This book would be very important indeed if Mr. Spencer Brown had substantiated his claims “that the concept of probability used in statistical science is meaningless in its own terms” , and that confirming this is the only significance of experiments in psychical research. The six short introductory chapters need not be discussed here. It is in Chapters VII to IX that the author develops his thesis that the concept of randomness is self–contradictory, and the statistician's concept of probability consequently (...) meaningless. I shall examine what I take to be the central argument leading to this conclusion. This is developed from a distinction between “primary chance or randomness” and “secondary chance or randomness” . The former concept is to be applicable only to individual events and is to depend upon their “unexpectedness or unpredictability”; the latter concept, applicable only to a series as such, is denned as “possessing no discernible pattern” . The definition of “primary randomness” is amplified, but not clarified, on page 49: “An event is primarily random in so far as... one cannot be sure of its occurrence... The only relevant criterion is that we are able to guess ”. We are then told that primary randomness “admits of analysis in subjective terms”, since the same event may be predictable by one person but unpredictable by another; whereas secondary randomness is “a more objective concept”. (shrink)

"Professor Mundle's authoritative and acclaimed critique of a way of thinking which still shapes the style of Anglo-Saxon philosophy is here presented in a revised text with a new postscript. Mundle shows how Austin, Ryle and Wittgenstein, among others, not only committed grammatical and logical errors akin to those they themselves detected in others, but misunderstood the relatoins between grammar and philosphy. Professor P.L. Heath contributes a new foreword, and Mundle himself answers his opponents in a subtly (...) provocative manner." --. (shrink)

Professor C. A. Mace, the psychologist, once wrote: ‘It is difficult … to present and defend any sort of behaviourism whatever without committing oneself to nonsense.’ I shall illustrate this thesis. I shall comment on the writings of some psychologists. This is relevant to my topic; for psychologists' expositions of behaviourism contain much more philosophy than science, and the inconsistencies which permeate their versions of behaviourism reappear in the works of eminent philosophers. My quotation from Mace comes from a paper (...) defending what he calls ‘analytical behaviourism’; which he distinguishes from ‘methodological behaviourism’ and ‘metaphysical behaviourism’. According to Mace, analytical behaviourism does not question the truth of our everyday statements about a person's mind or states of consciousness; what it claims is that such statements ‘turn out to be, on analysis, statements about the behaviour of material things’, that is, about a person's ‘bodily acts, bodily states, bodily dispositions, bodily “states of readiness” to act in various ways’. The father of behaviourism, J. B. Watson, rarely says anything suggesting this doctrine. As he presents it, behaviourism is both a methodological principle and a metaphysical theory. (shrink)

Professor C. A. Mace, the psychologist, once wrote: ‘It is difficult … to present and defend any sort of behaviourism whatever without committing oneself to nonsense.’ I shall illustrate this thesis. I shall comment on the writings of some psychologists. This is relevant to my topic; for psychologists' expositions of behaviourism contain much more philosophy than science, and the inconsistencies which permeate their versions of behaviourism reappear in the works of eminent philosophers. My quotation from Mace comes from a paper (...) defending what he calls ‘analytical behaviourism’; which he distinguishes from ‘methodological behaviourism’ and ‘metaphysical behaviourism’. According to Mace, analytical behaviourism does not question the truth of our everyday statements about a person's mind or states of consciousness; what it claims is that such statements ‘turn out to be, on analysis, statements about the behaviour of material things’, that is, about a person's ‘bodily acts, bodily states, bodily dispositions, bodily “states of readiness” to act in various ways’. The father of behaviourism, J. B. Watson, rarely says anything suggestingthisdoctrine. As he presents it, behaviourism is both a methodological principle and a metaphysical theory. (shrink)