Abstract
Vasso Kindi examines, first, whether Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, which was to replace the symbolic logic of the logical positivists, does indeed bear similarities to Bacon’s and Kant’s use of questions, as Collingwood claims. She argues that Collingwood’s emphasis on questions is more similar to Kant’s concern with presuppositions that make knowledge possible than to Bacon’s interest in pursuing and questioning nature to divulge her secrets. She, then, explains how Collingwood’s emphasis on questions is tied to his view that propositions are not abstract entities with intrinsic meaning in isolation from the network of presuppositions in which they are embedded. Finally, she suggests that the metaphysician’s task, according to Collingwood, is to ‘excavate’ different complexes of questions and answers until the absolute presuppositions which govern them are reached. It is this historical methodology that gives Collingwood’s metaphysics its distinctive character.
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Notes
- 1.
See (Hume 2007: 4): “Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.”
- 2.
Harvey Wheeler has argued that “Bacon’s science derived ultimately from his jurisprudence”, cited in (Pesic 1999: 91).
- 3.
Bacon calls his art “Interpretation of Nature” and says that it is an “art of logic” (2000: 15) which is to replace the ordinary one. Those who use the ordinary logic, says Bacon, “defeat and conquer their adversary by disputation; we conquer nature by work” (ibid.: 16).
- 4.
“[W]e have made the senses (from which, if we prefer not to be insane we must derive everything in natural things) sacred high priests of nature and skilled interpreters of its oracles” (Bacon 2000: 18).
- 5.
“[W]e are making a history not only of nature free and unconstrained (when nature goes its own way and does its own work), such as a history of the bodies of heaven and the sky, of land and sea, of minerals, plants and animals; but much more of nature confined and harassed, when it is forced from its own condition by art and human agency […] nature reveals herself more through the harassment of art than in her own proper freedom” (Bacon 2000: 20–21). Cf. “the secrets of nature reveal themselves better through harassments applied by the arts than when they go on in their own way” (ibid.: 81).
- 6.
Pace Collingwood but also some feminist scholars, Peter Pesic (1999: 84) insists that “[t]he interrogation [of nature] requires handcuffs and chains, but it is not a scene of torture.” Bacon compares nature to the mythical figure of Proteus who has to be constrained and handcuffed to reveal all that he knows. Pesic (ibid.: 86) cites Bacon who says “if anyone gets annoyed because I call the arts the bonds of nature when they ought rather to be considered its liberators and champions in that in some cases they allow nature to achieve its ends by reducing obstacles to order, then I reply that I do not much care for such fancy ideas and pretty words; I intend and mean only that nature, like Proteus, is forced by art to do what would not have been done without it: and it does not matter whether you call this forcing and enchaining, or assisting and perfecting.” Feminist scholars such as Carolyn Merchant, Sandra Harding, and Evelyn Fox Keller have argued that Bacon uses rape metaphors and sexual imagery to speak about knowledge of nature. A characteristic passage from Bacon cited by all these feminist scholars is the following: “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again. […] Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object—as your Majesty has shown in your own example” (Merchant 1980: 168).
- 7.
Chapter III of Collingwood’s Autobiography is entitled “Minute philosophers” and it discusses the Oxbridge ‘realists’. As Michael Beaney (2013: 249) notes, the term ‘minute philosophers’ was previously used by Cicero and by George Berkeley in his book, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher. In Beaney’s view (ibid.: 260), Collingwood’s logic of question and answer has roots in the tradition it was supposed to attack, that is, Oxford and Cambridge realism. Yet, he also recognizes that Collingwood was not just interested in identifying the subject and predicate of a statement through the question that the statement answers, as Cook Wilson used to do in Statement and Inference but was also concerned with “the very meaning and truth-value of the statement” (ibid.: 261).
- 8.
James’s emphasis is on concepts which help us “go in quest of the absent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or that, bend our experience, and make it tell us wither it is bound. We change its order, run it backwards, bring far bits together and separate near bits, jump about over its surface instead of plowing through its continuity, string its items on as many ideal diagrams as our mind can frame” (James 1996: 64). The Jamesian phraseology regarding experience brings to mind Bacon’s language when he talks about how nature needs to be harassed in order to be known.
- 9.
Cf.: “The fundamental presuppositions of modern natural science, or what I am calling its metaphysical presuppositions, are what Kant calls the principles of the pure understanding, e.g., that every event has a cause” (EM : 400). In his Idea of History (IH : 237), Collingwood compares wringing answers from nature the way Bacon did it, to putting the historian’s authorities in the witness-box. The metaphor of the witness-box that Collingwood uses implies that, in his view, Bacon and Kant, who also use the same metaphor, may be taken to engage in the same kind of investigation. Yet, as I have argued, Kant and Bacon may both emphasize the questioning of nature, but their attitude towards it is significantly different.
- 10.
- 11.
“The human understanding is carried away to abstractions by its own nature, and pretends that things which are in flux are unchanging. But it is better to dissect nature than to abstract” (Bacon 2000: 45). Cf.: “But our logic instructs the understanding and trains it, not (as common logic does) to grope and clutch at abstracts with feeble mental tendrils, but to dissect nature truly, and to discover the powers and actions of bodies and their laws limned in matter” (ibid.: 219–220).
- 12.
Cf.: “whether a proposition is T or F, significant or meaningless depends on what question it was meant to answer” (A: 39).
- 13.
Recollection (ἀνάμνησις) of what we already know was for Plato the means to learning (μάϑησις) and was associated—more explicitly by Aristotle—to thinking and discursive reasoning. It was an active search of what it is to be recalled and was, thus, distinguished from the passive state of memory (μνήμη) which was associated with perception (see Bloch 2007: 72–76). It is noteworthy that Collingwood, in his An Essay on Philosophical Method, referring to Socrates, contrasts knowledge from without via perception (by observing facts) and knowledge from within via thinking. According to Socrates’s theory, “knowledge was to be sought within the mind, and brought to birth by a process of questioning” (EPM : 10–11).
- 14.
- 15.
In fairness to Beaney it must be said that he points to ambiguities in the use of the word ‘proposition’ by Collingwood, one of them being the sense adopted by the logical positivists. But at times it seems that Beaney himself is willing to embrace the same, widely held, understanding of propositions.
- 16.
Cf.: Forster (1998). In opposition to Davidson, Michael Forster argues that important anthropologists and classicists, such as E. Fränkel and Evans-Pritchard, who had extensive experience in interpreting languages, behaviour, and texts, “firmly reject” massive commonality and agreement between remote cultures and suggests “to turn the tables on Davidson’s a priorist argument from his theory of meaning, understanding, and interpretation to the impossibility of discovering radical differences in beliefs and concepts —to accept the discovery of such differences as an established fact and to see in the incompatibility of this fact with Davidson’ s theory a further argument against the theory” (Forster 1998: 151–152, emphasis in the original).
- 17.
I owe Butterfield’s and Kuhn’s quotes to Theodore Arabatzis who made use of them in a talk on Davidson’s principle of charity and on how differently this principle is perceived by philosophers on the one hand and historians on the other.
- 18.
The logical positivists also thought that absolute presuppositions, such as ‘All events have causes” or “God exists”, lack truth value because they are unverifiable. But, pace Collingwood, they thought that they are nonsensical pseudo-propositions. According to Collingwood, however, if we were to think, as positivists do, that absolute presuppositions are nonsensical, then these pseudo-propositions could not, of course, serve as presuppositions and thinking would be left confused since systematic or scientific thinking depends on presuppositions and requires the disentanglement of a series of questions and answers (EM : 170–71, 233).
- 19.
It has to be stressed that the identification of similarities and differences is not meant by Collingwood to encourage the natural scientist’s work of classifications and generalizations.
- 20.
Collingwood distinguishes between assumptions and suppositions. The assumptions, as in the case of mathematics where we begin by making a certain hypothesis, such as ‘Let ABC be a triangle’, are freely chosen whereas suppositions proper aren’t (EM : 27–28, 414–15).
- 21.
Collingwood says that the concept of cause is ambiguous. One of its senses is the one that Collingwood calls ‘the historical sense’, in which the cause is associated with human activity, that is, deliberate actions and motives (EM: 285–86; IH: 214–15; PH: 191).
- 22.
It should be noted that Collingwood does not dismiss psychology tout court. He criticizes Freud—he mentions Freud’s Totem and Taboo—and other psychologists (EM : 118, 122–132), but he insists that he values the achievements of psychology as a science of feeling (EM: 141).
- 23.
Cf. what Collingwood says about character in history: that changes of character are brought about not only by the deliberate actions of the agent but also by the agent’s past, by what has happened to the agent. The agent’s past that constitutes the agent’s character can be studied historically as any other (PH : 192).
- 24.
The Collingwoodian thesis is reminiscent of Kuhn’s idea about the necessity of scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1970: 92–110). According to Kuhn, deep change is bound to occur in science because the practice of normal science carries within it the seed of change, namely, the prospect of anomalies which are bound to occur given the expansive nature of normal science on the one hand and its limited resources on the other.
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Kindi, V. (2018). Presuppositions and the Logic of Question and Answer. In: Dharamsi, K., D'Oro, G., Leach, S. (eds) Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02432-1_5
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