I sent a draft of "Fear of Chaos" to the philosopher George Elder Davie, who sent me his copy of John Anderson's essays in response. Anderson was a Scottish philosopher who spent most of his academic life in Sydney.
A four?year?old was grappling with the problem of why the fourth wee craw he wisny there at aa. Her seven?year?old sister told her he just wasn't. "How do you know?", she was asked. She answered, "I don't know how I know, but I know that I know.
This is the common sense John Anderson appeals to in his logic ? not the perhaps punning aspects stressed by George Davie of sense shared by the community or perception convened by the senses, but that autarchic sense which back?translates from Russian as "healthy thinking" ? where I know a spurious problem when I see one, and won't waste time analysing it. It reminds me irresistibly, though perhaps irrelevantly, of William Soutar's "Fate":

There wis a man fae Lunnon Links
Wham Fate wrocht unco sair:
Scarce richtit fae a dingin doun
Or he was doun aince mair.
Syne ae day he met Fate himsel
A bittock yont Anstruther
And spierd him why he warkd mair fell
Wi him nor ony other.
"Am I a dominie?' said Fate,
"Tae reel ye aff a rowt?
Aa that I ken's I dae it", he said,
Syne cluft him sic a clowt.

Of course, human agents who are answerable should verify what they know. For Anderson this is a matter of checking our facts for inconsistency: he proceeds by syllogism. He tells us how propositions work:
"Rejecting (…) the distinction between necessary and other truths, empiricism takes up the position that in discussion or inquiry any proposition can be treated as (a) a conclusion to be proved from premises accepted, (b) a premise accepted to be used in proving some conclusion, (c) a hypothesis to be tested by the observation of the truth or falsity of the conclusions drawn from it, or (d) an observation to be used in determining the truth or falsity of conclusions drawn from a hypothesis."
In his comments on cogito ergo sum we see the method working a treat. It's a very entertaining passage that couldn't have been done other than logically. Sometimes the method doesn't work so well. Twice, for example, he maintains that externality is a symmetrical relation, which it isn't (consider two concentric circles: the fact that one is external to the other does not imply the converse). At another point he maintains that "either" means "not neither", which it doesn't. In those instances, his own method can be used to correct the errors.
He declares boldly that philosophy should rule science . He copes well enough with Marx and Freud, so I had high hopes that this physics graduate would help me with Einstein and even Feynman. He rails at probability with such confidence that I expected to find some fundamental, syllogistic critique of quantum theory somewhere ? but there isn't any. As Feynman observed, you can philosophise on it as much as you like, but don't forget that it works. Shouting at it doesn't make it go away. on Einstein, Anderson seems to make the egregious mistake of conflating Berkleyan relativism with relativity theory.
Anderson is a logician. He says he is a classicist (which Burnet was), but logic is the only part of the trivium that interests him, just as geometry is the only part of the quadrivium. He makes a virtue of sticking to logic, though since he can't say what a virtue is, he resorts to rough rhetoric as polyfilla. He believes that "we cannot travel away from logic, however distant a system we go to" . He seems to regard it as innocent of time: "how long it will take people to find out something, or how many other things they will not then have found out, does not affect the fact that what they do find out is something that is absolutely the case. On the other hand, "Truths, we say, can be discovered but they can also be forgotten". Let me ask one question: is a forgotten truth still absolutely the case?
"Any of the elements in culture ? Science, Art, Industry itself ? no doubt operates through persons, but its "needs", in the sense of conditions necessary for its continuance, its 'lends", as the effects its continuance will produce on its surroundings, its interactions generally with other things so that it does or does not "survive", are not dependent on anyone's knowledge of them ? any more than, as Marx points out (Preface to Critique of Political Economy), a man's own history is dependent on what he thinks of himself."
Was that a yes? If so then I think you're taking your aversion to Berkeleyan relativism a bit too far, Mr Anderson. Trees, I'll admit with some reluctance, might not depend on someone seeing them, but truths depend on someone believing them. To use Marx's analogy, a man's history may not depend on what he thinks of himself, but what he thinks of himself certainly does, infinite regress or no. If, on the other hand, you judge the questions unanswerable ? since a "no" would indeed be absurd ? then I have shown (I think) how easy it is to travel away from logic.
Anderson starts out from common sense, but his logic over?rules it time and again. What community of sense would do away with ideas , the self, right and happiness , conscience and the distinction between inner and outer?
He is aware, nonetheless, of the limits to logic, and indeed says it is ultimately based on beliefs, which are "what eases our minds". He is not prepared, though, to admit quite how tight those limits are, since his logic cannot overstep the present indicative. The rest of his work is rhetoric.
Consider Anderson's treatment of time. The essay "Mind as Feeling" begins, "Traditionally mind is regarded as having characteristics of three fundamental kinds ? cognitive, conative and affective ? knowing, striving and feeling". A Russian philosopher called Muraviev associates knowing with past, striving with future and feeling with present tenses. There are two things that interest me about that: the first is that it shows the categories of past, present and future to be very coarse compared with natural language (in Exegesis and Argument, ed. Lee, Mourelatos and Rorty (Assen, 1973), Mouratelos writes that "Over much of the history of mankind, language as used by a given community has been metaphysically more subtle and sophisticated than the thought of that community's most penetrating philosophers"; it still is, which is why poetry can cope with philosophy but not vice versa). Examples from the kitchen: "I put too much salt in the pasta". Oh well, we'll just have to have more to drink with it". or "I've put too much salt in the pasta". "Well drain it and put in fresh boiling water. That'll sort it". These different past tenses indicate irrecoverable and recoverable past; they distinguish situations that can only be known from those that can be known and also changed by striving. In short, the strong parallels between past, present and future, and knowing, feeling and striving, are confirmed by Anderson's view of mind as feeling, because his philosophy is bound, to a degree that startled me, to the present indicative tense. There is also subtle crossover between the parallels, recognized in the verb tenses of natural languages. Maybe all logic is bound to the present tense; maybe it's common knowledge. If so, skip the next page or so.
Anderson describes logic as "what is". He says philosophy should be systematic, not a comprehensive set of solutions, but a single logic. He approves of Hegel maintaining "that this logic should be historical, if we take this to mean that it is the theory of things as historical; but it should not itself be considered as advancing, however the study of it may do so." Otherwise, he says, we fall into scepticism. And we don't want trouble, do we? Sad, though, that one who admired Heraclitus for his "no granting of a privileged position in reality to gods, men or molecules, with conflict everywhere and nothing above the battle" should put logic in a tabernacle.
This insistence on what is gets overdone. He maintains, against Ryle and the multitude, that "We know things while we continue to exercise our minds on them, while we continue to grapple with the questions they raise" it being understood that when we are not doing so, we do not know them. "Of course", he goes on, "there is a quite widespread assumption of the storehouse view of knowledge (of any piece of knowledge as being tucked away in some mental compartment) and language is used so as to support that view; but it is one of philosophy's tasks to correct common assumptions and usages, not to follow them." Please, Mr Anderson, don't try to tell me that when I'm using a Russian double imperfective verb I (more or less) know it, but don't know it when I'm not using it. Otherwise you'll have to tell me where it is in the interim: in the tabernacle with logic? in my unconscious? Or is it called into being (replete with mistakes, in my case) by my awareness of it? Berkeley might have liked that. Wouldn't it be easier to leave learning and knowing separate, and put the act of learning in the past? But you've no time for the past.
Or for the future: "doctrines like utilitarianism and progressivism whose special concern is the future are not merely anti?classical but are opposed to study, since the past is a field of study which can be constantly opened up, while the future is a field of conjecture or phantasy. Anderson, grounded in the present, is equally anti?classical: the past is not a field of study; it is what has been and gone, for the most part irrevocably. The field of study that can constantly be opened up is present awareness of the past or of anything else. In that it can be revised, it is as much exposed to conjecture and phantasy as is the future.
What drew my attention to Anderson's problems with time is the dog's breakfast he makes of the imperative. "... while the positive content of the imperative form is no more than an asserted fact, it also embodies the logical confusion of maintaining that the assertion cannot be denied, thus it is not really an issue but is above question". "Thus, while the real content is only you are going (a disputable matter), the special, "imperative" form introduces logical confusion ? inserts a "necessity" that is not in, but is above, the facts and that has to be excised if a definite issue is to emerge. (The issue, "Go", "No, I won't", might have been expressed more accurately as "You are going voluntarily", "I am not going voluntarily". Anderson's analysis makes the simple issue incomprehensible. The imperative embodies logical confusion only in the special sense that it confuses logic. He admits as much in "Determinism and Ethics" (of which more below): "If the statement that something "ought to be" has any meaning, it can only be that the thing is, positively, obligatory; that this is a matter of fact". Otherwise ? to cut the matter short but not I hope distort ? "The consequent impossibility of making any definite assertion would be fatal to any science, "normative" or positive". Fourteen years on, in 1942, he is still powerless against the imperative: " ... an imperative quality is something we could never observe or study; it has to be left in obscurity because it is basically ambiguous". This is the nearest Anderson gets to admitting defeat; but he still feels he has to blame it on the ambiguity of imperatives (which are, by nature, the least ambiguous locutions in the repertoire) rather than on the limits of logic. Why?
Arguing for determinism (which already strikes me as a contradiction), Anderson writes, "... selection of mind as a bearer of freedom is not due to any special interest in mind. Those who are interested in mind's workings will naturally take up a determinist position. The indeterminists are those with an axe to grind, with certain "values" to defend, with the view that certain things ought to be or are to be done. Theoretical concern with what is the case is, it seems to me, coextensive with determinism". That we can change nothing and that we can act freely are two powerful intuitions that meet in the centre of our being (a third intuition). The proponent of either extreme is in trouble. Anderson's solution is to deny the freedom of the individual and indeed the existence of the individual ? naturally enough: if past and future, knowing and striving, are deactivated, leaving only passive feeling, then the I is exposed to the weather and decomposed before death: "We believe (or, as I should say, the motive believes)" ; "Nevertheless, none but subjectivist objections have ever been urged to the view that it is certain brain processes that think" ; "emotions (or feelings) know, emotions strive and, in general, interact with other things" ; "... it is not so clearly understood that there is no faculty of "reason" which can guide the passions, but that thinking is an activity of the passions themselves" ; "The rejection of the conception of the "unitary person" went with the rejection of the "conscious self"" ; "In my article I took for granted the plurality of mental entities (sentiments, passions or whatever they may be called) for which I have argued elsewhere ? the existence of a society of "motives", having distinct characters and a certain capacity for independent action." All assertion and no argument. And lest it be thought that Anderson has turned the despotic self into a democracy with a "society of motives", you should note that he defines society as "that false solidarity of group interests". Me? my name is Legion. I is the survivor of my component parts.
I find this animist view of the individual very strange, with its motives that believe, thoughts that think and emotions that feel. It reminds me of a slightly crazy hard man in the school I attended, who called his feet Albert and Ceecil; "You'd better watch it", he'd say, "or I'll set Albert and Ceecil onto you."'
"Thus if we can rule out the supposition of a peculiarly critical faculty, we shall have disposed of both "conscience" and the "whole self" as candidates for that office." ? leaving operations to Albert and Ceecil? I'd rather not.
Once again: that we can change nothing and that we can act freely are two intuitions that meet in the centre of our being (a third intuition). The proponent of either extreme is in trouble. Ambiguity, in this area, is not sloppiness but mediation. It is simply untrue that "The principle of verbal communication is that the set of words used in making a given statement should have only one meaning". Tell that to the diplomats and poets.
We could avoid the unnecessary strain of keeping faith with either extreme by admitting we are implicated at every level in a process we won't escape alive. That would leave interstitial spaces for hope. But how does Anderson proceed, if he doesn't believe either in his self or in his freedom? Watch.
"…a classical period ? a period in which disinterestedness stands out from the wrangle of special interests as it does not in culturally lower times".
Disinterestedness? Yes, that's it:
"The classicist recognizes the natural opposition between disinterestedness and interestedness, between concern with the ways of working of things themselves and concern with what we can get out of them."
"…should be obvious to all those who admit that such a thing as disinterestedness exists".
"Developing the "values" of initiative, emulation, care for exactitude and rejection of the notion of "reward", the factory worker becomes assimilated to the scientist, the artist, the warrior ? types of disinterested activity."
"The common ethical notions of disinterestedness and of things which are "for their own sake"".
Disinterestedness is just one of those things: Anderson never tries to tell us how it can cohabit with determinism, and the nearest he gets to defining it involves the word "values", which he puts in perverted commas because values, as he says in his discussion of determinism, are metaphysical nonsense. Why does he want it so much? Surely disinterestedness entails both a self whose interests are to be disengaged and freedom for that self to disengage them? Why can he not admit it? For Anderson, I is allowed to open parliament, or to write a paper in the long vac., but not to interfere with realpolitik or the workings of the world, which it can only describe. Just the job for a university professor, don't you think? "What is done, whether it is good or not, will be determined by the forces that exist." Leave it to Albert and Ceecil. Leave Bosnia and Grozny to them, leave Bujumbura.
Anderson claims that his "pluralistic logic of events" offers the only logical answer to scepticism ? theology, defeatism, leaving things in the hands of higher powers" ? but he does this by leaving them in the hands of lower powers. He seems to despise the "tendency to seek safety and certainty" , yet subjects his mind to the laws of nature and logic, and dismisses anything risky as unimportant or negligible:
"... in general, choice plays little part in human life", although in our active lives we sometimes discover moral truths, we also discover other truths, in which, for the most part, we are much more interested"
"People in general do not think very much about the goodness of their activities".
"…it is equally absurd to say that there is any such question as "What am I to do?"".
In general ... we ... people in general ... absurd. Where have all the syllogisms gone?

A man with a moral code was walking through the desert. After a series of camel jokes he met John Anderson, who said, "To call it a norm or an ideal is merely an excuse for leaving it indefinite".
You're none too precise in defining "goods" yourself, said the man: I mean look at "The Meaning of Good", especially page 263. Anderson replied, "The fact that a good once established both communicates itself and assists other goods is not merely a reason for the continuance of the struggle against evils; it is itself the continuance of the struggle". The man said, seems fair enough; replace "good" with Old Etonian" or "adventitious infection" and it would be just as logical. The question then would be what you meant by evils,
and I smell a circular argument.
"The task of the ethical theorist", said Anderson, "will be to find goods and consider their ways of working, and in this connection he may well find how they are promoted and how prevented. His study will thus be a thoroughly deterministic one".
How are you going to find them, said the man, if you can't bring yourself to define them? Why ask how they can be promoted if you don't have any criterion for judging them good? And how can you promote them if (a) you are as determinate as they are and (b) you don't exist?
"The metaphysical conception of human freedom", said Anderson, "is rooted in mythology and has played havoc with all the anthropological sciences".
Here I am walking through the desert, said the man; I've lost my camel, I might be dead before it gets dark, I'd swap my putative freedom for a drink of water, but I don't give two hoots about anthropological sciences, and I don't think you do either. What's more, you're a counterpuncher when it comes to ethics. But you're a tub?thumper in economics. Look at this (he produced a copy of Studies in Empirical Philosophy from his saddle bag): "If moral forces exist in society at all, they must (as they obviously do) affect economic exchanges and the whole system of production, and any economic theory which puts them out of consideration will be defective on that account." You see? No room for morals in your ethical theory, but no way round them in economic theory. You know what you are? ...
"The realistic angel", said Anderson, "would, in fact, repudiate knowing by being; he would maintain that if we could only be ourselves, then we could not know ourselves at all" - he smiled, and disappeared.
Some time later our man was still walking, pondering these things in his heart, as one does, when he met someone carrying two small headstones.
What's that you've got?
The Tablets of the Law.
What does that one say?
Thou Shalt Not Kill
Oh yes. But you've done that, haven't you?
Fifth commandment, fifth amendment:
I refuse to answer on the grounds that I might
incriminate myself.
Well, see Exodus II, 11?12? Enough said.
It wasn't the Law then. And anyway,
it's Who Will Be I believe in, not the Law.
Look (SMASH!)
There: I've broken all of them
but they're all still there.
Because He made them,
like He made me. Tell me though,
what's that you've got?
Oh, it's my moral code.
Very nice. What does it do?
For a start, it stops me killing people.
Oh yes? How?
Partly by appeal to tradition ?
such as your own decalogue,
partly through the argument
of enlightened self?interest:
that if I don't kill you, for example,
then you won't kill me.
Surely you mean that if I do kill you
you won't kill me?
Or do you hope your own shining example will
make me like you or act like you?
You want a world full of yourselves?
It's not a moral code you want, pal,
it's a genetic engineer. Here ?
(takes the moral code and rips it up)
that's better.