Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/01/2025
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
The Crown Lavender Hill
Heward Wilkinson will speak on the Philosophical Significance of Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)
When Newman sent Mark Pattison in his old age a copy of the third edition (1878), Pattison wrote back to him that Development, which he had pioneered, had now become the norm in all academic disciplines!! This is quoted in the Preface to Owen Chadwick’s From Bossuet to Newman, which is the most masterly available account of what Newman is up to.
What is Newman up to? He writes (Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter III, Section III, 4):
“With a view, then, of furnishing another illustration of the peculiar logical method [my italic – HW] on which I have been insisting, let us proceed to consider the disposition, or lie, of the evidence which is adducible in the first five centuries in behalf of the supremacy of the Holy See; not, indeed, minutely going through it and establishing it, but saying enough to point out how the Ante-Nicene centuries may be viewed in the light of the Post-Nicene, whereas Protestants resolve the latter into the dimness and indistinctness of the former.
The question is this, whether there was not from the first a certain element at work, or in existence, which, for some reason or other, did not at once show itself upon the surface of ecclesiastical affairs, and of which events in the fourth century are the development, and whether the evidence of its existence and operation, which does occur in the earlier centuries, be it much or little, is not just such as ought to occur on such an hypothesis.”
What does this mean? Is Newman “on to” something of great importance which, being broadly an empiricist influenced by Hume, he has not fully managed to articulate. It comes out more clearly in fictional form in a discussion of Emma’s famous insult to Miss Bates, in the Box Hill episode of Chapter 43 of Jane Austen’s Emma, by Adena Rosemarin in a post-modern, anti-mimetic, concept paper: ‘Misreading’ Emma: the powers and perfidies of interpretive history (1984), republished in David Lodge’s Casebook (quote on p. 230) on Emma.
“The insult is so well prepared by our growing irritation , so irresistibly invited by Miss Bates’s own remark, and so well camouflaged by its brevity, that we are distracted both from Miss Bates’s pain and the implications of our distraction. All but the most meritorious of readers become Emma’s ready accomplices and, thus, her fellow penitents. Here, as always in Emma, guilt is developed after the act, its belatedness being in part what makes it guilt: we could and should have known better but didn’t. Our sense is not that insignificant events suddenly become significant – although, strictly speaking, this is what happens – but that we suddenly if retrospectively see the significance they have always had. Recessing the climax from our immediate recognition is, then, precisely what lends it such climactic force.”
“One of the ways in which Newmanesque Retrospection/Prospection may emerge is through anomalies. This would take the form of a possible Future-to-Present as the Already-Past-of-a-Future (or variants in terms of the historical past), which nevertheless presents itself as dissonant or discrepant in some way. Now, the text which this process reminds one of is that of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, who appeals to anomalies against the background of an existing paradigm which is predictive in a generic sense, and from which specific predictions may be derived. Kuhn is, presumably, an empiricist, but his inferences take us into very near to non-empiricist territory. One which may lead me to my next step is that, for instance, talking in his Postscript about the relation of Stimuli to Sensation he writes:
“Equally, it is because they have been selected for their success over historic time that we must speak of the experience and knowledge of nature embedded in the stimulus-to-sensation route.
Perhaps ‘knowledge’ is the wrong word, but there are reasons for employing it. What is built into the neural process that transforms stimuli to sensation has the following characteristics: it has been transmitted through education; it has, by trial, been found more effective than its historical competitors in a group’s current environment; and, finally, it is subject to change both through further education and through the discovery of misfits with the environment. Those are characteristics of knowledge, and they explain why I use the term. But it is strange usage, for one other characteristic is missing. We have no direct access to what it is we know, no rules or generalisations with which to express this knowledge. Rules which could supply that access would refer to stimuli not sensations, and stimuli we can know only through elaborate theory. [My italic – HW] In its absence, the knowledge embedded in the stimulus-to sensation route remains tacit. (Kuhn, p. 196)”
Here we have the stark realistic honesty of the scientific mind. Going on to discuss entities like electrons and electric currents, he then correctively remarks:
“The metaphor that transfers ‘seeing’ to contexts like these is scarcely a sufficient basis for such claims. In the long run it will need to be eliminated in favor of a more literal mode of discourse.” (Kuhn, p. 196)
There speaks the hard scientist.
For me this opens the door, in an unexpected context, to considering the relation of Retrospection/Prospection to primordial causality, as I call it. It is remarkable how far, as an empiricist, he is willing to go. Here is the acknowledgement of the profound limitation of our sensory knowledge, which leads to the radical scepticism which is implicit in the empiricist project, to which Hume points us in his work.
If we turn the other way, to a possible recognition of the touched upon temporal connections of the three modes of time, then we have primordial causality, which really was first glimpsed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, in his concept of the transcendental inference. Implicit in our temporal perspectives upon the world through the senses, is the inference to the causal world itself, an inference in practice which we have no problem whatsoever in making, particularly when we are thinking cosmologically, about the sun eclipses and the earth’s orbit, and beyond, for instance.
Kuhn recognises, with some disconcertment, that what he is saying draws from Polanyi’s conception of ‘tacit knowledge’. When he writes: “We have no direct access to what it is we know, no rules or generalisations with which to express this knowledge. Rules which could supply that access would refer to stimuli not sensations, and stimuli we can know only through elaborate theory…” he is referring as he notes to tacit knowledge. But, for Polanyi, this is a near universal principle of all human cognition. In Personal Knowledge (1958) Polanyi is constantly writing such things as (p. 80):
“Moreover, by being prepared to speak in our language on future occasions, we anticipate its applicability to future experiences, which we expect to be identifiable in terms of the natural classes accredited by our language. These expectations form a theory of the universe, which we keep testing continuously as we go on talking about things. So long as we feel that our language classifies things well, we remain satisfied that it is right and we continue to accept the theory of the universe implied in our language as true.”
These expectations are, for my conception, primary or primordial expectations and causal anticipations, and the whole of Polanyi’s theory of the tacit is, in my terms, primordial causality – as is very clear from Kuhn’s remark which he emphasises in context in the way we have just seen. Consider, for instance, denotation or referring to an object or person in the classical Aristotelian-Strawsonian way. Russell, in his On Denoting (1906 – https://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell(1905).pdf ), goes so far as to eliminate denoting and referring expressions altogether. He recognises that, in some very deep sense, we are embroiled in ontological commitments which, if allowed, would be primary and unreducible, primordial in my jargon. He replaces them with a succession of separate statements, which imply the same commitment. It is not easy to see how Russell could have ever conceived of such a reduction at all were he not committed to recognising denotation in the first place. But he certainly pays inadvertent tribute to the power of the primordial commitment in seeking (for many years, as he struggled with it) to reconstruct it. It seems to me that the three way bound variable statements with which he replaces denoting, in the Theory of Descriptions, all presuppose something like that the relevant ‘x’ is referring to the same ‘x’, which is such a basic presupposition that it is left unstated, but which undermines the reductive analysis.
“ ‘X’ the variable is essentially and wholly undetermined”, writes Russell. But if it is the same ‘x’, that is not true.
So what, provisionally, I am saying is, in line with remarks by Newman in A Grammar of Assent, and by the later Wittgenstein in On Certainty, that our capacity to denote objects persons and, by extension, concepts of many kinds (Strawson, Individuals, 1959), is an ultimate, which we cannot get behind, in the way we cannot get behind our assumption that there is a world beyond our sensations, the empiricist enigma. And we need to explore the connection of such implicit or tacit knowledge with the Newmanesque Retrospective/Prospective dialectic, already assumed in Polanyi’s remarks.”
We meet in The Crown, 102 Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5RD but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom. For details see SLPC Zoom Meeting