| Brand Blanshard, though little known outside of academic circles, was one of the giants of 20th-century philosophy. His ideas, writing, and teaching set an example of clarity, insight, and scrupulous dedication to the truth that few other philosophers of this or any century can equal. |  |
Born in 1892, he entered the University of Michigan in 1910 and, after his junior year, won a Rhodes scholarship to complete his studies at Merton College of Oxford University in England. Many years later, in his autobiography, he wrote: "I despair of putting in words what Oxford meant to me. It surely meant far more than to some who were better prepared to take it in stride ... To a youth straight from the Middle West it was overwhelming."
At Oxford, his tutor was H.H. Joachim, an eminent philosopher of the Absolute Idealist viewpoint; his mentor and inspiration was F.H. Bradley, a philosopher who towered over late 19th and early 20th-century philosophy in much the same way as Professor Blanshard towered over the middle part of this century. For much of his life, he was Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. He wrote his last book at the age of 92, and died in 1987, at the age of 95.
Professor Blanshard's magnum opus was The Nature of Thought (1939), a far-ranging two-volume work that he wrote from 1923-1938, much of his time spent at a carrel in the reading room of the British Museum. But he is probably best-known for his devastating critiques of logical positivism in epistemology and emotivism in ethics -- critiques which, by exposing the central errors of those theories, were almost single-handedly responsible for their abandonment.
I remember all that about Professor Blanshard, and yet, there are other things about him which to me are just as precious. He was a kind and inspiring teacher; a loving husband to his wife, Roberta Yerkes Blanshard; and a noble gentleman of the kind no longer known by this world. He was also my friend, and I miss him. I comfort myself with the thought that I will one day see him again.
Following is a tape transcript from the first evening I ever spent with Professor Blanshard at his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Sitting in his living room, sipping white wine while a fire rustled softly in the fireplace, we discussed how his ideas had evolved between the 1930s and the 1970s.
Also included are links to MP3 audio files of each part of the conversation. The first file contains about two minutes of informal conversation. Each file after that contains Prof. Blanshard's answer to one of my questions. I have tested the MP3 files in my own copy of iTunes and they worked fine. By the way, the occasional crackling noise you'll hear on the recording is not static. It's the sound of logs burning in Prof. Blanshard's fireplace.
To download the MP3 files, right-click the link and click Save Link As ... or Save Target As ... in the pop-up menu.
The transcript is divided into 10 sections after a little informal conversation.
Informal conversation. MP3 audio file (about 1.7MB)
[tape begins]
Palmer: (laughing)... Do you ever watch that show?
Blanshard: No, I seldom look at the TV, except the local station, which is CPTV. It has programs of special value. I find it hard to bear the sort of advertising interruptions that you constantly get on most of the shows. And anyway, I am still busy, in spite of my extreme antiquity.
Palmer: I'd hardly say, that, sir. Well, I always tell people that philosophy keeps you young.
Blanshard: I think you're right, in a way, yes. It's something that you can go on doing longer than any other subject that I know, except perhaps literature. I called on [Frederick] Tennant, the old philosopher [1866-1957] at Cambridge, whom I greatly respected. He was a philosophical theologian. And I found him at about 90, and almost stone deaf, sitting and reading the novels of Dumas. He said that he had gotten beyond the point where he could reason or philosophize profitably, although he answered the questions I put to him very pointedly. But it did strike me that you could go on reading Dumas, and such people, much longer than you could go on reading Kant or Hegel.
Palmer: Well, uh, could I ask you these questions, sir? There are two which are foremost in my mind.
I. Can there be only one perfectly-coherent system of thought?
Blanshard: Oh, yes, let's start with those. Which one would you like to begin with? The first one? Now, I take it that the point is this. A coherence theory claims that there is a single system which is inclusive of all propositions that could claim truth, as distinct from falsity. And the question is, whether or not there might be two systems which included all true propositions, or all actual facts and possibilities, within [their] own scope.
But now the objection is, I take it, that there might be an alternative system, just as there are alternative, equally plausible or credible theories about who is the murderer in a given case. Now, let's see whether that makes sense. You apparently don't find my way of putting it, which I think was not as clear as it might be, wholly convincing. Now, I think my argument was this. Suppose this system claims to be the all-inclusive system. But then, somewhere within that system, there occurs the proposition, "In system B, other than this, all true facts are included." Now, it seems to me that would implicitly involve you in contradiction. Because you start with a system claiming to be all-embracing, and then you mention a system alternative to this, which makes a similar claim.
You face a dilemma. If your proposition that such a system exists is true, then you have the contradiction of saying that this system, which is all-inclusive, is not all-inclusive because there is another system which covers all the same facts. On the other hand, if the reference to this other system is false, then it couldn't belong in your system at all. So on either horn of that dilemma, you seem to come back to a single system. Now, did I put that clearly?
Palmer: I understand the elimination of the false. But I sort of see the tail end of what you're getting at ...
Blanshard: There ought not to be any reference, should there? This reference to the other system must be false, mustn't it, if the system from which you start claims all-inclusiveness. So, really, what I should have said, I think, instead of distinguishing between facts and structure ...
Palmer: That was one of the questions I had.
Blanshard: Yes, I noticed that you did ask about that. And I think probably what I should have said was that if system A contains a reference to system B, that is inconsistent with system A's being all-inclusive, because this other system is by hypothesis equally inclusive. And then, you'd be contradicting yourself. You'd be saying, A is one system which is all-inclusive, but that system would contain a reference to another system which is not the one you started with. The presumption is that the system with which you start is the only one -- that it is uniquely all-inclusive.
Palmer: It was just the structure, I think, that threw me off.
Blanshard: Probably that was, yes.
II. In a perfectly coherent system, must every proposition entail every other proposition? Consequences for internal relations.
Palmer: Now, one question I had ... would there really be a structure in a fully-developed system of thought, in which every proposition entailed every other proposition? The result [of such reciprocal entailment] would be that all the propositions would be logically equivalent, and you would really have just one big proposition.
Blanshard: Well, I don't think that I would take that view. Something like that view was involved in [F.H.] Bradley's system. But I can't accept it because in that system, [for example,] all swans are black and all cows are gray. Now, if you take the theory of internal relations and try to carry it all the way through, as I was attempting to do in The Nature of Thought, you reach a position which I now am inclined to think is untenable. Because you resolve all propositions away into something quite different from what they are now, and indeed, the distinction between propositions and between terms vanishes.
If you accept Bradley's view, in which, let us say, relations are self-contradictory and therefore unreal, you get the curious view that there are no propositions at all, that there are no thoughts at all, because that involves different facts, and relations between those facts. And since relations are unreal, the facts which they relate must [also] be unreal.
Now, that seems to me fatal for discursive thinking. And if discursive thinking is abandoned, then philosophy is abandoned. You've gone over to the Oriental view, in which everything disappears in prana, or something.
So I don't hold the view that Bradley and [Bernard] Bosanquet do. I've tried to develop that a little more fully in my recent book on Reason and Belief. No, I am inclined to think that the theory of internal relations has to be accepted with rather considerable reservations and exceptions. Suppose, for example, that you take the number three. If you take the theory of internal relations seriously, and hold that an entity, when placed in a new context, and therefore new relations, becomes a different entity, you have to say that [the number] three means something different when you say there are three ears of corn and three marbles. And I can't convince myself that that's true.
So I've modified my theory of internal relations considerably. I think that there have to be grave reservations to that theory.
Palmer: You were really driving it [the theory of internal relations] home in The Nature of Thought.
Blanshard: Yes, I was. I was trying to carry it all the way. Now, [Ernest] Nagle, my friend and colleague, as you know, attacked me very severely on that ground. And I think he was partly right. I've replied to him in two or three places, as well as in the Schilpp volume [P.A. Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard, Open Court Publishing Company, 1980]. He was invited to write an essay, but he had already made his main criticism.
Palmer: Schilpp is doing a book on you, in that series?
Blanshard: Yes, in the Schilpp series. In fact, I read all the galley proofs of it, and I'm waiting daily for the page proofs.
In regard to that point, I don't think that I'd be prepared to say how far I'd go in offering reservations to the theory of internal relations. That's something I wish you'd do.
Palmer: I just kind of cut my teeth on The Nature of Thought ...
Blanshard: Have you seen my book Reason and Analysis?
III. Prof. Blanshard's critique of positivism.
Palmer: Yes. And you might be interested to know that your critique of positivism, in Reason and Analysis, is just now beginning to seep into other areas.
Blanshard: Is it?
Palmer: I was at an economics conference about two years ago, and a fellow named Mario Rizzo ...
Blanshard: I've heard of him, but I don't know ...
Palmer: He presented a critique of positivism in economics. And I guess that I was the only person there who had read Reason and Analysis, because everyone else seemed to think that he'd thought this up himself. It seemed to me that it was chapter and verse from your book.
Blanshard: Well, of course, positivism is now somewhat old hat in philosophical circles. And one of my colleagues, Robert Fogelin, thinks that I made a mistake in Reason and Analysis by not dealing more fully and carefully with the second, the "Wittgenstein 2." He thinks that's the real gospel of the new linguistic philosophy. And instead of that, I said that I found Wittgenstein almost unintelligible.
[Mrs. Blanshard (former Dean of Women at Swarthmore and a woman of considerable accomplishment in her own right) brings us dinner on TV-dinner trays.]
Blanshard: Now, sit over here, won't you, and we'll discuss the second question.
Palmer: I tend to think that the later Wittgenstein was a closet Idealist.
Blanshard: Is that so? Well, I hope that you'll write a paper to show that he was.
Palmer: Well, then, the second question was ...
IV. Problems in the idea of "self-evident"
or "self-warranted" foundational propositions.
Blanshard: About axioms, or intuitions, or self-evident truths.
Palmer: Now, the thing that makes the self-warranted propositions a little more difficult to attack is that it ["self-warrant"] is a weakened concept of self-evidence. It doesn't require that self-warranted propositions be certain or incorrigible, but simply that a person would be warranted in believing them even if he didn't have any particular evidence. That way, other propositions can add weight to the self-warranted propositions, and of course, in The Nature of Thought, in your discussion of self-evidence, a great many of the criticisms which you level against it rest on the idea that self-evident propositions are supposed to be certain. So basically, I was hoping for your advice on this issue.
Blanshard: Let me talk about it at some length while you eat, because it's a very complicated question, and I take somewhat different views on different types of alleged self-evidence.
Let's enumerate two of the propositions that are said to be apprehended by intuition. Of course, there's a large range of them. Suppose you take deduction, the inference of a proposition from a premiss or premisses. Now, why should we accept the premisses as a base of a deduction? Now, either because it's self-evident or because it's deduced from something else. Well, let's look at the "something else" that it's deduced from, and the same dilemma arises.
And so, either deduction becomes an infinite series of propositions which must be deduced from prior propositions, without end, which is most unsatisfactory; or else there must be some initial propositions, with which the deduction starts and which we can accept as self-warranted. That's one kind of [self-evidence] that I'd like to discuss with you.
Then, [second,] suppose you take the ordinary syllogism, such as "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, and therefore he is mortal." You see, by an act of intuition, it seems to me, that the conclusion follows from the premisses in that case. So, all deductions would appear to be cases of repeated intuition. That is, the apprehension that N follows M, which doesn't depend on the appeal to anything outside its own four corners.
Then, thirdly, there is a different and perhaps more important kind of intuitional proposition. Suppose you ask a question, "What is it that makes any deduction valid?" And the answer is, "conformity to logic." And what are the laws of logic? Well, there is a series of them, of which I suppose that the law of contradiction, or non-contradiction, is the most important. Now, how do you know that the law of contradiction is true? Evidently, not by deduction, because every step of the deduction would involve appeal to the law of contradiction, so you would be moving in a circle. Therefore, it is argued, the law of contradiction must be a self-evident, intuitively-grasped truth.
And then, fourthly, there is an immense range of propositions in ethics, which prima facie are self-evident and axiomatic. Suppose you say that "cruelty is wrong." Paton, in one of his books, uses that as an example of a proposition that is intuitively certain. He says that he is just as certain of that as he is that two and two make four. Now, if he is right about that, then apparently, once again, we find a certainty that doesn't rely on coherence with anything beyond itself, but is self-luminous.
Now, one could go on giving other kinds of propositions, but those are perhaps enough. Now, which one of those four types would you like to discuss?
Palmer: [Trying to swallow a mouthful of food so he can answer.]
V. Problems in the idea of "sense-data" statements.
Blanshard: The type which is regarded as an initial proposition, axiomatic?
Palmer: The whole idea that we can construct our knowledge out of little foundational propositions, like "I see a red patch here, a brown patch there, and that sort of thing."
Blanshard: I think that I still stick to the view that I took in The Nature of Thought on the business of seeing red patches. Suppose you say, "I see a red patch." Certainly, that is not a proposition which can be said to be intelligible or meaningful if you confine it to its own ... it couldn't be said to be self-evidently true. What do you mean by "I"? Well, think of Descartes, and all his problems. "See:" what do you mean by "see"? And is "see" a relation between the internal agent, the ego, and a physical patch, or a mental patch, or what? What do you mean by "see"? And then "patch" introduces the idea of space, and I suppose that a person couldn't talk about a patch unless he already apprehended the surrounding space and a limited area within that space. "Red:" well, red is a color, and I suppose that unless a person realized that red is a color, [then] he wouldn't see red as we see it. I don't suppose that a cardinal, in looking at its mate, sees red in exactly the same sense that we do. Because we recognize it as a color in a range of colors, and it has certain characteristics of its own. So there is a proposition which, I would say, just won't do at all, in the old intuitional sense. Because every word of the sentence carries you outside of it.
[Also, there's] "'A' patch:" now "a" means a member of a class. And no person could understand the proposition unless he understood what class membership meant. So I think it's literally true to say that every word of that sentence carries you outside the limits of what an ordinary intuitionist would say one saw to be certain [or self-warranted]. And it's only if one allows these conceptual auras to be introduced into the meaning of the proposition that it becomes enough of a proposition to be called self-evident.
Now, you may say, well, after all, let's just include those meanings. Then, the proposition will be self-evident. But I don't see any stopping point. In order to understand class membership, you have to go very deeply into logic, and in order to understand what you really mean by "seeing," you have to go beyond [the sentence itself]. And immediately, [as soon as] you do begin to understand, as an accomplished ophthalmologist or metaphysician would, what is meant by these things, the proposition becomes a different proposition.
Palmer: That's essentially the argument I'm making.
Blanshard: It seems to me that you're on safe ground.
Palmer: The only thing that worried me a little bit is that that really is the only argument. And while I think it's a decisive argument, it would be nice to find some other grounds.
Blanshard: Let me suggest one by taking one of the other types of intuitive propositions, and ask whether perhaps we couldn't transfer the argument to this one. Take the law of contradiction: a thing cannot be A and not-A in the same sense at the same time. Now, that is often alleged, of course, to be a self-evident proposition. But I'm inclined to think that [Bernard] Bosanquet is right, in the second volume of his Logic [Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, Volume II, Chapter 7; Oxford University Press, 1911], when he includes the law of contradiction among what he calls the "postulates" of inference.
Let me raise it in this way. Suppose someone just says, offhand, "The law of contradiction is absolutely certain within its own meaning." And then I ask this question: "Do you not become more certain of the law when you see if you can say, "Either this or nothing." Because if you deny the law of contradiction, then your whole world disappears in smoke. It vanishes, because it'd be impossible to say that anything was what it was, or anything was related to anything else, because the contradictory of that might be true. So your world would just dissolve. That law of contradiction is the bottleneck of all thinking.
The determined intuitionist might reply: "I don't see that I am the least more certain because of seeing that." But I think he is misrepresenting himself. I think that Bosanquet is right when he says that if you see that this proposition, which at first seems to require nothing but itself for its own justification, is the bottleneck of the existence, or the truth, of everything, then you do have an element of certainty added to it. And he would say, then, that the real verification or justification of the law of contradiction is that it is the, I wouldn't say the "foundation," but the postulate upon which all thinking is based. So that your world of thought vanishes without it.
Now, if you take the coherence theory, you would say the same thing of "That is a cardinal," or [points to fireplace] "That is a log burning on the fire." Bosanquet would say, and I'm inclined to think he's justified, although it might take quite a bit of talk, perhaps, to make it plausible, that every true proposition is so related to other true propositions that the denial of any would in the end mean the denial of all. And if you could show that, then, of your foundational propositions, you would have another type of argument besides the one which says merely that there is a periphery, or an aura, around all these propositions, of a conceptual kind that would need to be developed. You could say that in the long run, both the meaning and the truth of every true proposition [are] such that you could say, "Either this, or nothing."
Palmer: That, of course, challenges the atomistic view of propositions.
Blanshard: Yes, of course, absolutely.
Palmer: I've made a similar argument, essentially arguing that because "I see a red patch" presupposes these other propositions, that its truth depended on them. When in fact, in the logical order, at least in PM-style logic, it's the other way around -- you can deduce that "There are selves and I am one of them" from "I see a red patch." But you can't deduce "I see a red patch" from "There are selves and I am one of them." But what you're saying, is take the whole system of [true] propositions, and then, you can deduce "I see a red patch" from that. Is that it?
Blanshard: I think you've got it. Now, here's another. Here's a somewhat different way to approach that foundationalism. It's often thought that ...
[tape ends]
Blanshard: ... Is there any way you can test whether this is working all right? I hope you're not excluded by being at that distance [from the tape recorder].
Palmer: Oh, I don't have anything much to say.
VI. Modern physics raises problems for the coherence theory of truth and implies that the correspondence theory is correct.
Blanshard: Well, you do have a great deal to say, I'm sure. Now, you see, in what consists the truth of a statement that the perception on my part of a red patch depends upon the impingement upon my retina of light waves of a certain frequency. Let's suppose those light waves and their frequencies are beyond the power of observation -- ever. We could still say, I take it, according to the modern physicists, that the proposition is true. Well, now, the proposition can't be true simply on the grounds of coherence, I think. Because we admit that the electron cannot be introduced into either our own or into any future experience. And therefore, it seems to me that we are inevitably meaning by "truth" something other than mere coherence of our own conceptions, or the conceptions of science as a whole. Unless this wavelength actually existed out there, our proposition would not be true. And therefore, it seems to me, there is something over and above coherence that we have to introduce in a case like that.
Now, what is it? Well, I could only say that it's something I'm content to call "correspondence." Incidentally, [F.H.] Bradley uses this term over and over again, perhaps inadvertently ...
Palmer: But he doesn't really mean correspondence, though.
Blanshard: He doesn't mean correspondence, by correspondence what the ordinary realist would mean by it, I think. But I've been compelled to follow my friend A.C. Ewing [author of Idealism: A Critical Survey, Methuen & Co Ltd, London, 1934], with whom I discussed this matter in the house a few years ago. He was living, in '75 or so, when he came over here. And we discussed it, and he was convinced that, he came to be convinced in the end, and he wrote me, in the last letter I received from him, that coherence wouldn't do as either the meaning or the test of truth. I hold he was mistaken in going that far -- that coherence is our ultimate resource in regard to the test of truth, or the criterion. But not in regard to the nature of truth. There is something there that goes beyond coherence.
Palmer: So essentially, then, as you said, you think Rescher's criticism was invalid but that he was right anyway.
Blanshard: Yes, yes. That there is an element of correspondence in the nature of truth which I hadn't sufficiently taken into account in The Nature of Thought. I'm reluctant to admit errors, but I think one has to do that, if on reflection, one sees that one's older theory is insufficient. Now, this doesn't help you very much, because if you ask me what I mean by "correspondence," I can't say. I'm inclined to think that it's an indefinable term. I think that Wittgenstein's idea was just ridiculous. He found a correspondence, if you laid a fork over a knife, that would correspond to the truth of Wisdom's murdering his wife, for example, or something of that sort. That seems to me frivolous.
No, "correspondence" doesn't mean similarity, because there are well-attested cases, W.H.R. Rivers, for example, who claimed that his power of imagery had receded greatly from youth onwards, but his power of thinking clearly, he was certain, had advanced. Now, that wouldn't be possible if clear thinking depended upon correspondence in the sense of similarity with the object. If you think of an apple, for example -- now, I am the sort of person who uses images very freely. But there are lots of people -- Watson [J.B. Watson, a pioneer of the behaviorist view of human psychology], the behaviorist, was partly accountable for, I think, by the fact that he didn't have [mental] imagery, or very faint and dim and fragmentary imagery.
I can [mentally] see an apple very clearly, and I think that when I talk about apples, I see them, in my fancy. And one could argue with some plausibility that truth consisted in correspondence in that case. I don't think it does. And in many cases. For example, in the case of the wavelength or the electron, I don't see how one could say that truth consisted in a resemblance between anything in my mind and something I've never seen.
VII. Is philosophy making any progress?
Palmer: One of the things, as I mentioned, I think that Wittgenstein was a closet idealist, especially in his later years. Some of his work in the Philosophical Investigations seems like sort of a confused critique of foundationalism, and a defense of coherence, in his criticisms of private language ...
Blanshard: Yes, I've heard that said, or the equivalent of it said. Somebody was saying to me, I guess it was [Wilfrid] Sellars, perhaps, that people were moving around in the direction of where philosophy was 50 years ago. And I did hear Sellars say, "Perhaps we are going to return to Bosanquet." That seemed to be a remarkable thing for a person like Sellars to say. You can see that there is a tendency in that direction. Who is this chap who maintains that there are no sense-data, that every sense-datum is heavy with meaning -- a man in Minnesota ...
Palmer: Gee, I know who you're talking about, but ...
Blanshard: You know that man, yes. I suspect that he is right, there. And that seems to me in itself [to be] a sort of reversal of atomism and moving backward toward the old view that all that is real is the whole.
Palmer: Do you think that schools of philosophy are just going to keep coming in and going out, or are we really making progress?
Blanshard: I think we are making progress. I think that the school of analysis, much as I deplore many of its conclusions, has carried philosophy forward. It has made us aware of ambiguities, obscurities, and vaguenesses in our ordinary ways of speech, even of philosophic speech, that didn't hold before. Now, I find it, frankly, rather hard to read Edward Caird, at the present time. Because when he talks about self-consciousness, as he does continually, I really don't know what he means. And I think it's the analysts, largely, people like G.E. Moore, who have made us aware of the vagueness of such terms. And therefore, even in this rift of philosophy, for the last 40 years or so, I find hopeful signs. I think if we come back to metaphysics, as we plainly are doing, we're going to come back with a very much sharper arsenal of weapons than we had before.
Palmer: You mentioned that you didn't think coherence was all that there was to meaning and truth. Would you amplify that a little bit? Because I have been working on an idea that all there is to the meaning of propositions is their role in a system ...
[Mrs. Blanshard comes in to see how we're doing.]
Blanshard: You can take that, I think. Are you ... we have been so engaged in interesting conversation here that I haven't watched to see whether Mr. Palmer has finished his dinner. [laughs] Thank you, darling.
[Mrs. Blanshard takes the trays and leaves the room.]
VIII. Coherence, atoms, and the nature of truth.
Blanshard: Well, now ... I think what I would think of first is what I said already, that you can't accommodate the coherence theory to modern physics. Now, at a time when it was possible to doubt the existence of the atom, I think the coherence theory was much more plausible. My tutor at Oxford was H.H. Joachim. And I remember his saying to me, when we were talking about atoms, "Do you suppose there are such things?" Well, now, he was clearly skeptical about the whole development of the physics of the invisible -- not only the invisible, but that which could never be sensibly apprehended. If he had been perfectly clear that entities existed which would never be experienced by anyone, would he have been so confident that the test of truth lay in the internal consistency of concepts entertained by minds? I doubt if he could be so certain.
Palmer: But wouldn't the test of truth still be coherence, even if ...
Blanshard: Yes, I think so. I think so. I want to be clear about that. I still stick to coherence as our test or criterion of truth. That does seem to me [to be] ultimate. But I can't, in virtue of the fact that we believe, when we study physics, in entities that will never enter into experience at all, that can never be apprehended, in the nature of the case, with any knowing apparatus such as we are equipped with, I can't help thinking that coherence doesn't exhaust the nature of truth.
Palmer: What about the nature of meaning? Because, for example, take a ... the example that I always use is radioactivity, but you could equally well substitute in an atom. Take some sentence involving an atom, "There are so many atoms in a [rock] that's radioactive." Now, if you take away the context of modern physics, it seems to me that you rob the concept of "atom" or "radioactivity" of everything there is to it.
Blanshard: Yes.
Palmer: That it just functions within this system of propositions ...
Blanshard: I think you're right. You're right. I agree to that. But you see, suppose you do develop your system of physics, based upon the existence of the imperceptible, into a very extensive and internally coherent system. The truth of that would still depend upon the actual existence of the unapprehended, would it not? And it seems to me, therefore, that your system sooner or later has to depend on the existence of that which, by definition, cannot fall within thought, however developed. Unless you conceive some kind of knowledge that we know nothing about.
Palmer: But, well, then, you do still think that coherence exhausts the nature of meaning.
Blanshard: Yes, I think so. I don't think, for example, that you could think about radio waves without concepts which themselves implied further concepts. And the test of a statement made by a radiologist about his radio waves would, I suppose, depend on the coherence of these statements of his, or concepts of his, with other concepts of his, and with [those of] other people. But none of these concepts would ever reach the thing that they were talking about. So that I have become a non-idealist in that respect. That will disappoint you, I dare say, but I've changed my view on that point. I don't see, that is, how a person who believes in nothing but coherence as the nature of truth could believe in modern physics.
Palmer: I tell people that they have to commit themselves to truth as such, and not to any particular set of propositions that they think is true.
Blanshard: Yes. Well, it's terribly baffling, this question of truth. I don't pretend to have got the sort of clarity that I'm satisfied with, in regard to it. I think we still must distinguish between the test and the nature of truth. And I still am a coherentist, in the important sense in which for all practical purposes, you have to choose between coherence and correspondence. Because I think that you have to test even correspondence by coherence.
Palmer: You mentioned in a couple of places that while you think epistemological idealism is very sound, you have your doubts about metaphysical idealism.
Blanshard: Yes. Did I say that in The Nature of Thought?
Palmer: Ah, either in The Nature of Thought or in Reason and Belief.
Blanshard: Well, I don't know, at this distance, what I meant by it, exactly. But that, I think, would be part of it. Of course, I still believe in metaphysics, literally.
Palmer: So would you say that you have sort of gravitated toward pluralism?
Blanshard: No, no. I think that the aim of thought must still be at a coherent whole, in which everything, in the end, is implied by, and implies, everything else. And I hold to that, still.
IX. Is there a reality independent of thought?
Palmer: It would seem though, that if you were a pluralist in metaphysics, admitting atoms and things like that, that then you might have a conflict between what you called the immanent end of thought and the transcendent end of thought -- the [internal] end that thought is striving for, and getting thought squared with reality.
Blanshard: What do you think, yourself, about the attempt to identify the transcendent end with the immanent end of thought? That is, do you think that when we reach the immanent end of thought, that it will be identical with the transcendent end?
Palmer: Uh, yes. Principally, because I don't think that there is a reality independent of thought.
Blanshard: I see. Well, then, you're a better idealist than I. I've been corresponding with a young man at the University of Texas who now wants to go to Oxford to complete his degree. He is defending coherence as both the nature and criterion of thought. And the question I'm inclined to ask of him, as I am of you, is this: Are you prepared to say that if you developed your system to the completest possible extent, where both its internal coherence or consistency and its extent were the greatest possible, thought would become identical with the real world? There'd be nothing outside thought, then? That's what Bradley thinks.
Palmer: That's pretty much along the lines of your theory of ideas. And the odd thing is that I thought a lot of these things before I had read The Nature of Thought.
Blanshard: Is that so? Now, I still hold it in this sense. I think that the aim of thought is what I described it to be in The Nature of Thought. That is, a system of knowledge which is at once internally consistent and embracing of all that we know. But when you ask me whether, what it is that this system apprehends is itself included within the system, I have to pause and think again. Now, Bradley says, as you remember, that when we reach that point, thought and reality will have become one. But that means that philosophy as we know it, that is, discursive thinking, will have ceased.
X. Would discursive thinking disappear
in a perfectly-coherent system of thought?
Palmer: Well, of course, we'll never reach that point, so we don't have to worry about it.
Blanshard: Well, he [Bradley] worries about it in the last chapter of Appearance and Reality. And I think you and I have to worry about it, because we're talking now about the immanent and the transcendent aim of thought. I am now inclined to think that between the completed system of thought, which is our immanent end, and the world of reality, there will be a relation. And that relation will be one of complete truth. But what thought aims at is not the loss of itself in reality, the giving up of the being of thought, and its becoming identical with Gibraltar, for example. But will be rather, a system, complete and consistent within itself. But a system which will reflect in some way, in some adequate way, a reality that falls without itself. Now, unless you take that view, then you have to hold that all the discursive thinking that we do on the way to it, is going to dissolve into a sort of mystic's dream at the end. And I can't see how Bradley himself could argue that way, consistently now. Because you'll remember that in the beginning of the second part of Appearance and Reality, he takes the law of contradiction as his ultimate court of appeal. And says that only that is real which is internally consistent. But then, he uses that law of contradiction to deny that there are any such things as relations. And consistency is itself a relation! So he is denying that the system of thought which he is attempting to reach can have that which is the prime backbone of what he regards as reality. That seems to me a frightful inconsistency in his thinking.
Palmer: Well, the way I've attacked the problem is to distinguish between what we apparently have, and what is the real logical structure underneath. In other words, you have a lot of different propositions in logic, that have different -- the popular term now is "surface grammar."
Blanshard: Yes.
Palmer: But all actually being logically equivalent underneath. And so, if you had a system of propositions, each of which was entailed by and entailed every other proposition, then you might very well appear to have a whole system of distinct propositions related by logical relations. But what in fact you would have would be just one proposition.
Blanshard: I'm inclined to think that that statement, that in the long run, there is just one judgment possible ... should not be interpreted in such a way that there is logical equivalence between all propositions. I think it's true, for example, that every proposition in Euclid [Euclidean geometry] implies every other, because if you took any one of them away, the whole structure would fall. But surely, that does leave the various propositions of Euclid, not independent of each other, but distinct from each other, doesn't it? Because the proposition that two parallel lines never meet is not the same as the propositions that are deduced from that.
Palmer: Well, yes, it just seems as though the Euclidean system is incomplete in that respect. Because you really can't take just one proposition -- just one -- and deduce [the rest of the system].
Blanshard: Yes, that's true. That is, for our present knowledge, we can't. But you would agree, wouldn't you, that if we did know completely, we'd see that an adequate knowledge of any proposition in Euclid would involve a knowledge of all.
Well, now, you see -- what I am concerned with at present is saving the fact of distinctions between things. Distinctions between propositions, for example. It seems to me that Bradley and Bosanquet, much as I admire them, and Hegel, too -- held a view which would abolish the distinction between propositions, and therefore abolish even consistency as well as inconsistency in propositions. In other words, they have carried their coherence theory to a point where it's inconsistent with itself. Because consistency surely implies relations, and if relations are unreal, then you can't that anything is consistent with anything else. And Bradley really can't say that. He can't say that within his Absolute, "A is consistent with B," because A and B have vanished.
Palmer: Yes, the only way to save that, as far as I can tell, is with that sort of two-level conception of reality: apparently distinct things on the one hand which really resolve into one thing.
Blanshard: Yes. Are you satisfied with that?
Palmer: I'm sort of schizophrenic about the whole business. Because, theoretically, I'm satisfied. But then, all I have to do is take a walk in the park on a sunny day, and I get to thinking, "This is so crazy!"
Blanshard: Well, the Indian philosophers accept it readily enough. Either they are much beyond us, or they are much behind us. I spent a year in India, and it seems to me that they haven't yet learned the distinction between mysticism on the one hand, and discursive thinking on the other. In the end, everything does tend to blend with everything else, in a state of things in which every proposition, being the equivalent of every other proposition, really is not distinct from any other proposition. And they seem to think that the end of the seer is absorption in Nirvana, a sort of state in which everything is so mixed up with everything else that nothing is what it is any longer.
Palmer: You can see that in idealist writings.
Blanshard: Yes, it comes out very clearly at the end in Bradley. And I lived for three years within a stone's throw of Bradley, and have talked some of these matters over with him. And although at the time, as an undergraduate, I couldn't face this tremendous engine of thinking, I did come in time to doubt some of his major theses.
I don't want to discourage you from moving along idealistic lines, if there is any way of saving it. I am rather depressed by some of my own results in latter-day thinking. But it's better to be depressed and right than elated and wrong.
Palmer: I'll work along these lines and see where it leads me. [tape ends]