The Nature of Thought

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The Nature of Thought

File:Nature of thought.jpg Cover of the fourth edition
Author	Brand Blanshard
Illustrator
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Thought
Published	1939: Muirhead Library of Philosophy
Pages	654 (Volume I) 532 (Volume II)
ISBN	0-85527-545-6 Search this book on .
Followed by	Reason and Goodness

‘'The Nature of Thought’' (in two volumes) is a 1939 publication of American philosopher Brand Blanshard and one of the last major works of rationalist philosophy. Blanshard sidesteps questions concerning the nature of consciousness in general to focus more narrowly upon the nature and development of rational thought. While some discussion of the "coherence" theory of truth is also presented (primarily in chapters XXVI and XXVII), Blanshard’s primary objective was to provide “an analysis of thought that will neither be instantly repudiated by the psychologist nor indignantly disowned by the metaphysician.” Secondarily, the book may be regarded as an essay in the philosophy of psychology, with numerous implications for the reform of psychological methodology and explanation.

Context

Reason had a central role in the thought of rationalist philosophers from Socrates forward, and that role only received renewed emphasis during the Enlightenment, perhaps most notably in the work of Rene Descartes. Moreover, rationalism furnished the theoretical foundations for both science and mathematics. However, by the 20th century, Blanshard contended, suspicion of rational standards had become “part of the attitude of our day,” while “August, 1914” marked “the breaking of a dam and the submergence of a civilization.” With World War II then imminent, Blanshard commented forebodingly in the last pages of his book “there is another field where self-will and the repudiation of a common standard of judgement and obligation threaten to extinguish the life of reason altogether.”

Blanshard regarded the analysis of thought as being preparatory to the rehabilitation of reason itself, and saw in reason the one indispensable vehicle of all civilized norms and conduct, including the norms of mathematics, science, and philosophy.

But one sort of attack upon the sovereignty of reason in thought had been developed by, for example, George Santayana, who held that there is “only the blind movement of atoms, governed by physical laws that are ultimate surd facts. Not even the logician or the geometer is inclined in the slightest toward his conclusions by the requirements of his premisses. Rationality in the rationalist’s sense is an illusion.”

Blanshard’s counter-attack, which repudiated this sort of analysis, took some of its cues from absolute idealist philosophers such as Bradley and Bosanquet, though he was ultimately unable the accept the idealist strain in their thought. At the same time, he sought to counter the account of logic advanced by “formalist” philosophers like Bertrand Russell, who had, in effect, disconnected logic from reality; and he also attempted to meet the challenges posed by anti-rationalist psychologists such as Freud, and consciousness-dismissive psychologists such as Watson.

“The Nature of Thought” is structured as a long dialectic in which Blanshard systematically assesses the views of relevant psychologists, and later logicians, with a view to discarding what he regarded as invalid in them. Then, first salvaging the elements in those views that survived this initial critique, he goes on to advance his own positive account of reason with the aim of meeting the many attacks upon its legitimacy and autonomy (and by implication its potential role in life).

Summary

Thought in Perception

Blanshard begins with definitions of thought and of perception. He contends that both are shot through with an element of judgement from the very beginning, or very nearly so: “for with the barest and vaguest apprehension of anything given in sense as anything, perception is already present,” and “if sensation is present alone, we are below the perceptual level; judgement, or something like judgement, must be present also.” For its part, “judgement is thought at it simplest because nothing simpler could yield either truth or falsity” and “anything simpler than judgement will fall outside the sphere of thought.”

These preliminaries lead on to an explication of the inferential element in perception, which is argued to be pervasive; and this in turn leads to consideration of the question of how the furniture of the external world is constructed out of the initial fund of sensation and perceptual “meaning".

The Theory of the Idea

Abstract thought is carried out through the use of “ideas”. Blanshard initially assesses the views concerning ideas (or abstractions) set forth in Russell, behaviorist doctrine, the Pragmatists, and others, all of which are largely, though not entirely, rejected. However, this dialectic culminates in the assessment of Bradley, whose account he holds to be correct in many essentials, but which nevertheless fell somewhat short.

The centrality of the concept of “universals”, first encountered in Chapter I, is much more fully developed here, seen to be essential to all abstract thought, and continues to play a key role throughout the remainder of Volume I, Book Two. “The history of perception is a history of the gradually improving grasp of the universal.” He remarks: “First, there is the question what is actually in one’s mind when one thinks a class idea. . . . Secondly, there is the question what is the object of the idea; is it a universal separable from particulars, or a universal that is resident in the particulars, or just the particulars themselves?”

This section also advances numerous arguments with a bearing upon the nature of psychology as a discipline; and, he believes, characterizes psychological explanation properly for the first time. (These arguments are further developed throughout Volume II, but especially in Chapter XXII.)

The Movement of Reflection

The first section of Volume II begins here. With the foregoing analysis completed, Blanshard now maintains that “reflection is guided by an ideal of intelligibility; definition of this ideal is indispensable to both logic and the psychology of reasoning; the ideal is that of necessity within a system.” In this book this account is developed, as are its many consequences: “the rise of reflection is not explained by physical stimuli or practical necessity; it implies a tension or conflict within the theoretic impulse itself.” We also find in this book Blanshard’s account of the coherence theory of truth, which was to eclipse his broader analysis of the nature of thought. It was also to cement, in some reader’s minds, Blanshard’s association with the absolute idealists - an association he himself explicitly rejected.

The Goal of Thought

Blanshard remarks “all ideas, judgements, and processes of reflection, are directed toward the goal of intelligibility,” and “we found traces of it [the goal] even in the tied ideas of perception, though its workings there were dim.” This goal is rarely explicit in everyday thought, but it is nevertheless present implicitly; and it is the task of logic to identify what is most essential to its achievement. “It is not the business of the logician to study the vagaries of actual thinking, but to define what ideal demonstration consists in. At the same time the light thrown by logic on actual thinking would be far greater if the ideal of cogency were recognized, not as an iron paradigm to which reasoning must conform either wholly or not at all, but as an end attainable in degree, a spirit or ideal that animates in some measure all thinking, but is never fully realized even in the best. It is a main contention of this work that unless thought is recognized as the pursuit of such an ideal, and the ideal itself is defined, neither logic nor the psychology of thinking can do its work.” In this final book, Blanshard makes the case that such a pursuit is indeed implicitly present, defines its ideal of intelligibility, and addresses the question of how logic and the psychology of thinking can best and most properly achieve their ends. The concept of “internal relations” is here developed. “The world can be called intelligible only if its parts are related internally; its parts are so related,” he maintains.

Methodology

Dialectic

In the analytical table of contents of Volume II, Blanshard writes “To reflect with point requires the specification of the question, a process whose length and difficulty vary with the problem.” Throughout “The Nature of Thought” and all of his subsequent works, Blanshard consistently utilizes a dialectical approach to provide a continual specification and clarification of the questions with which he is concerned, a discussion of the best answers on offer to date, an assessment of where those answers fall short, and, finally, to prepare the way for his own answers. At the beginning of Chapter XIV, Volume I, he observes “. . . there is probably no such thing as a purely negative conclusion; when one denies that a thing is x, one always does so on the ground, explicit or not, that the thing has some positive character that excludes x. This is true of all the denials we have been making. Each successive rejection has been based on positive grounds, which have gradually been supplying a basis on which to construct a theory of our own. Furthermore, the rejection has in no case been complete. From every one of these doctrines there is something of importance that may be accepted and used.”

The Influence of the Absolute Idealists

The influence of the “absolute idealists” is evident throughout Blanshard’s work, and yet it is a highly qualified influence. It is perhaps most apparent in his conception of logic and of the relationship between logic and “underlying reality”. In “The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard” Blanshard comments: “One is reminded of the difference between Russell and Bosanquet over such a proposition as, ‘If a donkey is Plato, it is a great philosopher.’ To this formal logic raises no objection. Bosanquet commented that in a world so different as one would be in which a donkey were Plato, one could not say what would follow. ‘The hypothesis scatters your underlying reality to the winds, and what I should call the basis of implication is gone” (Logic, 2:41 and n.). Bosanquet seems to me right.”

The underlying reason for this position is discussed in his later book “Reason and Analysis” where he writes “At the turn of the [20th] century rationalism was in a complacent ascendancy in Britain, Germany, and America, though it was being sharply challenged in France. The form it most commonly took was absolute idealism. For Bradley, Bosanquet . . . reason was the yardstick of reality. That the world was rational was a philosophic postulate for philosophy was the attempt to understand, and why set out on the enterprise of finding intelligibility in the world unless one believed it was there to be found? For the present, to be sure, the world has a recalcitrant way of rebuffing our attempts to find in it a rational order: we do not know why roses are red or the sky is blue; we do not know, as Hume showed so conclusively, why one billiard ball rolls away when another strikes it. Of course the idealists were familiar with Hume’s arguments. They held that in this matter he was right about what we did know, and wrong about what we might know. Granting that we could not now answer these questions, there must be some reason for the color of rose and sky; and if billiard balls, rivers and planets follow an invariable course, we cannot suppose this to happen by chance or miracle Within unvarying sequence there must be some thread of necessity, and with time reason may isolate it. Indeed, ‘nothing in this world is single’; every thing, event, and quality stands in relation to others, and is what it is because of those others. Hence we shall not fully understand it unless we see it in the context of the relations that determine it, and ultimately in the context of the universe as a whole. Whether any bit of alleged knowledge is true will depend in the first instance on whether it coheres with out system of knowledge as a whole, and the degree of truth possessed by this system will depend in turn on its coherence with that all-inclusive system which is at once the goal of our knowledge and the constitution of the real.”

Blanshard not only agreed with this view, he argued the case for it himself. Nevertheless, in “The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard” he wrote: “‘To be is to be perceived.’ In none of my writings, so far as I know, have I accepted this argument of Berkeley’s, and it still seems to me unacceptable. I am an idealist in the sense that I think everything immediately apprehended is mental. I am not an idealist in the sense of supposing that I have some substitute proof that everything is mental. . . .I must apparently be content to be a gypsy philosopher, an absolutist and a rationalist but unacceptable in any idealist camp."

Influence and reception

The publication of “The Nature of Thought” on the eve of World War II meant that it generally failed to receive the sort of widespread discussion and evaluation that would otherwise have been accorded. The reviews that it did receive, such as that of Gilbert Ryle, tended to conjoin acknowledgement of the force and originality of his arguments with essentially ad hominem attacks that frequently misidentified him as an idealist. “He knows from experience what philosophizing is like,” Ryle commented, “and what are the marks, sources, and products of mistakes and inadequacies in philosophic theory. And he then extrapolates to non-philosophic theories and imputes the same canons and criteria to them.”

Reviewing for Theology, Dorothy Emmet was also drawn into seeing in Blanshard as the latest absolute idealist.

Ernest Nagel, a formalist, commented (erroneously) “In the context of developing his argument for philosophical idealism, Professor Blanshard examines the interpretations of necessity proposed by traditional empiricists, by formal logicians including symbolic logicians, and by logical positivists. He rejects each of them as falling short of the correct analysis which, according to him, only idealism supplies.”

As Blanshard’s views were more fully articulated in subsequent books, his influence broadened, while the tenor of criticism generally grew far more cautious, guarded, and narrow than that offered by Ryle and his other early critics. In “The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard” (1980) his views were subjected to the evaluation of 30 philosophers. Many of these assessments were broadly complimentary; and, when criticisms were offered, Blanshard’s replies most commonly suggest that his position was not fully understood.

Related work

The Nature of Thought is the major accomplishment of Blanshard's early years, but he subsequently produced three other major works:

• The publication in 1961 of the book, Reason and Goodness which developed a quasi-Aristotelian ethic in opposition to subjectivism and relativism.
• The book, Reason and Analysis (1962), which was another dialectic, in this case taking for its critique logical positivism, analytic, and linguistic philosophy and arguing the case for rationalism.
• The book Reason and Belief (1974), a dialectic critiquing both Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity, rejecting faith as a basis for conviction, and subsequently arguing for the central role of reason in all forms of belief.

References

Bibliography

Primary literature

• Paul Arthur Schilp, The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard, in Open Court's Library of Living Philosophers, volume XV, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1980, 1142p. Updates some of the views first expressed in The Nature of Thought

References

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