Anscombe on Memory

The person believes, that is assents to, the content of this experience. This assent does not, as in our previous argument, involve judgement of what the memory experience presents. For no one has the idea of 'the past' except in the first place from memory, and hence if memory is an experience the idea of the past must simply be in the experience: one cannot bring any primary judgement about the past to bear on the presentation. It is indeed difficult to see what the belief or assent consists in, as it cannot involve assessment of the experience. This was a problem which Hume felt strongly, and could not solve. It seems that assent can only be: allowing the memory experience to feel 'solid'. Plainly we have fallen into idealism.

(from Memory, Experience and Causation (Contemporary British Philosophy ed. H.D. Lewis publ.1974))

The empiricist orientation which seeks a mark of some kind to show that an experience is a memory experience throws its weight against the solid supposedly idealist view. A house has fallen on you and you have been buried for 3 days. I would say that such was a solid memory marks or no marks. You don't need to have the impossible re-experienceable original for that. Nevertheless there's a spectrum from the very definite to the imaginary re-constitution of the original. Both count as memory because the same power is at work. Woozley's point that even if the original experience is not around anymore memory is still involved with it seems to be non informitively obvious. It's a route on which one might meet Bergson on his way back.

A.D. Woozley on Memory

- Who is that you are playing?

- Nick Drake. He died in the 1970‘s.

- Never heard of him. When you come to your autobiography write 'my father was musically illiterate. Books were his life. He lived in a world of books. Unfortunately he died a raving lunatic.’

- That book there< A.D. Woozley’s Theory of Knowledge : An Introduction pub.1949) looks weighty.

- It is only an introduction. The main thing would be too much for me.



Woozley’s (1912 - 2008) Introduction is a sly thing and owes more to the English habit of understatement than to the import of its content. By the way he was the last surviving member of the group of philosophers who started what became known as Ordinary Language Philosophy.

Woozley was the last surviving member of the original group of seven philosophers whose informal discussions from 1937-39 were the beginnings of Oxford ordinary language philosophy.  There is an account of these original meetings in Isaiah Berlin's *Personal Impressions*, the chapter on J.L. Austin.  Austin and Berlin organized the group; besides Austin, Woozley and Berlin, the members were A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, Donald Macnabb and Donald MacKinnon.

(from Cora Diamond his widow)

There are two chapters on Memory which might be worth anyone’s consideration. He makes the point that although memory is fallible yet:

All collection of evidence, all theories, depend on memory, as Descartes found to his distress when he was trying to elaborate an error-proof method of attaining knowledge in any sphere

Memory is not regarded as a pramana (valid means of knowledge) in Hindu systems which is odd given that for the orthodox Smirti (remembered i.e. Tradition) is revered next only to Sruti (heard i.e. Scripture).

Memory has that mark of the individually dubitative which the sense of familiarity does not dismiss, in Woozley’s opinion. More anon.

Anscombe on Aristotle/Vritti & Upadhi

I mentioned in my previous post Snakes and Ladders that Advaita has found that narrow land between Realism and Idealism by using the concept of the vritti or mental modification which is identical to the object in a non-numerical way. That needs to be teazed out further but I offer this extended quote from Anscombe which indicates a ‘family resemblance’ between the theory of Aristotle on passive and active intellect and the Advaitins ‘vritti’ and ‘upadhi’/limiting adjunct.

Now the existence of the things is precisely the actualisation of this possibility: thus we find Aristotle constantly distinguishing between existence on the one hand and on the other (a) actuality (b) whatever is actualised by that actuality. In comparison with the latter, existence seems to relate to form; the existence of the matter that composes Socrates is substantial existence as a human being; but in comparison with ‘actuality’ or the formal cause, existence is is particular and material. The contrast between actuality and existence is drawn especially in his theory of knowledge, according to which if, say, a sighted animal receives a sense impression of red, the ‘actuality’ or ‘form’ signified by the word ‘red’ is one and the same in the seen object and the sensation, but the ‘existence’ of the red thing and the sensation of red is different. Either existence however, is the actualisation - and hence the actuality, and one and the same actuality - of what was before a mere potentiality. Similarly the intellect is actualised by the forms, which also actualise matter; again, the ‘actuality’ will be the same but the ‘existence’ different.

The theory has the attraction of seeming to preserve that internal relation which must be shown to hold between what we may quite generally call ‘cognitions’ and their objects, without falling into idealism. The forms which the intellect in understanding are without matter, and are made to be so by the intellect, which thus divides into a ‘passive’ intellect actualised by these forms, and a ‘productive’ intellect that makes the forms-without-matter: Aristotle compares this to light making colours actual. Thus it appears that the objects of understanding are only potential in material things, although, as they exist in material things, they are the actualisation of the matter of those things. It is ground for intense regret that Aristotle never expounded his ideas for the general public, shewing those unversed in these difficult conceptions how they might attain to them. For so far as his ideas are sound, they must be capable of a clearer exposition than he has given them.

(From Three Philosophers by G.E.M. Anscombe and P. Geach // citation: Anscombe on Aristotle)
Note: Italics in quote mine.

Scepticism, Animal Faith, and Fog

Is global scepticism or unrestricted methodic doubt actually rational if it forbids us doing what we do and saying what we say in our everyday lives? Is the purported bowing to reason and rationality and the elevation of knowledge to the incorrigible precisely the opposite of what draws us on to clarity. We accept the foggy and fuzzy under advisement hoping by judicious repair to achieve progress. To feel you are doomed to security only in the thin atmosphere of mathematics is the original Platonic error that continues to fascinate philosophers.

The Daddy of contemporary insecurity and the writer of its finest prose is Santayana. Scepticism and Animal Faith is a most comfortable bed and we barely feel the winding of its Procrustean windlass. In discussing the cognitive claims of memory he writes:

I have already accepted the belief in memory ; indeed, without accepting it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on which all human beliefs are reared.

As is often the case with Santayana we are brought up short at the sudden chilling of the warm prose bath by an insight put with much less suavity by Sidney Shoemaker in Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity.

Santayana:

A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection which renders a present image a vision of some past fact : I must stand here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am remembering ; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without supposing that I am living in it.

‘You cannot remember that you are remembering’. Similar points have been made by Thomas Reid and Elizabeth Anscombe cf. http://ombhurbhuva.blogspot.ie/2012/07/reid-and-anscombe-on-memory.html
I am at the stage in the reading of Animal Faith where he has admitted memory whilst still holding on to the reality of the flux of essences which are the creation of imagination. Are essences concepts or ideas? To which I answer 'pass’. Here I must call on Coleridge in Biographia Litteraria Chap.XII:

In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance.

Reid and Anscombe on Memory

Reading philosophy can be like our immersion in the world of a novel in that we are released from our own views for a time and willingly accept the depiction of the everyday as strange, uncanny, prophetic and unwieldy. Our handy ontology is subverted by persuasive oddness if we do not resist it and if we are to understand it we must accept that resistance is futile. How can you get Bergson on memory without abandoning naturalistic assumptions? This is difficult particularly if you belong to the school of rational beliefs, reasonably held version of intellectual probity. There is help at hand however.

Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of the past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.

Further down:

Philosophers indeed tell me, that this immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled; that this idea now exists in my mind or in my sensorium; and the mind contemplating this present idea, finds it a representation of what is past, of what my exist, and accordingly call it memory, or imagination.

(from An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense by Thomas Reid)

Writing in her essay on Memory and the Past Elizabeth Anscombe:

Then what makes my state or act of consciousness memory of the thing. Is it the mere fact that the thing happened and that I witnessed it? In that case there is nothing in the memory itself that makes it refer to the actual past event. And if so, why should the experience of memory have anything to do with actual past events or show one what it means for something to have happened?

She then in her consideration of the phenomenon of memory examines the present experience of which memory is supposed to be.

But if I consider some present thing (which can, if you like, be a state of mind) and my future ability to speak of it, it is brought out more clearly how difficult it is to make out that anything I may attribute to my future mental state will make what I say refer to this.

Is she moving towards a Reidian rejection of ‘ideas’ or the perhaps lesser claim that representations cannot bear the weight of memory. It is significant that the pramana theory of the means of valid knowledge does not accept memory as a free-standing means of knowledge. That is a side issue, I merely bring it up as a link to the concept of the pramana as an irreducible means of knowledge. In this system Perception stands on its own. Inference cannot be reduced to an instance of perception. Each pramana is irreducible.

Further down she writes:

In general we must fail if we try to explain the sense of statements about the past by means of present memory, consciousness of meaning, quality of images, or anything else of the kind. For either we have left out all reference to the actual past, or we have surreptitiously introduced it into an explanation that proposed to do without it.

Even though the focus of her paper is on the reality of the past, one can see that here she is pointing towards the Bergsonian idea that a memory of a past event is not got through an image. A memory is of the past but is not of the past through the memory. There is an irreducible aspect to memory and that is mysterious. Just this oddness of what we take for granted is philosophy is doing its work.

Philosopher Swimmers

I suppose if we are going to look at the progress from Atheism to Theism it will make more sense to look at its usual form of Christian Theism as Deists are thin on the ground at the moment. The group that is most likely to have been swayed by intellectual or rational arguments are philosophers. I use the appelation philosopher in a broad sense to cover anyone who has reflected deeply on things. There are a few philosophers that have made the transition from atheism to christian theism among them being Alisdair MacIntyre, A.N. Flew, Mortimer Adler, Ed Feser, Peter van Inwagen, C.S.Lewis, Victor Reppert, Edith Stein, Michael Dummett, Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. The first 4 seem to have been influenced by rational, apodeictic if you will, considerations; the others passed to belief from a variety of causes as far as I can judge. The reading of St.Teresa of Avila was a factor in the conversion of Stein, mystical experience in the case of Reppert and Lewis. Anscombe claims her reading from the age of 10 to 15 was a factor which could mean lives of the saints or the Summa. I can discover nothing about Geach’s pilgrim’s progress. There does not seem to have been any intellectual argument at play in the case of Dummett only the gradual acceptance of the truth of the Catholic religion. Peter van Inwagen may have become an Episcopalian by osmosis.

By the way I am absolutely open to correction on any of this somewhat broad brush review. On the basis of this minute sample of philosopher swimmers of the Tiber or the Thames it seems that conversion induced by argument comes quite late in life, the vanity of other systems by then apparent.

Dr. Michael Sudduth is disporting himself amongst the billows of the Yamuna led by ananda itself, isn’t it. The path to Eastern religion is overwhelmingly experiential but this is another topic for another day.

Addendum 1/2/12
How could I have forgotten the names of Jacques and Raissa Maritain who were saved from the fulfilment of their suicide pact by the teaching of Henri Bergson their professor at the Sorbonne. He brought them to a sense of the absolute and some time after that great devotee of the absolute and profound anti-rationalist Leon Bloy brought them into the Catholic Church. Bloy himself through a dramatic conversion had left his own anti-Catholic past behind. Jacques Maritain is of course famous for his Thomistic writing but his thought in my view has elements of the intuitionist approach.

Addendum 2/6/12
Add Thomas Merton and Bede Griffiths to the list of those who converted to Christianity as a result of mystical experience. Both later became monks, Trappist and Benedictine respectively.

Addendum 14/8/13
Nicholas Rescher adopted the Pascalian 'fake it to make it'.

Addendum 26/8/13: From Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe:

As a result of my teen-age conversion to the Catholic Church -itself the fruit of reading done from twelve to fifteen - I read a work called Natural Theology by a nineteenth century Jesuit. I read it with great appetite and found it all convincing except for two things. One was the doctrine of scientia media, according to which God knew what anybody would have done if, e.g., he hadn't died when he did.