In recent times Wittgenstein's work in logic has had an influence on other branches of philosophy. I am thinking, in particular, of social philosophy and the philosophy of religion. In these branches, Wittgenstein's followers have made much use of his notion of a language game. It has been argued, for example, that religion forms a language game of its own, having its own standards of reason, and is therefore not subject to criticism from outside. This argument has given rise to controversy, some seeing it as a subtle attempt by the religious to evade criticism. I have come myself to feel that the notion of a language game has been put to uses with which Wittgenstein himself might not have agreed, or, if he had, would have been wrong to do so. In order to explain what I mean I should like to look closely at the opening section of Peter Winch's article ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’.

Plato was the first feminist. In the Republic he puts forward the view that women are just the same as men, only not quite so good. It is a view which has often been expressed in recent years, and generates strong passions. Some of these have deep biological origins, which a philosopher can only hope to recognize and not to assuage. But much of the heat engendered is due to unnecessary friction between views which are certainly compatible and probably correct. And here a philosopher can help. If we can divide the issues neatly, at the joints, then we need not quarrel with one another for saying something, probably true, because what is being maintained is misconstrued and taken to mean something else, probably false.

In Book IV of The Odyssey, Menelaus tells Telemachus as much as he knows of Odysseus' wanderings. He reports that Odysseus, wanting to learn the end of his travels and needing directions for returning safely home through the dangerous seas, captured Proteus and held fast to him, though Proteus transformed himself into a bearded lion, a snake, a leopard, a bear, running water and finally into a flowering tree. Proteus eventually wearied, and consented to tell Odysseus something of what he wished to know.

In an article called ‘Moral Scepticism’ Professor R. F. Holland displays in a pointed and often impressive way both the virtues and the vices of a tempting approach to certain fundamental issues in moral philosophy. The appeal to sanity and honesty may, when directed towards chronic philosophical perplexity, cease to be a virtue and become the vice of disingenuousness. And when a philosopher writes that ‘no clear idea is available to us of what moral scepticism amounts to’, that moral scepticism would, if it were possible at all, have to be a ‘specially cooked-up affair’ by contrast with other varieties of scepticism, it is hard not to accuse him of just such a vice.

The reappearance of Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's far-ranging and provocative article, ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’, is the proximate cause of this short excursion to an old, well-scarred, and still fascinating battleground. Re-reading MacIntyre's brilliant offensive thrust led me to review the counter-attacks and diversionary movements that followed its first appearance. They in turn sent me back, inevitably and ultimately, to look again at the cause of this philosophic skirmishing: Section 1 of Part i of Book III of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, entitled ‘Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason’. The battles of the past have been waged chiefly round the last paragraph of this Section (pp. 469–470 in Selby-Bigge's edition), but my primary concern here is going to be with those ‘reasonings’ that precede the celebrated ‘is-ought’ paragraph. Closer attention to the bulk of Book III, Part i, Section 1, to which ‘reasonings’ Hume says he ‘cannot forbear adding … an observation’ on ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and some selective attention as well to Books I and II of the Treatise, should help to scale down the exaggerated importance attached to the ‘is-ought’ passage. Unless this is done, one runs the risk of permitting a tailpiece to wag the body of the chapter, if not the whole Book ‘Of Morals’.

In the winter of 1969 the Harvard Educational Review published a long article by Professor Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley. In this article Jensen reviewed the psychological evidence bearing upon the question ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ The original publication occasioned an enormous coast to coast brouhaha of protest and denunciation; including tyre-slashing, slogan-painting, telephoned abuse and threats, and strident demands to ‘Fire’ or even to ‘Kill Jensen’. The author has now republished this offending article, along with several shorter contributions in the same area, under the title Genetics and Education. He has also supplied, in addition to a full collection of References for the papers included, a Bibliography of the controversy, two Indices, and a 67 page Preface.

‘… and he arranged it all. It's done me the world of good, I can tell you. And that's why I said that yesterday was both yesterday and two years ago.’

‘Well, it still sounds nonsense to me. I told you H. G. Wells would do you no good.’

Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it.

Professor Hamlyn (in ‘Unconscious Intentions’, Philosophy, 1971) defen the idea of unconscious intentions independently of its place in Freudian theory. If successful, his argument would show that arguments such as Frederick Siegler's (in ‘Unconscious Intentions’, Inquiry, 1967), would not succeed in demonstrating the incoherence of the Freudian notion(s) of unconscious intention. Further, if Hamlyn is successful, he provides conceptual grounds from ordinary, non-psychoanalytic cases from which the Freudian notion of unconscious intention could be reconstructed.

In one way or another the theory and practice of modern medicine is confronting us with many dilemmas, chiefly, though not exclusively, of a moral character; the transplantation of organs, abortion, and euthanasia are examples, and closely associated with these are more obviously conceptual problems such as the definition of death and, for that matter, of life itself. Contemporary moral philosophers have been strangely silent on these matters, and have been content to leave the field to lawyers and churchmen and those few medical men both able and willing to reflect upon their practices. (I think it is fair to say that the attitude of the profession as a whole is exemplified by the physician who recently dismissed a journalist's question about how he decided which patients were to receive kidney dialysis and which not, with the remark ‘I'm not a moralist, I'm a doctor’.)

For a long time Hume's philosophical achievement was judged almost entirely by Book I of the Treatise. A major contribution of Kemp Smith's work on Hume was the insistence that the epistemological doctrines of Book I were essentially related to the ethical theory of Book III. Recent moral philosophy has found Book III to be of considerable intrinsic interest and relevance to current problems. It is now becoming apparent, however, that Hume's ethical theory is intimately bound up with the philosophy of mind in Book II. This new emphasis upon the significance of Book II for Hume's ethics derives from Dr Pall S. Árdal's book Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise. In view of Árdal's influence on continuing study in this field—witness the recent book by Philip Mercer—it becomes important to point out what I take to be a major error in one part of Árdal's analysis of the relationship between Hume's philosophy of mind and his moral theory.

Strawson's discussion of the concept of a person does seem to allow for the possibility of there being immaterial persons. Nevertheless his insistence that the concept of a person is the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics … are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type suggests that he is conflating the concept of a human being, in the technical sense of homo sapiens, and the concept of a person.

Christopher Cherry's article in the January 1973 issue of this journal has on its first page the sentence ‘And when a philosopher writes that “no clear idea is available to us of what moral scepticism amounts to”, that moral scepticism would, if it were possible at all, have to be a “specially cooked-up affair” by contrast with other varieties of scepticism, it is hard not to accuse him of just such a vice.’ He means the vice of disingenuousness and the person to whom he attributes it is me. I did not write what he says I wrote and neither of his quotations is accurate. On the next page Cherry claims again to be summarizing a view of mine when he says that ‘An “intellectual moral scepticism” would, if it were anything, have to be a peculiarly cooked-up affair, and so by implication different from other forms of intellectual philosophical scepticism. It is not a species of the same genus.’

Mr Newton-Smith and Mr Boyce, in discussion notes in the January 1972 number of Philosophy, have raised a number of interesting points about my original paper. But I feel that they have not gone beyond a simple denial of the central argument, which is to be found on pp. 124–126 and 128–130 of the April 1971 number, and that much of what they say therefore fails by petitio.