Pretending to Infer

Abstract

Some time in the early 1960s, soon after Professor O’Connor’s appointment to the Chair of Philosophy at Exeter University, he took part in a public philosophical discussion with the then Bishop of Exeter. In the course of the discussion, the Bishop insisted that reason could lead you just so far towards the conclusion that a god exists, but in the end you had to make a leap in the dark. Professor O’Connor’s reply was that if you are going to make a leap in the dark anyway, you might as well make it at the start and have done with it. What is at issue here is the meaning to be attached to being led by reason. For the Bishop, it presumably meant what it meant for Descartes, and has meant for most people since Descartes: adhering to clear and distinct ideas, talking plain commonsense, rejecting jargon while at the same time renouncing reliance on any kind of privileged access to the truth. If this what he meant by ‘reason could lead you’, he might well have claimed that only by thinking clearly about our place in the scheme of things, about morality, and about mortality, will you see the inevitability of renouncing such fallible human resources for dealing with these matters, in favour of a blind leap in the dark called ‘faith’. In other words there is, in the case, a point in following reason to its furthest limits before foregoing any further help from that quarter.

‘I told him he ought not simply to state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said arguments would spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands… I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that, and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments.’ (Bertrand Russell on Wittgenstein)