At the end of her book Professor Langton acknowledges one prima-facie difficulty for her position. This is Kant’s clear and repeated assertion of the ideality of space, its subjective source; for this may seem to bring into question her firm belief that the objective reality of the material world, the subject matter of the physical sciences, is an integral part of the critical doctrine. It may seem to threaten us (and Kant) with commitment to a kind of phenomenalistic, or even to the Berkeleian, idealism that Kant himself emphatically repudiates. Professor Langton is convinced that the threat is only apparent, and considers briefly a number of ways of circumventing it. The solution that she finds most satisfactory consists in drawing a distinction: the dynamical forces that constitute bodies are genuinely objective properties, but relational not intrinsic properties, of things as they are in themselves; space, though its source is subjective and hence spatial relations are ideal, is simply the form in which we have intuitive awareness of real dynamical relations; spatial relations are ideal, but they make experience of real dynamical relations possible. Professor Langton is aware that more work would need to be done on this solution. She says: ‘the connection Kant sees between dynamical and spatial relations must be regarded as unfinished business.’8 But she seems to have no doubt that a solution on these lines must be correct. It seems to me, however, that there is another and quite different difficulty for Professor Langton’s interpretation, a difficulty of which she takes no account at all. This difficulty relates not to the objects of outer sense, of 10 Strawson 8 R. Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 217. which space is the form, but to the contents of inner sense, of which time is the form: in other words, the contents of empirical self-consciousness, which Kant, somewhat like Hume, represents as a succession of constantly changing subjective states, a flux (his own word) of thoughts, perceptions, feelings. How are these to be accommodated in Professor Langton’s scheme of interpretation? They are certainly not intrinsic properties of any thing (presumably, in this case, a self) as it is in itself. They are firmly declared, like the objects of outer sense, to be appearances. But again they cannot have the reality of those real, but extrinsic, relational, causal, dynamic properties of things in themselves that constitute the objects of outer sense, the subject matter of the physical sciences. Yet they cannot just be left in the air, as it were; they must be found a place in the scheme of things, since without them no experience, and hence no knowledge of the objective world, the subject matter of the physical sciences, would be possible at all. They are indeed recognized by Kant as a fit subject for what he called empirical (as opposed to rational) psychology and picturesquely describes as a kind of physiology of inner sense. If Professor Langton is to find a place for them, then, it looks as if she must find besides those real but extrinsic dynamic properties of things in themselves that constitute bodies some analogous real but extrinsic properties of things in themselves that are capable of constituting minds or, perhaps better, empirical consciousness. No such account is forthcoming, however; and, even if it were, she would face a problem parallel to that apparently created for the objective reality of bodies by the ideality of space; for time also, the form of inner sense, is declared to be ideal. For these reasons, though not for these alone, I am unconvinced by Professor Langton’s work, interesting, impressive, and scholarly as it is. Yet I recommend it for these, its own, certainly intrinsic, properties. After that critical interlude, perhaps I should say a little more to justify the title of this chapter. It might reasonably be thought that in order to do that I should at least say, first, whether any other philosopher has had an influence upon me at all comparable with that of Kant, and, second, whether any particular view I have come to hold seems to me of outstanding importance. For reasons I have already made clear, no single other philosopher and no single work of any other philosopher has had in my philosophical history the position that Kant and the first Critique have had. But I can mention other more diffuse influences. First, then: Russell and Moore, the founding fathers, at least as far as England is concerned, of analytical philosophy in our period. Their influence related to the questions and problems they discussed rather than the answers and solutions they gave. Second: the brightest lights that shone on the Oxford philosophical scene in the 1950s—those of Ryle, Austin, and Grice—though here too it was more A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography 11 a matter of style of thought than any particular doctrines to which I responded. And, finally, I must mention Wittgenstein; for, if I share anyone’s conception of what our general philosophical aim or objective should be, it is, if I have understood him correctly, that of Wittgenstein, at least in his later period. That is, our essential, if not our only, business is to get a clear view of our most general working concepts or types of concept and of their place in our lives. We should, in short, be aiming at general human conceptual self-understanding. Wittgenstein saw that a necessary condition of achieving this was to liberate ourselves from false understanding; to tear away the veil of simple seductive illusions or pictures that pervaded or constituted much existing philosophical theory and that prevented us from seeing clearly, from getting the clear view we needed. To this task Wittgenstein devoted much of his formidable powers and did so with the unique effectiveness of genius. But I must add, as I think, that his almost obsessive anxiety to liberate us from false pictures, from the myths and fictions of philosophical theory, led to a certain loss of balance in his thinking. It did so in two ways. First, it led to a distrust of systematic theorizing in general—and hence to a disregard of the possibility, indeed, to my mind, the fact, that the most general concepts and categories of human thought do form in their connections and interdependencies an articulated structure that it is possible to describe without falsification. Indeed, what I tried to show in my work on Kant is that the first Critique contains, besides much else that is more questionable, the general outline of many essential features of just such a description. Second, this same anxiety to liberate us from false theory led Wittgenstein, as I think, to minimize or dismiss, or at least give too little acknowledgement to, some pervasive features of our experience and of our ordinary non-philosophical thought. It is true of these features that they can, in philosophical thinking, lend themselves to gratuitous inflation, to mythologizing, to false imaginary pictures—all of these proper targets of Wittgenstein’s hostility and scorn, the ‘houses of cards’ it was part of his mission to destroy. But that is no reason for failing to acknowledge them fully as the harmless, inescapable features that they are. So what are these features? I have in mind two things: the first is the reality of subjective experience in all its richness and complexity or, as one of our most distinguished contemporaries expressed it, in all its ‘heady luxuriance’— the phrase is Quine’s; the other is the inescapable presence in our thought of abstract intensional objects. Both, as I remarked just now, are easily misunderstood, prime sources of the generation of ‘pictures to hold us captive’. But neither should for that reason be downplayed or denied the character it actually has in our experience or our thought. Another thing I suggested I should do in order to justify my chapter title is to answer the question whether there is any particular view that I have 12 Strawson come to hold that I regard as of outstanding importance. Well, there is such a view: it is by no means new and I do not think I am alone in holding it. It is not exciting: it is even, I think, a truism. But it has been overshadowed and regarded with suspicion in recent times. It is not a view that I myself have come to merely recently. Indeed, I had already grasped it in an incomplete and inchoate form before 1950. But a sense of its importance and ramifications has steadily grown with me since. It is this: that the fundamental bearers of the properties of truth or falsity, the fundamental subjects of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’, are not linguistic items, neither sentences nor utterances of sentences. It is not, when we speak or write, the words we then use, but what we use them to say, that is in question. It is whatever may be believed, doubted, hypothesized, suspected, supposed, affirmed, stated, denied, declared, alleged, etc. that is or may be true. Any of these verbs may be followed by a noun clause of the form ‘that p’, and it is precisely the items designated or referred to by these noun clauses, as used on this or that occasion, that are the bearers of the properties of truth or falsity. We do not have, in common use, a general word for these items. We do not have such a word because we do not in practice need it; in practice, we always use a nominalization of one of the verbs in question as the subject of the predicate (for example, ‘your belief’, ‘his allegation’, ‘that statement’, etc.) or a noun phrase such as ‘what she has just said’ or even the form ‘that p’ itself. Philosophers have, at various times, made various attempts to supply this deficiency. Frege’s ‘thought’ is one; Austin groped towards it when he distinguished the ‘locutionary’ act (in terms of sense and reference) from the ‘phatic’ on the one hand and the ‘illocutionary’ on the other;9 G. E. Moore and others have happily used the term ‘proposition’, which, more recently, has shown a tendency to be replaced by ‘propositional content’ or merely ‘content’; an older term still is ‘judgement’. Whatever term we use for items of this kind—and I perhaps date myself by being content with old-fashioned ‘proposition’—the essential point is that such an item is not to be identified with an inscription or an utterance or a type of inscription or utterance; it is an abstract, intensional entity, but nonetheless an item of a kind such as we constantly think of and refer to whenever we think of, or comment on, what someone has said or written (in the declarative mode) or indeed on a thought that has, as we say, just entered our own heads. It is objected that there is no clear general criterion of identity for such items. Never mind: we get on well enough, and communicate well enough, without one. With the admission of propositions or judgements or thoughts as abstract intensional entities there goes along of course the admission of A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography 13 9 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). others: of senses, of concepts, of properties and universals in general. It is here, most obviously, that the risk of inflation comes in: the risk of seductive images, pictures to hold us captive, myths and fantasies that are often fathered, justly or not, on Plato. But in order to acknowledge the items in question as the harmless necessary things they are, regularly recognized in ordinary thought and talk, there is no need to be thus seduced, no need to be taken captive by such pictures. So I have spoken up for subjective experience on the one hand (the contents of inner sense, as Kant would say) and for abstract intensional entities on the other. And this prompts me to remark, in conclusion, on one mildly ironical feature of our subject in the early twenty-first century. If anyone is entitled to be called the founder of our subject, it is generally acknowledged to be Plato: and if anyone could be called the father of its modern development, most of us would nominate Descartes. The irony is that to accuse a philosopher of Platonism or Cartesianism is currently felt to be a seriously damaging charge. But if, and in so far as, I have exposed myself to it, I am unrepentant. Of course both these great men were guilty of exaggerations and more or less grave mistakes. But each had a grasp, however uncertain, of features of our thought and experience that it would be a much graver mistake to overlook, to deny, or to minimize. 14 Strawson    Edited by Hans-Johann Glock, Department of Philosophy, University of Reading Price: £35.00 (Hardback) 0-19-925282-3 Publication date: 10 July 2003 Clarendon Press 270 pages, 234mm x 156mm Series: Mind Association Occasional Series Oxford University Press