## 1. Life



Peter Frederick Strawson was born, in London, on November 23, 1919. He
studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at St. John's
College, Oxford, between 1937 and 1940. His philosophy tutors were
J.D. Mabbott, an eminent political philosopher, later to become Master
of the college, and H. P. Grice, whom Strawson himself described as
'one of the cleverest and most ingenious thinkers of our
time'. (This quotation comes from Strawson's
'Intellectual Autobiography' contained in Hahn 1998.
Strawson's account there of his life and thought contains much
that is of philosophical interest, and it also reveals much about him
as a person.) Strawson was then called up for military service and
belongs to that generation of British philosophers, including Ayer,
Hampshire, Hare, Hart and Wollheim, who saw service in the Second
World War. His first post after the war was at Bangor, in Wales. After
winning the prestigious John Locke Prize in Oxford (a prize awarded on
the basis of a written examination to philosophy graduates in Oxford),
he received an appointment at University College, Oxford, which made
him a Fellow in 1948. Two years later, in 1950, with the publication
of 'On Referring' in *Mind* and his debate with
Austin about truth, he achieved international fame.



His subsequent life as a philosopher was spent mostly in positions at
Oxford, first as a Fellow at University College, and then, after 1968,
as Gilbert Ryle's successor as Wayneflete Professor of
Metaphysical Philosophy, at Magdalen College. Writing extensively, in
both books and articles, about the philosophy of language,
metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, he succeeded
in redirecting Oxford philosophy away from the limitations which had
to some extent been accepted under the influence of Austin, towards a
re-engagement with some traditional abstract philosophical issues.
From the early 1950s onwards he established a pre-eminence within
Oxford philosophy, both through his publications and also through his
quite exceptional critical abilities. Part of the way that
Strawson's approach to philosophy contrasted with Austin's
is that Strawson was committed to the value of publication, of books
and articles, whereas Austin seemed content to develop his views and
promulgate them in lectures and talks. His achievements were
recognised by election in 1960 to the British Academy, by the
reception of a knighthood in 1977 and by many other honours. In 1998
he became the twenty-sixth philosopher to have a volume devoted to him
in the famous Library of Living Philosophers series, adding another
British name to the list of recipients of this honour, previous ones
being Whitehead, Russell, Moore, Broad and Ayer. He was probably the
most famous and most discussed British philosopher within the academic
world of philosophy from the 1950s until the late 1980s. His status is
evidenced by the fact that his writings attracted the attention of,
and were discussed by, the world's leading philosophers,
including, Russell, Sellars, Putnam, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke.



Strawson was married and had four children. He was a highly cultured
man, with a passion for literature, especially poetry, large amounts
of which he could recite and which he also wrote. In conversation,
manners and appearance, the overwhelming impression was of elegance
and effortless intelligence.



Strawson retired in 1987, but remained philosophically active until
his death in Oxford on February 13, 2006.


## 2. Reference



Strawson published 'On Referring' in 1950. (Like Frege,
Russell and, later, Kripke and Evans, Strawson made his name by
writing about reference.) He subsequently modified and developed his
views on reference, but the central claim of 'On
Referring' is something he always defended. Strawson's
title contains, of course, an allusion to Russell's famous
article 'On Denoting', the central idea of which Strawson
is criticising. Strawson's conception of the debate is that
Russell offered his theory of descriptions as a complete account of
the role of definite descriptions in English (such expressions as
'the queen of England'), whereas the truth is that the
role of the word 'the' when embedded in definite
descriptions cannot be captured in a single account. There are uses
which do not fit Russell's theory because the phenomenon is
simply more complex than Russell allowed. It is not, therefore, that
Strawson is offering his own complete theory; it is, rather, that he
is picking out uses for which, according to him, Russell's
theory fails, and characterising them. Russell's theory had
achieved the status of orthodoxy at the time that Strawson launched
his attack on it. That this is the way to understand Strawson's
contribution to the debate has the important consequence that it is no
objection to his approach to point to uses of 'the' about
which, arguably, Russell (or something close to Russell's view)
might be correct. Such points do not touch Strawson's central
claim. This undermines a number of responses to Strawson.
Strawson's paper initiated a debate about definite descriptions
that has run ever since its publication, and in which his views have
remained central.



Russell claimed that a sentence of the form 'The *F* is
*G*' says; 'There is one and only one *F*
and it is *G*.' The difference from 'An *F*
is *G*' is that the latter merely claims that there is
*a* (*G*) *F*, whereas the use of the definite
article imports the extra claim of uniqueness. Both are alike in
making an existential claim about *F*s, namely, there is an
*F*, and hence, according to Russell, at least part of the role
of 'the' is to be (or to introduce) what is called an
existential quantifier. This, in a crude presentation, is
Russell's Theory of Definite Descriptions. Against this Strawson
argued, first, that it is unsupported. He claimed that Russell's
main support for his theory is that a sentence such as 'The king
of France is bald' remains meaningful even though there is no
king of France. Its having meaning cannot, therefore, depend on there
being a referent for the apparent subject expression. According to
Strawson, Russell infers from that to the conclusion that the semantic
role of the apparent subject expression in such sentences (i.e.
'the *F*') cannot be to refer to or designate an
object, and must, rather, function as a quantifier. Against this,
Strawson suggested that the meaningfulness of 'The *F* is
*G*' should be thought of as, roughly, there being rules
as to what a use of the sentence in different circumstances will
amount to. If the circumstances are right, then it can be used in a
referring way; if not, then the use might not succeed in being an act
of reference. Strawson's distinction between a sentence's
having a meaning and the speech act performed by its use on an
occasion is clearly sound and important. One question that was debated
is whether all of Russell's reasons for his theory are disarmed
by the introduction of this distinction.



However, against the Russellian theory itself Strawson made the
important point that the theory implies that a sentence of the form
'The *F* is *G*' must count as false when
used in circumstances where there is no *F*. (These cases are
often described as ones involving 'reference failure'). It
must do so because, according to the theory, part of the role of
'The *F*' (at least in such declarative sentences)
is to say that there is an *F*. Contrary to this, Strawson
claims that we would not always regard a saying of 'The
*F* is *G*' as false in such circumstances. We
would not react by saying 'That is false' but would rather
say something like 'What do you mean?' or 'You must
be under a misapprehension'. He suggests that in such
circumstances the use amounts neither to saying something true nor to
saying something false. It exhibits what came to be called a
'truth-value gap'. In subsequent discussion it became
clear that it is difficult to determine what we should say about the
truth value of sentences involving referential failure.
Strawson's main objection to Russell's account is, though,
that it is simply obvious that sometimes we use 'The
*F*' to refer to or pick out an object, and we do not
then use it to *say* that there is an *F*.



Strawson's attitude is well presented in a later important paper
where he says:



> 
> The distinction between identifying reference and uniquely existential
> assertion is something quite undeniable. The sense in which the
> existence of something answering to a definite description used for
> the purpose of identifying reference, and its distinguishability by an
> audience from anything else, is presupposed and not asserted in an
> utterance containing such an expression, so used, stands absolutely
> firm, whether or not one opts for the view that radical failure of the
> presupposition would deprive the statement of a truth-value. It
> remains a decisive objection to the theory of Descriptions ...
> that ... it amounts to a denial of these undeniable distinctions.
> (Strawson 1964, 85)
> 



This passage reveals four important aspects of Strawson's
approach to definite descriptions.



The first is that his fundamental objection to Russell is that it is
simply obvious to him as a sensitive and self-reflective user of
language that the use of the word 'the' does not conform
to the theory. Whatever puzzles there may be about language and
reference their solution cannot require us to deny such obvious facts.
It is a recurring theme in, or perhaps a recurring part of the method
of, Strawson's philosophical discussion of language that some
aspects of language are more or less obvious to us. Second, the
contrast that strikes Strawson as especially obvious is that between
saying that there *is* (one and only one) *F* and
employing, in certain contexts, the definite description 'The
*F*'. If, standing in front of our familiar car, I say to
my family, 'The car will not start', I am hardly telling
them that we have, or there is, a certain car. Why should I engage in
a communicative act of that sort? It is the importance of this
contrast that impressed Strawson, as opposed to the problem often now
raised against Russell's theory, that the uniqueness commitment
seems equally problematic. Strawson notes the issue about uniqueness
but attends most to the assertion of existence problem. This reading
of the nature of Strawson's main objection to Russell implies
that a crucial question is whether it is indeed an implication of
Russell's analysis that the person employing the description
'The *F*' (in normal discourse) *says* that
there is one (and only one) *F*. If that is not an implication
of Russell's analysis then Strawson's main objection
lapses. It might also be asked whether any analysis of descriptions in
terms of quantifiers, even if developed in a more sophisticated way,
must have such a problematic implication.



Third, one central concept in Strawson's developed description
of the role of such an expression as 'The *F*' is
that it can be a device for what he calls identifying reference.
Roughly, Strawson's idea is that the definite description is
sometimes chosen to enable the audience to fix on or pick out as the
subject matter of the claim an item of which they already know. In
this role it cannot be that 'the *F*' tells them of
the existence of such an *F*, since its role rests on the prior
existence of such knowledge. Strawson provides a detailed analysis of
this function in the first chapter of *Individuals*, as well as
in the article from which the above quotation comes. Finally, a notion
that Strawson introduced in his own description of the nature of
definite descriptions and which surfaces in the quotation is that of
*presupposition*. Strawson said that the use of a definite
description standardly presupposes the existence of an object fitting
the description even though it does not say, nor therefore entail,
that there is such an object. This concept met with resistance amongst
philosophers but has had a colossal influence on linguists, who have
tended to see it as a useful concept in the description of language
(see Huang 2007, ch. 7). This encourages us to ask whether it is more
likely that linguists or philosophers have the better insight into
language.


## 3. Truth



The other very important debate that Strawson was involved in the
early 1950s was that with Austin about truth. Viewed in terms of the
politics of Oxford philosophy at that time, the debate perhaps
represents a power struggle between Austin, the hitherto acknowledged
leader, and Strawson, the younger challenger. Philosophically,
Strawson took exception to Austin's attempt (in Austin 1950) to
formulate a reconstructed version of the correspondence theory of
truth. Austin's account of truth is complex, but, roughly, he
held that in saying that a statement is true one is saying that the
state of affairs which a particular kind of linguistic convention,
which he called the referential conventions, ensure are picked out by
the use of the original sentence in the given circumstances, satisfy
the conditions which another sort of convention -- called the
descriptive conventions -- target the rest of the sentence onto.
Austin's idea can be illustrated with an example. The sentence
'The television is broken' is governed by certain
referential conventions which target it onto some state of affairs in
the world involving a particular television set; there are also
certain descriptive conventions built into the sentence linking it to
a type of state of affairs (the containing-a-broken-television type);
the former state of affairs conforms to, or falls under, the
descriptively correlated type. Strawson's criticism principally
alleges that Austin has no clear conception of what the supposed
referential conventions link sentences with. Is it objects --
say, the television? If so, then that is not a state of affairs, and
certainly not a fact.



Strawson also argues that facts and states of affairs should not be
regarded as things in the world. He suggests that we employ such nouns
as 'fact' and 'state of affairs' as
non-referential devices for expressing claims. Thus, I can say
'It is a fact that *P*' instead of simply saying
'*P*', but the former remark in no way introduces
an entity beyond anything introduced in the second claim. (This might
be labelled a redundancy theory of *facts*.) Having queried the
ontology of Austin's account, Strawson, somewhat surprisingly
seems prepared to allow that the conditions that Austin's
account incorporates are, in effect, *correlated* with the
truth of the sentence in question, but, he says, the fulfilment of
these conditions is not what we are *claiming* to obtain when
we say that it is true. It is simply obvious that remarks about truth
are not remarks *about* linguistic conventions. This criticism
seems to have a similar status to the central criticism of Russell.
Strawson's point against Austin is that it is simply obvious
that the theory cannot be correct because it is obvious to us as
language users that when we speak of truth we are not talking about
such things as referential (and descriptive) linguistic conventions.
Finally, Strawson pointed out that Austin's account could only
apply to a limited range of statements. If I say 'There are no
unicorns' what are the *referential targets* of my
remark?



Strawson's criticisms were taken by most people to have fatally
wounded Austin's theory. The subsequent discussion occasioned by
their debate primarily concerned some issues about the degree to which
Strawson's criticisms as a whole were fair to Austin, and also
whether the approach to truth that Strawson himself favoured was
adequate. Strawson's account, rather than Austin's, became
the focus of debate. Strawson himself returned to the former question
in later articles, arguing persuasively that even on the most
charitable interpretation Austin's idea of two sorts of
conventions cannot be made sense of. Strawson himself favoured a view
which took as the central insight about truth (one deriving from F. P.
Ramsey) that to say that P is true is equivalent to saying that P.
Strawson's own main contribution to working out this idea was to
stress the linguistic acts that the word 'true' enables us
to perform. This left him free to point out that even if
Ramsey's equivalence is the fundamental core of the notion of
truth, it would not follow that the expression 'true' is a
redundant expression. The presence in our language of the term
'true' might be of great--indeed,
indispensable--utility.



G. J. Warnock (in Warnock 1964) thought he discerned a problem in
Strawson's account because the theory might not allow that in
saying that a certain remark is true a speaker is saying something
about that remark, which Warnock thought a desirable element in an
account of truth. Rather, Warnock felt that according to Strawson the
speaker is simply saying the same as the original remark. In his
response Strawson pointed out that it is possible to incorporate
reference to the statement in the analysis he gave of truth
ascriptions. Thus, the claim 'John's statement that
*P* is true' can be treated as equivalent to (say)
'*P*, as John's statement said'. This is
ingenious, but it leaves one aspect of Strawson's view
unexplained, and it may have been this aspect that Warnock was trying
to home in on. Strawson stressed that it is statements that are truth
bearers. If, however, truth should not be thought of as a property of
anything, then what is the point of carefully identifying the things
that are its bearers? (On some of these issues, see Searle 1998.)


## 4. Logical Theory



Strawson published his first book *An Introduction to Logical
Theory* in 1952. In it he attempts to explain the nature, and the
scope and limits, of formal logic. The eminence he had already
achieved was reflected in the fact that it received a review by Quine
in *Mind*. Strawson's aim, generated in part by his
reflections on the correct treatment of definite descriptions, is to
say what formal logic is by explaining and elucidating its central
concepts, among them the notion of entailment. Strawson favours
explaining '*P* entails *Q*' as
''*P* and not *Q*' is
self-contradictory', and explains or elucidates the notion of
self-contradiction in terms of sentences saying nothing; in effect,
they give and then take back simultaneously. Strawson then looks at
the notion of form and of proof systems. He applies his ideas to
traditional syllogistic logic as well as to modern propositional and
predicate logic. It can be wondered how far his elucidation of the
central notions is adequate, and it can also be wondered whether he
attends to all the notions that need explanation in relation to formal
logic (e.g., consistency and completeness). The main part of his book
does not seem to have had a large influence on philosophers or
logicians. However, three elements in his discussion had and continue
to have considerable influence. First, he gave a fuller explanation of
the notion of presupposition than he had previously provided. Second,
Strawson asked how far the meaning of ordinary language connectives,
such as 'and', 'or' and 'if ...
then...', can be equated with those of the truth functional
connectives, such as '&', '[?]', and
'-', that logicians employ. Strawson argued that
there are significant differences. His conclusion is that these
ordinary expressions do not have what might be called a precise logic.
The question that Strawson asked has continued to be central in the
philosophy of language and has not been resolved. Grice took an
opposite view to Strawson and part of the point of Grice's
account of implication, as opposed to meaning or saying, was to
generate an explanation for the data that Strawson appealed to in
arguing for a semantic difference between ordinary language and formal
logic, without having to postulate a semantic difference. Strawson
himself later criticised Grice's theory, at least in relation to
conditionals. Third, he proposed an approach to the problem of
induction. We shall describe that later when looking at
Strawson's contribution to epistemology.


## 5. *Individuals*



In 1959 Strawson published his second book *Individuals*. It is
ambitious, abstract, wide ranging and original, and it has continued
to be read and discussed, especially the first half. Strawson coined
the terms 'descriptive metaphysics' to capture his task
and opposed that to what he called 'revisionary
metaphysics'. By using 'metaphysics' Strawson was
primarily emphasising the abstractness and generality of his
questions. A consequence of this generality, Strawson suggests, is
that the methods needed for settling them are different in kind from
those employed in debating less abstract conceptual or philosophical
questions. One such method, employed in chapter 2, when exploring the
sound world, involves imagining creatures with quite different
experiences from our own, and trying to determine their capacities for
thinking about objects. By calling it 'descriptive'
Strawson means, in part, that he is not recommending revisions or
additions to how we think. But the term also signals Strawson's
conviction that there is a shared and universal conceptual scheme
which we human beings have, and know that we have, and for which no
justification in terms of more fundamental concepts or claims can be
given. He writes:



> 
> [T]here is a massive central core of human thinking which has no
> history--or none recorded in histories of human thought; there
> are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental
> character, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialities
> of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least
> refined thinking; and yet are the indispensable core of the conceptual
> equipment of the most sophisticated human beings. (Strawson 1959, 10)
> 



The claim that there are a shared set of concepts which are at the
indispensable core of human thinking is a recognisably Kantian thesis.
(We say more about Strawson's relation to Kant below.)
Descriptive metaphysics aims to describe and analyse this universal
conceptual scheme. In particular, Strawson aims to focus on
*one* part of that total structure, namely our ability to
direct our thoughts, and speech, onto items in the world. It is
possible therefore to see *Individuals* as, in part, a
development of Strawson's interest in reference.



*Individuals* is very much a book of two halves. In the first
four chapters Strawson's focus is on our ability to refer to and
think about items in our environment, including ourselves. In the
second part, again of four chapters, the aim is to elucidate the
distinction between subject expressions and predicate expressions.
This latter task belongs more to philosophical logic or the philosophy
of language than to metaphysics, but the link is, according to
Strawson, that the central cases of subject expressions are those
picking out the entities to which we basically refer, the character of
which it has been the task of the first half to determine. Since, in
fact, the book's colossal and immediate impact was due primarily
to the brilliance and originality of its first three chapters, we
shall describe them in somewhat more detail than the rest of the book.
The truth is that reading the argument developed in those chapters
generates a continuous intellectual excitement, which the later
chapters do not quite match. It is also true that issues to do with
the subject-predicate distinction appeal to fewer people than do the
issues focused on in the early part.



Chapter 1 focuses on the question of whether there is a category of
entities which we can think about without depending on thought about
entities of other categories. The focus initially is not so much on
thought as on linguistically referring to something when in
conversation with an audience, and Strawson clarifies the relevant
idea of talking about an item by invoking the notion of identifying
reference which emerged in his theory of reference. Strawson proposes
the following model of latching onto an identifying reference. One
case is where the referent is picked out as a currently perceived item
- say, *this* page. In such a case the audience succeeds
when they pick out the same item in their own field of experience. The
other is where it is picked out as falling under a description.
Strawson's idea is that ultimately such descriptions need to
relate the item in some way to currently perceived items - say,
as the author of *this* page - for otherwise the
possibility of reduplication would prevent us from picking out a
unique item. (Such a two-fold structure of thought was also
accepted by Russell, but arguments in the theory of perception
persuaded him that the perceived scene was private rather than, as
Strawson holds, public.)



How should we think of these descriptive relations? Strawson claims in
chapter 1 that these descriptive relations are fundamentally
spatio-temporal. That is, my ability to think of James I rests on
thinking of him as the person ascending the throne in 1603, the
present time being 2018. Ultimately I fix on him via his place in a
spatio-temporal framework which is centred on my currently perceived
environment. Strawson further points out that since we need to update
this relational framework over time as we move around, we need to be
able to re-identify objects and places encountered at different times.
Strawson draws an epistemological conclusion from this. Since our
ability to maintain a grasp on the spatio-temporal framework depends
on acceptance of such identifications it is incoherent to be sceptical
about the procedures we rely on to confirm them while still thinking
in terms of the spatio-temporal framework itself. With these
conclusions in place, Strawson returns to his fundamental question as
to whether there is a basic category of items of reference. Some forms
of reference seem parasitic on other forms of reference: reference to
theoretical entities is dependent on reference to material
particulars; reference to experiences, such as Mary's pain in
her leg, are dependent on references to their subjects.
Strawson's assumption seems to be that putting these two
categories to one side leaves us with two candidates for the basic
items of reference: material bodies (in a broad sense) and
occurrences. Occurrences, however, cannot be basic since they too are
standardly picked out dependently - e.g., the fire in *that
house* - and, moreover, according to Strawson, they do not
form a structured framework allowing the spatio-temporal framework to
be grounded. Thus Strawson's conclusion: bodies (in a fairly
inclusive sense) are referentially basic.



Strawson next asks, in chapter 2, whether it is possible that there
should be a conceptual scheme that acknowledges the existence of
objective particulars but in which material bodies are not the basic
particulars. Since, according to the initial argument, referential
thought rests on a spatio-temporal framework only if it rests on
thought about bodies, this question becomes: can there be thought
about objective entities which doesn't involve thinking of them
in spatial terms? To investigate this question, Strawson considers
whether the notion of an objective particular would be comprehensible
to a creature with only auditory experience, the assumption being that
auditory experience on its own is non-spatial and thus that a creature
in such a situation wouldn't have access to spatial ways of
thinking. What objective notions would be available to such a
creature? Strawson imaginatively enters into the sound world to see
how far ideas analogous to those that space makes available can be
found. The best option relies on relating individual sounds to a
continuous 'master sound' which, as it were, defines
something analogous to space. Strawson himself appears to think this
might work. His view thus seems to be that although spatio-temporal
thinking rests on bodies, objective thinking cannot be shown to
require spatio-temporal thinking per se, but even in cases where there
can be objective thought without spatio-temporal thinking, there must
be something in in the subject's way of thinking which performs
a role analogous to the role that thought about space performs for us.
Strawson's argument was influentially discussed by Gareth Evans
in 'Things Without the Mind' (1980), a commentary on
chapter 2 of *Individuals*; further commentary can be found in
Snowdon 2006 and Cassam 2005.



In the next chapter, entitled 'Persons', Strawson leaves
behind speculation about concepts based on attenuated experiences, and
focuses on our rich thought about ourselves. His argument involves a
comparison between three conceptions of such thought. The first is
what he calls the no-ownership view. This is the view that we do not
really refer to ourselves when we use the first-person pronoun, even
though we seem to. There is nothing that owns or has the experiences
to which to refer. Strawson's response is to argue that once
this view is developed, genuine self-reference emerges as involved in
the theory's explanation of the illusion of ownership of
experiences. One question for this response is whether it is a
decisive objection to the no-ownership theory that an incoherence
emerges in its standard explanation as to why we tend to believe that
our experiences are owned. Why must the no-ownership view supply such
an explanation? The second conception is that deriving from Descartes,
according to which, the item that 'I' picks out is
something distinct from the physical body. Strawson argues that this
conception is incompatible with the principle that one can ascribe
experiences to oneself only if one is prepared to ascribe them to
others. This is because a subject can meet this requirement only if
they are able to pick out other subjects, and, Strawson holds, one
cannot pick out non-spatial subjects. Strawson concludes that when we
self-refer we refer to an entity which has two sides or aspects, the
physical and the mental, and not to a thing which possesses only the
mental sort of feature, something else having the physical features.
In effect, Strawson is representing ordinary thought as having the
structure of what others have called a dual-aspect theory. Persons are
things with two aspects - bodily and mental. He famously
describes this as the idea that the concept of a person is a
*primitive concept*. Second, since we can self-ascribe we must
be able to other-ascribe, and that means that our methods for doing so
must be adequate. As Strawson puts it, the criteria we employ for
psychological ascription to others must be 'logically
adequate'. There cannot, therefore, be a *genuine*
problem of other minds. Again, as in the first chapter, Strawson
derives a significant epistemological consequence from his conceptual
investigations. This famous chapter has exercised a fascination on
philosophers thinking about ourselves and has been, perhaps, as much
discussed as any piece of philosophical argument that Strawson wrote.
(For interesting discussion of this chapter see Ayer 1963, Martin
1969, and Snowdon 2009.)



Finally, Strawson takes Leibniz as an *opponent* of some of his
major theses and considers whether Leibniz might be able to avoid his
conclusions. He argues, displaying considerable ingenuity in
suggesting different interpretations of Leibniz, that Leibniz does not
escape the problems.



*Individuals* then shifts focus to the subject-predicate
distinction. Strawson's initial aim is, in effect, to show that
a novel theory is required. There are two reasons. First, we lack a
proper explanation as to why absolutely anything can be the reference
of a subject expression but only universals can be what predicates
express. Second, he classifies the different accounts on offer and
argues that they are either open to objection, or open to the demand
for further explanation. The contrast between subjects and predicates
that Strawson himself proposes for the central cases is that
understanding a subject expression depends on the possession of
empirical information, whereas the understanding of predicates does
not. For example, to understand the name 'James I' I need
to know something like; there was a king who ascended the throne in
1603. But to understand the predicate '... is
triangular', there is no empirical information about the world
that I need to grasp. There need not be, or have been, any triangles
at all. I have, rather, to grasp the principle of classification
linked to the term. Strawson's proposal is ingenious, but faces
a number of questions. First, is it clear that all predicates express
principles of classification the grasp of which involves no empirical
knowledge? Consider such natural kind involving predicates as
'is gold' or 'is a dog'. Second, is it obvious
that understanding subject expressions requires accepting the
empirical claims, as opposed to merely knowing what the assumptions
are? Third, what entitles Strawson to attach a priority within his
account to empirical claims? Why is non-empirical discourse, such as
mathematics, to be regarded as secondary? Strawson then attempts to
explain some other elucidations of the subject-predicate distinction
as deriving from his own suggestion, and to develop a more general
criterion on the basis of his own account having captured the core
cases. In the next chapter Strawson asks the very interesting and
novel question whether, just as the employment of (the core type of)
subject expressions presupposes empirical information, there is a type
of proposition the truth of which is presupposed by subject-predicate
propositions in general. He picks out what he calls
*feature-placing sentences*, such as 'It is
raining'. Such a sentence does not designate an object and
describe it, rather the sentence affirms the presence of a feature.
Strawson argues that where there are true subject-predicate
propositions there must also be true feature-placing sentences. That
is his answer to the question.



*Individuals* is far richer in argument than we have been able
to convey. It occasioned, more or less immediately, considerable
debate, and has continued to do so ever since. The epistemological
conclusions that Strawson advanced, both about bodies and about other
minds, were closely scrutinized. The overall arguments of the chapter
on persons and the chapter on bodies were closely analysed. The
contrast between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, although
briefly presented by Strawson, entered into the folk taxonomy of
philosophy. As well as occasioning disagreement, Strawson's book
stimulated, over time, a series of books all of which could be
described as essays in descriptive metaphysics with a similar focus
to, though not with identical conclusions to, *Individuals*.
These include Gareth Evans' *The Varieties of Reference*,
John Campbell's *Past, Space and Self*, and David
Wiggins, *Sameness and Substance*. (For a good general critical
discussion of *Individuals* see Williams 1961.)


## 6. *The Bounds of Sense*



In 1966, seven years after the publication of *Individuals*
Strawson published his third book, *The Bounds of Sense*,
subtitled *An essay on Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason*.



Strawson's introduction to Kant arose out of the historical
peculiarities of Oxford's degree in Philosophy, Politics and
Economics. At that time, the degree was structured such that there
were two special subjects which those who wished to specialise in
philosophy were obliged to take: Logic and Kant, the latter to be
studied through the *Critique of Pure Reason* and the
*Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals*. In the *Critique
of Pure Reason*, Strawson found 'a depth, a range, a
boldness, and a power unlike anything I had previously
encountered' (Strawson 2003, 8).



Strawson lacks sympathy with Kant's description of his task as
the explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements.
His approach to the first *Critique* is instead captured by his
characteristically elegant title which contains a three-fold pun.
First, it is an echo of a title that Kant considered for the
*Critique*. Second and third, it plays on the ambiguity of the
word 'sense' which can denote both sense-experience and
sense-meaning. According to Strawson, Kant sets a lower limit on
sense, arguing that 'a certain minimal structure is essential to
any conception of experience which we can make truly intelligible to
ourselves' (1966, 11). And he sets an upper limit on sense,
holding 'that the attempt to extend beyond the limits of
experience the use of structural concepts, or of any other concepts,
leads only to claims empty of meaning'. Finally, he does all of
this from 'a point outside [the bounds of sense], a point which,
if they are rightly drawn, cannot exist' (1966, 12). This point
outside the bounds of sense is Kant's metaphysics of
transcendental idealism and the 'imaginary subject of
transcendental psychology' (1966, 32). Strawson's analytic
project is to extract what is valuable of the first two strands from
the supposed incoherence of the last.



With regards to the lower limit of sense and the constructive part of
the first *Critique*, Strawson examines Kant's argument
that our experience must be of recognisably independent objective
items, which are spatial and temporal, and which must satisfy some
strong principles of permanence and causation. Strawson argues, with
both care and brilliance, that Kant's arguments are defective in
various ways, but that somewhat weaker, yet nonetheless important,
conclusions along similar lines can be defended. The most fecund and
brilliant part of Strawson's argument, and the part which has
correspondingly attracted the most attention, is Strawson's take
on Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in which
Strawson argues that 'for a series of diverse experiences to
belong to a single consciousness it is necessary that they should be
so connected as to constitute a temporally extended experience of a
unified objective world' (1966, 97). That is, the experience of
a self-conscious creature must involve, and be recognised as
involving, perception of objects. Strawson's reconstruction of
the argument relies on the idea that the experiences of a
self-conscious creature must provide room for the thought of
experience itself. But one can apply that notion only in the context
of the application of categories of things which are not experiences.
However, such categories can be available to a subject only if its
experiences provide it with the grounds for applying them, which
involves the idea that its experiences relate it to non-experiences,
that is to say, independent things. This argument is discussed in
Rorty 1970, Harrison 1970, and Gomes 2016.



With regards to the upper limit to sense and the destructive part of
the first *Critique*, Strawson examines Kant's arguments
in the Dialectic, and develops further requirements on our conception
of experience analogous to those Kant advances. The discussion of the
Paralogisms is particularly important for Strawson, containing, as he
sees it, a deep insight about the failures of Cartesian dualism. Kant
doesn't combine, according to Strawson, this recognition of the
failures of dualism with a correspondingly accurate account of
ourselves, but this failure is to be explained by Kant's
transcendental idealism, and once shorn of this theory, Kant's
view is able to be supplemented with a plausible and realistic account
of ourselves.



Finally, Strawson considers Kant's transcendental idealism, and
though he is ultimately unsympathetic, he explores its interpretation
with great care and considers why Kant might have adopted it. One
issue which he presses is whether there is a coherent way to fit
ourselves as objects into a framework of transcendental idealism,
given Kant's seeming view that real objects, things in
themselves, are unknowable and beyond our experience. The rejection of
transcendental idealism requires Strawson to scrutinize Kant's
arguments for it, and he very carefully and sympathetically analyses
and rejects Kant's arguments about space and time, and geometry,
and also the argument, presented in the Antinomies, that
transcendental realism generates contradictions. Strawson further
abandons much of Kant's talk of mechanisms of synthesis in the
generation of proper experience. Much of Strawson's discussion
here relies on his particular interpretation of transcendental
idealism, which has been heavily criticised, for instance in Matthews
1969.



*The Bounds of Sense* had an immediate impact and continues to
be extremely influential. Its interpretation of Kant quickly became a
target of discussion in Kant scholarship, and Strawson returned to
some issues of Kant interpretation in four essays which are collected
in Strawson 1997. But it also, as Putnam remarks, 'opened the
way to a reception of Kant's philosophy by analytic
philosophers' (Putnam 1998 in Hahn 1998, 273). One particular
focus has been on Strawson's use of a style of argument which he
took Kant himself to have developed. These arguments have come to be
called 'transcendental arguments'. In *Individuals*
and *The Bounds of Sense* they take the form of uncovering
dependencies in our ways of thinking of the world. These dependencies
can be taken to have anti-sceptical implications if claims about which
the sceptic is sceptical can be shown to be required for the
judgements which the sceptic makes, or ones which are involved in the
sceptic's own understanding of their view. In the years
following its publication this anti-sceptical response was closely
investigated, a large literature on it was generated, including
notably a number of powerful contributions by the American philosopher
Barry Stroud. (See Stroud 1968 and 2000.) One problem is that it is
extraordinarily difficult to show that there are the conceptual
dependencies which such transcendental arguments rely on.
Interestingly, Strawson himself soon devised a different response to
scepticism, but it is also true that the anti-sceptical approach that
Strawson developed here remains appealing to a range of
epistemologists, and this debate continues. Some discussion of the
prospects for such arguments can be found in Stern 1999 and Gomes
2017a.



Some issues that have been raised about *The Bounds of Sense*
are the following: (1) Does Strawson himself provide a satisfactory
identification of a good question that Kant's *Critique*
can be regarded as trying to answer? At about the same time that
Strawson published his book on Kant, Jonathan Bennett, in his book
*Kant's Analytic* suggested that Kant's claims have
to be regarded as unobviously analytic if they are to be correct. Is
Strawson's conception better than this? (2) Is Strawson's
interpretation of Kant - especially his account of
transcendental idealism - correct? (3) Does Strawson's
version of Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
fare any better than Kant's own? (4) Is Strawson right to think
that there are insights in Kant's project that can be separated
from his transcendental idealism? And (5) does Strawson defend the
anti-sceptical transcendental arguments cogently? Strawson's
relation to Kant is discussed in Glock 2003, Gomes 2017b, and the
papers collected in a special issue of the *European Journal of
Philosophy* (2016) marking the 50th anniversary of *The Bounds
of Sense*.


## 7. Later Books



Strawson published three more books (other than collections of essays)
in English (plus another in French which overlaps with one of those in
English). In 1974 *Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar*
appeared. Strawson himself described this book as 'probably the
most ambitious and certainly the one that has received the least
attention' (Strawson 2004, ix). He is right about the second
point but not, we suspect, about the first. It is an ambitious book,
but can hardly be ranked above either *Individuals* or *The
Bounds of Sense* in that respect! In the first part of it Strawson
presents a revised version of his account of the normal
subject-predicate distinction, and also presents a partial theory of
one particular case of subject expressions, namely proper names. In
this he was responding to the emergence of direct referential accounts
of the kind that Kripke had made popular. The discussion of the
subject-predicate distinction is clearer and more direct than the one
achieved in *Individuals*. What Strawson particularly brings
out is that in ordinary language predicates have a complex role,
involving the indication of universals, the expression of
exemplification, plus expression also of temporal aspects. This
functional complexity explains the correctness of certain other
accounts of the distinction. No consensus about the assessment of
Strawson's proposal has emerged, the reason being that there has
still been no very general interest in the subject-predicate
distinction. In the second part, Strawson develops an approach to the
understanding of grammar in which he attempts to relate grammar, in
the sense of syntax, to much more basic functional specifications of
the elements of a language, such that it becomes possible to see
actual grammars as different ways to achieve these functional roles.
Again, no consensus has emerged about this highly original way to
think about grammar.



In 1985 Strawson published *Skepticism and Naturalism: Some
Varieties*. The book grew out of Strawson's Woodbridge
Lectures at Columbia University in 1983. It is, in a sense, a book of
philosophy *about* philosophy. In each chapter Strawson focuses
on a philosophical dispute in which there is a strong tendency to deny
the reality or existence of an aspect which common sense affirms. The
term 'skepticism' in the title stands for this general
sceptical tendency. The first chapter concerns knowledge itself,
denied by the philosophical sceptic. The later chapters consider the
denial of certain aspects of ordinary human thought and experience,
such as the reality of colour by scientifically inspired philosophers,
and the reality of thought and experience by a certain sort of
materialist. The thread linking these chapters is the sceptical
thought that these aspects of our ordinary human experience are to be
found wanting on account of their not being reducible to a more
scientifically acceptable, physicalist base. In each case,
Strawson's aim is to deny the denial, and to explain, as one
might say, how philosophers can have their cake and eat it. Against
the sceptic about knowledge, Strawson stresses that the claims that
they deny are presuppositions of all human thought and enquiry;
against the reductive naturalist he goes further, not only stressing
the inescapability of the ordinary human standpoint but also allowing
it its own validity from its own particular standpoint.



The book is about philosophy in another sense, since it employs and
illuminates some ideas from earlier philosophers, especially Hume and
Wittgenstein, and reveals Strawson's very deep understanding of
them. The book marks, also, a further development in Strawson's
engagement with epistemological scepticism. Strawson expresses
agreement with some of his earlier critics (in particular Stroud) that
transcendental arguments are problematic as anti-sceptical devices,
and suggests instead that scepticism can be set aside because no-one
is persuaded by sceptical arguments. Philosophical sceptical doubts
are not *serious* doubts, and so are not to be taken
*seriously*. This further twist in Strawson's
epistemology has, again, inspired considerable debate, and no
consensus has yet emerged. In particular, it remains to be determined
how strongly we should take Strawson's suggestions that certain
claims are presuppositions on human thought and enquiry. One worry
which remains is that Strawson's point that no one is remotely
inclined to accept the sceptic's claim establishes at most that
we regard such arguments as having the status of defending a
paradoxical conclusion; it does not, in itself, explain why the
conclusion is incorrect. However, as well as being an original
contribution to epistemology, the book presents an approach to
ontology which deserves to be called Oxonian, because it has been
popular in Oxford. The idea is that there is no good reason not to be
realists about most aspects of the world, including colour, mentality,
meaning, and perhaps value, but that this does not require the defence
of a *reduction* to some features of a supposedly more
fundamental realm. This is a *relaxed* realism that does not
set its face against the claims of natural science, but rather refuses
to take them as calling into question the legitimacy of our ordinary
ways of thinking about the world. This form of Oxford realism was
influential on a generation of British philosophers, many of whom were
Strawson's students.



Finally, in 1992, Strawson published *Analysis and Metaphysics: an
Introduction to Philosophy.* Strawson had given introductory
lectures once he became a professor, and the lectures became this
book. It is, again, a book about philosophy, contrasting different
conceptions of the subject, and defending Strawson's own
conception of the nature and value of analysis. Of importance here is
Strawson's distinction between reductive and connective
analysis. Strawson's attitude is that the aim of analysis is to
reveal conceptual links and connexions, thereby illuminating some
features of our concepts, but that there is no favoured basic level of
thought to which it is the goal of philosophical analysis to reduce
everything else. Echoing the name for his conception of ontology, one
might call that a conception of *relaxed analysis*. Strawson in
fact repeatedly wrote about the nature of philosophy, and the views in
this book are his final conclusions. It is also a book in which he
practises what he preaches in relation to certain chosen areas,
including, for example, the topics of causation and explanation,
experience, meaning, and freedom. Whether it is a good introductory
book or not, it is certainly a deep and interesting treatment of its
topics for the non-beginner! Strawson himself prepares the reader by
remarking brilliantly that the book 'though introductory
... is not elementary. There is no such thing as elementary
philosophy. There is no shallow end to the philosophical pool'
(Strawson 1992, vii).


## 8. "Freedom and Resentment"



Strawson always joked that he would turn to moral philosophy only when
his powers were waning. He wrote very little on the topic, commenting
later on his 'Freedom and Resentment' and 'Social
Morality and Individual Ideal', that '[b]etween them,
these two papers effectively embody all I have thought or have to say
in a philosophical area which, important as I recognize it to be, I
have never found as intellectually gripping as those to which I have
given more attention' (Strawson 1998, 11). Nevertheless,
'Freedom and Resentment' (Strawson 1962) is perhaps now
Strawson's most famous and widely discussed paper.



Strawson's aim in this paper is to dissolve the so-called
problem of determinism and responsibility. He does this by drawing a
contrast between two different perspectives we can take on the world:
the 'participant' and 'objective' standpoints.
These perspectives involve different explanations of other
people's actions. From the objective point of view, we see
people as elements of the natural world, causally manipulated and
manipulable in various ways. From the participant point of view, we
see others as appropriate objects of 'reactive attitudes',
attitudes such as gratitude, anger, sympathy and resentment, which
presuppose the responsibility of other people. These two perspectives
are opposed to one another, but both are legitimate.



Strawson's paper notes two broad ways in which we can withdraw
from the participant perspective. The first involves cases in which
the agent remains someone to whom reactive attitudes are appropriate
but where something about the circumstances means that the attitude is
not appropriate in this particular case. Perhaps you stood on my foot
because you were pushed. In this case, you have a good excuse for your
behaviour and resentment is no longer appropriate. The second involves
cases in which the agent has more or less permanent incapacities which
remove them from the domain of reactive attitudes in general. Perhaps
the person who stood on my foot is a child or in the grip of some
psychopathological illness. In these cases, we cease to treat the
agent as a fitting object of reactive attitudes, even if only
temporarily.



Strawson takes these observations about the reactive attitudes to bear
on the reconciliation of determinism and responsibility because of the
inescapability of the reactive attitudes. They are a central part of
what it is to be human. The truth of determinism cannot, then, force
us to give up the participant standpoint, because the reactive
attitudes are too deeply embedded in our humanity. Between determinism
and responsibility there can be no conflict.



'Freedom and Resentment' has spawned an extensive
literature. It introduced the notion of reactive attitudes to debates
about free will and responsibility and one set of questions raised by
the paper concerns the nature of these attitudes. Strawson
characterises them initially as those belonging to involvement or
participation with others in interpersonal human relationships and he
takes them to target the good will of others as manifested in their
behaviour. Others have broaded the notion, instead emphasising their
connection to holding someone to some expectation or demand (see
Wallace 1994). Another set of questions concerns the relation between
the reactive attitudes and moral responsibility. Gary Watson, in a
paper first published in 1987, reads Strawson as holding that the
reactive attitudes are constitutive of moral responsibility and raises
a challenge for such a view in explaining our attitudes towards cases
of extreme evil (Watson 2004). Others have queried whether Strawson
intends the reactive attitudes to have such explanatory priority
(Alvarez 2021)



A final set of questions concerns the inescapability of the
participant stance and its role in the overall structure of
Strawson's argument. Some have emphasised the connections with
Strawson's reading of Hume and Wittgenstein as set out in
Skepticism and Naturalism; see, for example, Russell 1992. Others such
as Allais 2014 have emphasised the connections with Kant, not least
the suggestive affinity with Kant's attempt to dissolve the
problem of free will in the Critique of Pure Reason. More recently,
Hieronymi 2020 provides a book-length defence of a 'social
naturalist' reading of Strawson's paper and De Mesel 2022
traces the connection between 'Freedom and Resentment' and
Strawson's later (and underappreciated) writings on the same
themes. 



Strawson's paper and many of its important responses are
collected together in McKenna and Russell 2008. A set of papers
published to mark its 50th anniversary are collected in Shoemaker and
Tognazzini 2014.


## 9. Some Themes in Strawson's Writings



Strawson contributed ideas to debates about a wide range of topics,
only some of which can be described here. We have selected five areas
to describe.


### 9.1 Perception



Strawson made a major contribution to the theory of perception. His
conception is articulated to some extent in *The Bounds of
Sense*, but also in a series of articles, of which the most famous
is 'Perception and Its Objects' (1979). He suggests that
the concept of perception should be analysed as a causal concept. His
version of the causal theory differs in two main respects from that of
Grice, who also famously defended a similar analysis. First,
Strawson's argument for view turns on the idea that perception
is essentially a method of acquiring knowledge; he suggests that this
requires that the concept of perception is a causal concept. Second,
Strawson claims that Grice's attempt to spell out the right
causal chain by picking it out via examples is circular, and he
instead invokes notions of match and range. Strawson's version
attracted considerable attention. More important is Strawson's
claim that there is no way to describe perceptual experience in terms
which are not physical-object concept involving. That this can be
done, he thinks, is the crucial mistake of the traditional empiricist
model, as represented, for example, in the thought of A. J. Ayer.
According to Strawson we are not reading in or interpreting our
experiences when we respond to them by making objective judgements; we
are simply endorsing their content. Strawson therefore holds that it
is myth to suppose that we can locate a level of claim on the basis of
which we can defend the validity of our application of physical object
concepts. Rather, our experience is 'saturated' by those
concepts themselves. In a more recent terminology, Strawson holds that
perception involves the occurrence in us of experiences having
objective representational content, and that there can be
hallucinations with a similar content but which are not properly
perceptual because the complex causal requirements for being
perceptual are not met. Strawson's claims about perception are
discussed in Snowdon 1998.


### 9.2 Language



Strawson's contribution to the philosophy of language is also
far more extensive and important than so far indicated. He developed
his views in relation to the leading ideas of others about language.
One conception that he opposed is that of Quine. Writing with Grice,
he argued that Quine's criticisms of the idea of analyticity
rest on a commitment to a kind of reduction that itself is simply a
dogma. Moreover, repeatedly over the next twenty years he argued that
Quine's sceptical approach to meaning and related notions is
both unfounded and also wrong in that it deprives us of notions that
we cannot do without in the study of logic and language. Strawson also
engaged with Davidson's account of meaning, mainly in his
inaugural lecture 'Meaning and Truth' (1969), but also
elsewhere. Strawson suggests that truth is itself a notion secondary
to saying (and communication) and cannot play the role in an account
of meaning that Davidson proposed. His other reaction to the
Davidsonian programme, which accepted a notion of logical form for
natural language sentences specified in the complex formulae of
predicate logic, was to deny that there is a requirement to map
ordinary language onto artificial logical structures. This attitude
placed Strawson in opposition to a movement of thought that swept
through Oxford's younger philosophers during his time as a
professor. And what Strawson never quite achieved was an alternative
explanation to Davidson's of what a theory of meaning should be.
His attitude to truth, and his slogan that ordinary language has no
precise logic, implied that centring an analysis of meaning on truth
conditions and a search for logical forms in natural language
expressible in the predicate calculus was misguided. But he did not
give a positive account of how we do understand linguistic
utterances.



Strawson also made important contributions to the assessment of
Austin's theory of speech acts and Grice's own model of
meaning. Finally, he responded to the anti-realist approach developed
by Dummett, which also gained its adherents, in 'Scruton and
Wright on Anti-Realism' (1976), a brief but brilliant critique
which argued that there are no obvious reasons to adopt the
anti-realist account of truth, and moreover that it is hard to make
that account consistent with what appear to be obvious facts about the
knowability (or unknowability) of our psychological lives and the
past.


### 9.3 History of Philosophy



Another theme that needs stressing is Strawson's engagement with
the history of philosophy. His work on Kant in *The Bounds of
Sense* and in other articles is perhaps the most straightforward
example of this engagement, but it is not the only instance. In
*Individuals* and elsewhere he wrote about Descartes,
especially his account of the self. Leibniz is the hero, or perhaps
anti-hero, of chapter 4 of *Individuals*. Hume and Wittgenstein
are the central characters in *Skepticism and Naturalism*, and
he wrote about Spinoza, especially his theory of freedom. From the
last century, he wrote about Wittgenstein, in a famous review of the
*Philosophical Investigations*, published in *Mind*
(reprinted in Strawson 2011), and also G.E. Moore. These writings
reveal both a deep knowledge and a deep understanding of these
thinkers, never unsympathetic and always able to see the wood as well
as the trees. Strawson had a sense of the age of philosophical
problems, and of the insights from the great dead philosophers that
need preserving and renewing.


### 9.4 Scepticism and knowledge



We have set out, to some extent, the development of Strawson's
epistemological views, but have not described his earliest proposal in
relation to the problem of induction. In *An Introduction to
Logical Theory* he pioneered what came to be called the
'analytical solution', according to which there cannot be
any question as to the rationality of the employment of induction,
since by being rational we *mean*, amongst other things, using
induction. The question whether induction is rational resembles,
according to this approach, the question whether the law is legal.
Since 'being legal' means 'being in accordance with
the law', there can be no question about the legality of the
law. This remains a discussed approach. In *Individuals* he
talked of the satisfaction of certain conditions as being criterial
for the ascription of some disputed claims, and justified that by
transcendental arguments. *The Bounds of Sense* can be regarded
as an extended anti-sceptical transcendental argument. Finally, in
*Skepticism and Naturalism* he attempts to oppose the sceptic
by appealing to the inescapability of the claims opposed by the
sceptic. The unity amongst all these proposals is that the response to
scepticism is never the production of a proof or demonstration based
on a level of thought external or prior to the discourse in question.
Each solution aims to turn aside scepticism in some other way.
Strawson's ingenuity in devising such responses is very
impressive and he is the source of at least three major anti-sceptical
approaches.


## 10. Conclusion



Strawson did not seek to make disciples, nor did he write too much by
way of defence of his views against critics (except, as it were, when
he had to). However, he produced a continuous flow of original and
profound, and elegantly expressed, philosophy dealing with a very
broad range of topics. He thereby exerted a considerable influence on
philosophy, both during his lifetime and, indeed, since his death.