A Note on the Debate Between G.E.M. Anscombe and C.S. Lewis

I discovered an interesting article on the Internet, Praxeology, War, Democracy, and the State by Roderick T. Long of Auburn University. See Roderick T. Long’s Home Page or Wikipedia article on praxeology for a definition of ‘praxeology’. If you can’t read a DOC formatted file, do a google search and you’ll be offered an html rendering of that file.

The entire article is worth a read but I’m going to start with a particular quote and digress from there. Professor Long states the position that G.E.M. Anscombe took in her famous debate with C.S. Lewis with admirable clarity:

Anscombe, while broadly sympathetic with Lewis’s philosophical perspective, was unconvinced by the argument; she questioned Lewis’s assumption that reasons explanations and physical-cause explanations must be competitors, suggesting instead that one and the same action might have a reasons explanation under one description and a physical-cause explanation under another. (She agreed with Lewis, however, that reasons explanations are not reducible to physical-cause explanations.)

I think we have to be careful here because we are biological creatures and we should ask where something comes from if not from the empirical regions of this universe, this phase of God’s Creation. It’s certainly true that something is missing from the standard physicalist description. A clear statement of a coherent and honest physicalist description of human mental states can be found in Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature where he proposes a hypothetical language in which someone speaks of a specific pain as being a state of a specific neural region in the brain. It might sound silly, but it’s a serious position and it has taken me years to feel comfortable I can oppose this position in a coherent and plausible way. I do believe Rorty gets the best of the argument against many who merely use traditional philosophical terminology as if it were a magical incantation that will drive away the evil spirits of reductionism.

In a strong sense, all reasonable thinkers are reductionists. We strive to develop a minimal set of concepts and a disciplined vocabulary to speak the truth about our world. With that as background, I’ll freely admit to the substantial truth in Rorty’s position but it’s an incomplete position in a way that can be seen in terms of my worldview, which is based upon an updated version of Thomistic existentialism. See To See a World in a Grain of Sand for a synopsis of my first book in which I develop a worldview which I’ve been further developing in various writings on this website.

The task of a philosopher is to arrive at the best explanation of what exists by taking into account current empirical knowledge and making sense of it in light of any non-empirical knowledge. Personally, I think the only non-empirical knowledge available to human thinkers comes from God’s revelations about Himself. All else that we know deals with the various sorts of contents of Creation — including what we think of as mathematical and metaphysical truths. See The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: God as the Creator of Truths for a discussion of this claim. The expansion of our understanding of mathematics implies we should also expand metaphysics. That expansion might well allow us to speak more clearly about a lot of matters which are now mostly describable as being beyond the reach of a reductionism of the type usually labeled ‘physicalist’.

We should be careful of hand-waving about ‘reasons’ or ‘mind’ until we’ve accounted for all that is known about man and his contexts. We’re not merely embodied creatures and we’re not autonomous agents. We’re embedded in physical environments which are part of God’s Creation. Some of what we are is outside of our skins but still present in this world of matter and energy and fields ordered to God’s purposes. Moreover, modern cosmological physics points to the likelihood of a greater Creation, containing some strange, abstract stuff from which this universe was shaped. See To See a World in a Grain of Sand for an effort to account for this seemingly strange implication of modern physics.

We need to bring the context of the human race into our story before we start hand-waving too much. We need narratives that explicitly account for the spatial and historical context of human beings as a moral species. We need to recognize that we’re not autonomous creatures but rather beings engaged in a variety of relationships that shape us and sustain us. We who are Christians believe a particular relationship with the Triune God explains why we exist. We also believe that the incarnation, life, suffering, death, and resurrection of the Son of God raised the value of human life above the relative values of this world. See A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a discussion of the primacy of relationships over substances.

Our reasons are greater than what is implied by the corresponding brain-states but still mostly contained in our greater context of God’s Creation. Much of our knowledge and even some of our thinking is actually present in our more immediate environments in a direct and empirically measurable way. See A Review of Adaptive Thinking and subsequent entries on Adaptive Thinking for a discussion of the work of the German psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer, on this issue. Professor Gigerenzer has shown that our minds don’t think everything through but instead take advantage of various aspects of our physical environments by way of short-cuts in some important cognitive tasks. This is part of the response to Rorty’s example: when someone thinks using environmental short-cuts, his brain activity won’t be reflective of his complete thoughts, but this isn’t to say that Rorty is wrong in his basic claim that man is an empirical creature describable, in principle, in empirical terms, but I’ve also argued the ultimate truth can be seen when we realize we’re objects of God’s love and it’s our physical substance which gives us some limited freedom from our Creator that we might be His friends rather than His puppets or dreams.

But there’s more and has to be more for us to find higher truths, as well as practical thoughts, in our environments or the universe as a whole. Thomists can draw upon the principle:

Things are true.

Things are true, relationships between things are true, because they’re manifestations of thoughts of God. God doesn’t lie. He even puts rich truths in the things and relationships of His world. There are many things, an absolute infinity of relationships, outside of us and yet inside of God’s world and describable — in principle — in empirical terms. This is where Professor Gigerenzer’s work can be used to understand human thought. So far as I can tell, such terminology as ‘reasons explanations’ is best seen as proxy language for speaking about our relationships to the knowledge-filled, reason-filled world of God in which we live and move. Such proxy language can be useful but it can also distort our understandings of ourselves and our world when it’s used as if no further empirical explanations are possible. Still more importantly, I fear such language can help us mount defenses against God’s love.