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A Commentary on
Reason and Common Sense
a book by Robert Grote Mayor (1869-1947),
published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London 1952.
I came across Mayor's book some time ago in the library of a brother-in-law, who let me keep it because he felt I would better appreciate it than he could. He must have bought it secondhand before the decimalisation of the British currency. I suspect the book has long been out of print – I have never heard it mentioned anywhere, and the copy I have seems to be a first edition, so it's possible there were no other editions.
This commentary began as a contribution to a Wiki called 'Why?'. (A wiki is a discussion which takes the form of editing web pages on the Internet. Its distinctive feature is that new web pages are generated automatically on the same web site if, in editing a web page, a link to it is created using a very simple coding system, usually just by capitalising the first letter of each word of a phrase and removing the spacing between the words.) I created two web pages where I quoted in full the first two sections of the first chapter of the book and added my own comments to each. I did not continue the commentary beyond that for fear of breaking the law on copyright. If, as I suspect, Mayor's book is much neglected and difficult to get hold of, I may try to get permission to make a more extensive electronic copy of it. But even with such permission I am unlikely to type out the whole book since it is 656 pages of closely written text (comparable in size to a double-edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason).
Paragraphs enclosed within double quotation marks (") have been copied straight from the book. Also the headings have been copied from the book, except the sections are not numbered in the book and the section titles are taken from the chapter summary in the contents page, not from the body of the text.
CONTENTS
PREFACE by Desmond MacCarthy
NOTE by the editors J. P. Corbett and E. Gilman
PART ONE. PHILOSOPHIC DOUBT
Chapter 1. First Questions
Chapter 2. Types of Philosophy
Chapter 3. Knowledge, Reason, Common Sense
Chapter 4. What We Want To Know
Chapter 5. The Problem of Sense Perception
Chapter 6. The Sense of Resistance
…
Chapter 11. Philosophic Doubt
PART TWO. MIND AND MATTER
Chapter 12. The Place of Mind in the Material World
Chapter 13. Soul and Body
…
Chapter 17. Mechanism and Vitalism
PART THREE. REASON AND COMMON SENSE
Chapter 18. Belief in Other Minds
Chapter 19. Belief in the Self
…
Chapter 28. Ethics and Metaphysics
PART ONE. PHILOSOPHIC DOUBT
§1 Beginnings of doubt and the appeal to philosophy - §2 Abstruseness of philosophy - §3 Common sense can and must evaluate philosophy
§1 Beginnings of doubt and the appeal to philosophy
"What is reason, what is common sense, and how do the two stand to one another and both of them to philosophy? These questions will serve to mark out the line of inquiry in this book. The terms here proposed as its subject are vague and wide, and everyone, it may be said, uses them in different senses. Yet everyone, it may be answered, needs to use them. Anyone at least who at some time in his life feels a need to put his ideas in order, to ask what he has a right to believe about human life, the world, and man's place in the world, will find it hard to go far without appealing to the words 'reason', 'common sense', 'philosophy', and supposing them to mean something; and he may be led on then to examine more closely these words which are used so generally and so loosely, and to consider what he and other people have in mind when they use them."
The phrase 'common sense' seems to have declined since Mayor wrote this. Indeed I think I have noticed a decline in my own lifetime. I think that this is a reflection of social changes in Britain. The need to appeal to common sense may be just as great, but any attempt to articulate it, to give content to that common sense, has become much more fraught with difficulty, so that explicitly using the phrase seems to invite derision. The problems with appeal to common sense which Mayor sees in philosophic matters (see following paragraphs quoted) have become problems everyone can see in social matters.
"It is from the standpoint of such an inquirer that we are proposing to set out, from what we may call provisionally 'the standpoint of common sense'. Let us enlarge a little on what we are assuming it to be, since this will help to explain the line which our discussion is to follow. The point of view then from which this book is undertaken, and at which the reader is asked to place himself, is that of someone who has looked about him during a good many years of life, listened to the ideas of a good many people, picked up a certain amount of what he takes for knowledge, and to whom it occurs one day to ask himself what in the end it comes to, what is the result he carries away from all he has observed, heard, and thought. We are not supposing him to have any claim to speak with special knowledge or authority on the matters into which his inquiry may lead him; we allow him only the right which anyone may have, if he feels the need, to try to think out what are the questions which seem to him most important, to state them as clearly as he can, and to consider what the answers to them may be. Going on with our picture of him, we may suppose that as he has grown older he will have found his own ideas, or many of them, change with time, and he will have found that the people he meets hold different ideas about all sorts of things and that the most different ideas are held with confidence. He is likely to have found, if his experience has brought him into touch with various circles of opinion, that what to one of them seems plain certainty, to another seems preposterous; it extends over any length of years, that new theories, new forms of belief, continue to emerge, grow prominent, and disappear, each of which at first seems to make clear something that was obscure before, then begins to reveal difficulties in its turn, then comes to seem no less dubious than the theory which it replaced; and into whatever fields of thought his experience may have led him, he is likely to have found that they are full of controversies, and that when controversies come to an end, this is not so much because the questions which raised them are settled, as because they are forgotten, crowded out by other questions which for the moment seem important and then are forgotten in their turn."
The book was published postumously, and the biographical sketch of the author given in the preface (written by Sir Desmond MacCarthy) clearly shows that Mayor was very much an example of the kind of inquirer being described above, at least before he conceived writing the book. But even if Mayor, when he wrote the above words, still fitted this same description as his target reader, the author-reader relationship in itself entails that he does not have the same standpoint as his reader. In so far as there is a need for the reader to read the book, the author still has something to communicate, and so there is a difference in standpoints which the book is intended to overcome. With this qualification we can still take his words in the spirit in which he intended them to be taken, and take them as applying to himself as much as to the reader. The only point in the description above of the inquirer which presents any difficulty in this regard is the sentence which begins, "We are not supposing him to have any claim to speak with special knowledge or authority on the matters into which his inquiry may lead him, …" Clearly authorship carries a certain authority with regard to anticipating the contents of the book itself, and the reader recognises this authority in trusting that the author has something worth while to say. Thus the word 'special' must be refined in its application to the knowledge and authority of the author so as not to include any knowledge or authority which is being shared with the reader through the book itself.
"The inquirer whose point of view we are trying to represent will no doubt have his own beliefs on many of these controversial questions. Beliefs of some kind are a necessity, and education and environment will have seen to it that he has them. We need not suppose him to be by nature more sceptical than other people in the ordinary affairs of life. But if he is to help us in the business now before us, we must conceive him as differing from most people in having a kind of persistency which drives him, when he has asked himself a question, to follow it out as far as he can. However well then the beliefs he holds may serve him for the practical work of life, whether he holds them more or less firmly, whether they are fixed or change with time, they will not of themselves answer the questions with which we now suppose him to be most concerned. For at the point he has reached he is asking not so much, What do I believe? as, What have I a right to believe? What are the principles to which I should refer my beliefs, by which I can support them against the beliefs of others, if they are challenged, or against my own doubts, if doubts come to me? 'Reason tells us this', 'common sense tells us that', are answers he is likely to have given to particular questions in the past, and the appeal to these guides may appear for the time being to dispose of the particular matter in hand. But reason and common sense, it becomes plain, say different things to different people; some further guide then seems needed to show us how these guiding faculties are themselves to be used rightly. And so he will be led back to what a vague general opinion has looked on as the final court of appeal for human thought, to philosophy."
There is an interesting shift here, although already presaged in the fact that the standpoint of the inquirer has been described as the standpoint of common sense, and therefore as the subject-matter of the book. The inquirer being described is no longer a particular inquirer, the point of view no longer a particular point of view or standpoint of any particular person, but a class of inquirers and a range of points of view. In a paradoxical sense Mayor is narrowing the kind of readership his book is to have simply in requesting each individual reader to imagine the book to have a broader range of readership – this class of inquirers he is describing – than the reader might be prepared to consider. Mayor does not point out this underlying reason for narrowing down the class of inquirers, but it underlies the particular restrictions or specifications he gives. Thus the reason the inquirer must differ "from most people in having a kind of persistency" is that the book requires a reader who is persistent enough to wade through over 650 pages printed in a fairly small font … a massive book by philosophic standards. (Writing requires more persistence than reading, so no need to justify it separately for the author.) But perhaps it is not so much how far the inquirer is prepared to go, but rather that the inquirer is always prepared to go further than he (or she) has gone so far. For both author and reader the book is not the end. Furthermore, the inquirer is prepared to go in all sorts of directions, and the book has to cover in some way all the possible paths that may be travelled, or at least recognise that they have to be covered. By distancing the inquirer from the specific reader, the reader as well as the author has to consider all possible paths. (Clearly not every possible path can be considered separately, but that is not necessary.)
There is a further shift when the subject-matter of the book, the inquirer, is described as being led back to Philosophy. What the inquirer is already described as doing may satisfy some sort of abstract characterisation of doing philosophy, but the explicit mention of Philosophy adds a new dimension, a relation to a concretely historical enterprise dating back to the Ancient Greeks. The inquirer has been led to Philosophy just as the reader has been led to read Mayor's book.
§2 Abstruseness Of Philosophy
"But what is the value of this vague opinion, what is gained by bringing our questions to this final court? For here the conflict begins again. Philosophers too, we find, the men who have been called and who have called themselves 'philosophers', say different and contradictory things. Is there in philosophy anything more than this difference and contradiction, is there any underlying agreement which may help to show the way among these controversies, the controversies of philosophers themelves and all those others for which we are seeking a solution? This would seem to be the form which our question must now take. Here in philosophy is a meeting ground to which inquirers of various times and countries and beliefs have come together to discuss their problems, and in particular those fundamental problems as to the principles of thinking on which all lesser problems should be dealt with. What, if anything, has resulted from this meeting and discussing?"
"At this point a reflection may present itself which would dismiss our whole inquiry as likely to be fruitless. Every branch of knowledge, we may remind ourselves, develops with time a language of its own, builds up a literature of its own; it does this inevitably as it advances and finds first thoughts and everyday language inadequate for its purposes; to master this literature, and to learn how to speak this language, study and training are required. This is true of any of the sciences, or of any of those arts which have built up theories for themselves or, to use a general term, of any special discipline; should we not expect it to be true of philosophy, which is older than most of these and claims to be more comprehensive than any? And if we look at what has happened, we find that philosophy has in fact built up such a special literature and developed such a special language, that this is the form which its growth has taken; and we can see that in this language and literature there is matter enough, and more, to take up the lifetime of a student. Can we expect then that an inquirer such as we are supposing, who has never mastered this special language and literature, who represents only what we may call 'the lay intelligence' or 'ordinary common sense', will be able to say anything of value about the questions with which philosophy deals, able even to understand the answers which it gives to them? At the best, we may think, he might hope to understand some kind of simplified rendering of these answers which philosophers might translate for him out of their special language into the language of everyday."
"The problem with which we are here faced is one that arises not in philosophy only, but in any field of thought for which a technical language has grown up. We seem to have before us the dilemma that those who have not mastered the language have no right to speak, and those who have mastered it have to state their conclusions in a language which the world at large cannot understand. And this dilemma is in some sense a real one. There is such a division between specialized thought and common experience: it is the price we pay for specialization. We need not, however, suppose the division absolute, for this would make the relation between the two unintelligible. Any science, any branch of special knowledge, must draw from common experience the problems with which it deals, if these are to be real: it must be able to refer back to common experience the solutions which it arrives at, if these are to be of value. It must start from common experience and must return to this, however wide a circuit it may take in the interval through a region into which ordinary thinking cannot follow."
"But we may find that many philosophers, including some of those who would rank highest the power of philosophy to reach knowledge of supreme importance, seem to tell us that this knowledge is only to be reached by a long process of reasoning, pushed far beyond such reasoning as is used in common life and differing from this perhaps in its essential nature; and could anyone hope to succeed here unless he has spent a lifetime in mastering this process of reasoning? We may find again that philosophers, perhaps the same ones, perhaps others, will tell us that to reach results of value in philosophy we must be able to bring together the results of the different sciences; and could anyone hope to succeed here unless he has spent a lifetime (or might not a good many lifetimes be needed?) in mastering the discipline of these sciences? The higher we put our estimate as to the results which may be gained from philosophy, the less can we think it likely that these results are to be gained easily or quickly."
I suspect that the last sentence above explains why some people may be intimidated by my talk of theories of everything. But they need not be … it's not a question of each person having to master something on his or her own, but rather of co-operating in a common venture.
§3 Common sense can and must evaluate philosophy
"Let us try then to limit our aim, to define more closely what we may hope to do. Life brings before us questions to which we need to find some answer, if we can; and in particular there are persistent questions which have presented themselves at all times and places as to the true nature of mankind and of the world, questions as to what is man's origin and destiny, whether the world has a purpose, how this purpose, if we can discern one, is related to men's aims and wishes. Turning to exmine what philosophers have said, we find no lack of answers to these questions; only the answers differ, and then we ask, Can we find some core of agreement beneath this difference? If so, the best form that our inquiry could take might be to study what has been written and try so far as we can to understand. But such agreement, even in the most important matters, is hard to discover; it is certainly not evident either to outsiders who approach philosophy or to philosophers themselves when they discuss [with] one another. Here then, in this absence of agreement, is one difficulty; and a second is, that when we ask by what arguments these different conclusions are reached, we find them expressed in a language, supported by methods of reasoning, which, so it is claimed, and the claim sounds plausible, only special study and training can understand and estimate. And thus inquiring common sense seems brought to a standstill. If the methods were plain to our comprehension, we might hope to decide where conclusions differ; if the conclusions agreed, we might be ready to accept them without comprehending the methods; but neither of these ways lies open."
"Yet any study, however far it may travel into an inner region of its own, must have also an outer region in which it meets with ordinary thought; and in the outer region, in which that meeting takes place, there must be room for discussion of the scope and method of study. Our questions as to what we most want to know, as to the nature of man and of the world, may find their answers, if there are answers to be found, only in an inner region of thought; they may have then to be set aside as questions which it is beyond the power of common sense to solve. So much we may have to admit; but there must at least remain for common sense a question which in a manner lies behind those others, and which we may thus define: Has philosophy any knowledge to give as to these matters about which we most want to know? This question which remains may be not less difficult than those others which we have had to set aside; it may be, as they may be, in the end insoluble; but at least its difficulty cannot be such as to take it outside the region in which common sense can hope to deal with it. For when we set aside those other questions as beyond the reach of common sense, what we were supposing was that philosophy, or one of the many schools of philosophy, might have discovered some special method by which they could be explored and answered; and when we say that one question remains for common sense to deal with, what we are maintaining is that the question whether such a method has been discovered, or whether it exists at all, or whether the belief in it may not be an illusion, cannot itself be decided in terms of that method, but must be answered somehow before we trust ourselves to it. All special knowledge, however much it may in the end claim authority, must to begin with be able to justify itself to the ignorant; in which sense it can rightly be asked to do this, we shall endeavour to consider as we proceed; but that in some sense it can do it, is what marks off knowledge from illusion."
"With these reflections the first step in our inquiry begins to disclose itself. We shall ask what sort of knowledge philosophy claims to reach, and by what sort of methods. We shall try to distinguish the different main conceptions which philosophers of different types have held on this matter, to state them so far as we can in clear and simple terms, and to consider whether, when they are so examined, one of these conceptions seems to justify itself to common sense rather than another. In this undertaking our main concern will be the scope and method of philosophy, not its ultimate results. The first certainly cannot be considered in isolation from the second; in philosophy all questions run together, and when we ask how a philosopher is searching and for what, we may get light on this by considering what he believes himself to have found. We shall not, however, suppose ourselves at this stage to possess any test by which we may decide whether this or that conclusion should be accepted as true, we shall be concerned with conclusions only in so far as they may help us to understand what is to be said about scope and method. We shall maintain ourselves as far as we can in a position of suspense, taking over from common sense only such ordinary beliefs as are needed to make any dicussion possible, and holding even these provisionally. We shall regard it as possible that what seems at the outset most certain may be doubtful and what seems most unlikely may be the truth. Such a suspense of judgement will be in place until we have reached, or done our best to reach, an answer to the question at present before us, which is to ask what is the proper method for philosophy. If we can find ground on which to rest a firm answer to this question, we may then hope with the help of that method to attempt a further stage of our inquiry."
CHAPTER II Types of Philosophy
§1 Three types of philosophy. The traditional conception - §2 Rise and characteristics of science - The critical conception of philosophy - Questions unanswered by science. The impressionist conception - Relations of these three conceptions - The critical and impressionist conceptions compared - Summary. Uncertainty as to the interpretation of ‘knowledge’
§1 Three Types of Philosophy The traditional conception of Philosophy
The first type, what Mayor calls the traditional or metaphysical conception, seems to be Philosophy conceived as the explanation of everything. His initial description is "central knowledge attained by the reason", which I think is a rather clumsy way of putting it. He admits that 'attained' could be replaced by 'pursued', that "usage of the word 'philosophy' seems to waver between the sense of an activity and that of an achievement." By the end of the same paragraph he has clearly plumped for describing philosophy as an activity or pursuit. Perhaps he realises that these two senses can be combined, but he does not even hint at such a possibility at this stage. His initial description itself wavers in a different, but related way, between being the central knowledge and being the attainment of it. The phrase 'explanation of everything' combines these two latter senses, and the reference to reason is unnecessary in that reason is explanation of the explanation, which must be included in an explanation of everything. This may be a combination which Mayor approves of, but which he can only arrive at towards the end of his book.
I claim that the mention of reason is not strictly necessary, but its inclusion is justified because it serves two purposes: 1) it stresses reflexivity, that everything includes the explanation itself; 2) it stresses the logic, the verbal nature which is perhaps not so explicit in the general notion of explanation.
My main problem with this initial description is the adjective 'central'. Fortunately, Mayor is probably equally unhappy with it and goes on to elaborate it in various ways. Here are 4 elaborations of "central knowledge":
"A central way of thinking or knowing which underlies all thought or knowledge about particular things."
"A centre or focus for all possible knowledge, to which should be related all that a man believes about himself and the world and his place in the world, about what is and what may be and what ought to be."
"A framework in which all these beliefs can be comprehended and shown in their right connection and order."
"A knowledge about the ultimate nature of reality."
§2 Rise and characteristics of science
In the second type, Mayor seems to be discussing two different conceptions of Philosophy, although he may be right to treat them as only different, contradictory aspects of an incoherent conception of Philosophy. Even in describing this conception as incoherent I am perhaps using the word ‘incoherent’ in two ways simultaneously, viz. a conception of Philosophy as incoherent, as not really a coherent discipline, nor even coherent like a particular religion or political ideology; and a conception which, under scrutiny, falls apart and does not really say anything about Philosophy. Mayor's second type combines analytic philosophy, what Winch has called the under-labourer conception of Philosophy (see Winch's Idea of a Social Science), referring to Locke's metaphor of an under-labourer (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: 'The Epistle to the Reader', Nidditch edition, p. 10), and what is called scientism.
With regard to what Mayor says about the so-called scientific method, I think that he hits the nail on the head: the distinctive feature of the sciences is the limitation of subject-matter in each science, enabling each science to tailor its method to its specific subject-matter. This is the method of analysis writ large, applied to knowledge as a whole. But the whole that is divided fails to include knowledge of the division itself.
For scientism, Philosophy is not some coherent discipline in its own right, and in so far as the word has any real use it is simply all the sciences considered collectively. It is a conception of Philosophy that is incoherent in the first sense. But in so far as it is asserted, it betrays itself as incoherent in the second sense, for the assertion lies outside all the sciences which it recognises. This paradox is most clearly manifested in the verification principle of logical positivism.
(In practice, scientism can take many forms depending on which science it is immersed in, which science wherein all other sciences appear as pale imitations, which science holds most promise of providing the key to unlock an explanation of everything.)
For analytic philosophy, Philosophy is conceived as conceptual analysis. It is no longer the method of analysis writ large, but only as applied to concepts. Philosophy is thus conceived along the same lines as the sciences, defined by its limitation to a specific subject-matter. But, using a similar argument to Mayor, what appropriate method for analysing a concept could there be other than the method of the science in which the concept is used? And if the particular concept is not being used by a science, being some "ordinary language" concept, by implication there is no method which is particularly appropriate. This conception of Philosophy has been caricatured, and I think, deservedly, by Ernst Gellner, as reducing Philosophy to the compiling of dictionaries. (Cf. Words and Things.)
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