). “Proof of an External World” (1939), “Certainty” (1940) and “Four Forms of Scepticism!’

10 Philosophy of G. E. Moore, 4. by P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, 111,1968), VoI. I, 13-14.

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(1941), Moore is not stalking Idealists like McTaggart but sceptics like Russell who said such (<monstrous>> things as that for all he knew the world might have come into existence five minutes ago. So Max Black was quite right by the examples he gave to imply that Moore opposed not only Idealists, but also sceptics - those who doubted that anyone knew for certain that he or she had ever seen a hand, or had eaten breakfast yesterday.

Thus the first point I should like to make here is that Moore’s approach, SO disconcerting to his critics, is connected with his understanding of the nature of scepticism. But even here, fully to understand Moore, we must allude to the familiar distinction between radical and mitigated forms of scepticism. “Certainty”, for example, is directed against “mitigated scepticism”, a doctrine that denies that anyone can know empirical proposi- tions to be true with certainty while maintaining that they can at least be known with some degree of probability. Hume in his less radical moments was a sceptic of this sort; and in the 20th Century, most logical positivists espoused a similar view. Moore’s attack in “Certainty” against this doctrine is important and I believe insufficiently appreciated; but for our purposes here I shall ignore it. It is rather those radical forms of scepticism, which deny that certitude is possible, that Moore wished to undermine and upon wluch I shall concentrate here.

111.

. With respect to such radical forms of scepticism, Moore agrees that he cannot prove the propositions that entail the existence of external objects to be true and yet he continues to insist that he does know them to be true. His approach to scepticism is thus a curious mixture of boldness and caution. In effect, he is saying that he cannot prove that scepticism is wrong, while at the same time asserting that he knows that it is.

Given his assessment of the situation, he therefore must adopt a wholly different strategy in meeting sceptical challenges, and I shall now explain what that is, and in particular why he does not argue his case. I concede, of course, that what I am proposing here goes beyond what Moore actually says, since in fact he is silent with respect to this point. But what I am suggesting is consi- stent with, and I believe, deepens our understanding of his mode of proce- dure. We are thus in the not unusual situation of a critic who interprets a literary text as conveying some sort of message, even though its author never makes that message explicit by a meta-discussion of it. The merit of such an

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approach thus ultimately turns on the degree of insight which the interpreta- tion provides, with the proviso, of course, that it is not inconsistent with what- ever clues, textual or otherwise, that may be available. So I will here speak of Moore’s strategy as if this were something Moore actually had in mind while cautioning the reader that it is really my rendering of a complex text that is being presented.

I will begin this interpretation by pointing to an essential feature of scepticism, which is especially prominent in its most radical or Pyrrhonic forms. In the hands of its cleverest proponents, such as Michel de Montaigne, Pyrrhonic scepticism is not a theoory or a doctrine, and accordingly it is not composed of, nor does it put forth, any assertions. In particular, such radical sceptics do not assert that nothing can be known. To make such a claim would expose them to rebuttal, to the question: How do you know that nothing can be known? And this, of course, would be self-defeating, requiring just the sort of affirmation of knowledge that the sceptic cannot countenance. Instead, the clever sceptic is like a counter-puncher in boxing. He waits for his opponent to make a move and then he exploits the opening. In this form we might think of scepticism as an attitude rather than a theory, something like the mental set of a compulsive critic who has no views of his own, but is always ready to find a counter-example to any assertion that another might make. It is important in understanding the radical sceptic’s modus operandi that one realize that such sceptics also avoid generalization; they respond to the proposals of their opponents on a case by case basis. That is true even when an opponent proffers a generalization, e.g., that one can know what the world is like on the basis of reason (or experience) alone. The strategy is thus designed to avoid any initiative that equals or exceeds what an opponent has himself put on the table.

But if the sceptic is not putting forth any theory, then one cannot prove that his position is wrong, because there is no position to be confuted. The sceptic is simply making hay with the views that his opponent, the so-called dogmatist, advances. Now I think that Moore realized this, though as I have indicated he never says so explicitly. What Moore realized subliminally or intuitively, as one might put it, was that sceptical challenges could not be met by conventional modes of argumentation and accordingly that what was necessary in this situation was to develop a non-argumentative counter-stra- tegy. The point of such a strategy would not be to beat the sceptic at the game of argumentation but to offer mistunce to certain sorts of sceptical maneuv- ers and in this way to blunt their effects. .. . To many commentators, among them Black and Wittgenstein, Moore

seemed incredibly obstinate, even obtuse. But that is to miss the power and the

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point of what he was doing. In effect, he refused to play the sceptic’s game and by his obduracy prevented the sceptic from winning. The outcome of this sort of resistance was in boxing parlance a draw; neither side could be said to have defeated the other. But from a certain standpoint, one might give the verdict to Moore - on points, as it were. For the sceptic is a kind of parasite who lives off the views of others. To deny him sustenance is to diminish him; and that is what Moore did. From Moore’s perspective, i.e., from the perspec- tive of one who believed that he knew certain sorts of propositions to be true with certainty, his nondefeat by the sceptic allowed him to carry on business as usual. And that is a kind of victory in a war of attrition.

IV.

We can now spell all this out. The sceptic’s strategy leads to a famous con- ceptual difficulty, an infinite regress, that some writers, such as R. H. Popkin and Roderick Chisholm, have called “The Problem of the Criterion”. Here is how the strategy works. Suppose someone, Moore for instance, asserts that he knows there is a door in that wall (said while pointing to a specific area in a room). The sceptic now asks, “How do you know that there is?” The question seems perfectly appropriate. If someone makes a claim, it is generally in order to ask for the reasons that support the claim. As we have seen, Wittgenstein would agree that the question is in order (and accordingly his way of dealing with scepticism had to differ from Moore’s).

So the question, “How do you know that p?” is in order and this is the fiist move that the sceptic makes in developing the regress. We thus have two elements in a conversational scenario: an initial assertion by someone, and the query, “How do you know?” The question will naturally elicit a response from the first speaker, that is, he will give the reason that supports his claim, and thus will take another step toward developing the regress. Suppose the response is: “Because I can see that there is a door in the wall”. What has happened by this move is that the person who made the original assertion has been maneuvered by the sceptic into proposing a criterion that supports his statement.

In effect, what he is saying is that “because I can see that that such and such is the case; I therefore know that such and such is the case”. But now the sceptic can ask: “Is that a good reason for saying that you know?” He can offer, as counter-examples, the familiar arguments based upon perceptual illusion and the existence of dreams. The regress is now in full flow. The

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speaker has been put in a position where he is required to give another reason, a new criterion, for saying that seeing is a good reason for claiming to know, and then it will become apparent that the latter reason in turn must have its reason, and so on endlessly.

The sceptic can move in for the kill once his dogmatic opponent proffers a criterion for supporting what he has asserted. The kill consists in making it plain to the speaker that there is a logical gap between the criterion he has given and the claim which that criterion supposedly supports. It is important to understand the power of the sceptic’s move here. The sceptic does not have to argue that the speaker was in fact mistaken when he claimed to see the door; that would be to put forth an assertion himself. His point is that whe- ther the speaker is right or not, the criterion that he has employed fails to gua- rantee that he does indeed know what he claims to know. But why is that so?

The answer concerns the nature of the conception of knowledge which dogmatists from Plato to the present have employed. This conception has to parts: i) That if A knows that p, p is true, and ii) that if A knows that p, then A cannot be mistaken. It is the second of these principles that especially con- cerns the sceptic, and in particular the word “cannot”. According to (ii) to say that one knows that p entails that it is impossible that A could be mistaken. But now if one gives as a reason for claiming there is a door in that wall that one can see that there is, then one is advancing a criterion which is such that the criterion can be satisfied and yet the speaker might be mistaken. All the sceptic has to do to make his point is to show that it is possible that the criterion will be satisfied while the assertion might be false. All the familiar sceptical arguments, developed since time immemorial, can now be brought to bear to demonstrate that there is a logical gap between supporting criterion and epistemic claim: arguments about brains in vats, the argument from illu- sion, and so forth. These arguments entail that all our experience can be exactly what it is and yet that it might not correspond to any external reality. So the appeal to any sort of experience, such as seeing or hearing something, does not guarantee that one cannot be mistaken. Thus one might have the experience of seeing a door in a place where in reality there is none. Accord- ingly, the criterion of seeing does not provide air-tight support for the claim to know that there is a door; and therefore it is not true that one knows that there is a door there.

Without putting forth any claim himself, but just by bringing it to the attention of the dogmatist that his reasoning is fallible, the sceptic has made it plain to his opponent that he does not know what he claims to know. What is particularly powerful and ironic about this result is that it is parasitic upon a conception of knowledge that the dogmatist himself is espousing. The sceptic

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is not putting forth some other conception. If he did, his moves would lack real force; the argumentative situation would be like two ships passing in the dark and never meeting one another. So the sceptic is, in effect, saying: I accept the conception of knowledge you begin with, my friend; but now let us draw out some of the consequences of that conception. When we do, we can see that your claim to know is defective because it rests on criteria that are not logically conclusive. The scenario thus ends with the defeat of the dogmatist on turf he has himself selected.

Moore met this set of maneuvers by basically refusing to play the sceptic’s game. He did this by refusing to explain how he knew what he claimed to know. That iefusal blocked the sceptical regress at its source; it made it impossible for the sceptic’s pattern of moves to get off the ground. By resisting the request to explain how he knew, Moore avoided putting himself in the position where he was forced to give a criterion in support of his claim to know. He thus blocked at that point the pressures that led to the sceptical regress.’

It was an extremely effective manoeuvre that created an impossible dilemma for the sceptic. The sceptic could assert, in response to Moore’s obduracy, that Moore didn’t in fact know what he claimed to know: did not know, that is, such propositions as that the earth is very old.,But to have adopted that horn of the dilemma would have exposed him to the very ques- tion he had so seduously worked to avoid: “HOW do you know that Moore is wrong?” The answer to that query would have required that the sceptic leave the posture of epoche and make a positive claim. But that would have com- pletely undermined his strategy. The other alternative was to say nothing. But that amounted to leaving the field unopposed to Moore, also an infeasible option. Neither choice was thus acceptable. Moore’s tactics had cleverly shifted the onus onto the sceptic without leaving room for rebuttal or for fur- ther manoeuvre. His refusal to carry on the traditional conversational sce- nario was thus the key to blunting the sceptical onslaught.

V.

I have been arguing here that Moore’s consistent refusal in various papers to explain how he knew that which he insisted he did know may well have been motivated by factors that were intuitive and inexplicit, but that nonetheless drove him in the right direction in coping with an ingenious and slippery opponent.

The outcome, to be sure, was something less than victory and something more than defeat; one might describe it as a standoff. For a purist the result

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would have been disappointing. But there is textual evidence that Moore was not dissatisfied with such outcomes. Near the end of “Certainty”, dealing with the Dream Hypothesis, he writes:

I agree, therefore, with that part of this argument which asserts that if I don’t know that I’m not dreaming, it follows that I don’t know that I am standing up, even if I both actually am and think that I am. But this first part of the argument is a considera- tion which cuts both ways. For, if it is true, it follows that it is also true that if I do know that I am standing up, then I do know that I am not dreaming. I can therefore just as well argue: since I do know that I’m standing up, it follows that I do know that I’m not dreaming; as my opponent can argue: since you don’t know that you’re not dreaming, it follows that you don’t know that you’re standing up. The one argument is just us good as the other, unless my opponent can give better reasons for asserting that I don’t know that I’m not dreaming than I can give for asserting that I do know that I am standing up (my italics), l 1

Even if Moore had not refuted the radical sceptic, his obtaining at least a standoff was a considerable achievement, It allowed the dogmatist to continue to engage in philosophical speculation without worrying about being undercut by sceptical challenges. For some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, that result may not have been good enough; for what Wittgenstein wanted was the complete defeat of scepticism and a philosophical vindication of common sense. But at least no philosopher before Wittgenstein had accomplished as much in this direction as Moore.

Had Max Black lived to read this paper, I believe there is much in it he would have agreed with, and especially with the sentiments about Moore’s achievements that I have just expressed. For Max himself wrote:

To a friendly critic of his procedure who suggests there may be no way of settling doubts about proposed analyses, Moore says: “There is certainly something else to do beside going on doubting; and that is to go on thinking about it”. l2

Moore’s comment exhibits just the features I have been describing above. It is a wonderful expression of both a common sense and a sophisticated phi- losophical point of view.

11 0. E. Moore, PhilosophicalPapers. 241. 12 Op. cit., 9-10.

Dialectica Vol. 44, No 1-2 (1990)