33

ABSTRACTIONS
Reprinted from ‘Dialogue’ (Canadian Philosophical Review), vol. , 1962, by permission of
the editors

St Augustine said, ‘When you do not ask me what Time is, I know
perfectly well; but when you do ask me, I cannot think what to say.’
What, then, was it that he knew perfectly well, and what was it that he did
not know? Obviously he knew perfectly well such things as these, that
what happened yesterday is more recent than what happened a month
ago; that a traveller who walks four miles in an hour goes twice as fast as a
traveller who takes two hours over the same journey. He knew how to say
things and how to understand things said to him which specified dates,
durations and times of day; epochs, seasons and moments. He knew
when it was midday and he could use the calendar. He could cope effi-
ciently and easily with concrete chronological and chronometrical tasks.
He could use and understand tensed verbs. What he could not do is to
give any reply at all to such abstract questions as these: what is it that
there is twice as much of in a fortnight as in a week? Why could Time,
unlike a battle, never have started, and why can Time, unlike a concert,
never come to a stop? Does Time flow on at an uniform or an irregular
speed, and, in either case, is its speed measured in a second sort of Time?
In short, what is Time—is it a Thing or a Process or a Relation? Is it a sort
of cosmic river, only one without any tangible water between its non-
existing banks? One which flows out of no spring and pours out into no
ocean?
 CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 449

We might say that Augustine, like anyone else, could answer concrete
factual questions about times; but that, like everyone else, he could not
answer abstract questions about the concept of Time. But what is this
difference between concrete or factual questions and abstract or conceptual
questions?
Take another example. Hume, like any other sensible person, knew
perfectly well how to distinguish between one occasion when he met a
friend by appointment and another occasion when he met a friend by
chance; or between one game of cards when the dealer dealt himself all
the aces by trickery and another when the dealer dealt himself all the aces
by sheer luck. None the less, when Hume, as a philosopher, asks himself
What is Chance? he actually gives an answer which we can swiftly prove to
be wrong. He says that since whatever comes about is due to some cause,
and since chance is not a cause, therefore, to say that something, like a
meeting between friends, has come about by chance can only mean that it
has come about from some cause of which we are ignorant. But this
answer must be wrong, for though we are ignorant of the cause of cancer,
we should never say that cancer comes about by chance. The phrase ‘by
chance’ cannot therefore be equivalent to the phrase ‘from an unknown
cause’. Hume tried but failed to answer his abstract question about the
concept of chance, though in everyday life he knew perfectly well how to
distinguish fortuitous coincidence from non-fortuitous conjunctions of
affairs. We are tempted to say that he did not know the meaning of the
abstract noun ‘Chance’, despite the fact that he knew perfectly well the
meaning of the adverbial phrase ‘by chance’. Yet how could he possibly
know the one without knowing the other?
To change the example once more, you yourselves would find it difficult
to tell me what Knowledge is and how it differs from True Belief, yet your
difficulty, whatever it is, does not continue to embarrass you when asked
such concrete questions as these: Do you still know the date of the Battle
of Waterloo? At what age did you learn or come to know Pythagoras’
theorem? Why are memorised gibberish syllables easier to forget, i.e.
cease to know, than significant sentences, and sentences in prose easier to
forget than sentences in verse?
Notice that in this case, while my abstract epistemological question
employed the abstract noun ‘knowledge’, in my concrete questions this
abstract noun did not occur, but only the active verbs ‘know’, ‘learn’ and
‘forget’. So we are tempted to say that we do not know the meaning of the
450 COLLECTED PAPERS: VOLUME 2

abstract noun, though we are perfectly at home with the meanings of the
active verbs. Yet this cannot be right, for if a person understands perfectly
well the active verbs ‘know’, ‘learn’, and ‘forget’ he knows all that he
needs in order to understand the abstract noun ‘knowledge’. If a child
has learned what it is for someone to conquer or protect someone else,
he needs no further lessons in order to understand the abstract nouns
‘conquest’ and ‘protection’.
Similarly with adjectives. A person who is quite familiar with the idea
of things being probable or improbable is fully equipped to understand
the abstract noun ‘probability’—yet is not thereby equipped to answer the
abstract, conceptual question ‘What is probability?’ or ‘Is probability a
property of happenings, though only some future ones, or is it a property
of some of our thoughts about happenings?’ Questions like those that
perplexed Augustine and defeated Hume, namely the abstract questions
about Time and Chance, can be classified as conceptual questions. They are
questions about Concepts. But a question such as ‘How long did the battle
last?’ or ‘Did the friends meet by chance or by design?’ is a question about a
battle or a meeting. Here the ideas of temporal duration and of fortuitous-
ness are being operated with; but they are not here being operated upon.
Somewhat similarly, the sculptor operates with a chisel, but it is the stone
that he is operating upon. It would be the business of the mechanic, not
the sculptor, to operate upon the chisel itself.
With some exaggeration we might try saying that a conceptual question
or conceptual statement typically has for its grammatical subject an
abstract noun, like ‘Time’ or ‘Chance’ or ‘Probability’, where a factual
question about a battle, or a meeting, or the weather would incorporate
the corresponding concrete ideas only by means of its verbs or adjectives
or adverbs. The weather forecast that tells us that in a certain region there
will probably be snowstorms tomorrow has for its subject the weather in a
certain place, and not the concept of probability. This idea comes in only
adverbially, as a qualification of the expectations about the weather. But
to say this would be too violent. For the weather forecast might just as
well be worded in this way: ‘There is the probability’ or ‘There is a high
probability of snowstorms in such and such a region’. This forecast
employs the abstract noun ‘probability’, though its author would certainly
tell us, if asked, that he was not talking about the concept of probability,
but only talking about the weather. The presence of the abstract noun
‘probability’ or ‘time’ does not prove that the sentence incorporating it
 CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 451

expressed a proposition about the concept of Probability or the concept of

Time. It can do so, but it need not. Correspondingly, a philosopher or
logician might be discussing the concept of Knowledge, Time, Chance or
Probability, although he abstained from employing those abstract nouns
or any others.
How is an abstract assertion, however it is worded, about the concept of
Time, or Probability or Knowledge related to the concrete assertions in
which, perhaps, a battle is said to have lasted for three days, snowstorms
are asserted to be probable, or the schoolboy is said no longer to know
Pythagoras’ theorem? (1) Clearly the abstract assertion about the concept
is, in an important way, more sophisticated than the concrete assertions. A
child who had not yet progressed far enough to understand that snow
would probably be falling tomorrow, would a fortiori not yet be equipped
to understand assertions about the concepts of Probability and Time.
(2) But more than this. Abstract assertions about the concepts of Probability
and Knowledge are parasitic upon concrete assertions expressed, perhaps,
with the adverb ‘probably’ and the verb ‘know’, ‘learn’ or ‘forget’—
parasitic in this way, that the maker of an assertion about Probability or
Time or Knowledge is saying in perfectly general terms something about
what is said when, for example, it is said that snow will probably be falling
tomorrow, or that the schoolboy has forgotten what he had once learned,
namely, Pythagoras’ theorem. What functioned as predicate or a part of
the predicate of the concrete assertion is itself the subject matter that is
being talked about in the abstract assertion. Statements about Probability
are, in an important way, statements about what it is that is stated when we
state that something will probably happen or what it is that is asked when
someone asks whether it is more likely to snow than to rain. To put it over-
grammatically, the abstract noun ‘probability’ is parasitic upon, inter alia,
the adverb ‘probably’, and the abstract noun ‘Time’ is parasitic upon, inter
alia, the tenses of ordinary tensed verbs. The chisel with which, this morn-
ing, the sculptor was carving the stone, is, this afternoon, the object upon
which the mechanic is working. But he is always working upon the chisel
as the tool with which stone-carving has been done and is to be done
again, though stone-carving is not being done with it this afternoon.
Maybe we can now begin to see part of what it was that perplexed
Augustine. It puzzled him that, so to speak, in the morning he could,
without error or confusion, produce and follow ordinary remarks con-
taining tensed verbs and specifications of dates, hours and epochs, and yet,
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so to speak, in the afternoon he could not answer questions about the

concept of Time. The morning task and the afternoon task belong to
different levels; and the afternoon task requires reconsidering, in a special
way, features of what had been done, perfectly efficiently perhaps, but still
naïvely, in the morning. In the morning he had talked good sense about
everyday topics in, inter alia, temporal dictions; but in the afternoon he had
to try to talk good sense about the good sense that, in the morning, he had
talked in those temporal dictions.
But now for a further point. The persons responsible for publishing
weather forecasts are constantly having to tell their hearers that, for
example, snowstorms are likely in certain regions, while in other regions,
though snowstorms are possible, rainy weather is much more probable;
and so on. From what intellectual motive can they or anyone else raise
what I am calling the ‘afternoon’-conceptual questions, namely the ques-
tions about what had been contributed to their morning forecasts by
their expressions ‘probably’, ‘possible, but less likely’ and so on? If, in the
morning, they knew quite well what they were saying, why do they or
other people need, in the afternoon, to try to say things about the
well-understood things that they had said in the morning? How are any
conceptual problems left requiring a solution, if the meteorologist had,
in the morning, said with truth, consistency and clarity all that he meant
to say about tomorrow’s weather? What light is there for a conceptual
discussion in the afternoon to throw on themes in which the meteorolo-
gist had in the morning been in no darkness at all? He and his hearers
knew what he meant, so how can he need to be given an autopsy on what
he meant? What questions about Time are left to perplex Augustine, after
he has said and understood all the chronological and chronometrical
things about the everyday world that he had needed to say and understand
before lunch?
Let us take a new example. We are all, in everyday life, constantly having
to consider concrete questions of existence and non-existence. How long
ago did mammoths exist and how long have they been extinct or non-
existent? Does there exist a prime number between 23 and 29? Is this
island uninhabited or do there exist some human beings on it? Even when
we speak of people constructing or demolishing bridges or houses we are
speaking of them as bringing bridges or houses into existence, and as
rendering them no longer existent. When theists and atheists dispute
about the existence of God, they may not come to an agreement on their
 CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 453

problem; but they do not differ in their employment of the notions of

existence or non-existence.
None the less, there do arise, so to speak, in the afternoon, well-known
problems about the concepts of existence and non-existence. How can
non-existence be ascribed to anything, say a prime number between 23
and 29, or to a 20th century mammoth, if there is, i.e. if there exists
nothing of which this or any other predicate can be predicated? Just how
do 100 imaginary dollars differ from 100 real or existent dollars, if I can
imagine my 100 imaginary dollars as having all the properties of the real
dollars, including that of being real? Once again we have to ask how it is
that we are, in the morning, perfectly at home with the idea of things
existing or being extinct or non-existent, and yet, in the afternoon, find
ourselves challenged to describe what it was that we had earlier been at
home with. Yet we do, somehow, need to be able to describe it. What sort
of a need is this? To ask this is to ask what sorts of problems are specifically
philosophical problems. Why do we need to philosophise?
Let us try out this suggested answer. A man at the dinner-table may
know very well the difference between an onion and a beetroot. He knows
their names, he knows how they taste, he can tell them apart from their
looks and smells; maybe he even knows how to cultivate and cook them.
But he cannot classify them; he cannot say to what different botanical sorts
onions and beetroots belong. So perhaps we are in a similar position. We
can, in concrete cases, tell existence from non-existence, knowledge from
ignorance, a month from a minute; but we cannot say what sort of a thing
it is for something to exist, what sort of a thing knowing is, or what sort of
a thing a minute is a short stretch of. Perhaps problems about concepts are
classificatory problems. I daresay that this is how Socrates thought of his
philosophical problems, namely as problems the solution to which, if he
could ever find them, would be of the pattern ‘Virtue is a species of
Knowledge, differing from other species of Knowledge in such and such
respects’.
I do not think that this suggested answer is right, and for this rea-
son. The philosophically interesting and crucial problems are problems
about concepts which are, typically, too pervasive or too catholic to be
treated as mere species of higher genera. The concepts of Time, Know-
ledge, Probability, Cause, Chance, Existence, Negation, and so on, are not
departmental notions, and a fortiori not sub-departmental notions; they are
inter-departmental. They belong, to put it metaphorically, not to this or
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that special vocabulary but to the topic-neutral syntax of our thoughts

about the world.
So now let us consider another suggestion. Instead of thinking of a man
who knows onions from beetroots but cannot tell us to what botanical
sorts they belong, let us now think instead of the inhabitant of a village
who knows well every house, field, stream, road and pathway in the
neighbourhood and is, for the first time, asked to draw or consult a map of
his village—a map which shall join on properly to the maps of adjacent
districts and in the end to the map of his country and even of his contin-
ent. He is being asked to think about his own familiar terrain in a way that
is at the start entirely strange, despite the fact that every item that he is to
inscribe or identify in his map is to be something that he is entirely
familiar with. In the morning he can walk from the church to the railway
station without ever losing his way. But now, in the afternoon, he has to
put down with compass bearings and distances in kilometres and metres
the church, the railway station and the paths and roads between. In the
morning he can show us the route from anywhere to anywhere; but it still
puzzles him in the afternoon to describe those routes—describe them not
just in words but in such cartographical terms that his local map will fit in
with the maps of his entire region and country. He has, so to speak, to
translate and therefore to re-think his local topographical knowledge into
universal cartographical terms. Now he has to survey even his own dear
home as if through the transparent pages of an international atlas.
I think you will agree that Augustine’s puzzlement about the concept of
Time has a good deal in common with the puzzlement of our villager who
is asked to think about his home-village in cartographical terms.
We should notice that part of what perplexes the villager when for the
first time asked to draw or to read a map of a place in which he is entirely
at home is that he has to describe it in perfectly general, cartographical
terms—terms, that is, which are shared by all other places. Where he
normally thinks of his home, his church and his railway station in personal
terms, now he has to think of them in impersonal, neutral terms. For him
his village is unlike every other village in being the centre of his own life;
but the map is neutral as between his village and any other. It represents
them all by different arrangements of the same dots, lines and colours. All
their distances, compass bearings and heights above sea level are given in
the same unemphatic, impartial, impersonal code. The map is not a local
snapshot; or an album of local snapshots; it is a slice out of an universal
 CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 455

diagram. When he is out of the country, a snapshot of his home may make
him feel homesick; but the map-reference of his home will not do this.
None the less the map is a store of knowledge about his district, for
which his own personal familiarity with it can never deputise. Besides
being personally intimate with his neighbourhood, he does also need to
know its geography. He has learned something valuable when he has
made the, at first, perplexing transition from thinking of his neighbour-
hood in only personal and practical terms, to thinking of it also in neutral,
public, cartographical terms. Unlike Augustine, he can now say, ‘When, in
the morning, you do not ask me questions, I can guide you on foot from
anywhere in the district to anywhere else; but, when in the afternoon, you
do ask me questions, I can now also tell you the distances in kilometres and
the compass bearings between anywhere in the district and anywhere else
in the district, or anywhere else in the country or even anywhere else in
the whole wide world.’ Not only can he cope with the familiar morning
tasks, but he can now also cope with the sophisticated afternoon tasks.
Both are territorial tasks about one and the same region; but they are tasks
of different levels. The ‘afternoon’ or cartographical task is more sophisti-
cated than the ‘morning’ task of merely guiding someone from the
church to the station. But this ‘afternoon’ task is also in an important way
parasitic upon tasks of the ‘morning’ type, since the ‘cash value’, so to
speak, of what the code-symbols in the map represent consists wholly in
such things as the fields, bridges, paths, rivers and railway-stations with
which the local inhabitants and visitors and even the Ordnance Surveyors
themselves became familiar not by studying maps but ambulando.
How should we apply this analogy of the two levels of topographical
knowledge to the difference on which we have been concentrating,
namely the difference between concrete and abstract, morning and after-
noon, factual and conceptual considerations? In this way. In making
my everyday unphilosophical statements, in asking my ordinary factual
questions or in giving my concrete, practical advice, I say what I have
to say with a variety of familiar words and phrases. These may be quite
untechnical expressions or they may be technical or semi-technical expres-
sions. Some of them may be unfamiliar to some people, but if I myself am
not familiar with them, either I avoid trying to use them, or I am in doubt
whether I have said what I wished to say.
Now every word or phrase that I so employ—with a few exceptions,
such as expletives—so contributes to my statement, question or advice
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that it would have been a different statement, etc., had I used a dif-
ferent non-synonymous word or phrase instead. It would have been a
different statement, different in having different implications, in requiring
different tests for truth or falsehood, in being compatible and incompat-
ible with different affiliated statements, in being evidence for or against
different corollaries, and so on. Let us label these for brevity its ‘implica-
tion threads’. If I am familiar with a word or phrase, then I know,
ambulando, the particular differences, of these sorts, that it contributes to the
particular statements etc. in which I employ it. Having said something
sensible with it, I know how to go on saying particular things that con-
tribute to make co-sense with what I said. So far I am like the villager who,
on leaving the church, turns right in order to walk home and never has to
nullify his first steps by turning back in his tracks. He is continuously on
the correct route all the way—unless he is absent-minded or distracted;
and this reservation applies to my talking and thinking too.
But now we have to notice a new point. The things that we say often,
indeed usually, contain a mixture or plurality of words or phrases. We
have to marry the contribution made by one to the contributions made by
all the others; and sometimes the implication threads generated by one of
them pull or seem to pull across or away from the implication threads
generated by another. For example, I might truly and intelligibly describe
a weary sailor in a storm as having toiled voluntarily, although reluctantly;
and then I find myself in a perplexity. For I seem to be saying that he toiled
not under compulsion but because he volunteered to do it, despite the fact
that he did not want to do it. The natural implication threads of ‘voluntar-
ily’ seem to pull away from the natural implication threads of ‘reluctantly’.
So now it is not enough to be familiar with the separate contributions of
the two adverbs. I need to be able to say how their apparent conflict is an
unreal one, as it must be if my original statement was intelligible and true.
I am now confronted by a conceptual problem, though doubtless a fairly
elementary and local one. But still it is a problem the solution of which
requires consideration in perfectly general terms of the notions of action,
motive, preference, strength of desires, choice and so on, with no particular reference
to this sailor or this storm. I have, so to speak, now to place on the same
regional map the ideas of ‘voluntarily’ and ‘reluctantly’ with each of
which by itself I am quite at home. I have to orientate them together with
one another, and also orientate them together with the other familiar ideas
with which they must or may come into conjunction. I have to fix what I
 CHAPTER 33: ABSTRACTIONS 457

may call their ‘logical bearings’ vis-à-vis one another and vis-à-vis all their
other normal or possible neighbours. Of course the big philosophical
issues are not those which, like my specimen about the sailor, just happen
more or less accidentally to crop up now and then, but those which
inevitably present themselves over and over again. When we speak, as we
constantly have to speak, in the very same breath, of a responsible human
agent acting in a world which is, as he himself also is, a field of chemical,
mechanical and biological causes and effects, we are not merely liable, but
bound, to find ourselves perplexed by the seeming interferences between
the implication threads belonging to our causal ideas and the implication
threads belonging to our moral ideas. Men must, we feel, be free; yet they
must, we also feel, be amenable to prediction and explanation. Their
actions cannot be mechanical. Yet also they cannot be unmechanical.
But how? And now we can see, I hope, that the answer to this question
‘But how?’ is not one the answer to which can be provided either out of
our morning familiarity with the ideas of culpability and merit; or out of
our morning familiarity with the ideas of impact, attraction, pressure and
tension, stimulus and response. We have now, instead, suspiciously to
trace and test in their own right the implication threads which ordinarily
we naïvely rely upon. We have now to operate upon what we ordinarily
operate readily and unquestioningly with. We now need the theory of our
daily practice, the geography of our daily walks. When two or twenty
familiar implication threads seem to pull across and against one another, it
is no longer enough to be able unperplexedly to follow along each one by
itself. We need to be able to state their directions, their limits and their
interlockings; to think systematically about what normally we merely think
competently and even dexterously with. Our familiarities are now at seem-
ing loggerheads with themselves; so an afternoon discipline and method
have to be superimposed upon our morning habits. However forcibly a
man may, in the morning, argue on this or that concrete topic, he may still
need to learn a quite new kind of lesson, namely how, in the afternoon, to
assess the forces of those arguments and how to compare and correlate
them with the forces of seemingly interfering or cooperating arguments.
It follows first that the philosophical examination of a concept, like that,
say, of Time or Probability or Voluntariness, can never be the examination
of that concept by itself, but only the examination of it vis-à-vis its numer-
ous neighbour-concepts, and then vis-à-vis their innumerable neighbours
too. Even the cartographer cannot produce a map that is the map just of
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one boulder by itself, or one stretch of water by itself. It follows second that
the procedure of the philosophical examination of a concept is necessarily
an argumentative or, if you prefer, a dialectical procedure. The philosopher
has done nothing at all until he has shown the directions and the limits
of the implication threads that a concept contributes to the statements
in which it occurs; and to show this he has, so to speak, to tug these
threads through their neighbouring threads, which, in their turn, he must
simultaneously be tugging.
What cross-bearings are to the cartographer, crossing implication
threads are for the philosopher. Augustine’s after-breakfast ability to say
things in temporal terms and to understand things said in temporal
terms was not enough by itself to enable him, after lunch, to co-ordinate
the contributions to statements of these temporal terms with the contribu-
tions made to them by associated terms of different sorts. He was like the
sailor, who, though perfectly at home in his own ship, is asked about the
disposition and organisation of the fleet to which his ship belongs. This is
not just a new question of an old sort. It is a question of a new sort.