## 1. Life and Work



Details about the life of John Cook Wilson, or 'Cook
Wilson' as he is commonly called, may be found in a memoir
published in 1926 by his pupil A. S. L. Farquharson, in his edition of
Cook Wilson's posthumous writings, *Statement and Inference
with other Philosophical Papers* (SI, xii-lxiv). He was born
in Nottingham on June 6, 1849, the son of a Methodist minister.
Educated at Derby Grammar School, he went up to Balliol College in
1868, elected on an exhibition set up by Benjamin Jowett for students
from less privileged schools. At Balliol, Cook Wilson read classics
with Henry Chandler, from whom he certainly got his penchant for
minutiae, and mathematics with Henry J. S. Smith. He also studied
philosophy with Jowett and T. H. Green, who steered him towards Kant
and idealism (SI, 880), along with other students from his generation,
such as Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, Richard Lewis Nettleship and
William Wallace. He even went to Gottingen in 1873-74 to
attend lectures by Hermann Lotze (SI, xxvii), whose portrait he kept
in his study. Cook Wilson wrote late in his life that "from the
first I would not commit myself even to the most attractive form of
idealism, tho' greatly attracted by it" (SI, 815).
Farquharson also mentions Friedrich Ueberweg's *System of
Logic and History of Logical Doctrines* (Ueberweg 1871) as an
early 'realist' influence (SI, 880). If we are to follow
Prichard, however, Cook Wilson abandoned idealism "with extreme
hesitation" (Prichard 1919, 309) and "it was only towards
the close of his life that he really seemed to find himself"
(Prichard 1919, 318). (See also on this point Farquharson's
reminiscence in (SI, xix).)



Cook Wilson was elected fellow of Oriel College in 1873 and he
succeeded Thomas Fowler as Wykeham Professor of Logic, New College in
1889. Bernard Bosanquet, Thomas Case, and John Venn had been among his
rivals. He finally moved to New College in 1901, where he remained
until his death from pernicious anemia on 11 August 1915. His wife
Charlotte, whom he had met in Germany, predeceased him; they had a son
(Joseph 1916b, 557). Cook Wilson lived the uneventful life of an
Oxford don. Among his awards, he became Fellow of the British Academy
in 1907. A Liberal in his convictions (SI, xxix), he did not get
involved in politics, nor did he take a prominent part in the affairs
of his university. (He is, for example, seldom mentioned in (Engel
1983).) His most cherished extra-curricular activity appears to have
been the development of tactics for military bicycle units.



Cook Wilson published little during his lifetime. Setting apart
publications on military cycling and other incidental writings, the
bulk of his publications were in his chosen fields of study, classics
and mathematics. His work in Ancient philosophy, which form the bulk
of his publications, is discussed in the next section.



In mathematics, he published a strange treatise that arose out of his
failed attempt at proving the four-colour theorem, *On the
Traversing of Geometrical Figures* (TGF). It had virtually no
echo. Farquharson quoted the mathematician E. W. Hobson explaining
that Cook Wilson "hardly gave sufficient time and thought to the
subject to make himself really conversant with the modern aspects of
the underlying problems" (SI, xxxviii). Cook Wilson also
published two short papers on probability (IP, PBT) in which he gave
new proofs of the discrete Bayes' formula and of Jacob
Bernouilli's theorem (this last being known today as the weak
law of large numbers). Edgeworth called the former an "elegant
proof" (Edgeworth 1911, 378, n.10), but Cook Wilson was
seemingly ignorant of an already better proof of the latter via the
Bienayme-Chebyshev inequality (Seneta 2012, 448 & 2013,
1104). His mathematical endeavours were otherwise largely wasted on
trying to prove the inconsistency of non-Euclidean geometries. Cook
Wilson claimed that he had 'apprehended' and thus
'knows' the truth of Euclid's axiom of the
parallels--he held it to be "absolutely self-evident"
(SI, 561)--calling the idea of a non-Euclidean space a
"chimera" (SI, 456) and non-Euclidean geometries
"the mere illusion of specialists" (SI, xxxix). He thus
tried in vain to find a contradiction to "convince the rank and
file of mathematicians" so that "they would at least not
suppose the philosophic criticism, by which I intended anyhow to
attack, somehow wrong" (SI, xcvi). (See section 5 for further
discussion of the point about knowledge.)



Cook Wilson published very little in philosophy: his inaugural
lecture, *On an Evolutionist Theory of the Axioms* (ETA, see
also SI, 616-634), a critique of Spencer opening with a very
short encomium to Green and Lotze (ETA, 3-4), and a short piece
in *Mind* (CLP) on the 'Barber Shop Paradox'. In
the former, he argued that Spencer's claim that the criterion of
truth *p* is the impossibility to think its contradictory and
that this criterion is the product of evolution is based on a circular
reasoning: to prove that the criterion results from evolution, one
must apply it. The 'Barber Shop Paradox'--not to be
confused with the 'Barber's Paradox'--is
attributed to Lewis Carroll (Carroll 1894), but it originated in a
private debate about 'hypotheticals' with Cook Wilson, who
attempted his own solution in CLP (Moktefi 2007a, chap. v, sect. 2),
(Moktefi 2007b), (Moktefi 2008, sect. 5.2), while Russell had already
satisfactorily resolved it in a footnote to *The Principles of
Mathematics* (Russell 1903, 18). Cook Wilson was also involved on
the same occasion in the genesis of Carroll's better-known
'paradox of inference', in 'What the Tortoise Said
to Achilles' (Carroll 1895), which will be discussed in section
8.



Cook Wilson's reluctance to publish was partly caused by the
fact that he constantly kept revising his views. As mentioned, he
apparently reached a more or less stable viewpoint only late in his
life. One of his better-known sayings is that



> 
> 
> ... the (printed) letter killeth, and it is extraordinary how it
> will prevent the acutest from exercising their wonted clearness of
> vision. (SI, 872) [See also Collingwood (2013, 19-20).]
> 
> 
> 



His argument was that authors that have committed to print their views
on a given issue would, should they prove to be erroneous, more often
than not feel obliged to defend them and to engage in pointless
rhetorical exchanges instead of seeing immediately the validity of
arguments against them.



As a result, Cook Wilson resorted throughout his career to the
printing for private circulation of pamphlets, known as
*Dictata*, which he began revising for publication shortly
before his death. Only 11 years later did the two volumes of
*Statement and Inference* appear, in 1926, put together by
Farquharson from his lecture notes and *Dictata*, along with
some letters. These volumes are subdivided in five parts and 582
sections. Their arrangement, which is not Cook Wilson's, betrays
their origin in his lectures in logic and in the theory of knowledge;
also interspersed are texts that originate from his study of and
lectures on Plato and Aristotle. As the chronological table of the
various sections shows (SI, 888-9), the texts thus assembled
were written at different dates and, in light of Cook Wilson's
frequent change of mind (including his move away from idealism), they
express views that are at times almost contradictory. This makes any
study of his philosophy particularly difficult and, more often than
not, accounts of his views are influenced by those, equally important,
of his pupil H. A. Prichard.


## 2. Ancient Philosophy



Cook Wilson published over 50 papers in Ancient philosophy, in
scholarly journals such as *Classical Review*, *Classical
Quarterly*, *Transactions of the Oxford Philological
Society* and *Philologische Rundschau*, and a few
book-length studies on Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics*
(AS) and on Plato's *Timaeus.* His main philological
claim concerning the structure of the seventh book of *Nicomachean
Ethics* was that it contained traces of three versions probably
written by some Peripatetic later than Eudemus. To this he added a
year later a discussion (ASV) of interpolations in
*Categories*, *Posterior Analytics* and *Eudemian
Ethics*. In a postscript to the revised version of AS (1912), he
claimed, however, that the variants were probably different drafts
written by Aristotle himself. His pamphlet on the *Timaeus*
(IPT) was mainly polemical, painstakingly detailing R. D.
Archer-Hind's 'obligations' in his 1888 edition of
the *Timaeus* to earlier authors, J. G. Stallbaum more than any
other.



Cook Wilson is mainly remembered today for two contributions to Plato
studies, foremost for his paper 'On the Platonist Doctrine of
the asumbletoi
arithmoi' (OPD), which bears
on the debate on 'intermediates' in Plato. This issue
originates in Aristotle's claim in *Met*. A 6
987b14-17 that Plato believed that the objects of mathematics
occupy an "intermediate position" between sensible things
and Ideas/Forms. Since there is no explicit commitment to this claim
in Plato, scholars either rejected Aristotle's testimony or
looked for passages where Plato might be said to have implicitly
endorsed it, such as the Line at the end of Book VI of the
*Republic*. Cook Wilson argued against reading this passage as
implicitly endorsing 'intermediates', claiming that
objects of thought (dianoia) are
Ideas, because Plato stated in *Rep.* 511d2-3 that they
are "intelligible given a principle"
(kaitoi
noeton onton
met' arkes), and, as
Cook Wilson saw the matter: "nothing but an
idea can be an object of
nous" (OPD, 259).



He also argued that universals being 'one' in contrast
with the 'many' to which they correspond, there could be
only one 'Circularity', one 'number Two', etc.
This means that, for example, 'the number Two' or the
universal 'twoness' being one, it cannot be a plurality
composed of units and thus that 'two and two make four' is
not an addition of universals such as 'twoness and twoness make
fourness' or 'the number Two added to the number Two makes
the number Four'. These expressions have no sense according to
Cook Wilson, for whom 'two and two make four' merely means
that 'any two things added to any other two things make four
things' (OPD, 249). This is why numbers *qua* universals
are 'unaddible' or 'uncombinable'
(asumbletoi) as
Aristotle put it in, e.g., *Met*. M 8 1083a34, a view that Cook
Wilson takes to be "exactly the Platonic doctrine" (OPD,
250).



The need to posit 'intermediates' can be seen as arising
from the fact that one cannot perform arithmetical operations on these
'Idea numbers', as Cook Wilson called them, while one
would need entities that are 'in between' (ta
metaxu) sensible things and Idea numbers
to account for arithmetical truths as elementary as 'two and two
make four'. Cook Wilson nevertheless argued against commitment
to 'intermediates' (OPD, SS4), his view being that
arithmetical operations are always on particulars and if the
'monadic numbers' of arithmetic are plurality of units,
Idea numbers are properties of these numbers. That Plato had reached
this view of Idea numbers as
asumbletoi
arithmoi at the time he wrote the
*Republic* or later on would be yet another issue.



Cook Wilson also argued (OPD, SS5) that Idea numbers form a series
ordered by a relation of 'before and after'
(proteron kai
usteron) and, following
Aristotle's testimony in *Eth. Nic.* I 6,
1096a17-19 and *Met.* B 3, 999a6-14, that there
could be no genus of the species forming such ordered series (for a
critique of this reading of Aristotle, see Lloyd (1962)). In other
words, there can be no Form or universal of the Idea numbers. He would
thus claim that in the proposition 'The number Two is a
universal', the expression 'a universal' cannot
denote in turn a particularization of 'universalness',
because the latter is not a true universal as it lacks an
"intrinsic character" (SI, 342 n.1 & 351), and this he
took to be the point of Plato's doctrine of "unaddible
numbers" (SI, 352).



Cook Wilson not only believed that these views are the true
interpretation of Plato, but also that they are true
*simpliciter* and he criticized Dedekind's definition of
continuity in *Stetigkeit und die irrationale Zahlen* (Dedekind
1872) for "not realising the truth attained so long ago in Greek
philosophy that [numbers] are Universals" and not magnitudes
(OPD, 250, n.1 & SI, ciii) (Joseph 1948, 59-60). He never
explained in any details how this critique is supposed to work against
Dedekind, but provided instead lengthy and unconvincing arguments for
also rejecting Russell's logicist definition of natural numbers
on similar ground (see section 8).



Despite the fact that he drew such preposterous consequences from it,
Cook Wilson's reading of Plato and Aristotle in OPD remained
influential, albeit controversial, throughout the last century,
through Ross' edition of Aristotle's *Metaphysics*
(1924, liii-lvii, *ad* B 3, 999a6-10 & M 6,
1080a15-b4) and especially through its advocacy by Harold
Cherniss in *Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the
Academy* (Cherniss 1944, App. vi) and *The Riddle of the Early
Academy* (Cherniss 1945, 34-37 & 76). Cherniss'
student Reginald Allen still claimed in the 1980s that Cook
Wilson's is the "true view of Plato's
arithmetic" (Allen 1983, 231-233). (For further
endorsements of Cook Wilson's reading see (Joseph 1948, 33 &
chap. v), (Klein 1968, 62) or (Taran 1981, 13-18) and for
criticisms see (Hardie 1936, chap. vi), (Austin 1979, 302) or
(Burnyeat 2012, 166-167).)



Cook Wilson's other notable contribution is the provision, in
'On the Geometrical Problem in Plato's *Meno*, 86e
sqq.' (GPP), of a key addition to S. H. Butcher's
clarification (1888) of the notoriously obscure geometrical
illustration of *Meno* 86e-87b, showing that Plato did
not intend to offer an actual solution to the problem of the
inscription of an area as a triangle within a circle, but simply to
determine, while alluding to the method of analysis, the possibility
of its solution. An analogous explanation of that passage was provided
later on by T. L. Heath (1921, 298-303) and A. S. L. Farquharson
(1923), while Knorr (1986, 71-74) and Menn (2002, 209-214)
defended this interpretation without mention of Cook Wilson. (See also
the critical discussion of the 'Cook Wilson/Heath/Knorr
interpretation' in (Lloyd 1992), as well as (Scott 2006,
133-137) and (Wolfsdorf 2008, 164-169).)



Apart from these, Cook Wilson's impact seems to have been
limited to minute points of philology, such as the references to his
critical comments on Apelt's edition of *De Melisso Xenophane
Gorgia* (APT) in (Kerferd 1955) or to his pamphlet on the
*Timaeus* in A. E. Taylor's and F. M. Cornford's
own commentaries of that dialogue, and the critical discussion of his
views in Ross' edition of *Aristotle's Prior and
Posterior Analytics* (Ross 1949, 496-497).



Given that Cook Wilson's views on knowledge and belief (see
section 5) are linked to Plato's own distinction between
episteme and
doxa, it is worth mentioning that they also had an
impact on the study of Plato's dialogues. For example, although
A. D. Woozley held a different view of knowledge as "not
something generically different from belief, but as the limited case
of belief" (Woozley 1949, 193), Cook Wilson's distinction
between knowledge and belief is introduced as an interpretative tool
in chapter 8 of R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, *Plato's
Republic. A Philosophical Commentary* (Cross & Woozley 1964),
while the idea that knowledge involves 'reflection' (the
'accretion' described in section 5) and the concept of
'being under the impression that' are involved in
Ryle's discussion of knowledge in Plato's
*Theaetetus* (Ryle 1990, 23 & 27-28). (For a similar
claim about *Theaetetus*, see Prichard (1950, 88), and for Ryle
on Cook Wilson on *Parmenides*, see end of section 7.) The
impact of Cook Wilson's views was at any rate not limited to
Plato studies: they form, for example, the basis for H. A.
Prichard's critique of Kant in his *Kant*'s*Theory of Knowledge* (Prichard 1909) or of his lectures on the
Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume on knowledge (Prichard 1950, chap.
5). (See in particular Prichard (1909, 245), quoted below or (1950,
86, 88 & 96) for statements of the distinction between knowledge
and belief.)


## 3. On Method: Ordinary Language



If Cook Wilson's reverence towards ordinary language derived
from his training as a philologist, it was not limited to occasional
references to instances of usage to buttress his arguments. He
believed that in philosophy one must above all "uncompromisingly
[...] try to find out what a given activity of thought
presupposes as implicit or explicit in our consciousness", i.e.,
to "try to get at the facts of consciousness and not let them be
overlaid as is so commonly done with preconceived theories" (SI,
328). He also spoke of the latter as originating in 'reflective
thought' and argued it has two major defects. First, it is based
on principles that, for all we know, might be false and,
concomitantly, it is too abstract, because it is not based on the
consideration of particular concrete examples. Indeed, in a passage
where he criticized Bradley's regress arguments against the
reality of relations (Bradley 1897, chap. III), Cook Wilson begins by
pointing out that "throughout this chapter there is not a single
illustration, though it is of the last importance that there should
be" (SI, 692). (On this critique of Bradley, see also Joseph
(1916a, 37).) This is, however, slightly misleading, given that
Bradley opens his discussion in his previous chapter, where a first
regress is deployed, with the case of a lump of sugar (Bradley 1897,
16).) As H. H. Price put it later, for Cook Wilson and his epigones
"to philosophize without instances would be merely a waste of
time" (Price 1947, 336).



Secondly, Cook Wilson thought that philosophers are most likely to
introduce distinctions of their own that do not correspond to the
'facts of consciousness' and thus distort our
understanding of them. He therefore strove to uncover these
'facts of consciousness' through an analysis of concrete
examples which would be free of philosophical jargon. This is strongly
reminiscent of the 'descriptive psychology' of the
Brentano School. As a matter of fact, Gilbert Ryle, who described
himself as a "fidgetty Cook Wilsonian" in his youth (Ryle
1993, 106) and who was also probably the only Oxonian who knew
something about phenomenology in the 1920s, believed Cook
Wilson's descriptive analyses to be as good as any from Husserl
(Ryle 1971, vol. I, 176 & 203n.).



In what may be deemed a variant of the 'linguistic turn',
Cook Wilson believed that an examination of the "*verbal*
form of statement" was needed in order "to see what light
the form of expression might throw upon problems about the mental
state" (SI, 90), thus that ordinary language would be the guide
to the 'facts of consciousness', because it embodies
philosophically relevant distinctions:



> 
> It is not fair to condemn the ordinary view wholly, nor is it safe:
> for, if we do, we may lose sight of something important behind it.
> Distinctions in current language can never safely be neglected. (SI,
> 46)
> 



> 
> The authority of language is too often forgotten in philosophy, with
> serious results. Distinctions made or applied in ordinary language are
> more likely to be right than wrong. Developed, as they have been, in
> what may be called the natural course of thinking, under the influence
> of experience and in the apprehension of particular truths, whether of
> everyday life or of science, they are not due to any preconceived
> theory. In this way the grammatical forms themselves have arisen; they
> are not the issue of any system, they are not invented by any one.
> They have been developed unconsciously in accordance with distinctions
> which we come to apprehend in our experience. (SI, 874)
> 



> 
> Reflective thought tends to be too abstract, while experience which
> has developed the popular distinctions recorded in language is always
> in contact with the particular facts. (SI, 875)
> 



For this reason, Cook Wilson considered it "repugnant to create
a technical term out of all relation to ordinary language" (SI,
713) and SI is replete with appeals to ordinary language. For example,
he argued in support of his views on universals that "ordinary
language reflects faithfully a true metaphysics of universals"
(SI (208), see section 7). But such appeals were not just meant to
undermine 'preconceived theories', they were also
constructive, e.g., when he distinguished between the activity of
thinking and 'what we think', i.e., between
'act' and 'content' (SI, 63-64), arguing
that this is "likely to be right" because "it is the
natural and universal mode of expression in ordinary untechnical
language, ancient and modern" (SI, 67) and "it comes from
the very way of speaking which is natural and habitual with those who
do not believe in any form of idealism" (SI, 64). As it turns
out, Cook Wilson believed that the 'content', i.e.,
'what we think' is not *about* the thing we think
about, but the thing itself (so knowledge contains its object, see
section 6). 



These views were to prove particularly influential in the case of J.
L. Austin, who began his studies at Oxford four years after the
publication of SI. It is a common mistake to think of Wittgenstein as
having had some formative influence on Austin, as he was arguably the
least influenced by Wittgenstein of the Oxford philosophers (Hacker
1996, 172). (On this point see also Marion (2011), for the contrary
claim, Harris & Unnsteinsson (2018).) At any rate, the evidence
adduced here and elsewhere since Marion (2000) ought not to be ignored
and, the philosophy of G. E. Moore notwithstanding, it is rather Cook
Wilson and epigones such as Prichard that are the source of the
peculiar brand of 'analytical philosophy' that was to take
root in Oxford in the 1930s, known as 'Oxford philosophy'
or 'ordinary language philosophy'. One merely needs here
to recall the following well-known passage from Austin's
'A Plea for Excuses', which is almost a paraphrase of Cook
Wilson:



> 
> Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found
> worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in
> the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more
> numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the
> survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and
> reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to
> think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon--the most favoured
> alternative method. (Austin 1979, 182)
> 



Neither Cook Wilson nor Austin believed, however, that ordinary
language was not open to improvements. Cook Wilson was explicit about
this when detailing his procedure:



> 
> 
> Obviously we must start from the facts of the use of a name, and shall
> be guided at first certainly by the name: and so far we may appear to
> be examining the meaning of a name. Next we have to think about the
> individual instances, to see what they have in common, what it is that
> has actuated us. [...] At this stage we must take first what
> seems to us common in certain cases before us: next test what we have
> got by considering other instances of *our own* application of
> the name, other instances in which has been working in us. Now when
> thus thinking of other instances, we may see that they do not come
> under the formula that we have generalized. [...] There is a
> further stage when we have, or think we have, discovered the nature of
> the principle which has really actuated us. We may now correct some of
> our applications of the name because we see that some instances do not
> really possess the quality which corresponds to what we now understand
> the principle to be. This explains how it should be possible to
> criticize the facts out of which we have been drawing our data. (SI,
> 44-45)
> 
> 
> 



Austin's 'linguistic phenomenology' (Austin 1979,
182) was devised along similar lines (on this point, see Longworth
2018a), and he also thought that ordinary language could be improved
upon:



> 
> 
> Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there
> is such a thing. [...] ordinary language is *not* the last
> word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon
> and superseded. Only remember, it is the *first* word. (Austin
> 1979, 185)
> 
> 
> 



It is worth noting that Cook Wilson uses in the above passage the
example of Socrates' search for definitions as an illustration
of his procedure. This strongly suggests that he derived it from
consideration of the method of induction
(epagoge) in Ancient philosophy:
collect first a number of applications of a given term and, focussing
on salient features of these cases, formulate as an hypothesis a
general claim covering them, then test it for counterexamples against
novel applications. (Longworth (2018a) has also drawn some interesting
parallels with 'experimental mathematics' (see Baker
(2008) and the entry to this Encyclopedia).)


## 4. Apprehension & Judgement



Since Cook Wilson's philosophy was largely defined in opposition
to British Idealism, it is worth beginning with some points of
explicit disagreement. Roughly put, under the idealist view knowledge
is constituted by a coherent set of mutually supporting beliefs, none
of which are basic, while others would be derivative. Surprisingly,
when H. H. Joachim published *The Nature of Truth* (1906),
perhaps the best statement of the coherence theory of truth usually
attributed to the British Idealists, Cook Wilson criticized him for
relying on a discredited 'correspondence' theory (SI,
809-810). Cook Wilson did not argue directly against the
coherence theory, as Russell did (Russell 1910, 131-146), but
simply took the opposite foundationalist stance. He reasoned that the
chain of justification ought to come to an end and that this end point
is some non-derivative knowledge, which he called
'apprehension' (SI, 816). As he put it: "it becomes
evident that there must be apprehensions not got by inference or
reasoning" (UL, SS 18).



As Farquharson noted (SI, 78 n.), Cook Wilson did not define his key
notion of 'apprehension'. (This is related with Cook
Wilson's claim discussed in section 5 that knowledge is
undefinable.) The notion appears to be at the same time close to
Aristotle's 'noesis' and to Russell's
'acquaintance'. Cook Wilson obviously took his lead from a
tradition beginning with *Posterior Analytics* B 19 and his
comments are reminiscent of Thomas Reid, who argues in his *Essays
on the Intellectual Powers of Man* (Bk. II, chap. v) that
perception involves some conception of the object and the conviction
of its existence, this conviction being immediate, non-inferential and
not open to doubt. Cook Wilson was not exactly faithful to Aristotle
and Reid, however, since he argued that apprehensions can be both
perceptual and non-perceptual (SI, 79), and that some are obtained by
inference while some are not, the latter being the material of
inference (SI, 84-85). Furthermore, he argued that perceptual
apprehensions should not be confused with sensations, as the mere
having of a sensation is not yet to know what the sensation is, an
idea that has echoes in Austin (Austin 1979, 91-94 & 122
n.2). For this, one needs an "originative act of
consciousness" that goes beyond mere passivity and compares the
sensation in order to apprehend its definite character. As Cook Wilson
put it: "we are really comparing but we do not recognize that we
are" (SI, 46).



Cook Wilson thought it misleading to base logic on
'judgement' instead of 'proposition' or
'statement' (SI, 94) and he questioned the traditional
analysis of proposition under the form '*S* is
*P*', which he saw has having various meanings (Joseph
(1916a, 6), see also section 9 for a related point). In his polemics
against idealism, Cook Wilson's main target was the traditional
theory of judgement that one finds, e.g., in Bradley's
*Principles of Logic* (Bradley 1928), where the topic is simply
divided into 'judgement' and 'inference'.
There would thus be a common form of thinking called the
'judgement' that '*S* is *P*',
which would include non-inferred knowledge, opinion, and belief, but
would exclude inferred knowledge. One would be misled, he argued, by
the common verbal form '*S* is *P*' that
knowledge, belief, and opinion are species of the same genre called
'judgement' (SI, 86-7). He claimed instead to follow
'ordinary usage' in adopting a 'judicial'
account of 'judgement':



> 
> A judgement is a decision. To judge is to decide. It implies previous
> indecision; a previous thinking process, in which we were doubting.
> Those verbal statements, therefore, which result from a state of mind
> not preceded by such doubt, statements which are not decisions, are
> not judgements, though they may have the same verbal form as
> judgements. (SI, 92-3)
> 



He further argued first that inferring is thus one of the forms of
judgement: "if we take judging in its most natural sense, that
is as decision on evidence after deliberation, then inferring is just
one of those form of apprehending to which the words judging and
judgement most properly apply" (SI, 86). Some inferences are,
however, immediately apprehended, e.g., when one recognizes that it
follows from 'if *p*, then *q*' and
'*p*', that '*q*'. Furthermore,
the presence of a prior indecision or doubt, as opposed to confidence,
is deemed an essential ingredient of judgement. It does not, however,
fully put an end to doubt: as a judge may well be mistaken, our
ordinary judgements "form fallible opinions only" (Joseph
1916a, 160).



Now, if indecision and doubt are involved prior to judgement,
apprehension or knowledge (perceptual or not) could not be judgement,
because, by definition, there is no room for doubt in these cases.
When one is of the opinion that *p*, one has found the evidence
being in favour of *p*, without being conclusive. But Cook
Wilson thought statements of opinion as not involving the expression
of a decision, so they not judgement either:



> 
> 
> It is a peculiar thing--the result of estimate--and we call
> it by a peculiar name, opinion. For it, taken in its strict and proper
> sense, we can use no term that belongs to knowing. For the opinion
> that A is B is founded on evidence we know to be insufficient, whereas
> it is of the very nature of knowledge not to make its statements at
> all on grounds recognized to be insufficient, nor to come to any
> decision except that the grounds are insufficient; for it is here that
> in the knowing activity we stop. (SI, 99-100)
> 
> 
> 



Moreover, there is no 'common mental attitude' involved in
'knowing' and 'opining':



> 
> 
> One need hardly add that there is no verbal form corresponding to any
> such fiction as a mental activity manifested in a common mental
> attitude to the object about which we know or about which we have an
> opinion. Moreover it is vain to seek such a common quality in belief,
> on the ground that the man who knows that *A* is *B* and the
> man who has that opinion both believe
> that *A* *is* *B*. (SI, 100)
> 
> 
> 



It is an important characteristic of 'believing', setting
it apart from other 'activities of consciousness', that it
is accompanied with a feeling of confidence, greater than in
opining:



> 
> To a high degree of such confidence, where it naturally exists, is
> attached the word belief, and language here, as not infrequently, is
> true to distinctions which have value in our consciousness. It is not
> opinion, it is not knowledge, it is not properly even judgement. (SI,
> 102)
> 



The upshot of these remarks is that 'knowledge',
'belief', and 'opinion' are not, as idealists
would have it, species of the same genre, 'judgement' or
'thinking': these are all distinct and *sui
generis*. This leads to the all-important distinction between
'knowledge' and 'belief', discussed in the
next section: they do not merely differ in kind, they are not even two
species of the same genus (Prichard 1950, 87). But Cook Wilson also
held the view that knowing is more foundational, so to speak, as it is
presupposed by other 'activities of thinking' such as
judging and opining. For example, opinion involves knowledge, but goes
beyond it:



> 
> 
> There will be something else besides judgement to be recognized in the
> formation of opinion, that is to say knowledge, as manifested in such
> activities as occur in ordinary perception; activities, in other
> words, which are not properly speaking *decisions*. (SI,
> 96)
> 
> 
> 


## 5. Knowing & Believing



Given that "our experience of knowing [is] the presupposition of
any inquiry we can undertake", Cook Wilson reasoned that
"we cannot make knowing itself a subject of inquiry in the sense
of asking what knowing is" (SI, 39). It follows immediately from
this impossibility of inquiring about the nature of knowledge that a
'theory of knowledge' is itself impossible, a consequence
he first expressed in a letter to Prichard in 1904:



> 
> We cannot *construct* knowing--the act of
> apprehending--out of any elements. I remember quite early in my
> philosophic reflection having an instinctive aversion to the very
> expression '*theory* of knowledge'. I felt the
> words themselves suggested a fallacy. (SL, 803)
> 



> 
> Knowledge is *sui generis* and therefore a 'theory'
> of it is impossible. Knowledge is simply knowledge, and an attempt to
> state it in terms of something else must end in describing something
> which is not knowledge. (Prichard 1909, 245)
> 



Thus, knowledge, as obtained in 'apprehension', could not
be defined in terms of belief augmented by some other property or
properties, as in the definition of knowledge as 'justified true
belief'. Cook Wilson is thus to be counted among early
20th-century opponents of this view (Dutant (2015), Le
Morvan (2017) & Antognazza (2020)). This view is known since
Timothy Williamson's *Knowledge and its Limits* as
'knowledge first' (see Williamson (2000, v) and Adam
Carter, Gordon & Jarvis (2017) for recent developments of this
view).



At the turn of the last century, it was also held by the neo-Kantian
philosopher Leonard Nelson (Nelson 1908 & 1949), to whom Cook
Wilson alludes in SI (872), but it was also held unbeknownst to him by
members of the Brentano school, such as Adolf Reinach, Max Scheler,
and Edmund Husserl. (See Mulligan (2014) for a survey.) It was to
become the central plank of 'Oxford Realism'. For the
Oxonians and the Brentanians one knows that *p* only if one
'apprehends' that *p*. As Kevin Mulligan put it:
"one knows that *p* in the strict sense only if one has
perceived that *p* and such perceiving is not itself any sort
of belief or judging" (Mulligan 2014, 382). A version of this
view is defended today by Timothy Williamson, according to whom
knowledge is a mental state "being in which is necessary *and
sufficient* for knowing *p*" (Williamson 2000, 21),
and which "cannot be analysed into more basic concepts"
(Williamson 2000, 33). The claim is, however, about 'knowledge
that *p*' and not anymore about 'apprehending that
*p*'.



If knowledge is indeed distinct from belief, then the difference
cannot be one of degree in the feeling of confidence or in the amount
of evidential support:



> 
> In knowing, we can have nothing to do with the so-called
> 'greater strength' of the evidence on which the opinion is
> grounded; simply because we know that this 'greater
> strength' of evidence of A's being B is compatible with
> A's not being B after all. (SI, 100)
> 



> 
> To know is not to have a belief of a special kind, differing from
> beliefs of other kinds; and no improvement in a belief and no increase
> in the feeling of conviction which it implies will convert it into
> knowledge. (Prichard 1950, 87)
> 



Austin has a nice supporting example in *Sense and Sensibilia*,
using the fact that 'seeing that' is factive: if no pig is
in sight, I might accumulate evidence that one lives here: buckets of
pig food, pig-like marks on the ground, the smell, etc. But if the pig
suddenly appears:



> 
> 
> ... there is no longer any question of collecting evidence; its
> coming into view doesn't provide me with more *evidence*
> that it's a pig, I can now just *see* that it is, the
> question is settled. (Austin 1962, 115)
> 
> 
> 



There is a parallel move by John McDowell in 'Criteria,
Defeasibility and Knowledge' against the notion of
'criteria', deployed by some commentators of Wittgenstein
as a sort of 'highest common factor' between evidence and
proof (McDowell 1998, 369-394). Here, a 'highest common
factor' would be a state of mind that would count as knowing,
depending on one or more added factors, but would count in their
absence as something else such as believing (McDowell 1998, 386).
McDowell is now seen as having thus put forward a form of
'disjunctivism' about knowledge and belief (more on
disjunctivism in section 6). Although McDowell does not mention these
authors, Travis (2005) has shown that this move has roots in both Cook
Wilson and Austin. The fact that there is no highest common factor to
knowledge and belief entails for Cook Wilson a rejection of
'hybrid' and 'externalist' accounts of
knowledge. Any 'hybrid' account would factor knowledge
into an internal part, possibly a copy of the object known, and a
relation of that copy to the object itself (see immediately below and
section 6). Since there is no such highest common factor, this view,
integral to 'externalist' accounts of knowledge, had to be
rejected (Travis 2005, 287).



But Cook Wilson was led here to a further thesis. If one is prepared
to say 'I believe *p*', when one is not sure that
evidence already known is sufficient to claim that 'I know that
*p*', then it looks as if one should always be in a
position to know if one knows or if one merely believes. He argued,
however, that 'knowing that one knows' should not mean
that, once a particular piece of knowledge has been obtained, one
should then decide if it counts as knowledge or not, because this
decision would count again as a piece knowledge and "we should
get into an unending series of knowings" (SI, 107). This is why
he insisted that knowing that one knows "must be contained
within the knowing process itself":



> 
> 
> Belief is not knowledge and the man who knows does not believe at all
> when he knows: he knows it. (SI, 101)
> 
> 
> 
> The consciousness that the knowing process is a knowing process must
> be contained within the knowing process itself. (SI, 107)
> 
> 
> 



This claim was given further emphasis by Prichard, but his own
formulation differ in an important respect, since he introduces the
idea of a "reflection" in virtue of which when one knows
that *p*, one is able to know that one knows that *p*
and, when one believes that *p*, one is also able to know that
one believes that *p*, so that it would be impossible to
mistake knowledge for belief and vice-versa:



> 
> 
> We must recognize that whenever we know something we either do, or at
> least can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it, and
> that whenever we believe something, we similarly either do or can
> directly know that we are believing it and not knowing it. (Prichard
> 1950, 86 & 88)
> 
> 
> 



One can see that this is not quite Cook Wilson's position, given
his regress argument. Prichard assumes that, whenever one does not
know, one knows that one does not know:



> 
> 
> When knowing, for example, that the noise we are hearing is loud, we
> do or can know that we are knowing this and so cannot be mistaken, and
> when believing that the noise is due to a car we know or can know that
> we are believing and not knowing this. (Prichard 1950, 89)
> 
> 
> 



Charles Travis called the claim that in knowing that *p* one
can always distinguish one's condition from all states in which
not-*p* the 'accretion' (Travis (2005, 290) &
Kalderon & Travis (2013, 501)) and he argued that it damages the
core of Cook Wilson's and Prichard's positions (Travis
2005, 289-294). To use the above example of the pig suddenly
coming into view, the claim is that, although one can know by
reflection that one knows that one is seeing a pig, one cannot by mere
reflection exclude the possibility that one is in fact seeing some
cleverly engineered 'ringer'. The upshot of this argument
is not immediately clear: if it is the case that one knows *p*
only if *p* and one knows that one knows that *p*, how
could one be unable to exclude the case that not-*p*, hence
that one does not know *p*? At all events, Travis sees this as
reinstalling the argument from illusion (Travis 2005, 291), that had
already been subjected to numerous critiques from an early paper by
Prichard to Austin's *Sense and Sensibilia*:



> 
> 
> That statements about appearances imply that we at least know enough
> of reality to say that real things have certain *possible*
> predicates, e.g., bent or convergent. To deny this is to be wholly
> unable to state how things look. [...] It is only because we know
> that our distance from an object affects its apparent size that we can
> draw a distinction between the size it looks and the size it is. If we
> forget this we can draw no distinction at all. (Prichard 1906,
> 225-226)
> 
> 
> 
> ... it is important to remember that all talk of deception only
> *makes sense* against a background of general non-deception.
> (You can't fool all the people all of the time.) It must be
> possible to *recognize* a case of deception by checking the odd
> case against more normal ones. (Austin 1962, 11)
> 
> 
> 



Guy Longworth (2019) has detailed how much Austin owed to Cook Wilson
on knowledge (see Urmson (1988) for a discussion in relation to
Prichard): Austin held the 'knowledge first' view and,
concomitantly, rejected the possibility of a theory of knowledge
(Austin 1962, 124), he viewed knowledge as akin to proof, thus as
being different in kind from belief on accumulation of evidence (see
Austin (1962, 115) & (1979, 99)). But Austin dropped the
'accretion' in 'Other Minds' as he shifted the
analysis of the claim that 'If I know, I can't be
wrong' (SI (69) & Prichard (1950, 88)) to that of 'I
know that *p*' as providing a form of warrant,
one's authority for saying that *p* (Austin 1979,
99-100). Krista Lawlor (2013) recently suggested that Austin
introduced here the speech act of 'assurance'. (Although
it has been claimed that the idea of 'performatives'
originates in an exchange of letters on promises with Prichard
(Warnock 1963, 347), that dimension remained unexplored in Oxford
Realism before Austin, who was consciously moving away here from
strict focus on 'statements'.) 



The 'accretion' raises indeed an issue concerning
'other minds', given that it is one's reflective
view that, supposedly, authoritatively determines that one knows:
could there be other ways to determine whether someone else knows?
(See Longworth (2019).) This is how Austin, who also viewed knowledge
as a state of mind, was arguably led to explore the ramifications the
challenge 'How do you know?' to the person claiming
'I know'. Although he warned against the
'descriptive fallacy' (Austin 1979, 103), Austin's
claim appears to be, rather, that 'I know' has functions
"over and above describing the subjective mental state of
knowing" (Longworth (2019, 195), see Austin (1979,
78-79)).



To come back to Cook Wilson, he grappled here with related problems.
It is implied by the above that knowledge requires a sort of warrant
very much akin to a proof and, consequently, "we are forced to
allow that we are certain of very much less than we should have said
otherwise" (Prichard 1950, 97). Mathematical knowledge appears
paradigmatic. As Prichard put it: "In mathematics we have,
without real possibility of question, an instance of knowledge; we are
certain, we *know*" (Prichard 1919, 302). (Joseph used
this view to argue against Mill's empiricist account of
mathematics, using 'intuition' where Cook Wilson would use
'apprehension' (Joseph 1916a, 543-553).) Alas, Cook
Wilson put forth the axiom of parallels in Euclidean geometry as an
example of knowledge, and dismissed non-Euclidean geometries as
inconsistent (see section 1). If for any *p* such as the axiom
of parallels, someone fails to 'apprehend' it, then all he
could do is, somehow lamely, ask them to try and "remove
[...] whatever confusions or prejudices [...] prevent them
from apprehending the truth of the disputed proposition"
(Furlong 1941, 128).



This reply raises a *prima facie* problem for Cook Wilson,
because he could not have known, in the sense of 'knowing
*p* only if *p*', that 'non-Euclidean
geometries are inconsistent', since it has been proved that they
are not. He thus unwittingly provided an illustration of the need to
account, from his own internalist standpoint, for the sort of error
(or 'false judgement') committed when one claims to know
that *p*, while it is the case that not-*p*. For someone
to know or to be in error while thinking that one knows would just be
two undistinguishable states, since which of the two happens to be the
case would depend on some external factors:



> 
> ... the two states of mind in which the man conducts his
> arguments, the correct and the erroneous one, are quite
> undistinguishable to the man himself. But if this is so, as the man
> does not know in the erroneous state of mind, neither can he know in
> the other state. (SI, 107)
> 



Cook Wilson saw this a threat to the very possibility of demonstrative
knowledge, since one would never be sure that any demonstration is
true (SI, 107-108). Answering the threat, he would need here is
thus to make room for errors--when one thinks that one knows but
one does not--but without excluding by the same token the
possibility that knowing entails being in a position that one knows
that one knows.



Cook Wilson was thus led to distinguish, in some of his most
intriguing descriptive analyses, a further 'form of
consciousness', different from both knowledge and belief (or
opinion), which he called 'being under the impression
that' (SI, 109-113). A typical example being when one sees
the back of Smith on the street and, 'being under the impression
that' it is a friend, say Jones, one slaps him on the back, only
to realize one's mistake when he turns his head. The
"essential feature" of this state of mind is, according to
Cook Wilson, "the absence of any sense of uncertainty or doubt,
the action being one which would not be done if we felt the slightest
uncertainty" (SI, 110). Thus, one did not falsely judge that the
man on the street was Jones, because there was no judgement at all:
one was merely 'under the impression that' it was him.
Maybe one had some evidence that it was Jones, but the point is that
one acted on it without questioning the evidence: it was not used as
evidence, there was no assessment out of which one may be said to
prefer this possibility that other possibility, because no other
possibility was entertained. In this state of mind, the possibility of
error is somehow excluded, given that it does not occur to one that
'This man is Jones' might be false. It is thus not the
case that one thought that one knew but really did not, because it is
not true that to begin with one thought one knew, since one had not
reflected on one's evidence. The absence of doubt or uncertainty
opens the door to the possibility of being mistaken while taking
oneself as being certain.



The notion of 'being under the impression that' played a
significant role in the writings of the Oxford Realists, not just
those of Prichard, who also spoke of the 'an unquestioning frame
of mind', 'thinking without question' or
'taking for granted' (Prichard 1950, 79 &
96-98), but also those of William Kneale, H. H. Price and J. L.
Austin--see, e.g., Kneale (1949, 5 & 18), Price (1935), and
Austin (1962, 122). Perhaps most strikingly, Prichard was to drop the
'accretion' and argue in a late essay,
'Perception', that perception is not a kind of knowing: we
merely see colour extensions, which we systematically mistake for
objects or 'take for granted' to be objects (Prichard
1950, 52-68). Still, the notion of 'being under the
impression that' had its critics at Oxford, such as H. P. Grice,
who was aware of the difficulties raised by the
'accretion':



> 
> 
> This difficulty led Cook Wilson and his followers to the admission of
> a state of "taking for granted", which supposedly is
> subjectively indistinguishable from knowledge but unlike knowledge
> carried no guarantee of truth. But the modification amounts to
> surrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-called
> knowledge is really only "taking for granted"? (Grice
> 1989, 383-384)
> 
> 
> 



One may also justifiably feel that Cook Wilson has not fully explained
away cases of error such as his own in being certain that
'non-Euclidean geometries are inconsistent', because his
conviction was not the result of merely 'being under the
impression that'.



Nevertheless, the influence of Cook Wilson's conceptions was
felt in a variety of ways in the second half of the last century. H.
H. Price offered in *Belief* an important commentary on Cook
Wilson's notion of 'being under the impression that'
(Price (1969, 204-220), reprising some of the content of Price
(1935)). He deemed it an important addition to the traditional
'occurrence' analysis of belief, as opposed to the
'dispositional' analysis. Price usefully contrasted
'being under the impression that' with
'assent' (Price 1969, 211-212), which is usually
said to involve preference and confidence: in prefering *p* one
would decide in favour of *p* having alternatives *q*
and *r* in mind, but this is precisely not the case when
'being under the impression that', since in this state one
does not entertain alternatives. As Cook Wilson points out,
"there is a certain passivity and helplessness" involved
(SI, 113). There is no confidence either, since in this state of mind
doubt is not an option, hence no degree of certainty is involved.
Price also explored (1969, 212-216) connections between this
unquestioning state of mind and the notion of 'primitive
credulity' (Bain 1888, 511), i.e., the idea harking back to
Spinoza (*Ethics* IIp49s) that one naturally believes in the
reality of anything that is presented to one's mind, unless some
contradicting evidence is also occurring.



In contrast to Price, Jonathan Cohen argued that beliefs are
dispositions (Cohen (1989, 368) & (1992, 5)). He also rejected the
Cook Wilson's claim that belief involves confidence (see section
4), but, without crediting him (except privately), Cohen made use of
'being under the impression that' to define belief as a
disposition to 'normally to feel that *p*' or
'to feel it true that *p*' (Cohen (1989, 368) &
(1992, 7)). So defined, belief would thus differ from
'acceptance', which results from a conscious and voluntary
choice and involves, like Price's 'assent',
preference and confidence. Cohen further added to these differences
that acceptance is also subjectively closed under deductibility, while
this is not the case with belief:



> 
> 
> ... you may well feel it true that *p* and that
> if *p* then *q*, without feeling it true
> that *q*. You will just be failing to put two and two together,
> as it were. And detective-story writers, for example, show us how
> often and easily we can fail to do this with our beliefs. (Cohen 1992,
> 31-32)
> 
> 
> 



So acceptance of *p* involves 'premissing', i.e.,
the decision to use *p* as a premise or rule of inference in
further reasonings, and Cohen thought that he was carving nature at
its joint here: "Belief is a disposition to feel, acceptance a
policy for reasoning" (Cohen 1992, 5). This is in many ways not
faithful to Cook Wilson's original ideas, but one can sense
their presence within the idea of being unreflectively disposed to
feel that *p* being conceptually distinct from accepting
*p*.



On another note, John McDowell described knowledge in 'Knowledge
and the Internal' as a "standing in the space of
reasons" and argued against an "interiorization of the
space of reasons" that would occur if one were to think of
knowledge as achieving flawless standings in the space of reason,
"without needing the world to do us any favours" (McDowell
1998 395-396). If appearances were to be misleading, it would be
argued that this not be the result of faulty moves within the space of
reason but simply an "unkindness of the world". This
conception, McDowell sees as opening the door to an
'hybrid' account of knowledge, with flawless standings in
the space of reasons as an internal part, which would provide
necessary conditions for knowledge, and favours from the
world--when thing are as they appear to be--as an extra
condition (McDowell 1998, 400). But, McDowell concludes, "the
very idea of reason as having a sphere of operation within which it is
capable of ensuring, without being beholden to the world that
one's postures are all right [...] has the look of a
fantasy" (McDowell 1998, 405). This is so precisely because the
resources from the space of reasons could not provide factiveness on
their own, so knowledge could *not* be completely constituted
by standings within it. To rid oneself of the fantasy, one needs
simply to recognize that on occasions when the world is what it
appears to be, this favour is "not extra to the person's
standing in the space of reasons" (McDowell 1998, 405) and that
"we are vulnerable to the world's playing us false; and
when the world does not play us false we are indebted to it"
(McDowell 1998, 407). Here too, although the terminology is taken from
Wilfrid Sellars, there is a recognizable source in Cook Wilson.



Finally, another significant development related to the
'accretion' is its connection with the 'knowing that
one knows' principle in epistemic logic, first introduced in
Jaakko Hintikka's ground-breaking *Knowledge and Belief*
(Hintikka 1962). Hintikka argued for the equivalence between 'I
know that *p*' and 'I know that I know that
*p*' or, more generally, that '*i* knows
that *p*' (*Kip*) implies
'*i* knows that *i* knows that *p*'
(*KiKip*) (Hintikka 1962, chap. 5). In
connection with this, he noticed that Prichard's introduction
the idea of "reflection" (see Prichard (1950, 88) quoted
above) turns the argument into an argument from introspection that
does not sustain the more general claim that '*i*
believes that *p*' (*Bip*) implies
'*i* knows that *i* believes that
*p*' (*KiBip*) (Hintikka
1962, 109-110). Still, Hintikka thought that Cook Wilson and
Prichard would be right, if their remarks were to be understood as
restricted to the case where *i* is the first-person pronoun
'I' (Hintikka 1962, 110). 



Although Williamson has picked up the Oxonian banner of
'knowledge first', this is one point where he did not
follow Cook Wilson and Prichard, since he argued against the
'knowing that one knows' principle with help of the notion
of 'luminosity'. A condition C is said to be
'luminous' if and only if for every case *a*, if C
obtains in *a* then in *a* one is in a position to know
that C obtains (Williamson 2000, 95). Williamson (2000, chap. 4)
provided arguments against 'luminosity', thus that one can
know without being able to know that one knows. 


## 6. Perception



Cook Wilson also argued against idealism that in apprehension it is
neither the case that the object exists only within the apprehending
consciousness, nor that it is constituted by it: the object is
independent of the apprehending consciousness. As he wrote: "the
apprehension of an object is only possible through a being of the
object other than its being apprehended, and it is this being, no part
itself of the apprehending thought, which is what is
apprehended" (SI, 74). This independence, he considered to be
presupposed by the very idea of knowledge expounded above. But he
further rejected the distinction between act, content and object of
perception, first by negating the act-object distinction:



> 
> 
> In our ordinary experience and in the sciences, the thinker or
> observer loses himself in a manner in the particular object he is
> perceiving or the truth he is proving. That is what he is thinking
> about, and not about himself; and, though knowledge and perception
> imply both the distinction of the thinker from the object and the
> active working of that distinction, we must not confuse this with the
> statement that the thinking subject, in actualizing this distinction,
> thinks explicitly about himself, and his own activity, as distinct
> from the object. (SI, 79)
> 
> 
> 



And, secondly, by rejecting the notion of 'content':
"For the only thing that can be found as 'content'
of the apprehending thought is the nature of the object
apprehended" (SI, 75). Austin echoed this last point saying that
"our senses are dumb" (Austin 1962, 11). (There is an
extensive literature on this claim, see, e.g., (Travis 2004) or
(Massin 2011).) The point is not that perception does not aim at an
object, but merely to deny that it does so through a
'content' acting as intermediary:



> 
> what I think of the red object is its own redness, not some mental
> copy of redness in my mind. I regard it as having real redness and not
> as having my copy of redness. [...] If we ask in any instance
> what it is we think of a given object of knowledge, we find it always
> conceived as the nature or part of the nature of the thing known. (SI,
> 64)
> 



What one apprehends must be the real object itself, not "some
mental copy" of it, so Cook Wilson is claiming here that, as a
state of mind, knowledge contains its object: "what we apprehend
[...] is included in the apprehension as a part of the activity
or reality of apprehending" (SI, 70). A long letter to G. F.
Stout (SI, 764-800) is of particular importance here, where Cook
Wilson criticized Stout on 'Primary and Secondary
Qualities' (Stout 1904), with this key diagnosis, of the
'objectification of the appearing as appearance':



> 
> 
> This is sometimes spoken from the side of the object as the
> *appearance* of the object to us. This 'appearance'
> then gets distinguished from the object [...] But next the
> *appearance*, though properly the appear*ing* of the
> object, gets itself to be looked on as itself an object and the
> immediate object of our consciousness, and being already, as we have
> seen, distinguished from the object and related to our subjectivity,
> becomes, so to say, a merely subjective
> 'object'--'appearance' in that sense. and
> so, as *appearance* of the object, it has now to be represented
> not as the object but as some phenomenon caused in our consciousness
> by the object. Thus for the true appearance (= appearing) to us of the
> *object* is substituted, through the
> 'objectification' of the appearing as appearance, the
> appearing to us of an *appearance*, the appearing of a
> phenomenon caused in us by the object. (SI, 796)
> 
> 
> 



Cook Wilson's rejection of 'hybrid' accounts of
knowledge (see the previous section) is linked to his rejection of
epistemological 'intermediaries', so that knowledge could
not be of some such 'objectified' appearance. He
considered all such intermediaries ('images',
'copies', 'representative', *tertium
quid*, etc.) as "not only useless in philosophy but
misleading as tending to obscure the solution of a difficult
problem" (SI, 772). In this he stood in the tradition of Thomas
Reid, his arguments were as a matter of fact first developed against
the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume (for example in UL (SS
10)). In his letter to Stout, Cook Wilson put it thus:



> 
> 
> You begin an important section of your argument by assuming the idea
> of sensations being *representative.*
> 
> 
> 
> They {represent--express--stand for} something other than
> themselves.
> 
> 
> 
> Now, I venture to think that the idea of such *representation*
> in philosophy, or psychology rather, is very loose and treacherous
> and, if used at all, should be preceded by a 'critique' of
> such *representative* character, and an explanation of the
> exact sense in which the word representative is used. (SI, 769)
> 
> 
> 



Against views of this kind, Cook Wilson developed three arguments in
his letter. First, he pointed out that it is impossible to know
anything about the relation between the representative and the object,
since one can never truly compare the former to the latter. Secondly,
he claimed that representationalist theories are always in danger of
leading towards idealism, since one must then somehow
'prove' the existence of the object which is, so to speak,
'behind' its representatives--there might be none.
Thirdly, he claimed that all such theories beg the question, since the
representative has to be apprehended in turn by the mind, and not only
this further 'apprehension' remains unexplained, it would
require that the mind be equipped with the very apparatus that the
representationalist theories were, to begin with, devised to
explain:



> 
> We want to explain knowing an object and we explain it solely in terms
> of the object known, and that by giving the mind not the object but
> some idea of it which is said to be like it--an image (however
> the fact may be disguised). The chief fallacy of this is not so much
> the impossibility of knowing such image is like the object, or that
> there is any object at all, but that it assumes the very thing it is
> intended to explain. The image itself has to be apprehended and the
> difficulty is only repeated. (SI, 803)
> 



Cook Wilson also inveighed against Stout's notion of
'sensible extension' pointing out *inter alia* that
it makes no sense to claim that these are extended without being in
space (SI, 783) and he tried to explain how a given object may appear
to have different shapes from different perspectives, without making
an appeal to any representative (SI, 790f.).



Stout answered these criticisms in print (for a discussion see Nasim
2008, 30-40 & 94-98). He argued that he had not been
holding a view akin to Locke's representationalism, claiming
that the 'representative function' of his
'presentations' is of a different nature, more like a
memory-image would represent what is remembered (Stout 1911, 14f.),
but it is at first blush unclear what he meant by this. Against Cook
Wilson's first argument, he claimed that in his conception
presentations and presented objects form an "inseparable
unity" (Stout 1911, 22), this being, once more, unclear. At all
events, both Stout and Russell, in his theory of
'sense-data' as 'objects of perception'
(Russell 1912), insisted that the physical object and the
representative are 'real'. But one might say that this
'objectification of the appearing as appearance', does not
annul Cook Wilson's diagnosis of the difficulties inherent in
that position. At least Russell was clearer about its implications,
requiring a 'logical construction' of physical objects as
functions of 'sense-data'. One way to counter Cook Wilson
on the absurdity of the locution 'sensible extensions' is
to distinguish between 'private' and 'public'
space, as Russell was to do in 'The Relation of Sense-Data to
Physics' (Russell 1917, 139-171); as it is well-known,
this postulation generates its own set of difficulties, e.g., the
claim that space must have 6 dimensions (Russell 1917, 154). Russell
on 'sense-data' was to become a favourite target for
Prichard's acerbic wit (Prichard 1915 & 1928).



Cook Wilson also wove his joint critique of the 'objectification
of the appearing as appearance' and of representationalism into
a broad historical narrative according to which "empiricism ends
in the Subjective Idealism it was intended to avoid" (UL, SS
10, see also SI, 60-63); he spoke of an "insidious and
scarcely 'conscious' dialectic" that "has done
much mischief in modern metaphysics and theories of perception"
(SI, 797). Wilfrid Sellars, who attended Prichard's classes as a
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the mid-1930s, found the idea of such a
'dialectic' appealing:



> 
> I soon came under the influence of H. A. Prichard and, through him, of
> Cook Wilson. I found here, or at least seemed to find, a clearly
> articulated approach to philosophical issues which undercut the
> dialectic, rooted in Descartes, which led to both Hume and 19th
> Century Idealism. At the same time, I discovered Thomas Reid and found
> him appealing for much the same reasons. (Sellars 1975, 284)
> 



Although Cook Wilson's philosophy may be construed as a
continuation of sorts of the Scottish School of Hutcheson and Reid
(see also section 10), it is striking that there are hardly any
references to these authors in his writings, even more so given that
they contain critiques of Locke, Berkeley and Hume from a similar
standpoint. (See Alsaleh (2003), focussing on attacks on Hume and
their impact on Price (1932) and Austin (1962), and Marion (2009) for
an overview of the 19th-century stages of this
'dialectic').



There was, however, no doctrinal unity on perception among Cook
Wilson's epigones. Prichard was probably the first to put Cook
Wilson's views into print in 'Appearances and
Reality' (Prichard 1906) but, as already pointed out, he ended
up arguing that in perception we systematically mistake colour
expanses for objects. H. H. Price, who was at first close to Cook
Wilson (Price 1924), incorporated a sense-data theory while rejecting
phenomenalism in *Perception* (Price 1932). He became for that
reason one of Austin's targets in *Sense and Sensibilia*
(Austin 1962), which remains, for all its novelty, faithful to Cook
Wilson's orthodoxy on knowledge. At all events, a form of direct
realism in the theory of perception is one of the characteristic
features of Oxford Realism. It is an ancestor to contemporary variants
such as the position argued for by John McDowell in *Mind and
World* (McDowell 1994) and, after a long eclipse, Cook
Wilson's views are once more playing a role in current debates
about perception. (See for example references to them in Kalderon
(2011, 241; 2018, xv, 49, 88 & 184), Siegel (2018, 2), Stoneham
(2008, 319-320).)



One topic of particular interest in this respect is
'disjunctivism' (see Soteriou (2016) for an overview).
This is the view that in perception one is faced *either* with
cases of genuine perception *or* with cases of illusion or
hallucination, as in 'I see a flash of light *or* I am
having the perfect illusion of doing so' (Hinton 1973, 39). Such
disjunctions were first analysed in detail by Michael Hinton (see
Hinton (1973) and Snowdon (2008)), but there have been suggestions
that disjunctivism harks back to Austin or even Cook Wilson and
Prichard (Kalderon & Travis (213, 498-499), for
Austin's case, see also Longworth (2019)). Adjudicating such
claims depends on one's understanding of disjunctivism itself,
but a few points can be adduced. Disjunctivism should not be confused
with any 'naive' or 'direct realism', but
one may appeal to it to defend such views, therefore one should expect
Cook Wilson and Oxford Realists to have taken some steps towards it.
The sharp distinction between knowledge and belief (section 5), with
the rejection of any 'highest common factor' between the
two, should count as a first step. (The above-mentioned critiques of
the argument from illusion reinforce this point.) A further step
towards a form of disjunctivism is also taken when, having
distinguished knowledge from belief, Cook Wilson also claimed that
belief presupposes knowledge: it is only when assessing what I may
know about some thing that I might realize that it is not sufficient
to claim that 'I know that *p*', so that I remain
circumspect and merely claim that 'I believe that
*p*' (see sections 4 & 5).


## 7. Universals



In metaphysics too, Cook Wilson had first to cope with idealism, thus
with the looming threat of Bradley's regress about relations
(Bradley 1897, chaps. II-III). Given a relation *R* between
*a* and *b*, a regress arises when one asks what relates
the relation to its relata, e.g., what relates *a* to *R*(and *R* to *b*), and one assumes as an answer that
a further relation, say, *R\**, is needed to tie *a* and
*R*, a bit like a string that ties two objects together that
needs a further string to both of its ends to tie it to the objects.
Since a need to explain the tie between *a* and *R\**
arises by the same token, one needs to introduce yet another relation
*R\*\**, and so forth. In a brief chapter (SI, 692-695),
Cook Wilson argued that the first move here--supposing that
*R\** is needed to tie *a* to *R*--is simply
'unreal', because there could not be a *new*
relation that relates a relation to one of its terms. Thus, the
regress would not be generated. One problem with Cook Wilson's
objections is that they admittedly aim at the regress concerning
'external relations' (SI, 692), but they are not fully
developed against 'internal relations' that Bradley also
entertains (Bradley 1897, 17-18). Cook Wilson may not have a
full and appropriate answer to Bradley, but he thought he was thus
free to entertain the relation of a subject to its attributes.



Although this is rarely noted, Cook Wilson is one of the forerunners
of what we now call 'trope theories'. What Edmund Husserl
called 'moments' and later on G. F. Stout called
'characters' and D. C. Williams 'tropes', Cook
Wilson called instead 'particularization of the universal'
(SI, 336) or 'particularized qualities' (SI (713),
Mulligan et al. (1984, 293 n.13)). Among his contemporaries, Cook
Wilson's ideas stand indeed closest to both Stout's and
Husserl's. He seems not to have known about the latter, but one
noticeable common feature concerns 'dependence' (Mulligan
et al. 1984, 294). Cook Wilson suggested towards the end of his life
that 'things' taken in themselves should be called
'existences' (SI, 713) and, keeping close to the language
of Aristotle (tode ti, 'a
this'), he defined an 'existence' as 'a this
such and such' (SI, 713). Starting with the subject-attribute
distinction, in the case of an existence where the subject is said to
be a 'substance', he argued that the "ordinary
conception" of its 'attribute-element' is that it is
"always a dependent reality" (SI, 157), with these
"dependent existences" having in turn further existences
dependent on them (SI, 153).



Under his conception 'existences' are, one might say,
'bundles' of particularized qualities. But he did not
consider 'substance' as a sort of substrate in which
universals are particularized, as many defenders of tropes do: the
'thing' is according to him a mere 'unity' of
elements, "not something over and above them. which has them,
but their unified existence" (SI, 155). He also expressed this
by saying that the universal "covers the whole nature of the
substance" (SI, 349), as "the particular does not have the
universal *in* it and something *also* besides the
universal to make it particular" (SI, 336, see also Joseph
(1916a, 23)). It contains nothing besides the particularization of the
universal: "the particular is not something that has the
quality, it is the particularized quality. This animal is
particularized animality" (SI, 713). Likewise, "the
differentia cannot be separated from the genus as something added on
to it" (SI, 359), the species are just the forms that the
universal, as genus, takes (SI, 335). Stout, citing Cook Wilson with
approval, put it thus: "square shape is not squareness plus
shape; squareness itself is a special way of being a shape"
(Stout 1930, 398). (The view harks back to Aristotle, *Met.* I
8 1058a21-26, see also on this point Joseph (1916a,
85-86), Wisdom (1934, 29), Prior (1949, 5-6) and Butcharov
(1966, 147-153)).



Trope theories usually explain the fact that two things
'share', say, a particular shade of yellow with help of a
resemblance class. Here, Cook Wilson parts company, claiming that the
universal is "something identical in the particulars, which
identity cannot be done away by substituting the term *similar*
for *same*" (SI, 344 & 347). Although the universal
is, according to Cook Wilson, nothing outside its particularizations,
it is claimed to be a "unity and identity in particulars"
or a "real unity in objects" (SI, 344). It is meant to
possess an 'intrinsic character' (SI, 342n. & 351),
for which Cook Wilson reluctantly introduced a technical term:
"the characteristic being of the universal" (SI, 342). But
he introduced no equivalent to Stout's *fundamentum
relationis* or 'distributive unity of a class' (Stout
1930, 388), because he did not define the universal in terms of
membership of a class. Although he recognized that universals have an
extension, i.e., the "total being of the universal"
composed of the "whole of the particulars as the
particularization of this unity", he did not identify the
universal with it (SI, 338).



For this reason and in virtue of the realist epistemology which he
tied to this conception (immediately below), Cook Wilson is often read
as having held a form of 'immanent realism', as opposed to
the moderate forms of nominalism more typical of trope theories
(Armstrong (1978, 85) or Moreland (2001, 165 n. 16)). One objection
against this stance is that there is not much point having both
universals and tropes. As David Armstrong put it, one of the two is
bound to be redundant: "Either get rid of universals, embrace a
trope version of Resemblance Nominalism or else cut out the middlemen,
namely, the tropes" (Armstrong 1989, 17 & 132). This reading
cannot be the last word, though, since Cook Wilson also appears only
to have admitted one sort of entities, the tropes or
'particularizations of the universal'. Thus, there seems
to be a tension, at best unresolved, in Cook Wilson's stance,
which could explain why it has found few supporters, one exception
being J. R. Jones (1949, 1950 & 1951).



Cook Wilson's 'particularizations of the universal'
are thus "strictly objective" and "not a mere
thought of ours" (SI, 335-336); they thus cannot be
phenomenal entities. His thinking here is of apiece with his
anti-idealist views on 'apprehension'. He had argued
against T. H. Green's neo-Kantian stance, that apprehension has
no 'synthetic' character: any synthesis apprehended is
attributed to the object and not the result of an activity of the
'apprehending mind'. As he put it, "in the judgement
of knowledge and the act of knowledge in general we do not combine our
apprehensions, but apprehend a combination" (SI, 279), and it is
"the nature of the elements themselves" which
"determines which unity they have or can have"; the
'apprehending mind' has "no power whatever to
*make* a complex idea out of simple ones" (SI, 524). This
view implies that universals and connections between them, as
particularized, are *in rebus* and to be apprehended as such
(Price 1947, 336). The view is, therefore, that there is no possible
apprehension of the universal except as particularized:



> 
> 
> Just as the universal cannot be, except as particularized, so we
> cannot apprehend it except in the apprehension of a particular. (SI,
> 336)
> 
> 
> 



Cook Wilson further reasoned that, when one states that
'*a* is a triangle', one is predicating of
*a* the universal 'triangularity' and that,
analogously, in stating that 'triangularity is a
universal' one would then put the universal
'triangularity' in the subject position--the
'nominative case to the verb' as he quaintly puts it (SI,
349)--and treat it as if it were a particular, while putting
'universal' in the predicate position. But to talk about
the universal in this way would require *per impossibile* that
one apprehends the universal in abstraction from any of its
particularizations. Cook Wilson held his conception as being, if not
popular among philosophers, at least in accordance with ordinary
language and common sense (SI, 344-345).



It is thus the particularization of a given 'characteristic
being' which we are said to apprehend, but "neither as
universal nor as particularized" (SI, 343). There is no
suggestion in Cook Wilson's writings of something akin to
Husserl's act of 'categorial intuition' or
'ideational abstraction', in virtue of which the universal
would be "brought to consciousness and [...] actual
givenness" (Husserl 2001, 292). He believed instead that the
'intrinsic character' of any universal is inexplicable,
because the relation between particular and universal, although
fundamental and thus presupposed by any explanation (SI, 335 &
345), is *sui generis*, therefore not explainable in terms of
something else:



> 
> 
> I seem to have discovered that the true source of our metaphysical
> difficulties lies in the attempt, a mistaken attempt too frequent in
> philosophy, to explain the nature of the universal in terms of
> something other than itself. In fact the relation of the universal to
> the particular is something *sui generis*, presupposed in any
> explanation of anything. The nature of the universal therefore
> necessarily and perpetually eludes any attempt to explain itself. The
> recognition of this enable one to elucidate the whole puzzle of the
> *Parmenides* of Plato. (SI, 348, see also SI, 361)
> 
> 
> 



Cook Wilson thus believed to have found an answer to the notorious set
of regress arguments known as the 'third man' in
*Parm*. 132a-143e. (Ryle argued later on that Cook
Wilson's answer would not do, developing his own regress
argument against the notion of 'being an instance of',
that Ryle read Cook Wilson as presupposing, while merely claiming that
it is *sui generis* (Ryle 1971, vol. I, 9-10).)


## 8. Philosophy of Logic



Cook Wilson did not contribute to logic. His inclination was at any
rate conservative. For example, there was for him no room even to try
and make a case for an alternative logic, since he held the
Aristotelian principles (the principle of syllogism, the law of
excluded middle and the principle of contradiction) to be "those
simple laws or forms of thoughts to which thought must conform to be
thought at all. Thought therefore cannot throw any doubt on them
without committing suicide" (ETA, 17 & SI, 626). Cook Wilson
also rejected new developments in symbolic logic from Boole to
Russell. He was not as such adverse to the "symbolization of
forms of statements": when criticizing Boole's he alluded
to "an improved calculus of [his] own" (SI, 638), which he
called "fractional method" (SI, 662). But he did not
publish it and all we have is the beginnings of an outline (SI,
192-210). His main objection to Boole--a common one at the
time--was to the algebraist's use of equations, perceived
as an intrusion of mathematics in logic (SI, 635-636). (See the
whole chapter (SI, 635-662).) And the little he knew of
mathematical logic, Cook Wilson ferociously opposed. He did think of
syllogistic as "a science in the same sense as pure
mathematics" (SI, 437), but he was opposed to the very idea of
logical foundations for mathematics because he believed that logical
inferences are exhausted by syllogistic and, "mathematical
inference *as such* is not syllogistic" (SI, xcvi). This
is a misunderstanding, common at the time, of the expressive power of
quantification theory as developed among others by Gottlob Frege and
C. S. Peirce, of which he was clearly insufficiently cognizant, if not
plainly ignorant.



Cook Wilson used his interpretation of Plato's doctrine of Idea
numbers as
asumbletoi
arithmoi as a basis for an attack
on Russell and the logicist definition of numbers, Plato's
doctrine being understood (see section 2) as entailing that there
cannot be a universal of the members of the ordered series of
universals: 1-ness, 2-ness, 3-ness, etc. because they do not share an
'intrinsic character'. Confusing this series with that of
the natural numbers, he concluded that the logicist definition in
terms of classes of classes, e.g., of the number 5 as the class of all
classes equinumerous with a given quintuplet, is "a mere
fantastic chimera" (SI, 352). In line with the argument about
putting the universal 'triangularity' in the subject
position (previous section), Cook Wilson reasoned for the case of
natural numbers that there would be an alleged 'universal of
numberness' and that this would lead straight to a
contradiction: since all particulars of a universal are said to
possess its quality, a group of 5 as a particular of
'5-ness' would thus possess the 'universal of
numberness', thus contradicting his claim that a particular
cannot be a universal (SI, 353). 



By the same token, Cook Wilson thought that this line of reasoning
shows that Russell's paradox of the class of all classes that do
not contain themselves (Russell 1903, chap. X) is a "mere
fallacy of language" (SI, cx). He thus argued at length (SI,
SSSS 422-32), including in his correspondence with
Bosanquet (SI, SSSS 477-518) that there can no more be a
'class of classes' than 'universalness' could
be a 'universal of universals' and that a class can no
more be a member of itself than 'universalness' could be a
particular of itself: the implied 'universal of
universals' or 'universalness', of which universals
would be the particulars, would be a particular of itself, which is,
Cook Wilson claims, "obviously absurd" (SI, 350). For bad
reasons such as these, Cook Wilson was contemptuous of what he called
"the puerilities of certain paradoxical authors" (SI,
348). He even wrote to Bosanquet:



> 
> I am afraid I am obliged to think that a man is conceited as well as
> silly to think such puerilities are worthy to be put in print: and
> it's simply exasperating to think that he finds a publisher
> (where was the publisher's reader?), and that in this way such
> contemptible stuff can even find its way into examinations. (SI, 739)
> 



The problem with Cook Wilson's arguments is that they are based
on an elementary confusion between membership of a class and inclusion
of classes (see for example SI, cx & 733-734). Peter Geach
called Cook Wilson "an execrably bad logician" (Geach
1978, 123) for committing blunders such as this. (Cook Wilson's
claim in a letter to Lewis Carroll that it is not possible to know
that 'Some *S* is *P*' without knowing which
*S* it is which is *P* is another such elementary
blunder (Carroll 1977, 376).)



Fortunately, Cook Wilson made a more interesting contribution to
philosophy of logic in his discussion of Lewis Carroll's paradox
of inference (Carroll 1895), of which he gave the following
formulation:



> 
> 
> ... let the argument be A1 = B1, B1= C1, therefore A1 = C1. The
> rule which has to be put as the major premiss is, things being equal
> to the same thing are equal to one another. Under this we subsume
> A1 and C1 are things equal to the same thing,
> and so draw the conclusion that they are equal to one another. This is
> syllogism I. Now syllogism I, which is of the form MP, SM, SP, in turn
> exemplifies another rule of inference which is the so-called
> *dictum de omni et nullo*. This must now appear as a major
> premiss. The resulting syllogism may be put variously; the following
> short form will serve. Every inference which obey the dictum is
> correct; the inference of syllogism I obeys the dictum; therefore it
> is correct. This is a new syllogism (II) which again has for rule of
> inference the same dictum; hence a new syllogism (III) and so on
> *in saecula saeculorum*. (SI, 444)
> 
> 
> 



Leaving aside the incorrect identification of the inference rule as
the *dictum de omni,* this is recognizably the infinite regress
in Carroll's paradox and, while Carroll did not provide one,
Cook Wilson offered the following diagnosis:



> 
> 
> ... it is clearly a fallacy to represent the rule according to
> which the inference is to be drawn from premisses as one of the
> premisses themselves. We should anticipate that this must somehow
> produce an infinite regress. (SI, 443)
> 
> 
> 



These passages cannot be precisely dated and his correspondence with
Carroll for the relevant period is lost, so one cannot tell who framed
the paradox first (Moktefi 2007, chap. V, sect. 3.1). They were both
anticipated, however, by Bernard Bolzano, who already stated the
paradox in his *Wissenschaftslehre* (1837) and provided a
similar diagnosis (Bolzano 1972, SS 199). (For a discussion, see
Marion (2016).) Interestingly, Cook Wilson's diagnosis is linked
to his own views on the apprehension of universals *via* their
particularizations (see the previous section):



> 
> 
> A direct refutation may, however, be given as follows. In the above
> procedure the rule of inference is made a premiss and a particular
> inference is represented as deduced from it. But, as we have seen,
> that its an inversion of the true order of thought. The validity of
> the general rule of inference can only be apprehended in a particular
> inference. If we could not see the truth directly in the particular
> inference, we should never get the general rule at all. Thus it is
> impossible to deduce the particular inference from the general rule.
> (SI, 445)
> 
> 
> 



In Lewis Carroll's presentation of the paradox, the Tortoise
refuses to infer the conclusion when faced with an instance of the
rule of *Modus Ponens* and Achilles suggests that one should
then add the rule as a further premise, but the Tortoise still refuses
to infer, so that Achilles then suggest to add the whole formula
resulting from adding the rule as a premise as yet a further premise
to no avail, and so forth. It is often claimed that the
Tortoise's repeated refusals indicates that rules of inference
are in themselves normatively inert, so that a further ingredient is
needed for one to infer, e.g., a ''rational
insight'' (Bonjour 1998, 106-107). Cook
Wilson's claim that one can only 'apprehend' the
validity of the rule in a particular inference, thus 'seeing the
truth directly' or possessing a 'direct intuition'
(SI, 441), is an analogous move.



The idea that a rule of inference cannot be introduced as a premise in
an inference in accordance with it, on pains of an infinite regress,
was also reprised by Ryle (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 216 & 238). But he
used it to argue for his celebrated distinction between 'knowing
how' and 'knowing that': ''Knowing a
rule of inference is not possessing a bit of extra information.
Knowing a rule is knowing how. It is realised in performances which
conform to the rule, not in theoretical citations of it.''
(Ryle 1971, vol. II, 217). However, if 'knowing how' is no
longer a state of mind (even dispositionally), then the view is no
longer Cook Wilson's.



Cook Wilson believed that all statements are
'categorical', arguing away 'hypothetical
judgements' with the claim that "in the hypothetical
attitude", we apprehend "a relation between two
problems" (SI, 542-543 & Joseph (1916a, 185)). In
other words, conditionals do not express judgements but connections
between questions. This view was elaborated by Ryle into his
controversial stance on indicative conditionals as
'inference-tickets' in ''If',
'So', and 'Because'' (Ryle 1971, vol.
II, 234-249). Ryle compared conditionals of the form 'If
*p*, then *q*', to "bills for statements
that statements could fill" (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 240) and he
rejected the form 'If *p* then *q*, but
*p*, therefore *q*', claiming that in some way the
*p* in the major premise cannot for that reason be the same as
*p* asserted by itself. This, of course, runs afoul of
Geach's 'Frege Point' (Geach 1972).


## 9. Philosophy of Language



Cook Wilson also questioned superficial uniformity of the form
'*S* is *P*', calling the subject of
attributes 'metaphysical' (SI, 158) in order to
distinguish it from the subject of predication. He thus distinguished
the *ontological* distinction between substance and attribute
from the *logical* subject-predicate distinction. Using the
traditional definition of the subject as 'what supports the
predicate' and the predicate as 'what is said concerning
the subject' (quoting Boethius, SI, 114-115), he noted
that a 'statement' such as 'That building is the
Bodleian' has different analyses, depending on the occasion in
which it is used. If in answer to 'What building is
that?', with the 'stress accent' on 'the
Bodleian' as in 'That building is *the
Bodleian*', the subject is 'that building' and
the predicate as 'what is said concerning the subject' is
'that that building is the Bodleian' (SI, 117 & 158).
But, if in answer to the question 'Which building is the
Bodleian?' with the 'stress accent' now on
'that' as in '*That* building is the
Bodleian', then the Bodleian is the subject and the predicate is
'that building pointed out was it' (SI, 119). The same
goes for 'glass is *elastic*', where elasticity is
predicated of glass and '*glass* is elastic', when
it is stated in answer to someone looking for substances that are
elastic. This shows that the relation of subject to predicate is
somehow symmetric, but it is not the case, however, with the
subject/attribute distinction because ''The subject cannot
be an attribute of one of its own attributes'' (SI, 158).
Cook Wilson also noted that ''the stress accent is upon
the part of the sentence which conveys the new
information'' (SI, 118), and he would thus say that the
subject-predicate relation depends on the *subjective* order in
which we apprehend them (SI, 139), while the relation between
'subject' and 'attribute' is *objective*in the sense that it is holding between a particular thing and a
'particularized quality', it is a ''relation
between realities without reference to our apprehension of
them'' (Robinson 1931, 103).



In 'How to Talk' (Austin 1979, 134-153), Austin
further developed distinctions akin to Cook Wilson's
differentiation between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysical
subject/attribute distinctions, and this differentiation was shared by
P. F. Strawson (Strawson 1959, 144), who also believed in
'particularized qualities' (Strawson (1959, 168) &
(1974, 131)). In a bid to avoid Bradley's regress (Strawson
1959, 167), he introduced the idea of 'non-relational
ties' between subject and attribute, leaving
'relations' for the link between logical subject and
predicate. Some non-relational ties are thus said to hold between
particulars and particulars: to the relation between Socrates and the
universal 'dying' corresponds an 'attributive
tie' between the particulars that are both Socrates *and*
the event of his death. That such 'ties' are less obscure
than 'relations' and that this maneuver actually succeeds
in stopping the regress are further issues, but it is interesting to
note that Strawson chose the name 'attributive tie' in
honour of Cook Wilson (Strawson (1959, 168), see SI, 193).



Strawson also noted that Cook Wilson's argument for
differentiating between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysical
subject/attribute distinctions involves an appeal to
''pragmatic considerations'' (Strawson 1957,
476). Cook Wilson's claim that a sentence such as 'glass
is elastic' may state something different depending on the
occasion in which it is used also had an important continuation in J.
L. Austin's more general point that, although the meaning of
words plays a role in determining truth-conditions, it is not an
exhaustive one: it "does not fix for *them* a
truth-condition" because that depends on how truth is to be
decided on the occasion of their use (see Travis (1996, 451) and
Kalderon & Travis (2013, 492 & 496)):



> 
> 
> ... the question of truth and falsehood does not turn only on
> what a sentence *is*, nor yet on what it *means*, but
> on, speaking very broadly, the circumstances in which it is uttered.
> (Austin 1962, 111)
> 
> 
> 



This line of thought has been pursued further by Charles Travis under
the name of 'occasion-sensitivity', i.e.,
''the fact that the same state of the world may require
different answers on different occasions to the question of whether
what was said in a given statement counts as true''
(Travis (1981, 147), see also (1989, 255)), this being a recurring
theme, see the papers collected in Part 1 of (Travis 2008)). Thus,
Cook Wilson's above examples, 'That building is the
Bodleian' or 'glass is elastic', are genealogically
related to what are commonly known as 'Travis cases',
i.e., sentences used to make a true statement about an item in one
occasion and a false one about the same item in another. (For examples
of these, see Travis (1989, 18-19), (1997, 89), (2008, 26 &
111-112).)



R. G. Collingwood also took Cook Wilson as putting forth a slightly
different thesis, namely that the meaning of a statement is determined
by the question to which it is an answer (Collingwood 1938, 265 n.).
He used this idea as the basis for his 'logic of questions and
answers' (Collingwood 2013, chap. 5) and for his theory of
presuppositions (Collingwood 1998, chaps. 3-4), this last being
further developed by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot (1980, 42f.).
Collingwood was reluctant, however, to recognize Cook Wilson as an
inspiration, since he thought ill of the idea of
'apprehensions' as a non-derivative basis for knowledge
and he believed instead that knowledge comes from asking questions
first (Collingwood 2013, 25), and thus that knowledge depends on a
'complex of questions and answers' (Collingwood 2013,
37).


## 10. Moral Philosophy



Cook Wilson hardly wrote on topics outside the theory of knowledge and
logic, but two remarks ought to be made concerning moral philosophy.
First, the last piece included in *Statement and Inference* is
composed of notes for an address to a discussion society in 1897, that
was announced as 'The Ontological Proof for God's
Existence'. In this text, which opens with a discussion of
Hutcheson and Butler, Cook Wilson argued that in the case of
"emotions as are proper to the moral consciousness", such
as the feeling of gratitude:



> 
> We cannot separate the judgement from the act as something in itself
> speculative and in itself without the emotion. We cannot judge here
> except emotionally. This is true also of all moral and aesthetic
> judgements. Reason in them can only manifest itself emotionally. (SI,
> 860)
> 



He argued further, in what amounts to a form of moral realism, that
there must be a real experience, i.e., in the case of gratitude,
"Goodwill of a person, then, must here be a real
experience" (SI, 861), and that the feeling of "reverence
with its solemnity and awe" is in itself "not fear, love,
admiration, respect, but something quite *sui generis*"
(SI, 861). It is a feeling that, Cook Wilson argued, "seems
directed to one spirit and one alone, and only possible for spirit
conceived as God" (SI, 864). In other words, the existence of
the feeling of reverence presupposes that God exists. Cook Wilson thus
sketched within the span of a few pages a theory of emotions, which is
echoed today in the moral realism that has been developed, possibly
without knowledge of it, in the wake of David Wiggins'
'Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life' (Wiggins 1976)
and a series of influential papers by John McDowell--now
collected in McDowell (2001).



Cook Wilson's ideas had a limited impact on Oxford theology.
Acknowledging his debt, the theologian and philosopher C. C. J. Webb
described religious experience as one that "cannot be adequately
accounted for except as apprehension of a real object" (Webb
1945, 38), but he nevertheless chose to describe his standpoint as a
form of 'Platonic idealism' (Webb 1945, 35). Cook
Wilson's realism also formed part of the philosophical
background to C. S. Lewis' "new look" in the 1920s,
*via* E. F. Carritt's teaching. In *Surprised by Joy,*Lewis also described awe as "a commerce with something
which [...] proclaims itself sheerly objective" (Lewis
1955, 221), but he quickly moved away from this position (see Lewis
(1955, chaps. XIII-XIV) and McGrath (2014, chap. 2)).



Secondly, Prichard is also responsible for an extension of Cook
Wilson's conception of knowledge to moral philosophy, with his
paper 'Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?' (Prichard
1912), whose main argument is analogous to Cook Wilson's
argument for the impossibility of defining knowledge. In a nutshell,
duty is *sui generis* and not definable in terms of anything
else. The parallel is explicit in Prichard (1912, 21 &
35-36). That we ought to do certain things, we are told, arises
"in our unreflective consciousness, being an activity of moral
thinking occasioned by the various situations in which we find
ourselves", and the demand that it is proved that we ought to do
these things is "illegitimate" (Prichard 1912, 36). In
order to find out our duty, "the only remedy lies in actually
getting into a situation which occasions the obligation" and
"then letting our moral capacities of thinking do their
work" (Prichard 1912, 37). This paper became so influential that
Prichard was elected in 1928 to the White's Chair of Moral
Philosophy at Corpus Christi, although his primary domain of
competence had been the theory of knowledge. His papers in moral
philosophy were edited after his death as Prichard (1949, now 2002).
Prichard stands at the origin of the school of 'moral' or
'Oxford intuitionism', of which another pupil of Cook
Wilson, the Aristotle scholar W. D. Ross (Ross 1930, 1939) remains the
foremost representative, along with H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt,
and J. Laird. Some of the views they expressed have recently gained
new currency within 'moral particularism', e.g., in the
writings of Jonathan Dancy (Dancy 1993, 2004).


## 11. Legacy



The historical importance of Cook Wilson's influence ought not
to be underestimated. In his obituary, H. W. B. Joseph described him
as being "by far the most influential philosophical teacher in
Oxford", adding that no one had held a place so important since
T. H. Green (Joseph 1916b, 555). This should be compared with the
claim that in the 1950s Wittgenstein was "the most powerful and
pervasive influence" (Warnock 1958, 62). The
'realist' reaction against British Idealism at the turn of
the 20th century was at any rate not confined to the
well-known rebellion of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.
There were also 'realisms' sprouting in Manchester (with
Robert Adamson and Samuel Alexander), and in Oxford too, where Thomas
Case had already argued for realism in *Physical Realism* (Case
1888) (Marion 2002b), although it is clearly Cook Wilson's
influence that swayed Oxford away from idealism. Since he published so
little, it is therefore mainly through teaching and personal contact
that he made a significant impact on Oxford philosophy, not only
through the peculiar tutorial style to which generations of
'Greats' students were subjected--as described in
Walsh (2000) or Ackrill (1997, 2-5)--but also through
meetings that he initiated, which were to become the
'Philosophers' Teas' under Prichard's
tutelage, the 'Wee Teas' under Ryle's and
'Saturday Mornings' under Austin's.



His legacy can thus be plotted through successive generations of
Oxford philosophers. E. F. Carritt, R. G. Collingwood (who reverted to
a form of idealism later on), G. Dawes Hicks, H. W. B. Joseph, H. A.
Prichard, W. D. Ross and C. C. J. Webb are among his better-known
pupils at the turn of the century. After his death, his influence
extended through the teaching of Carritt, Joseph and Prichard, and the
posthumous volumes of *Statement and Inference* to the
post-World War I generation of the 1920s, including Frank Hardie, W.
C. Kneale, J. D. Mabbott, H. H. Price, R. Robinson and G. Ryle, and
the early analytic philosophers of the 1930s, J. L. Austin, I. Berlin,
J. O. Urmson, and H. L. A. Hart, in particular. For example, Isaiah
Berlin's described Hart as "an excellent solid Cook
Wilsonian" in a letter to Price (Berlin 2004, 509), and admitted
himself to have been at first an Oxford Realist (Jahanbegloo 1992,
153). (See Marion (2000, 490-508) for further details.) Thus,
Oxford Realism first dislodged British Idealism from its position of
prominence at Oxford and then transformed itself into ordinary
language philosophy and, as pointed out in the previous section, moral
intuitionism. In the post-World War II years, Cook Wilson's name
gradually faded away, however, while 'ordinary language
philosophy', which owed a lot to his constant reliance on
ordinary language against philosophical jargon, blossomed. It became
one of the strands that go under the name of 'analytic
philosophy', so Cook Wilson should perhaps be seen as one of its
many ancestors.



The only Oxford philosopher of note who opposed the
'realists' before World War II was R. G. Collingwood, who
died too soon in 1943. He felt increasingly alienated and ended up
reduced to invective, describing their theory of knowledge as
"based upon the grandest foundation a philosophy can have,
namely human stupidity" (Collingwood 1998, 34) and their
attitude towards moral philosophy as a "mental kind of
decaudation" (Collingwood 2013, 50). Collingwood objected to
Cook Wilson's anti-idealist claim that 'knowing makes no
difference to the object known', that in order to vindicate it
one would need to compare the object as it is being known with the
object independently of its being known, which is the same as knowing
something unknown, a contradiction (Collingwood 2013, 44). But
Collingwood's argument did not rule out the possibility of
coming to know an object, while knowing that it was not altered in the
process. (For critical appraisals, see Donagan (1985, 285-289)
Jacquette (2006) and Beaney (2013).) In another telling complaint, he
criticized the Oxford Realists for being interested in assessing the
truth or falsity of specific philosophical theses without paying
attention to the fact that the meaning of the concepts involved may
have evolved through history, and so there is simply no 'eternal
problem' (Collingwood 2013, chap. 7). This points to a lack of
historical sensitivity, which is indeed another feature of analytic
philosophy that arguably originates in Cook Wilson.



There was another deleterious side to Cook Wilson's influence in
Oxford: his contempt for mathematical logic. It explains why one had
to wait until the appointment of Hao Wang in the 1950s for modern
formal logic first to be taught at Oxford. In the 1930s, H. H. Price
was still teaching deductive logic from H. W. B. Joseph's *An
Introduction to Logic* (Joseph 1916a) and inductive logic from J.
S. Mill's *System of Logic*. This reactionary attitude
towards modern logic and later objections to 'ordinary language
philosophy' go a long way to explain why Cook Wilson's
reputation dropped significantly in the second half of last century.
In the 1950s, Wilfrid Sellars was virtually alone in his praise:



> 
> 
> I can say in all seriousness that twenty years ago I regarded
> Wilson's *Statement and Inference* as the philosophical
> book of the century, and Prichard's lectures on perception and
> on moral philosophy, which I attended with excitement, as veritable
> models of exposition and analysis. I may add that while my
> philosophical ideas have undergone considerable changes since 1935, I
> still think that some of the best philosophical thinking of the past
> hundred years was done by these two men. (Sellars 1957, 458).
> 
> 
> 



As the tide of 'ordinary language philosophy' ebbed, Cook
Wilson's views on knowledge showed more resilience. In the
1960s, Phillips Griffiths' anthology on *Knowledge and
Belief* included excerpts from Cook Wilson (Phillips Griffiths
1967, 16-27) and John Passmore was able to write that
"Cook Wilson's logic may have had few imitators; but his
soul goes marching on in Oxford theories of knowledge" (Passmore
1968, 257).



As shown in sections 5 and 6, Cook Wilson's views on knowledge
and perception are now once more involved in contemporary debates.
They had remained influential all along, although his name was often
not mentioned. His peculiar combination of the claims that knowledge
is a factive state of mind and that it is undefinable, argued for anew
by J. L. Austin, has been taken up and further developed by John
McDowell (McDowell 1994, 1998), Charles Travis (Travis 1989, 2008),
and Timothy Williamson (Williamson 2000, 2007), who is currently
Wykeham Professor of Logic, New College. One has, therefore, what
Charles Travis once described as "an Oxford tradition despite
itself" (Travis (1989, xii), on this last point, see also
Williamson (2007, 269-270n)).



During the twentieth century, secondary literature on Cook
Wilson's philosophy was not considerable, with a few papers of
unequal value by Foster (1931), Furlong (1941), Lloyd Beck (1931) and
Robinson (1928a, 1928b), along with a few studies on universals in the
post-war years (see section 7), and only one valuable commentary,
Richard Robinson's *The Province of Logic* (Robinson
1931). Interest in the study of his philosophy was only revived at the
beginning of this century, with Marion (2000) giving a first overview
of Oxford Realism. In a short book, Kohne (2010) charts the views of
Cook Wilson, Prichard and Austin on knowledge as a mental state. An
important contribution, Kalderon & Travis (2013) secured Oxford
Realism's place in the history of analytic philosophy, comparing
it with other forms of realism in Frege, Russell and Moore, while
drawing links with later developments in the writings of J. L. Austin,
J. M. Hinton and John McDowell. As a result of this revival of
interest, the philosophies of J. L. Austin (Longworth 2018a, 2018b
& 2019, and the entry to this Encyclopedia) and of Wilfrid Sellars
(Brandhoff 2020) are now being re-interpreted in light of Cook
Wilson's legacy.