by Antony Flew
7.54 So to the offenders who say, or, more often, to the offenders of whom others say, that not they but society is to blame for their offenses, we have to insist that for every individual person society is and can only be everyone else but that person. So if any offenders are to be shown not to have been truly responsible for committing their offenses, it must be up to either them or their presumably nonoffending defenders to try to show either that it was not the offenders themselves but some other particular individuals who were really responsible for the offenders committing the offenses formerly attributed to them; or that the offenders’ social situation was such that they could not reasonably have been expected (prescriptive) not to have committed those offenses.
7.55 I refuse to conclude this chapter without sharing another commercial item from my philosophical scrapbook. Let it serve as a final cheerful reinforcement for what was said earlier about the crucial importance of contradiction and noncontradiction (see paragraphs 1.10–1.31). This item comes from a circular letter from Dover Publications, a New York firm with a very useful line of reprints of classical texts in philosophy, science, and—wait for it!—logic. It reads: “We shall enjoy hearing from you, and for your convenience we are enclosing a business reply envelope which requires no postage (due to U.S. postal regulations reply envelopes cannot be used from foreign addresses, and therefore none is enclosed).”
8.1 Insofar as any book of the present sort is successful, its end must be a new beginning. Yet for many the effect of appreciating some of the great variety of mistakes that can be made in reasoning may be not encouragement, but despair. Surely it must be practically impossible to avoid all these and other mistakes and to get everything right? No doubt it is. But it is as wrong here as it is everywhere else to argue that if I cannot do everything, then I cannot, and am not obliged to, do anything. For instance, it is intellectually, but not only intellectually, shabby to argue that because I cannot contribute either money or time and effort to all the causes which may make demands on me, therefore I cannot and need not contribute to any. It is also an error, albeit one committed by the great Immanuel Kant himself, to contend that striving after perfection must presuppose a commitment to the belief that actual perfection can and perhaps will be achieved.
8.2 Perhaps the shortness of the book will reduce such temptations to discouragement. Wise teachers keep their reading lists short partly lest their students should conclude that because they cannot read everything they do not need to read anything. But the main thing to stress again now is that the challenge to think better is a challenge to our integrity.
8.3 Chapter 1 tried to bring out how the notion of valid deductive argument is and must be defined in terms of contradiction and noncontradiction (see paragraphs 1.1–1.10). No one who has any concern with what is or is not true can afford to be unmoved by the threat or still more by the actuality of self-contradiction (see paragraphs 1.16–1.26). Chapter 2 revealed the essentially hypothetical character of valid argument. It is argued, if such and such a proposition is true then it follows that, and we may validly deduce that, some other proposition is also true. But—and this is of crucial importance for scientific enquiry—whereas the truth of such a validly drawn deduction does not guarantee the truth of the premise from which it is thus validly deduced, its falsity does decisively demonstrate the falsity of that premise. The same chapter developed the distinctions between, on the one hand, logically necessary and logically sufficient conditions and, on the other hand, causally necessary and causally sufficient conditions (see paragraphs 2.18–2.29). It also distinguished the concept of the contrary from that of the contradictory (see paragraphs 2.37–2.40).
8.4 Chapter 3 displayed some of the possibilities of deceiving ourselves by making covert shifts between substantial and merely tautological interpretations of the same forms of words (see paragraphs 3.1–3.10). The same chapter then went on to link this with the Popperian thesis that a forthright concern for truth demands an emphasis upon the possibilities of falsification and a permanent critical openness toward their realization (see paragraphs 3.17–3.26).
8.5 In chapter 4 the main concern was to insist that any insights we have into the reasons why people may be inclined to hold or to utter certain propositions (whether these reasons are motives or causes) and any insights we may gain from the future advancement of psychology and sociology should be harnessed to the improvement of our thinking. They should not be misemployed to distract attention from questions about the reasons (grounds) for holding that these propositions are true or, as the case may be, false (see paragraphs 4.3–4.28). Then in chapter 5 it was urged that to play Humpty Dumpty with the established meanings of words is to act in bad faith (see paragraphs 5.32–5.35).
8.6 It is time at least to suggest a wider connection between rationality in general and personal integrity. This suggestion is the more important and the more timely because it is nowadays fashionable to disdain the former, and in particular the exacting standards of science, in favor of a supposedly incompatible ideal of sincerity in personal relationships. This is a preposterous antithesis, since sincerity and integrity require what is being in their name rejected.
8.7 In chapter 1 I wrote: “To say that someone knows something is to say more than that he claims to know it or that he believes it most strongly. It is to say also both that it is true and that he is in a position to know that it is true. So neither the sincerity of his conviction nor the ingenuousness of his utterance guarantees that he really knew” (see paragraph 1.57). Someone may be absolutely sincere and ingenuous in claiming to know, and yet nevertheless turn out to have been mistaken. That this can and does happen is both a philosophical and an everyday commonplace.
8.8 What is not quite so often remarked is that to the extent that I make claims to knowledge without ensuring that I am indeed in a position to know, I must prejudice my claims both to sincerity and to ingenuousness. It is just not honest for me to pretend to know the winners of tomorrow’s greyhound races when I am not directly or indirectly acquainted with either the form of the dogs or the plans of the dopers. Nor will my dishonesty be diminished—though the consequent damage will be—if my predictions happen to be fulfilled. Notwithstanding that law cannot be equated with morals, nor belief with knowledge, it is to the point to notice that, by the U.K. Perjury Act of 1911, it is perjury to swear what we believe to be false, regardless of whether what we swore to happened to be true (Stephen 1950, vol. 4, p. 148). No doubt many other jurisdictions make similar provisions. Compare, for instance, the words of Abraham Lincoln as quoted in paragraph 1.18.
8.9 Being in a position to know is not always or even most often a matter of being able to deduce what is known from premises also known. Clearly it could not be. For on this assumption knowledge would be impossible since it would require the completion of an infinite series of deductions from premises all of which would have first to be deduced from others, in turn first deduced from others, and so on. Sometimes we know without inference, as when we know that something hurts or that there is a great big truck right in front of our eyes. Where the need for rational appraisal has to enter is in the determination that we are indeed in a position to know and do know. This need becomes urgent whenever there are grounds for fearing that we may be mistaken. For to maintain any belief while dismissing, or refusing to give due weight to, reasonable and relevant objections is to show that you are more concerned to maintain that belief than really to know whether it or something else is, after all, true.
8.10 Something similar holds, too, with regard to policies and programs. Suppose we propose some policy or support some program on the grounds that its implementation will lead to various shining results. Then we have to accept that to precisely the extent that we are genuinely and sincerely devoted to those splendid objectives, we shall be eager to monitor the actual results of implementation and ready to make or to support some appropriate change of course the moment that it emerges, if it does, that we were mistaken in thinking
that these policies would fulfill our original aspirations.
8.11 Suppose that we are not in this way ready and eager to learn from our mistakes. Then we make it cruelly clear that our true concern either always was, or has now become, not concern for the stated objectives of our policy or program, but concern for something else altogether. Perhaps our real object never was what we said it was. Or perhaps our pride and other sentiments have become involved in that program. Perhaps it was our personal program and/or the program of a party to which we are strongly attached. The actual implementation of that program thus becomes for us not a means to the realization of its originally stated objectives but an end in itself.
8.12 As the matter has been put in the previous two paragraphs, the necessary connections between sincerity of purpose, rationality, and an insistence upon monitoring success or failure in achieving that purpose must seem obvious and undeniable. Surely no one with any pretensions to rationality could fail to see these connections and act appropriately? But the truth is almost the contrary (see paragraphs 2.37–2.40). Almost no one promoting or engaged in the implementation of public policies seems to see these connections and act appropriately; unless, that is, you count as appropriate action on the part of those who have their own unpublicized reasons for keeping secret the actual effects of implementing the policy in question, the inaction of not supporting or demanding monitoring.
8.13 Since I do not want to seem to be taking sides in any current U.S. controversy I will now draw a vividly scandalous example from a book published in Beverly Hills and London eighteen years ago (Price et al. 1980). It was announced as the first of a series of Annual Reviews of Community Mental Health. What then called itself the “community mental health movement” in the United States consisted of all—as its members certainly would have wished us to say—person programs launched under the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963. This was passed in response to a presidential message to the Congress on “Mental Health and Mental Retardation,” dated February 5, 1963. President Kennedy, who had a particular family reason for being especially concerned about this subject, made it absolutely clear what were the good results which were desired. Demanding “a bold new approach” he emphasized that “prevention is far more desirable for all concerned” than cure. Without specifying any illustrative examples, he called for “selective specific programs directed at known causes.”
8.14 Fifteen or more years later a collective of contributors, all of whom are members of this movement and who therefore have strong and obvious personal stakes in the continuation and expansion of these programs, published this Annual Review. Judging by the contents, and still more by what it does not contain, no one expected it to be studied by any critical outsider. For with this book—as with Sherlock Holmes and the dog not barking during the night—the most remarkable thing is what does not happen. Nowhere from beginning to end does there occur one single reference, whether direct or indirect, to any evidence that any of these programs has actually succeeded in reducing the incidence of mental retardation or mental illness or even in holding it down below the higher level to which it might perhaps otherwise have been expected to rise.
8.15 Had there in fact been any such demonstrated successes, we can be sure that this book would have been full of allusions to them. Furthermore, everyone who had joined and was remaining in “the movement” with the prime intention of helping to prevent or cure such manifestly evil afflictions would have been rejoicing in the successes already achieved, while anyone proposing fresh initiatives toward similar ends would have been eager to learn and to apply the lessons to be drawn from those past achievements. The unlovely truth, however, was otherwise. These proud “prevention professionals,” professing carers and compassionists though they were, did not, it seems, feel constrained even to pretend to have fulfilled any part of the beneficent (do-gooding) mandate with which they were charged. Yet they seemed not a whit disturbed by what, for all that they themselves had to say to the contrary, appears to have been their expensive and total failure actually to prevent any specifiable and determinate evils.
8.16 Instead—with some sideswipes against certain notoriously callous and uncaring conservatives suspected of contemplating what to all these people would be cruel cuts in both their program and, indirectly, their individual budgets—some of them now proposed, with no awkward self-questioning about past failures, so to reinterpret the expressions “mental disease,” “mental disorder,” and “mental retardation,” as to facilitate demands for (yet more) further funding and extra staff. This and this alone, they suggest, will enable another and more ambitious kind of good to be done, albeit with equally little reason offered for believing that they will have any more success in attaining these different, though no doubt equally worthy, objectives.
8.17 In the perspective of this chapter the most revealing, as well as the most scandalous, feature of the entire Annual Review was the form taken by a solitary statement of the need for some systematic monitoring of success and failure. Except for this rare moment of illumination all the contributors were inclined blindly to identify (their) stated intentions with (their) actual achievements. Nowhere in this Annual Review was there so much as a hint that systematic monitoring of actual success or failure is essential to the doing of a decent and progressively improving job. Instead the sole reference to this task points in a different direction. A trio of contributors made what at least up to the time of their writing had proved to be, from the standpoint of the “community mental health movement in the United States,” an unwarrantably pessimistic statement. This from their point of view unwarrantably pessimistic statement was to the effect that: “[I]t is our strong conviction that prevention proponents will lose the political battle for funding without good data—capable of documenting the effectiveness and social utility of prevention programs” (Price et al., pp. 7 and 288).
8.18 Another example is perhaps rather less vividly scandalous. But partly for that reason it is perhaps more impressively instructive. This is the example of what in the United Kingdom is called not the public but the (state) maintained school system. From its first establishment the pupils in this peculiar publicly owned and managed industry have never been subjected to any comprehensive system of independently assessed examinations. The system has therefore never been able or required to provide any direct measures of the quantity and quality of its output of pupil learning. The only official check on the activities of the schools of which this system is composed has traditionally been the sending in of teams of Her or, as the case might be, His Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. The schools were warned of forthcoming inspections. And in the nature of the case inspectors were able to inspect not the product but only the process of teaching.
8.19 If some state-owned industry charged with the production of some sort of material goods had been managed in this way and if the facts of its extraordinarily hands-off management had become public knowledge, then there is no doubt but that all politicians opposed to whatever was the current administration would have seized on these facts as a heaven-sent example of that administration’s almost unbelievable incompetence and untrustworthiness.
8.20 Since the United Kingdom maintained school system is effectively a monopoly, which has for almost the whole of the present century been catering for over 90 percent of all U.K. children, the basic facts about what has been its traditional form of management have always been public knowledge. I say “effectively a monopoly” because any antimonopoly laws anywhere in the world would surely be enacted well before any single supplier won over 90 percent of the market. And this would be so even before taking into account that this particular supplier, being a public service, has always operated what in the ordinary commercial world would have been accounted a policy of predatory not-pricing against its independent competitors. I say its “traditional form of management” because in 1988 an Educational Reform Act did at last launch a radical reform program that should eventually result in the con
struction of the fully comprehensive system of examinations that has so long and so significantly been lacking. But what is so remarkable about the period before 1988 is what did not happen.
8.21 For what is here both so remarkable and for us so impressive is that, regardless of which of the two parties of government was in office, no opposition politicians ever attacked this failure systematically to measure the actual product of this state-owned industry. Since there were no adequate measures of the product it was scarcely possible to raise questions about productivity or the lack of it. One and all appeared to be agreed that the necessary and sufficient condition of educational improvement was an increase in the teacher/pupil ratio—something which in any other industry would have been construed as presumptive evidence of overpersoning. Of course smaller classes are more agreeable for all concerned and involve less assessment and correction work for their teachers. But the belief that they make for more effective teaching is one of those “demonstrated not by the evidence marshalled to support it, but by the lack of any felt necessity to produce evidence” (Sowell 1986b, p. 60).
8.22 When in 1981—as a first, hesitant, and tentative measure of reform—an act was passed to require schools to publish any results achieved by their pupils in any of the then-available independently assessed examinations, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), by far the largest teachers’ union in the United Kingdom, revealingly declared its “total opposition.” Almost no one responded to this remarkable and revealing declaration as almost everyone would have responded had a labor union representing the employees in some state-owned and state-managed manufacturing industry declared its total opposition to the publication of the findings of investigations into the quality and quantity of material goods produced by that industry.