David Pears

In the last twenty-five years there has been increasing interest in the philosophy of action, and many different theories have been put forward. The revival of this subject had several causes. If we are going to impute responsibility to agents, we need to know what action is, what makes it voluntary and what makes it intentional. So ethics and the philosophy of law have promoted interest in these questions. They are also worth investigating for their own sakes simply in order to find out the truth of the matter. Wittgenstein treated them in this way when he was working on his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and his answers, enigmatic but fascinating, reflect the ideas of Schopenhauer, However, it was his later work that gave a real impetus to the philosophical analysis of action, and in it his special concern was the connection between intending and meaning. There are also earlier influences discernible in recent philosophy of action, and some of the theories that have been proposed go back to Aquinas and Aristotle.

There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that. The truth about the world may be difficult or even impossible to attain by ordinary methods.

The human mind is a measure of nature and, like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often claims to detect in the other part which it measures. Wittgenstein in some of his later work was concerned with a fundamental form of this problem. Do the meanings of our words remain stable and unchanged through all the vicissitudes of our lives? If Crusoe talked to himself during his solitary period, may there not have been some slippage, not evident to him, in his use of his vocabulary? Ruskin believed that the growth of industry had dimmed the bright colours of nature that had surrounded him in his early years, and he might have gone further and suspected that the common use of colour-words was shifting in the same direction. The Gypsy Moth acquired a darker camouflage in the industrialised Midlands. Who knew how words would react? Would they remain unchanged and show up the change in the rest of nature or would they change with it?

The seventh volume of Russell’s Collected Papers contains the core of a book which he never completed. He stopped working on it, probably because he felt that he could not honestly go on. He had hoped that Wittgenstein would approve of what he had been writing, but when they met in May 1913, Wittgenstein told him that it was all wrong, and, as Russell admitted to Ottoline Morrell, he did not know how to answer Wittgenstein’s objections. He never published the whole of what he had written, and it is likely that what he did publish was the part that did not particularly interest Wittgenstein, while he suppressed the part on which the fire of Wittgenstein’s criticisms had been concentrated.

As a child I collected butterflies, and I remember being impressed by a comic cartoon which showed another collector, older and more experienced than myself, who had accidentally swallowed a specimen he had been chasing. Later I felt the same sense of incongruity when I read Berkeley’s claim that everything he perceived was really in his mind. Surely he was overdoing it. True, his was only a case of mental ingestion, and anyway the butterfly would not be taken in by a single act: first, the blue of its wings, then with more difficulty their shape and size, and finally even the grainy arrangement of their scales which would only show up under a microscope. But how could he do it? His portrait does not show him with his hand over his mouth and an expression of dismay on his face like the man in the cartoon. On the contrary, he looks like someone who is happy to have made his point.