John Cook Wilson

First published Tue Dec 8, 2009; substantive revision Wed Jun 1, 2022

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic atNew College, Oxford. His ideas are at the origin of ‘OxfordRealism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxfordduring the first decades of the twentieth century. Although trained asa classicist and a mathematician, his most important contributionswere to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge isfactive in conjunction with the thesis that, as a state of mind, it isnot definable in terms of belief—they share no ‘highestcommon factor’—and he thus rejected ‘hybrid’and ‘externalist’ accounts of knowledge. He also arguedfor direct realism in perception, criticizing both empiricism andidealism, and argued for a view of universals as tropes. His influenceswayed Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A.Prichard, Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to someextent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and‘ordinary language philosophy’, which defined in turn muchof Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth century.Cook Wilson’s name was, however, all but forgotten by the end ofthe century, but the influence of his ideas is still felt today in thewritings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travisand Timothy Williamson.

1. Life and Work

Details about the life of John Cook Wilson, or ‘CookWilson’ as he is commonly called, may be found in a memoirpublished in 1926 by his pupil A. S. L. Farquharson, in his edition ofCook Wilson’s posthumous writings,Statement and Inferencewith other Philosophical Papers (SI, xii–lxiv). He was bornin Nottingham on June 6, 1849, the son of a Methodist minister.Educated at Derby Grammar School, he went up to Balliol College in1868, elected on an exhibition set up by Benjamin Jowett for studentsfrom less privileged schools. At Balliol, Cook Wilson read classicswith Henry Chandler, from whom he certainly got his penchant forminutiae, and mathematics with Henry J. S. Smith. He also studiedphilosophy with Jowett and T. H. Green, who steered him towards Kantand idealism (SI, 880), along with other students from his generation,such as Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, Richard Lewis Nettleship andWilliam Wallace. He even went to Göttingen in 1873–74 toattend lectures by Hermann Lotze (SI, xxvii), whose portrait he keptin his study. Cook Wilson wrote late in his life that “from thefirst I would not commit myself even to the most attractive form ofidealism, tho’ greatly attracted by it” (SI, 815).Farquharson also mentions Friedrich Ueberweg’sSystem ofLogic and History of Logical Doctrines (Ueberweg 1871) as anearly ‘realist’ influence (SI, 880). If we are to followPrichard, however, Cook Wilson abandoned idealism “with extremehesitation” (Prichard 1919, 309) and “it was only towardsthe close of his life that he really seemed to find himself”(Prichard 1919, 318). (See also on this point Farquharson’sreminiscence in (SI, xix).)

Cook Wilson was elected fellow of Oriel College in 1873 and hesucceeded Thomas Fowler as Wykeham Professor of Logic, New College in1889. Bernard Bosanquet, Thomas Case, and John Venn had been among hisrivals. He finally moved to New College in 1901, where he remaineduntil his death from pernicious anemia on 11 August 1915. His wifeCharlotte, whom he had met in Germany, predeceased him; they had a son(Joseph 1916b, 557). Cook Wilson lived the uneventful life of anOxford don. Among his awards, he became Fellow of the British Academyin 1907. A Liberal in his convictions (SI, xxix), he did not getinvolved in politics, nor did he take a prominent part in the affairsof his university. (He is, for example, seldom mentioned in (Engel1983).) His most cherished extra-curricular activity appears to havebeen the development of tactics for military bicycle units.

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

In mathematics, he published a strange treatise that arose out of hisfailed attempt at proving the four-colour theorem,On theTraversing of Geometrical Figures (TGF). It had virtually noecho. Farquharson quoted the mathematician E. W. Hobson explainingthat Cook Wilson “hardly gave sufficient time and thought to thesubject to make himself really conversant with the modern aspects ofthe underlying problems” (SI, xxxviii). Cook Wilson alsopublished two short papers on probability (IP, PBT) in which he gavenew proofs of the discrete Bayes’ formula and of JacobBernouilli’s theorem (this last being known today as the weaklaw of large numbers). Edgeworth called the former an “elegantproof” (Edgeworth 1911, 378, n.10), but Cook Wilson wasseemingly ignorant of an already better proof of the latter via theBienaymé-Chebyshev inequality (Seneta 2012, 448 & 2013,1104). His mathematical endeavours were otherwise largely wasted ontrying to prove the inconsistency of non-Euclidean geometries. CookWilson claimed that he had ‘apprehended’ and thus‘knows’ the truth of Euclid’s axiom of theparallels—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 thustried in vain to find a contradiction to “convince the rank andfile of mathematicians” so that “they would at least notsuppose the philosophic criticism, by which I intended anyhow toattack, somehow wrong” (SI, xcvi). (See section 5 for furtherdiscussion of the point about knowledge.)

Cook Wilson published very little in philosophy: his inaugurallecture,On an Evolutionist Theory of the Axioms (ETA, seealso SI, 616–634), a critique of Spencer opening with a veryshort encomium to Green and Lotze (ETA, 3–4), and a short pieceinMind (CLP) on the ‘Barber Shop Paradox’. Inthe former, he argued that Spencer’s claim that the criterion oftruthp is the impossibility to think its contradictory andthat this criterion is the product of evolution is based on a circularreasoning: to prove that the criterion results from evolution, onemust apply it. The ‘Barber Shop Paradox’—not to beconfused with the ‘Barber’s Paradox’—isattributed to Lewis Carroll (Carroll 1894), but it originated in aprivate debate about ‘hypotheticals’ with Cook Wilson, whoattempted his own solution in CLP (Moktefi 2007a, chap. v, sect. 2),(Moktefi 2007b), (Moktefi 2008, sect. 5.2), while Russell had alreadysatisfactorily resolved it in a footnote toThe Principles ofMathematics (Russell 1903, 18). Cook Wilson was also involved onthe same occasion in the genesis of Carroll’s better-known‘paradox of inference’, in ‘What the Tortoise Saidto Achilles’ (Carroll 1895), which will be discussed in section8.

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

… the (printed) letter killeth, and it is extraordinary how itwill prevent the acutest from exercising their wonted clearness ofvision. (SI, 872) [See also Collingwood (2013, 19–20).]

His argument was that authors that have committed to print their viewson a given issue would, should they prove to be erroneous, more oftenthan not feel obliged to defend them and to engage in pointlessrhetorical exchanges instead of seeing immediately the validity ofarguments against them.

As a result, Cook Wilson resorted throughout his career to theprinting for private circulation of pamphlets, known asDictata, which he began revising for publication shortlybefore his death. Only 11 years later did the two volumes ofStatement and Inference appear, in 1926, put together byFarquharson from his lecture notes andDictata, along withsome letters. These volumes are subdivided in five parts and 582sections. Their arrangement, which is not Cook Wilson’s, betraystheir origin in his lectures in logic and in the theory of knowledge;also interspersed are texts that originate from his study of andlectures on Plato and Aristotle. As the chronological table of thevarious sections shows (SI, 888–9), the texts thus assembledwere written at different dates and, in light of Cook Wilson’sfrequent change of mind (including his move away from idealism), theyexpress views that are at times almost contradictory. This makes anystudy of his philosophy particularly difficult and, more often thannot, 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, inscholarly journals such asClassical Review,ClassicalQuarterly,Transactions of the Oxford PhilologicalSociety andPhilologische Rundschau, and a fewbook-length studies on Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics(AS) and on Plato’sTimaeus. His main philologicalclaim concerning the structure of the seventh book ofNicomacheanEthics was that it contained traces of three versions probablywritten by some Peripatetic later than Eudemus. To this he added ayear later a discussion (ASV) of interpolations inCategories,Posterior Analytics andEudemianEthics. In a postscript to the revised version of AS (1912), heclaimed, however, that the variants were probably different draftswritten by Aristotle himself. His pamphlet on theTimaeus(IPT) was mainly polemical, painstakingly detailing R. D.Archer-Hind’s ‘obligations’ in his 1888 edition oftheTimaeus to earlier authors, J. G. Stallbaum more than anyother.

Cook Wilson is mainly remembered today for two contributions to Platostudies, foremost for his paper ‘On the Platonist Doctrine ofthe ἀσύμβλητοιἀριθμοί’ (OPD), which bearson the debate on ‘intermediates’ in Plato. This issueoriginates in Aristotle’s claim inMet. A 6987b14–17 that Plato believed that the objects of mathematicsoccupy an “intermediate position” between sensible thingsand Ideas/Forms. Since there is no explicit commitment to this claimin Plato, scholars either rejected Aristotle’s testimony orlooked for passages where Plato might be said to have implicitlyendorsed it, such as the Line at the end of Book VI of theRepublic. Cook Wilson argued against reading this passage asimplicitly endorsing ‘intermediates’, claiming thatobjects of thought (διάνοια) areIdeas, because Plato stated inRep. 511d2–3 that theyare “intelligible given a principle”(καίτοινοητῶν ὂντωνμετ’ ἀρκῆς), and, asCook Wilson saw the matter: “nothing but anιδέα can be an object ofνοῦς” (OPD, 259).

He also argued that universals being ‘one’ in contrastwith the ‘many’ to which they correspond, there could beonly one ‘Circularity’, one ‘number Two’, etc.This means that, for example, ‘the number Two’ or theuniversal ‘twoness’ being one, it cannot be a pluralitycomposed of units and thus that ‘two and two make four’ isnot an addition of universals such as ‘twoness and twoness makefourness’ or ‘the number Two added to the number Two makesthe number Four’. These expressions have no sense according toCook Wilson, for whom ‘two and two make four’ merely meansthat ‘any two things added to any other two things make fourthings’ (OPD, 249). This is why numbersqua universalsare ‘unaddible’ or ‘uncombinable’(ἀσύμβλητοι) asAristotle put it in, e.g.,Met. M 8 1083a34, a view that CookWilson takes to be “exactly the Platonic doctrine” (OPD,250).

The need to posit ‘intermediates’ can be seen as arisingfrom the fact that one cannot perform arithmetical operations on these‘Idea numbers’, as Cook Wilson called them, while onewould need entities that are ‘in between’ (τάμεταξύ) sensible things and Idea numbersto account for arithmetical truths as elementary as ‘two and twomake four’. Cook Wilson nevertheless argued against commitmentto ‘intermediates’ (OPD, §4), his view being thatarithmetical 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 reachedthis view of Idea numbers asἀσύμβλητοιἀριθμοί at the time he wrote theRepublic or later on would be yet another issue.

Cook Wilson also argued (OPD, §5) that Idea numbers form a seriesordered by a relation of ‘before and after’(πρότερον καὶὔστερον) and, followingAristotle’s testimony inEth. Nic. I 6,1096a17–19 andMet. B 3, 999a6–14, that therecould be no genus of the species forming such ordered series (for acritique of this reading of Aristotle, see Lloyd (1962)). In otherwords, there can be no Form or universal of the Idea numbers. He wouldthus claim that in the proposition ‘The number Two is auniversal’, the expression ‘a universal’ cannotdenote 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 hetook to be the point of Plato’s doctrine of “unaddiblenumbers” (SI, 352).

Cook Wilson not only believed that these views are the trueinterpretation of Plato, but also that they are truesimpliciter and he criticized Dedekind’s definition ofcontinuity inStetigkeit und die irrationale Zahlen (Dedekind1872) for “not realising the truth attained so long ago in Greekphilosophy that [numbers] are Universals” and not magnitudes(OPD, 250, n.1 & SI, ciii) (Joseph 1948, 59–60). He neverexplained in any details how this critique is supposed to work againstDedekind, but provided instead lengthy and unconvincing arguments foralso rejecting Russell’s logicist definition of natural numberson 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 remainedinfluential, albeit controversial, throughout the last century,through Ross’ edition of Aristotle’sMetaphysics(1924, liii–lvii,ad B 3, 999a6–10 & M 6,1080a15–b4) and especially through its advocacy by HaroldCherniss inAristotle’s Criticism of Plato and theAcademy (Cherniss 1944, App. vi) andThe Riddle of the EarlyAcademy (Cherniss 1945, 34–37 & 76). Cherniss’student Reginald Allen still claimed in the 1980s that CookWilson’s is the “true view of Plato’sarithmetic” (Allen 1983, 231–233). (For furtherendorsements of Cook Wilson’s reading see (Joseph 1948, 33 &chap. v), (Klein 1968, 62) or (Tarán 1981, 13–18) and forcriticisms 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’sMeno, 86esqq.’ (GPP), of a key addition to S. H. Butcher’sclarification (1888) of the notoriously obscure geometricalillustration ofMeno 86e–87b, showing that Plato didnot intend to offer an actual solution to the problem of theinscription of an area as a triangle within a circle, but simply todetermine, while alluding to the method of analysis, the possibilityof its solution. An analogous explanation of that passage was providedlater 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 alsothe critical discussion of the ‘Cook Wilson/Heath/Knorrinterpretation’ 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 beenlimited to minute points of philology, such as the references to hiscritical comments on Apelt’s edition ofDe Melisso XenophaneGorgia (APT) in (Kerferd 1955) or to his pamphlet on theTimaeus in A. E. Taylor’s and F. M. Cornford’sown commentaries of that dialogue, and the critical discussion of hisviews in Ross’ edition ofAristotle’s Prior andPosterior Analytics (Ross 1949, 496–497).

Given that Cook Wilson’s views on knowledge and belief (seesection 5) are linked to Plato’s own distinction betweenἐπιστήμη andδόξα, it is worth mentioning that they also had animpact on the study of Plato’s dialogues. For example, althoughA. D. Woozley held a different view of knowledge as “notsomething generically different from belief, but as the limited caseof belief” (Woozley 1949, 193), Cook Wilson’s distinctionbetween knowledge and belief is introduced as an interpretative toolin chapter 8 of R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley,Plato’sRepublic. 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 inRyle’s discussion of knowledge in Plato’sTheaetetus (Ryle 1990, 23 & 27–28). (For a similarclaim aboutTheaetetus, see Prichard (1950, 88), and for Ryleon Cook Wilson onParmenides, see end of section 7.) Theimpact of Cook Wilson’s views was at any rate not limited toPlato studies: they form, for example, the basis for H. A.Prichard’s critique of Kant in hisKant’sTheory of Knowledge (Prichard 1909) or of his lectures on theDescartes, 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 knowledgeand belief.)

3. On Method: Ordinary Language

If Cook Wilson’s reverence towards ordinary language derivedfrom his training as a philologist, it was not limited to occasionalreferences to instances of usage to buttress his arguments. Hebelieved that in philosophy one must above all “uncompromisingly[…] try to find out what a given activity of thoughtpresupposes as implicit or explicit in our consciousness”, i.e.,to “try to get at the facts of consciousness and not let them beoverlaid as is so commonly done with preconceived theories” (SI,328). He also spoke of the latter as originating in ‘reflectivethought’ and argued it has two major defects. First, it is basedon principles that, for all we know, might be false and,concomitantly, it is too abstract, because it is not based on theconsideration of particular concrete examples. Indeed, in a passagewhere he criticized Bradley’s regress arguments against thereality of relations (Bradley 1897, chap. III), Cook Wilson begins bypointing out that “throughout this chapter there is not a singleillustration, though it is of the last importance that there shouldbe” (SI, 692). (On this critique of Bradley, see also Joseph(1916a, 37).) This is, however, slightly misleading, given thatBradley opens his discussion in his previous chapter, where a firstregress 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 oftime” (Price 1947, 336).

Secondly, Cook Wilson thought that philosophers are most likely tointroduce distinctions of their own that do not correspond to the‘facts of consciousness’ and thus distort ourunderstanding of them. He therefore strove to uncover these‘facts of consciousness’ through an analysis of concreteexamples which would be free of philosophical jargon. This is stronglyreminiscent of the ‘descriptive psychology’ of theBrentano School. As a matter of fact, Gilbert Ryle, who describedhimself as a “fidgetty Cook Wilsonian” in his youth (Ryle1993, 106) and who was also probably the only Oxonian who knewsomething about phenomenology in the 1920s, believed CookWilson’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 “verbalform of statement” was needed in order “to see what lightthe form of expression might throw upon problems about the mentalstate” (SI, 90), thus that ordinary language would be the guideto the ‘facts of consciousness’, because it embodiesphilosophically 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, withserious results. Distinctions made or applied in ordinary language aremore likely to be right than wrong. Developed, as they have been, inwhat may be called the natural course of thinking, under the influenceof experience and in the apprehension of particular truths, whether ofeveryday life or of science, they are not due to any preconceivedtheory. In this way the grammatical forms themselves have arisen; theyare not the issue of any system, they are not invented by any one.They have been developed unconsciously in accordance with distinctionswhich we come to apprehend in our experience. (SI, 874)

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

For this reason, Cook Wilson considered it “repugnant to createa 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 “ordinarylanguage reflects faithfully a true metaphysics of universals”(SI (208), see section 7). But such appeals were not just meant toundermine ‘preconceived theories’, they were alsoconstructive, e.g., when he distinguished between the activity ofthinking and ‘what we think’, i.e., between‘act’ and ‘content’ (SI, 63–64), arguingthat this is “likely to be right” because “it is thenatural and universal mode of expression in ordinary untechnicallanguage, ancient and modern” (SI, 67) and “it comes fromthe very way of speaking which is natural and habitual with those whodo not believe in any form of idealism” (SI, 64). As it turnsout, Cook Wilson believed that the ‘content’, i.e.,‘what we think’ is notabout the thing we thinkabout, but the thing itself (so knowledge contains its object, seesection 6).

These views were to prove particularly influential in the case of J.L. Austin, who began his studies at Oxford four years after thepublication of SI. It is a common mistake to think of Wittgenstein ashaving had some formative influence on Austin, as he was arguably theleast influenced by Wittgenstein of the Oxford philosophers (Hacker1996, 172). (On this point see also Marion (2011), for the contraryclaim, Harris & Unnsteinsson (2018).) At any rate, the evidenceadduced here and elsewhere since Marion (2000) ought not to be ignoredand, the philosophy of G. E. Moore notwithstanding, it is rather CookWilson and epigones such as Prichard that are the source of thepeculiar brand of ‘analytical philosophy’ that was to takeroot in Oxford in the 1930s, known as ‘Oxford philosophy’or ‘ordinary language philosophy’. One merely needs hereto recall the following well-known passage from Austin’s‘A Plea for Excuses’, which is almost a paraphrase of CookWilson:

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

Neither Cook Wilson nor Austin believed, however, that ordinarylanguage was not open to improvements. Cook Wilson was explicit aboutthis when detailing his procedure:

Obviously we must start from the facts of the use of a name, and shallbe guided at first certainly by the name: and so far we may appear tobe examining the meaning of a name. Next we have to think about theindividual instances, to see what they have in common, what it is thathas actuated us. […] At this stage we must take first whatseems to us common in certain cases before us: next test what we havegot by considering other instances ofour own application ofthe name, other instances in which has been working in us. Now whenthus thinking of other instances, we may see that they do not comeunder the formula that we have generalized. […] There is afurther stage when we have, or think we have, discovered the nature ofthe principle which has really actuated us. We may now correct some ofour applications of the name because we see that some instances do notreally possess the quality which corresponds to what we now understandthe principle to be. This explains how it should be possible tocriticize 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 Longworth2018a), and he also thought that ordinary language could be improvedupon:

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if thereis such a thing. […] ordinary language isnot the lastword: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved uponand superseded. Only remember, it is thefirst word. (Austin1979, 185)

It is worth noting that Cook Wilson uses in the above passage theexample of Socrates’ search for definitions as an illustrationof his procedure. This strongly suggests that he derived it fromconsideration of the method of induction(ἐπαγωγή) in Ancient philosophy:collect first a number of applications of a given term and, focussingon salient features of these cases, formulate as an hypothesis ageneral claim covering them, then test it for counterexamples againstnovel applications. (Longworth (2018a) has also drawn some interestingparallels with ‘experimental mathematics’ (see Baker(2008) and the entry to this Encyclopedia).)

4. Apprehension & Judgement

Since Cook Wilson’s philosophy was largely defined in oppositionto British Idealism, it is worth beginning with some points ofexplicit disagreement. Roughly put, under the idealist view knowledgeis constituted by a coherent set of mutually supporting beliefs, noneof which are basic, while others would be derivative. Surprisingly,when H. H. Joachim publishedThe Nature of Truth (1906),perhaps the best statement of the coherence theory of truth usuallyattributed to the British Idealists, Cook Wilson criticized him forrelying on a discredited ‘correspondence’ theory (SI,809–810). Cook Wilson did not argue directly against thecoherence theory, as Russell did (Russell 1910, 131–146), butsimply took the opposite foundationalist stance. He reasoned that thechain of justification ought to come to an end and that this end pointis some non-derivative knowledge, which he called‘apprehension’ (SI, 816). As he put it: “it becomesevident that there must be apprehensions not got by inference orreasoning” (UL, § 18).

As Farquharson noted (SI, 78 n.), Cook Wilson did not define his keynotion of ‘apprehension’. (This is related with CookWilson’s claim discussed in section 5 that knowledge isundefinable.) The notion appears to be at the same time close toAristotle’s ‘noesis’ and to Russell’s‘acquaintance’. Cook Wilson obviously took his lead from atradition beginning withPosterior Analytics B 19 and hiscomments are reminiscent of Thomas Reid, who argues in hisEssayson the Intellectual Powers of Man (Bk. II, chap. v) thatperception involves some conception of the object and the convictionof its existence, this conviction being immediate, non-inferential andnot open to doubt. Cook Wilson was not exactly faithful to Aristotleand Reid, however, since he argued that apprehensions can be bothperceptual and non-perceptual (SI, 79), and that some are obtained byinference while some are not, the latter being the material ofinference (SI, 84–85). Furthermore, he argued that perceptualapprehensions should not be confused with sensations, as the merehaving of a sensation is not yet to know what the sensation is, anidea that has echoes in Austin (Austin 1979, 91–94 & 122n.2). For this, one needs an “originative act ofconsciousness” that goes beyond mere passivity and compares thesensation in order to apprehend its definite character. As Cook Wilsonput it: “we are really comparing but we do not recognize that weare” (SI, 46).

Cook Wilson thought it misleading to base logic on‘judgement’ instead of ‘proposition’ or‘statement’ (SI, 94) and he questioned the traditionalanalysis of proposition under the form ‘S isP’, which he saw has having various meanings (Joseph(1916a, 6), see also section 9 for a related point). In his polemicsagainst idealism, Cook Wilson’s main target was the traditionaltheory of judgement that one finds, e.g., in Bradley’sPrinciples of Logic (Bradley 1928), where the topic is simplydivided into ‘judgement’ and ‘inference’.There would thus be a common form of thinking called the‘judgement’ that ‘S isP’,which would include non-inferred knowledge, opinion, and belief, butwould exclude inferred knowledge. One would be misled, he argued, bythe common verbal form ‘S isP’ thatknowledge, 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 previousindecision; a previous thinking process, in which we were doubting.Those verbal statements, therefore, which result from a state of mindnot preceded by such doubt, statements which are not decisions, arenot judgements, though they may have the same verbal form asjudgements. (SI, 92–3)

He further argued first that inferring is thus one of the forms ofjudgement: “if we take judging in its most natural sense, thatis as decision on evidence after deliberation, then inferring is justone of those form of apprehending to which the words judging andjudgement most properly apply” (SI, 86). Some inferences are,however, immediately apprehended, e.g., when one recognizes that itfollows from ‘ifp, thenq’ 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, ourordinary judgements “form fallible opinions only” (Joseph1916a, 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 thatp, one has found the evidencebeing in favour ofp, without being conclusive. But CookWilson thought statements of opinion as not involving the expressionof a decision, so they not judgement either:

It is a peculiar thing—the result of estimate—and we callit by a peculiar name, opinion. For it, taken in its strict and propersense, we can use no term that belongs to knowing. For the opinionthat A is B is founded on evidence we know to be insufficient, whereasit is of the very nature of knowledge not to make its statements atall on grounds recognized to be insufficient, nor to come to anydecision except that the grounds are insufficient; for it is here thatin 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 anysuch fiction as a mental activity manifested in a common mentalattitude to the object about which we know or about which we have anopinion. Moreover it is vain to seek such a common quality in belief,on the ground that the man who knows thatA isB and theman who has that opinion both believethatAisB. (SI, 100)

It is an important characteristic of ‘believing’, settingit apart from other ‘activities of consciousness’, that itis accompanied with a feeling of confidence, greater than inopining:

To a high degree of such confidence, where it naturally exists, isattached the word belief, and language here, as not infrequently, istrue to distinctions which have value in our consciousness. It is notopinion, 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 idealistswould have it, species of the same genre, ‘judgement’ or‘thinking’: these are all distinct andsuigeneris. This leads to the all-important distinction between‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’, discussed in thenext section: they do not merely differ in kind, they are not even twospecies of the same genus (Prichard 1950, 87). But Cook Wilson alsoheld the view that knowing is more foundational, so to speak, as it ispresupposed by other ‘activities of thinking’ such asjudging and opining. For example, opinion involves knowledge, but goesbeyond it:

There will be something else besides judgement to be recognized in theformation of opinion, that is to say knowledge, as manifested in suchactivities as occur in ordinary perception; activities, in otherwords, which are not properly speakingdecisions. (SI,96)

5. Knowing & Believing

Given that “our experience of knowing [is] the presupposition ofany inquiry we can undertake”, Cook Wilson reasoned that“we cannot make knowing itself a subject of inquiry in the senseof asking what knowing is” (SI, 39). It follows immediately fromthis impossibility of inquiring about the nature of knowledge that a‘theory of knowledge’ is itself impossible, a consequencehe first expressed in a letter to Prichard in 1904:

We cannotconstruct knowing—the act ofapprehending—out of any elements. I remember quite early in myphilosophic reflection having an instinctive aversion to the veryexpression ‘theory of knowledge’. I felt thewords themselves suggested a fallacy. (SL, 803)

Knowledge issui generis and therefore a ‘theory’of it is impossible. Knowledge is simply knowledge, and an attempt tostate it in terms of something else must end in describing somethingwhich is not knowledge. (Prichard 1909, 245)

Thus, knowledge, as obtained in ‘apprehension’, could notbe defined in terms of belief augmented by some other property orproperties, as in the definition of knowledge as ‘justified truebelief’. Cook Wilson is thus to be counted among early20^th-century opponents of this view (Dutant (2015), LeMorvan (2017) & Antognazza (2020)). This view is known sinceTimothy Williamson’sKnowledge and its Limits as‘knowledge first’ (see Williamson (2000, v) and AdamCarter, Gordon & Jarvis (2017) for recent developments of thisview).

At the turn of the last century, it was also held by the neo-Kantianphilosopher Leonard Nelson (Nelson 1908 & 1949), to whom CookWilson alludes in SI (872), but it was also held unbeknownst to him bymembers of the Brentano school, such as Adolf Reinach, Max Scheler,and Edmund Husserl. (See Mulligan (2014) for a survey.) It was tobecome the central plank of ‘Oxford Realism’. For theOxonians and the Brentanians one knows thatp only if one‘apprehends’ thatp. As Kevin Mulligan put it:“one knows thatp in the strict sense only if one hasperceived thatp and such perceiving is not itself any sortof belief or judging” (Mulligan 2014, 382). A version of thisview is defended today by Timothy Williamson, according to whomknowledge is a mental state “being in which is necessaryandsufficient for knowingp” (Williamson 2000, 21),and which “cannot be analysed into more basic concepts”(Williamson 2000, 33). The claim is, however, about ‘knowledgethatp’ and not anymore about ‘apprehending thatp’.

If knowledge is indeed distinct from belief, then the differencecannot be one of degree in the feeling of confidence or in the amountof evidential support:

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

To know is not to have a belief of a special kind, differing frombeliefs of other kinds; and no improvement in a belief and no increasein the feeling of conviction which it implies will convert it intoknowledge. (Prichard 1950, 87)

Austin has a nice supporting example inSense and Sensibilia,using the fact that ‘seeing that’ is factive: if no pig isin sight, I might accumulate evidence that one lives here: buckets ofpig food, pig-like marks on the ground, the smell, etc. But if the pigsuddenly appears:

… there is no longer any question of collecting evidence; itscoming into view doesn’t provide me with moreevidencethat it’s a pig, I can now justsee that it is, thequestion 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 Wittgensteinas a sort of ‘highest common factor’ between evidence andproof (McDowell 1998, 369–394). Here, a ‘highest commonfactor’ would be a state of mind that would count as knowing,depending on one or more added factors, but would count in theirabsence 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 ondisjunctivism in section 6). Although McDowell does not mention theseauthors, Travis (2005) has shown that this move has roots in both CookWilson and Austin. The fact that there is no highest common factor toknowledge and belief entails for Cook Wilson a rejection of‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts ofknowledge. Any ‘hybrid’ account would factor knowledgeinto an internal part, possibly a copy of the object known, and arelation of that copy to the object itself (see immediately below andsection 6). Since there is no such highest common factor, this view,integral to ‘externalist’ accounts of knowledge, had to berejected (Travis 2005, 287).

But Cook Wilson was led here to a further thesis. If one is preparedto say ‘I believep’, when one is not sure thatevidence already known is sufficient to claim that ‘I know thatp’, then it looks as if one should always be in aposition to know if one knows or if one merely believes. He argued,however, that ‘knowing that one knows’ should not meanthat, once a particular piece of knowledge has been obtained, oneshould then decide if it counts as knowledge or not, because thisdecision would count again as a piece knowledge and “we shouldget into an unending series of knowings” (SI, 107). This is whyhe insisted that knowing that one knows “must be containedwithin the knowing process itself”:

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

This claim was given further emphasis by Prichard, but his ownformulation differ in an important respect, since he introduces theidea of a “reflection” in virtue of which when one knowsthatp, one is able to know that one knows thatpand, when one believes thatp, one is also able to know thatone believes thatp, so that it would be impossible tomistake knowledge for belief and vice-versa:

We must recognize that whenever we know something we either do, or atleast can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it, andthat whenever we believe something, we similarly either do or candirectly know that we are believing it and not knowing it. (Prichard1950, 86 & 88)

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

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

Charles Travis called the claim that in knowing thatp onecan always distinguish one’s condition from all states in whichnot-p the ‘accretion’ (Travis (2005, 290) &Kalderon & Travis (2013, 501)) and he argued that it damages thecore of Cook Wilson’s and Prichard’s positions (Travis2005, 289–294). To use the above example of the pig suddenlycoming into view, the claim is that, although one can know byreflection that one knows that one is seeing a pig, one cannot by merereflection exclude the possibility that one is in fact seeing somecleverly engineered ‘ringer’. The upshot of this argumentis not immediately clear: if it is the case that one knowsponly ifp and one knows that one knows thatp, howcould one be unable to exclude the case that not-p, hencethat one does not knowp? At all events, Travis sees this asreinstalling the argument from illusion (Travis 2005, 291), that hadalready been subjected to numerous critiques from an early paper byPrichard to Austin’sSense and Sensibilia:

That statements about appearances imply that we at least know enoughof reality to say that real things have certainpossiblepredicates, e.g., bent or convergent. To deny this is to be whollyunable to state how things look. […] It is only because we knowthat our distance from an object affects its apparent size that we candraw a distinction between the size it looks and the size it is. If weforget this we can draw no distinction at all. (Prichard 1906,225–226)
… it is important to remember that all talk of deception onlymakes sense against a background of general non-deception.(You can’t fool all the people all of the time.) It must bepossible torecognize a case of deception by checking the oddcase against more normal ones. (Austin 1962, 11)

Guy Longworth (2019) has detailed how much Austin owed to Cook Wilsonon knowledge (see Urmson (1988) for a discussion in relation toPrichard): 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 asbeing different in kind from belief on accumulation of evidence (seeAustin (1962, 115) & (1979, 99)). But Austin dropped the‘accretion’ in ‘Other Minds’ as he shifted theanalysis of the claim that ‘If I know, I can’t bewrong’ (SI (69) & Prichard (1950, 88)) to that of ‘Iknow thatp’ as providing a form of warrant,one’s authority for saying thatp (Austin 1979,99–100). Krista Lawlor (2013) recently suggested that Austinintroduced here the speech act of ‘assurance’. (Althoughit 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 OxfordRealism before Austin, who was consciously moving away here fromstrict focus on ‘statements’.)

The ‘accretion’ raises indeed an issue concerning‘other minds’, given that it is one’s reflectiveview 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 knowledgeas a state of mind, was arguably led to explore the ramifications thechallenge ‘How do you know?’ to the person claiming‘I know’. Although he warned against the‘descriptive fallacy’ (Austin 1979, 103), Austin’sclaim appears to be, rather, that ‘I know’ has functions“over and above describing the subjective mental state ofknowing” (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 warrantvery much akin to a proof and, consequently, “we are forced toallow that we are certain of very much less than we should have saidotherwise” (Prichard 1950, 97). Mathematical knowledge appearsparadigmatic. As Prichard put it: “In mathematics we have,without real possibility of question, an instance of knowledge; we arecertain, weknow” (Prichard 1919, 302). (Joseph usedthis view to argue against Mill’s empiricist account ofmathematics, using ‘intuition’ where Cook Wilson would use‘apprehension’ (Joseph 1916a, 543–553).) Alas, CookWilson put forth the axiom of parallels in Euclidean geometry as anexample of knowledge, and dismissed non-Euclidean geometries asinconsistent (see section 1). If for anyp such as the axiomof parallels, someone fails to ‘apprehend’ it, then all hecould do is, somehow lamely, ask them to try and “remove[…] whatever confusions or prejudices […] prevent themfrom apprehending the truth of the disputed proposition”(Furlong 1941, 128).

This reply raises aprima facie problem for Cook Wilson,because he could not have known, in the sense of ‘knowingp only ifp’, that ‘non-Euclideangeometries are inconsistent’, since it has been proved that theyare not. He thus unwittingly provided an illustration of the need toaccount, from his own internalist standpoint, for the sort of error(or ‘false judgement’) committed when one claims to knowthatp, while it is the case that not-p. For someoneto know or to be in error while thinking that one knows would just betwo undistinguishable states, since which of the two happens to be thecase would depend on some external factors:

… the two states of mind in which the man conducts hisarguments, the correct and the erroneous one, are quiteundistinguishable to the man himself. But if this is so, as the mandoes not know in the erroneous state of mind, neither can he know inthe other state. (SI, 107)

Cook Wilson saw this a threat to the very possibility of demonstrativeknowledge, since one would never be sure that any demonstration istrue (SI, 107–108). Answering the threat, he would need here isthus to make room for errors—when one thinks that one knows butone does not—but without excluding by the same token thepossibility that knowing entails being in a position that one knowsthat one knows.

Cook Wilson was thus led to distinguish, in some of his mostintriguing descriptive analyses, a further ‘form ofconsciousness’, different from both knowledge and belief (oropinion), which he called ‘being under the impressionthat’ (SI, 109–113). A typical example being when one seesthe back of Smith on the street and, ‘being under the impressionthat’ it is a friend, say Jones, one slaps him on the back, onlyto realize one’s mistake when he turns his head. The“essential feature” of this state of mind is, according toCook Wilson, “the absence of any sense of uncertainty or doubt,the action being one which would not be done if we felt the slightestuncertainty” (SI, 110). Thus, one did not falsely judge that theman 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 thatone acted on it without questioning the evidence: it was not used asevidence, there was no assessment out of which one may be said toprefer this possibility that other possibility, because no otherpossibility was entertained. In this state of mind, the possibility oferror is somehow excluded, given that it does not occur to one that‘This man is Jones’ might be false. It is thus not thecase that one thought that one knew but really did not, because it isnot true that to begin with one thought one knew, since one had notreflected on one’s evidence. The absence of doubt or uncertaintyopens the door to the possibility of being mistaken while takingoneself as being certain.

The notion of ‘being under the impression that’ played asignificant role in the writings of the Oxford Realists, not justthose of Prichard, who also spoke of the ‘an unquestioning frameof 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), andAustin (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: wemerely see colour extensions, which we systematically mistake forobjects or ‘take for granted’ to be objects (Prichard1950, 52–68). Still, the notion of ‘being under theimpression 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 ofa state of “taking for granted”, which supposedly issubjectively indistinguishable from knowledge but unlike knowledgecarried no guarantee of truth. But the modification amounts tosurrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-calledknowledge is really only “taking for granted”? (Grice1989, 383–384)

One may also justifiably feel that Cook Wilson has not fully explainedaway cases of error such as his own in being certain that‘non-Euclidean geometries are inconsistent’, because hisconviction was not the result of merely ‘being under theimpression that’.

Nevertheless, the influence of Cook Wilson’s conceptions wasfelt in a variety of ways in the second half of the last century. H.H. Price offered inBelief an important commentary on CookWilson’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 usuallysaid to involve preference and confidence: in preferingp onewould decide in favour ofp having alternativesqandr in mind, but this is precisely not the case when‘being under the impression that’, since in this state onedoes 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 minddoubt is not an option, hence no degree of certainty is involved.Price also explored (1969, 212–216) connections between thisunquestioning state of mind and the notion of ‘primitivecredulity’ (Bain 1888, 511), i.e., the idea harking back toSpinoza (Ethics IIp49s) that one naturally believes in thereality of anything that is presented to one’s mind, unless somecontradicting evidence is also occurring.

In contrast to Price, Jonathan Cohen argued that beliefs aredispositions (Cohen (1989, 368) & (1992, 5)). He also rejected theCook Wilson’s claim that belief involves confidence (see section4), but, without crediting him (except privately), Cohen made use of‘being under the impression that’ to define belief as adisposition to ‘normally to feel thatp’ or‘to feel it true thatp’ (Cohen (1989, 368) &(1992, 7)). So defined, belief would thus differ from‘acceptance’, which results from a conscious and voluntarychoice and involves, like Price’s ‘assent’,preference and confidence. Cohen further added to these differencesthat acceptance is also subjectively closed under deductibility, whilethis is not the case with belief:

… you may well feel it true thatp and thatifp thenq, without feeling it truethatq. You will just be failing to put two and two together,as it were. And detective-story writers, for example, show us howoften and easily we can fail to do this with our beliefs. (Cohen 1992,31–32)

So acceptance ofp involves ‘premissing’, i.e.,the decision to usep as a premise or rule of inference infurther reasonings, and Cohen thought that he was carving nature atits joint here: “Belief is a disposition to feel, acceptance apolicy for reasoning” (Cohen 1992, 5). This is in many ways notfaithful to Cook Wilson’s original ideas, but one can sensetheir presence within the idea of being unreflectively disposed tofeel thatp being conceptually distinct from acceptingp.

On another note, John McDowell described knowledge in ‘Knowledgeand the Internal’ as a “standing in the space ofreasons” and argued against an “interiorization of thespace of reasons” that would occur if one were to think ofknowledge as achieving flawless standings in the space of reason,“without needing the world to do us any favours” (McDowell1998 395–396). If appearances were to be misleading, it would beargued that this not be the result of faulty moves within the space ofreason but simply an “unkindness of the world”. Thisconception, McDowell sees as opening the door to an‘hybrid’ account of knowledge, with flawless standings inthe space of reasons as an internal part, which would providenecessary conditions for knowledge, and favours from theworld—when thing are as they appear to be—as an extracondition (McDowell 1998, 400). But, McDowell concludes, “thevery idea of reason as having a sphere of operation within which it iscapable of ensuring, without being beholden to the world thatone’s postures are all right […] has the look of afantasy” (McDowell 1998, 405). This is so precisely because theresources from the space of reasons could not provide factiveness ontheir own, so knowledge couldnot be completely constitutedby standings within it. To rid oneself of the fantasy, one needssimply to recognize that on occasions when the world is what itappears to be, this favour is “not extra to the person’sstanding in the space of reasons” (McDowell 1998, 405) and that“we are vulnerable to the world’s playing us false; andwhen the world does not play us false we are indebted to it”(McDowell 1998, 407). Here too, although the terminology is taken fromWilfrid Sellars, there is a recognizable source in Cook Wilson.

Finally, another significant development related to the‘accretion’ is its connection with the ‘knowing thatone knows’ principle in epistemic logic, first introduced inJaakko Hintikka’s ground-breakingKnowledge and Belief(Hintikka 1962). Hintikka argued for the equivalence between ‘Iknow thatp’ and ‘I know that I know thatp’ or, more generally, that ‘i knowsthatp’ (K_ip) implies‘i knows thati knows thatp’(K_iK_ip) (Hintikka 1962, chap. 5). Inconnection with this, he noticed that Prichard’s introductionthe idea of “reflection” (see Prichard (1950, 88) quotedabove) turns the argument into an argument from introspection thatdoes not sustain the more general claim that ‘ibelieves thatp’ (B_ip) implies‘i knows thati believes thatp’ (K_iB_ip) (Hintikka1962, 109–110). Still, Hintikka thought that Cook Wilson andPrichard would be right, if their remarks were to be understood asrestricted to the case wherei 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 notfollow Cook Wilson and Prichard, since he argued against the‘knowing that one knows’ principle with help of the notionof ‘luminosity’. A condition C is said to be‘luminous’ if and only if for every casea, if Cobtains ina then ina one is in a position to knowthat C obtains (Williamson 2000, 95). Williamson (2000, chap. 4)provided arguments against ‘luminosity’, thus that one canknow without being able to know that one knows.

6. Perception

Cook Wilson also argued against idealism that in apprehension it isneither the case that the object exists only within the apprehendingconsciousness, nor that it is constituted by it: the object isindependent of the apprehending consciousness. As he wrote: “theapprehension of an object is only possible through a being of theobject other than its being apprehended, and it is this being, no partitself of the apprehending thought, which is what isapprehended” (SI, 74). This independence, he considered to bepresupposed by the very idea of knowledge expounded above. But hefurther rejected the distinction between act, content and object ofperception, first by negating the act-object distinction:

In our ordinary experience and in the sciences, the thinker orobserver loses himself in a manner in the particular object he isperceiving or the truth he is proving. That is what he is thinkingabout, and not about himself; and, though knowledge and perceptionimply both the distinction of the thinker from the object and theactive working of that distinction, we must not confuse this with thestatement that the thinking subject, in actualizing this distinction,thinks explicitly about himself, and his own activity, as distinctfrom 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 objectapprehended” (SI, 75). Austin echoed this last point saying that“our senses are dumb” (Austin 1962, 11). (There is anextensive literature on this claim, see, e.g., (Travis 2004) or(Massin 2011).) The point is not that perception does not aim at anobject, 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 mentalcopy of redness in my mind. I regard it as having real redness and notas having my copy of redness. […] If we ask in any instancewhat it is we think of a given object of knowledge, we find it alwaysconceived as the nature or part of the nature of the thing known. (SI,64)

What one apprehends must be the real object itself, not “somemental copy” of it, so Cook Wilson is claiming here that, as astate of mind, knowledge contains its object: “what we apprehend[…] is included in the apprehension as a part of the activityor reality of apprehending” (SI, 70). A long letter to G. F.Stout (SI, 764–800) is of particular importance here, where CookWilson criticized Stout on ‘Primary and SecondaryQualities’ (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 theappearance of the object to us. This ‘appearance’then gets distinguished from the object […] But next theappearance, though properly the appearing of theobject, gets itself to be looked on as itself an object and theimmediate object of our consciousness, and being already, as we haveseen, distinguished from the object and related to our subjectivity,becomes, so to say, a merely subjective‘object’—‘appearance’ in that sense. andso, asappearance of the object, it has now to be representednot as the object but as some phenomenon caused in our consciousnessby the object. Thus for the true appearance (= appearing) to us of theobject is substituted, through the‘objectification’ of the appearing as appearance, theappearing to us of anappearance, the appearing of aphenomenon caused in us by the object. (SI, 796)

Cook Wilson’s rejection of ‘hybrid’ accounts ofknowledge (see the previous section) is linked to his rejection ofepistemological ‘intermediaries’, so that knowledge couldnot be of some such ‘objectified’ appearance. Heconsidered all such intermediaries (‘images’,‘copies’, ‘representative’,tertiumquid, etc.) as “not only useless in philosophy butmisleading as tending to obscure the solution of a difficultproblem” (SI, 772). In this he stood in the tradition of ThomasReid, his arguments were as a matter of fact first developed againstthe empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume (for example in UL (§10)). In his letter to Stout, Cook Wilson put it thus:

You begin an important section of your argument by assuming the ideaof sensations beingrepresentative.
They {represent—express—stand for} something other thanthemselves.
Now, I venture to think that the idea of suchrepresentationin philosophy, or psychology rather, is very loose and treacherousand, if used at all, should be preceded by a ‘critique’ ofsuchrepresentative character, and an explanation of theexact sense in which the word representative is used. (SI, 769)

Against views of this kind, Cook Wilson developed three arguments inhis letter. First, he pointed out that it is impossible to knowanything 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 ofleading 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 therepresentative has to be apprehended in turn by the mind, and not onlythis further ‘apprehension’ remains unexplained, it wouldrequire that the mind be equipped with the very apparatus that therepresentationalist theories were, to begin with, devised toexplain:

We want to explain knowing an object and we explain it solely in termsof the object known, and that by giving the mind not the object butsome idea of it which is said to be like it—an image (howeverthe fact may be disguised). The chief fallacy of this is not so muchthe impossibility of knowing such image is like the object, or thatthere is any object at all, but that it assumes the very thing it isintended to explain. The image itself has to be apprehended and thedifficulty is only repeated. (SI, 803)

Cook Wilson also inveighed against Stout’s notion of‘sensible extension’ pointing outinter alia thatit makes no sense to claim that these are extended without being inspace (SI, 783) and he tried to explain how a given object may appearto have different shapes from different perspectives, without makingan appeal to any representative (SI, 790f.).

Stout answered these criticisms in print (for a discussion see Nasim2008, 30–40 & 94–98). He argued that he had not beenholding a view akin to Locke’s representationalism, claimingthat the ‘representative function’ of his‘presentations’ is of a different nature, more like amemory-image would represent what is remembered (Stout 1911, 14f.),but it is at first blush unclear what he meant by this. Against CookWilson’s first argument, he claimed that in his conceptionpresentations and presented objects form an “inseparableunity” (Stout 1911, 22), this being, once more, unclear. At allevents, both Stout and Russell, in his theory of‘sense-data’ as ‘objects of perception’(Russell 1912), insisted that the physical object and therepresentative are ‘real’. But one might say that this‘objectification of the appearing as appearance’, does notannul Cook Wilson’s diagnosis of the difficulties inherent inthat position. At least Russell was clearer about its implications,requiring a ‘logical construction’ of physical objects asfunctions of ‘sense-data’. One way to counter Cook Wilsonon the absurdity of the locution ‘sensible extensions’ isto distinguish between ‘private’ and ‘public’space, as Russell was to do in ‘The Relation of Sense-Data toPhysics’ (Russell 1917, 139–171); as it is well-known,this postulation generates its own set of difficulties, e.g., theclaim that space must have 6 dimensions (Russell 1917, 154). Russellon ‘sense-data’ was to become a favourite target forPrichard’s acerbic wit (Prichard 1915 & 1928).

Cook Wilson also wove his joint critique of the ‘objectificationof the appearing as appearance’ and of representationalism intoa broad historical narrative according to which “empiricism endsin the Subjective Idealism it was intended to avoid” (UL, §10, see also SI, 60–63); he spoke of an “insidious andscarcely ‘conscious’ dialectic” that “has donemuch mischief in modern metaphysics and theories of perception”(SI, 797). Wilfrid Sellars, who attended Prichard’s classes as aRhodes 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, ofCook Wilson. I found here, or at least seemed to find, a clearlyarticulated approach to philosophical issues which undercut thedialectic, rooted in Descartes, which led to both Hume and 19thCentury Idealism. At the same time, I discovered Thomas Reid and foundhim appealing for much the same reasons. (Sellars 1975, 284)

Although Cook Wilson’s philosophy may be construed as acontinuation of sorts of the Scottish School of Hutcheson and Reid(see also section 10), it is striking that there are hardly anyreferences to these authors in his writings, even more so given thatthey contain critiques of Locke, Berkeley and Hume from a similarstandpoint. (See Alsaleh (2003), focussing on attacks on Hume andtheir impact on Price (1932) and Austin (1962), and Marion (2009) foran overview of the 19th-century stages of this‘dialectic’).

There was, however, no doctrinal unity on perception among CookWilson’s epigones. Prichard was probably the first to put CookWilson’s views into print in ‘Appearances andReality’ (Prichard 1906) but, as already pointed out, he endedup arguing that in perception we systematically mistake colourexpanses for objects. H. H. Price, who was at first close to CookWilson (Price 1924), incorporated a sense-data theory while rejectingphenomenalism inPerception (Price 1932). He became for thatreason one of Austin’s targets inSense and Sensibilia(Austin 1962), which remains, for all its novelty, faithful to CookWilson’s orthodoxy on knowledge. At all events, a form of directrealism in the theory of perception is one of the characteristicfeatures of Oxford Realism. It is an ancestor to contemporary variantssuch as the position argued for by John McDowell inMind andWorld (McDowell 1994) and, after a long eclipse, CookWilson’s views are once more playing a role in current debatesabout 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 facedeither withcases of genuine perceptionor with cases of illusion orhallucination, as in ‘I see a flash of lightor I amhaving the perfect illusion of doing so’ (Hinton 1973, 39). Suchdisjunctions were first analysed in detail by Michael Hinton (seeHinton (1973) and Snowdon (2008)), but there have been suggestionsthat disjunctivism harks back to Austin or even Cook Wilson andPrichard (Kalderon & Travis (213, 498–499), forAustin’s case, see also Longworth (2019)). Adjudicating suchclaims depends on one’s understanding of disjunctivism itself,but a few points can be adduced. Disjunctivism should not be confusedwith any ‘naïve’ or ‘direct realism’, butone may appeal to it to defend such views, therefore one should expectCook Wilson and Oxford Realists to have taken some steps towards it.The sharp distinction between knowledge and belief (section 5), withthe rejection of any ‘highest common factor’ between thetwo, should count as a first step. (The above-mentioned critiques ofthe argument from illusion reinforce this point.) A further steptowards a form of disjunctivism is also taken when, havingdistinguished knowledge from belief, Cook Wilson also claimed thatbelief presupposes knowledge: it is only when assessing what I mayknow about some thing that I might realize that it is not sufficientto claim that ‘I know thatp’, so that I remaincircumspect and merely claim that ‘I believe thatp’ (see sections 4 & 5).

7. Universals

In metaphysics too, Cook Wilson had first to cope with idealism, thuswith the looming threat of Bradley’s regress about relations(Bradley 1897, chaps. II–III). Given a relationR betweena andb, a regress arises when one asks what relatesthe relation to its relata, e.g., what relatesa toR(andR tob), and one assumes as an answer thata further relation, say,R*, is needed to tiea andR, a bit like a string that ties two objects together thatneeds a further string to both of its ends to tie it to the objects.Since a need to explain the tie betweena andR*arises by the same token, one needs to introduce yet another relationR**, and so forth. In a brief chapter (SI, 692–695),Cook Wilson argued that the first move here—supposing thatR* is needed to tiea toR—is simply‘unreal’, because there could not be anewrelation that relates a relation to one of its terms. Thus, theregress would not be generated. One problem with Cook Wilson’sobjections is that they admittedly aim at the regress concerning‘external relations’ (SI, 692), but they are not fullydeveloped against ‘internal relations’ that Bradley alsoentertains (Bradley 1897, 17–18). Cook Wilson may not have afull and appropriate answer to Bradley, but he thought he was thusfree to entertain the relation of a subject to its attributes.

Although this is rarely noted, Cook Wilson is one of the forerunnersof what we now call ‘trope theories’. What Edmund Husserlcalled ‘moments’ and later on G. F. Stout called‘characters’ and D. C. Williams ‘tropes’, CookWilson called instead ‘particularization of the universal’(SI, 336) or ‘particularized qualities’ (SI (713),Mulligan et al. (1984, 293 n.13)). Among his contemporaries, CookWilson’s ideas stand indeed closest to both Stout’s andHusserl’s. He seems not to have known about the latter, but onenoticeable common feature concerns ‘dependence’ (Mulliganet al. 1984, 294). Cook Wilson suggested towards the end of his lifethat ‘things’ taken in themselves should be called‘existences’ (SI, 713) and, keeping close to the languageof Aristotle (τόδε τι, ‘athis’), he defined an ‘existence’ as ‘a thissuch and such’ (SI, 713). Starting with the subject-attributedistinction, in the case of an existence where the subject is said tobe a ‘substance’, he argued that the “ordinaryconception” of its ‘attribute-element’ is that it is“always a dependent reality” (SI, 157), with these“dependent existences” having in turn further existencesdependent on them (SI, 153).

Under his conception ‘existences’ are, one might say,‘bundles’ of particularized qualities. But he did notconsider ‘substance’ as a sort of substrate in whichuniversals are particularized, as many defenders of tropes do: the‘thing’ is according to him a mere ‘unity’ ofelements, “not something over and above them. which has them,but their unified existence” (SI, 155). He also expressed thisby saying that the universal “covers the whole nature of thesubstance” (SI, 349), as “the particular does not have theuniversalin it and somethingalso besides theuniversal to make it particular” (SI, 336, see also Joseph(1916a, 23)). It contains nothing besides the particularization of theuniversal: “the particular is not something that has thequality, it is the particularized quality. This animal isparticularized animality” (SI, 713). Likewise, “thedifferentia cannot be separated from the genus as something added onto it” (SI, 359), the species are just the forms that theuniversal, as genus, takes (SI, 335). Stout, citing Cook Wilson withapproval, put it thus: “square shape is not squareness plusshape; squareness itself is a special way of being a shape”(Stout 1930, 398). (The view harks back to Aristotle,Met. I8 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 aresemblance class. Here, Cook Wilson parts company, claiming that theuniversal is “something identical in the particulars, whichidentity cannot be done away by substituting the termsimilarforsame” (SI, 344 & 347). Although the universalis, 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 topossess an ‘intrinsic character’ (SI, 342n. & 351),for which Cook Wilson reluctantly introduced a technical term:“the characteristic being of the universal” (SI, 342). Buthe introduced no equivalent to Stout’sfundamentumrelationis or ‘distributive unity of a class’ (Stout1930, 388), because he did not define the universal in terms ofmembership of a class. Although he recognized that universals have anextension, i.e., the “total being of the universal”composed of the “whole of the particulars as theparticularization of this unity”, he did not identify theuniversal with it (SI, 338).

For this reason and in virtue of the realist epistemology which hetied to this conception (immediately below), Cook Wilson is often readas having held a form of ‘immanent realism’, as opposed tothe moderate forms of nominalism more typical of trope theories(Armstrong (1978, 85) or Moreland (2001, 165 n. 16)). One objectionagainst this stance is that there is not much point having bothuniversals and tropes. As David Armstrong put it, one of the two isbound to be redundant: “Either get rid of universals, embrace atrope version of Resemblance Nominalism or else cut out the middlemen,namely, the tropes” (Armstrong 1989, 17 & 132). This readingcannot be the last word, though, since Cook Wilson also appears onlyto have admitted one sort of entities, the tropes or‘particularizations of the universal’. Thus, there seemsto be a tension, at best unresolved, in Cook Wilson’s stance,which could explain why it has found few supporters, one exceptionbeing J. R. Jones (1949, 1950 & 1951).

Cook Wilson’s ‘particularizations of the universal’are thus “strictly objective” and “not a merethought of ours” (SI, 335–336); they thus cannot bephenomenal entities. His thinking here is of apiece with hisanti-idealist views on ‘apprehension’. He had arguedagainst T. H. Green’s neo-Kantian stance, that apprehension hasno ‘synthetic’ character: any synthesis apprehended isattributed to the object and not the result of an activity of the‘apprehending mind’. As he put it, “in the judgementof knowledge and the act of knowledge in general we do not combine ourapprehensions, 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 tomake a complex idea out of simple ones” (SI, 524). Thisview implies that universals and connections between them, asparticularized, arein rebus and to be apprehended as such(Price 1947, 336). The view is, therefore, that there is no possibleapprehension of the universal except as particularized:

Just as the universal cannot be, except as particularized, so wecannot 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 ofa the universal ‘triangularity’ and that,analogously, in stating that ‘triangularity is auniversal’ 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 aboutthe universal in this way would requireper impossibile thatone apprehends the universal in abstraction from any of itsparticularizations. Cook Wilson held his conception as being, if notpopular among philosophers, at least in accordance with ordinarylanguage and common sense (SI, 344–345).

It is thus the particularization of a given ‘characteristicbeing’ which we are said to apprehend, but “neither asuniversal nor as particularized” (SI, 343). There is nosuggestion in Cook Wilson’s writings of something akin toHusserl’s act of ‘categorial intuition’ or‘ideational abstraction’, in virtue of which the universalwould be “brought to consciousness and […] actualgivenness” (Husserl 2001, 292). He believed instead that the‘intrinsic character’ of any universal is inexplicable,because the relation between particular and universal, althoughfundamental and thus presupposed by any explanation (SI, 335 &345), issui generis, therefore not explainable in terms ofsomething else:

I seem to have discovered that the true source of our metaphysicaldifficulties lies in the attempt, a mistaken attempt too frequent inphilosophy, to explain the nature of the universal in terms ofsomething other than itself. In fact the relation of the universal tothe particular is somethingsui generis, presupposed in anyexplanation of anything. The nature of the universal thereforenecessarily and perpetually eludes any attempt to explain itself. Therecognition of this enable one to elucidate the whole puzzle of theParmenides of Plato. (SI, 348, see also SI, 361)

Cook Wilson thus believed to have found an answer to the notorious setof regress arguments known as the ‘third man’ inParm. 132a-143e. (Ryle argued later on that CookWilson’s answer would not do, developing his own regressargument against the notion of ‘being an instance of’,that Ryle read Cook Wilson as presupposing, while merely claiming thatit issui generis (Ryle 1971, vol. I, 9–10).)

8. Philosophy of Logic

Cook Wilson did not contribute to logic. His inclination was at anyrate conservative. For example, there was for him no room even to tryand make a case for an alternative logic, since he held theAristotelian principles (the principle of syllogism, the law ofexcluded middle and the principle of contradiction) to be “thosesimple laws or forms of thoughts to which thought must conform to bethought at all. Thought therefore cannot throw any doubt on themwithout committing suicide” (ETA, 17 & SI, 626). Cook Wilsonalso rejected new developments in symbolic logic from Boole toRussell. He was not as such adverse to the “symbolization offorms of statements”: when criticizing Boole’s he alludedto “an improved calculus of [his] own” (SI, 638), which hecalled “fractional method” (SI, 662). But he did notpublish it and all we have is the beginnings of an outline (SI,192–210). His main objection to Boole—a common one at thetime—was to the algebraist’s use of equations, perceivedas an intrusion of mathematics in logic (SI, 635–636). (See thewhole chapter (SI, 635–662).) And the little he knew ofmathematical logic, Cook Wilson ferociously opposed. He did think ofsyllogistic as “a science in the same sense as puremathematics” (SI, 437), but he was opposed to the very idea oflogical foundations for mathematics because he believed that logicalinferences are exhausted by syllogistic and, “mathematicalinferenceas such is not syllogistic” (SI, xcvi). Thisis a misunderstanding, common at the time, of the expressive power ofquantification theory as developed among others by Gottlob Frege andC. S. Peirce, of which he was clearly insufficiently cognizant, if notplainly ignorant.

Cook Wilson used his interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of Ideanumbers asἀσύμβλητοιἀριθμοί as a basis for an attackon Russell and the logicist definition of numbers, Plato’sdoctrine being understood (see section 2) as entailing that therecannot be a universal of the members of the ordered series ofuniversals: 1-ness, 2-ness, 3-ness, etc. because they do not share an‘intrinsic character’. Confusing this series with that ofthe natural numbers, he concluded that the logicist definition interms of classes of classes, e.g., of the number 5 as the class of allclasses equinumerous with a given quintuplet, is “a merefantastic chimera” (SI, 352). In line with the argument aboutputting the universal ‘triangularity’ in the subjectposition (previous section), Cook Wilson reasoned for the case ofnatural numbers that there would be an alleged ‘universal ofnumberness’ and that this would lead straight to acontradiction: since all particulars of a universal are said topossess its quality, a group of 5 as a particular of‘5-ness’ would thus possess the ‘universal ofnumberness’, thus contradicting his claim that a particularcannot be a universal (SI, 353).

By the same token, Cook Wilson thought that this line of reasoningshows that Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes that donot contain themselves (Russell 1903, chap. X) is a “merefallacy of language” (SI, cx). He thus argued at length (SI,§§ 422–32), including in his correspondence withBosanquet (SI, §§ 477–518) that there can no more be a‘class of classes’ than ‘universalness’ couldbe a ‘universal of universals’ and that a class can nomore be a member of itself than ‘universalness’ could be aparticular of itself: the implied ‘universal ofuniversals’ or ‘universalness’, of which universalswould be the particulars, would be a particular of itself, which is,Cook Wilson claims, “obviously absurd” (SI, 350). For badreasons 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 assilly to think such puerilities are worthy to be put in print: andit’s simply exasperating to think that he finds a publisher(where was the publisher’s reader?), and that in this way suchcontemptible stuff can even find its way into examinations. (SI, 739)

The problem with Cook Wilson’s arguments is that they are basedon an elementary confusion between membership of a class and inclusionof classes (see for example SI, cx & 733–734). Peter Geachcalled Cook Wilson “an execrably bad logician” (Geach1978, 123) for committing blunders such as this. (Cook Wilson’sclaim in a letter to Lewis Carroll that it is not possible to knowthat ‘SomeS isP’ without knowing whichS it is which isP is another such elementaryblunder (Carroll 1977, 376).)

Fortunately, Cook Wilson made a more interesting contribution tophilosophy of logic in his discussion of Lewis Carroll’s paradoxof inference (Carroll 1895), of which he gave the followingformulation:

… let the argument be A₁ = B₁, B₁= C₁, therefore A₁= C₁. Therule which has to be put as the major premiss is, things being equalto the same thing are equal to one another. Under this we subsumeA₁ and C₁ are things equal to the same thing,and so draw the conclusion that they are equal to one another. This issyllogism I. Now syllogism I, which is of the form MP, SM, SP, in turnexemplifies another rule of inference which is the so-calleddictum de omni et nullo. This must now appear as a majorpremiss. The resulting syllogism may be put variously; the followingshort form will serve. Every inference which obey the dictum iscorrect; the inference of syllogism I obeys the dictum; therefore itis correct. This is a new syllogism (II) which again has for rule ofinference the same dictum; hence a new syllogism (III) and so onin saecula saeculorum. (SI, 444)

Leaving aside the incorrect identification of the inference rule asthedictum de omni, this is recognizably the infinite regressin 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 towhich the inference is to be drawn from premisses as one of thepremisses themselves. We should anticipate that this must somehowproduce an infinite regress. (SI, 443)

These passages cannot be precisely dated and his correspondence withCarroll for the relevant period is lost, so one cannot tell who framedthe paradox first (Moktefi 2007, chap. V, sect. 3.1). They were bothanticipated, however, by Bernard Bolzano, who already stated theparadox in hisWissenschaftslehre (1837) and provided asimilar diagnosis (Bolzano 1972, § 199). (For a discussion, seeMarion (2016).) Interestingly, Cook Wilson’s diagnosis is linkedto his own views on the apprehension of universalsvia theirparticularizations (see the previous section):

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

In Lewis Carroll’s presentation of the paradox, the Tortoiserefuses to infer the conclusion when faced with an instance of therule ofModus Ponens and Achilles suggests that one shouldthen add the rule as a further premise, but the Tortoise still refusesto infer, so that Achilles then suggest to add the whole formularesulting from adding the rule as a premise as yet a further premiseto no avail, and so forth. It is often claimed that theTortoise’s repeated refusals indicates that rules of inferenceare in themselves normatively inert, so that a further ingredient isneeded for one to infer, e.g., a ‘‘rationalinsight’’ (Bonjour 1998, 106–107). CookWilson’s claim that one can only ‘apprehend’ thevalidity of the rule in a particular inference, thus ‘seeing thetruth 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 inan inference in accordance with it, on pains of an infinite regress,was also reprised by Ryle (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 216 & 238). But heused it to argue for his celebrated distinction between ‘knowinghow’ and ‘knowing that’: ‘‘Knowing arule of inference is not possessing a bit of extra information.Knowing a rule is knowing how. It is realised in performances whichconform to the rule, not in theoretical citations of it.’’(Ryle 1971, vol. II, 217). However, if ‘knowing how’ is nolonger a state of mind (even dispositionally), then the view is nolonger Cook Wilson’s.

Cook Wilson believed that all statements are‘categorical’, arguing away ‘hypotheticaljudgements’ with the claim that “in the hypotheticalattitude”, we apprehend “a relation between twoproblems” (SI, 542–543 & Joseph (1916a, 185)). Inother words, conditionals do not express judgements but connectionsbetween questions. This view was elaborated by Ryle into hiscontroversial stance on indicative conditionals as‘inference-tickets’ in ‘‘If’,‘So’, and ‘Because’’ (Ryle 1971, vol.II, 234–249). Ryle compared conditionals of the form ‘Ifp, thenq’, to “bills for statementsthat statements could fill” (Ryle 1971, vol. II, 240) and herejected the form ‘Ifp thenq, butp, thereforeq’, claiming that in some way thep in the major premise cannot for that reason be the same asp asserted by itself. This, of course, runs afoul ofGeach’s ‘Frege Point’ (Geach 1972).

9. Philosophy of Language

Cook Wilson also questioned superficial uniformity of the form‘S isP’, calling the subject ofattributes ‘metaphysical’ (SI, 158) in order todistinguish it from the subject of predication. He thus distinguishedtheontological distinction between substance and attributefrom thelogical subject-predicate distinction. Using thetraditional definition of the subject as ‘what supports thepredicate’ and the predicate as ‘what is said concerningthe subject’ (quoting Boethius, SI, 114–115), he notedthat a ‘statement’ such as ‘That building is theBodleian’ has different analyses, depending on the occasion inwhich it is used. If in answer to ‘What building isthat?’, with the ‘stress accent’ on ‘theBodleian’ as in ‘That building istheBodleian’, the subject is ‘that building’ andthe 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 theBodleian?’ with the ‘stress accent’ now on‘that’ as in ‘That building is theBodleian’, then the Bodleian is the subject and the predicate is‘that building pointed out was it’ (SI, 119). The samegoes for ‘glass iselastic’, where elasticity ispredicated of glass and ‘glass is elastic’, whenit is stated in answer to someone looking for substances that areelastic. This shows that the relation of subject to predicate issomehow symmetric, but it is not the case, however, with thesubject/attribute distinction because ‘‘The subject cannotbe an attribute of one of its own attributes’’ (SI, 158).Cook Wilson also noted that ‘‘the stress accent is uponthe part of the sentence which conveys the newinformation’’ (SI, 118), and he would thus say that thesubject-predicate relation depends on thesubjective order inwhich we apprehend them (SI, 139), while the relation between‘subject’ and ‘attribute’ isobjectivein the sense that it is holding between a particular thing and a‘particularized quality’, it is a ‘‘relationbetween realities without reference to our apprehension ofthem’’ (Robinson 1931, 103).

In ‘How to Talk’ (Austin 1979, 134–153), Austinfurther developed distinctions akin to Cook Wilson’sdifferentiation between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysicalsubject/attribute distinctions, and this differentiation was shared byP. F. Strawson (Strawson 1959, 144), who also believed in‘particularized qualities’ (Strawson (1959, 168) &(1974, 131)). In a bid to avoid Bradley’s regress (Strawson1959, 167), he introduced the idea of ‘non-relationalties’ between subject and attribute, leaving‘relations’ for the link between logical subject andpredicate. Some non-relational ties are thus said to hold betweenparticulars and particulars: to the relation between Socrates and theuniversal ‘dying’ corresponds an ‘attributivetie’ between the particulars that are both Socratesandthe event of his death. That such ‘ties’ are less obscurethan ‘relations’ and that this maneuver actually succeedsin stopping the regress are further issues, but it is interesting tonote that Strawson chose the name ‘attributive tie’ inhonour of Cook Wilson (Strawson (1959, 168), see SI, 193).

Strawson also noted that Cook Wilson’s argument fordifferentiating between the logical subject/predicate and metaphysicalsubject/attribute distinctions involves an appeal to‘‘pragmatic considerations’’ (Strawson 1957,476). Cook Wilson’s claim that a sentence such as ‘glassis elastic’ may state something different depending on theoccasion in which it is used also had an important continuation in J.L. Austin’s more general point that, although the meaning ofwords plays a role in determining truth-conditions, it is not anexhaustive one: it “does not fix forthem atruth-condition” because that depends on how truth is to bedecided on the occasion of their use (see Travis (1996, 451) andKalderon & Travis (2013, 492 & 496)):

… the question of truth and falsehood does not turn only onwhat a sentenceis, nor yet on what itmeans, buton, speaking very broadly, the circumstances in which it is uttered.(Austin 1962, 111)

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

R. G. Collingwood also took Cook Wilson as putting forth a slightlydifferent thesis, namely that the meaning of a statement is determinedby the question to which it is an answer (Collingwood 1938, 265 n.).He used this idea as the basis for his ‘logic of questions andanswers’ (Collingwood 2013, chap. 5) and for his theory ofpresuppositions (Collingwood 1998, chaps. 3–4), this last beingfurther developed by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot (1980, 42f.).Collingwood was reluctant, however, to recognize Cook Wilson as aninspiration, since he thought ill of the idea of‘apprehensions’ as a non-derivative basis for knowledgeand he believed instead that knowledge comes from asking questionsfirst (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 andlogic, but two remarks ought to be made concerning moral philosophy.First, the last piece included inStatement and Inference iscomposed of notes for an address to a discussion society in 1897, thatwas announced as ‘The Ontological Proof for God’sExistence’. In this text, which opens with a discussion ofHutcheson and Butler, Cook Wilson argued that in the case of“emotions as are proper to the moral consciousness”, suchas the feeling of gratitude:

We cannot separate the judgement from the act as something in itselfspeculative and in itself without the emotion. We cannot judge hereexcept emotionally. This is true also of all moral and aestheticjudgements. Reason in them can only manifest itself emotionally. (SI,860)

He argued further, in what amounts to a form of moral realism, thatthere must be a real experience, i.e., in the case of gratitude,“Goodwill of a person, then, must here be a realexperience” (SI, 861), and that the feeling of “reverencewith its solemnity and awe” is in itself “not fear, love,admiration, respect, but something quitesui generis”(SI, 861). It is a feeling that, Cook Wilson argued, “seemsdirected to one spirit and one alone, and only possible for spiritconceived as God” (SI, 864). In other words, the existence ofthe feeling of reverence presupposes that God exists. Cook Wilson thussketched within the span of a few pages a theory of emotions, which isechoed today in the moral realism that has been developed, possiblywithout 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—nowcollected in McDowell (2001).

Cook Wilson’s ideas had a limited impact on Oxford theology.Acknowledging his debt, the theologian and philosopher C. C. J. Webbdescribed religious experience as one that “cannot be adequatelyaccounted for except as apprehension of a real object” (Webb1945, 38), but he nevertheless chose to describe his standpoint as aform of ‘Platonic idealism’ (Webb 1945, 35). CookWilson’s realism also formed part of the philosophicalbackground to C. S. Lewis’ “new look” in the 1920s,via E. F. Carritt’s teaching. InSurprised by Joy,Lewis also described awe as “a commerce with somethingwhich […] proclaims itself sheerly objective” (Lewis1955, 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 CookWilson’s conception of knowledge to moral philosophy, with hispaper ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ (Prichard1912), whose main argument is analogous to Cook Wilson’sargument for the impossibility of defining knowledge. In a nutshell,duty issui generis and not definable in terms of anythingelse. 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 moralthinking occasioned by the various situations in which we findourselves”, and the demand that it is proved that we ought to dothese things is “illegitimate” (Prichard 1912, 36). Inorder to find out our duty, “the only remedy lies in actuallygetting into a situation which occasions the obligation” and“then letting our moral capacities of thinking do theirwork” (Prichard 1912, 37). This paper became so influential thatPrichard was elected in 1928 to the White’s Chair of MoralPhilosophy at Corpus Christi, although his primary domain ofcompetence had been the theory of knowledge. His papers in moralphilosophy 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 CookWilson, the Aristotle scholar W. D. Ross (Ross 1930, 1939) remains theforemost representative, along with H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt,and J. Laird. Some of the views they expressed have recently gainednew currency within ‘moral particularism’, e.g., in thewritings of Jonathan Dancy (Dancy 1993, 2004).

11. Legacy

The historical importance of Cook Wilson’s influence ought notto be underestimated. In his obituary, H. W. B. Joseph described himas being “by far the most influential philosophical teacher inOxford”, adding that no one had held a place so important sinceT. H. Green (Joseph 1916b, 555). This should be compared with theclaim that in the 1950s Wittgenstein was “the most powerful andpervasive influence” (Warnock 1958, 62). The‘realist’ reaction against British Idealism at the turn ofthe 20^th century was at any rate not confined to thewell-known rebellion of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge.There were also ‘realisms’ sprouting in Manchester (withRobert Adamson and Samuel Alexander), and in Oxford too, where ThomasCase had already argued for realism inPhysical Realism (Case1888) (Marion 2002b), although it is clearly Cook Wilson’sinfluence that swayed Oxford away from idealism. Since he published solittle, it is therefore mainly through teaching and personal contactthat he made a significant impact on Oxford philosophy, not onlythrough the peculiar tutorial style to which generations of‘Greats’ students were subjected—as described inWalsh (2000) or Ackrill (1997, 2–5)—but also throughmeetings that he initiated, which were to become the‘Philosophers’ Teas’ under Prichard’stutelage, the ‘Wee Teas’ under Ryle’s and‘Saturday Mornings’ under Austin’s.

His legacy can thus be plotted through successive generations ofOxford philosophers. E. F. Carritt, R. G. Collingwood (who reverted toa 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-knownpupils at the turn of the century. After his death, his influenceextended through the teaching of Carritt, Joseph and Prichard, and theposthumous volumes ofStatement and Inference to thepost-World War I generation of the 1920s, including Frank Hardie, W.C. Kneale, J. D. Mabbott, H. H. Price, R. Robinson and G. Ryle, andthe early analytic philosophers of the 1930s, J. L. Austin, I. Berlin,J. O. Urmson, and H. L. A. Hart, in particular. For example, IsaiahBerlin’s described Hart as “an excellent solid CookWilsonian” in a letter to Price (Berlin 2004, 509), and admittedhimself 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 ofprominence at Oxford and then transformed itself into ordinarylanguage philosophy and, as pointed out in the previous section, moralintuitionism. In the post-World War II years, Cook Wilson’s namegradually faded away, however, while ‘ordinary languagephilosophy’, which owed a lot to his constant reliance onordinary language against philosophical jargon, blossomed. It becameone of the strands that go under the name of ‘analyticphilosophy’, so Cook Wilson should perhaps be seen as one of itsmany ancestors.

The only Oxford philosopher of note who opposed the‘realists’ before World War II was R. G. Collingwood, whodied too soon in 1943. He felt increasingly alienated and ended upreduced to invective, describing their theory of knowledge as“based upon the grandest foundation a philosophy can have,namely human stupidity” (Collingwood 1998, 34) and theirattitude towards moral philosophy as a “mental kind ofdecaudation” (Collingwood 2013, 50). Collingwood objected toCook Wilson’s anti-idealist claim that ‘knowing makes nodifference to the object known’, that in order to vindicate itone would need to compare the object as it is being known with theobject independently of its being known, which is the same as knowingsomething unknown, a contradiction (Collingwood 2013, 44). ButCollingwood’s argument did not rule out the possibility ofcoming to know an object, while knowing that it was not altered in theprocess. (For critical appraisals, see Donagan (1985, 285–289)Jacquette (2006) and Beaney (2013).) In another telling complaint, hecriticized the Oxford Realists for being interested in assessing thetruth or falsity of specific philosophical theses without payingattention to the fact that the meaning of the concepts involved mayhave evolved through history, and so there is simply no ‘eternalproblem’ (Collingwood 2013, chap. 7). This points to a lack ofhistorical sensitivity, which is indeed another feature of analyticphilosophy that arguably originates in Cook Wilson.

There was another deleterious side to Cook Wilson’s influence inOxford: his contempt for mathematical logic. It explains why one hadto wait until the appointment of Hao Wang in the 1950s for modernformal logic first to be taught at Oxford. In the 1930s, H. H. Pricewas still teaching deductive logic from H. W. B. Joseph’sAnIntroduction to Logic (Joseph 1916a) and inductive logic from J.S. Mill’sSystem of Logic. This reactionary attitudetowards modern logic and later objections to ‘ordinary languagephilosophy’ go a long way to explain why Cook Wilson’sreputation 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 regardedWilson’sStatement and Inference as the philosophicalbook of the century, and Prichard’s lectures on perception andon moral philosophy, which I attended with excitement, as veritablemodels of exposition and analysis. I may add that while myphilosophical ideas have undergone considerable changes since 1935, Istill think that some of the best philosophical thinking of the pasthundred years was done by these two men. (Sellars 1957, 458).

As the tide of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ ebbed, CookWilson’s views on knowledge showed more resilience. In the1960s, Phillips Griffiths’ anthology onKnowledge andBelief included excerpts from Cook Wilson (Phillips Griffiths1967, 16–27) and John Passmore was able to write that“Cook Wilson’s logic may have had few imitators; but hissoul goes marching on in Oxford theories of knowledge” (Passmore1968, 257).

As shown in sections 5 and 6, Cook Wilson’s views on knowledgeand perception are now once more involved in contemporary debates.They had remained influential all along, although his name was oftennot mentioned. His peculiar combination of the claims that knowledgeis a factive state of mind and that it is undefinable, argued for anewby J. L. Austin, has been taken up and further developed by JohnMcDowell (McDowell 1994, 1998), Charles Travis (Travis 1989, 2008),and Timothy Williamson (Williamson 2000, 2007), who is currentlyWykeham Professor of Logic, New College. One has, therefore, whatCharles Travis once described as “an Oxford tradition despiteitself” (Travis (1989, xii), on this last point, see alsoWilliamson (2007, 269–270n)).

During the twentieth century, secondary literature on CookWilson’s philosophy was not considerable, with a few papers ofunequal value by Foster (1931), Furlong (1941), Lloyd Beck (1931) andRobinson (1928a, 1928b), along with a few studies on universals in thepost-war years (see section 7), and only one valuable commentary,Richard Robinson’sThe Province of Logic (Robinson1931). Interest in the study of his philosophy was only revived at thebeginning of this century, with Marion (2000) giving a first overviewof Oxford Realism. In a short book, Kohne (2010) charts the views ofCook Wilson, Prichard and Austin on knowledge as a mental state. Animportant contribution, Kalderon & Travis (2013) secured OxfordRealism’s place in the history of analytic philosophy, comparingit with other forms of realism in Frege, Russell and Moore, whiledrawing links with later developments in the writings of J. L. Austin,J. M. Hinton and John McDowell. As a result of this revival ofinterest, 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 CookWilson’s legacy.

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[ASV] ‘Aristotelian Studies I. On the Structure of theSeventh Book of the Nicomachean Ethics, ch. i–x, vomVerfasser’,Göttingische gelehrte Anzeige, April14, 1880, pp. 449–474.
[IPT]On the Interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. CriticalStudies with Reference to a Recent Edition, Oxford, ClarendonPress, 1889.
[ETA]On an Evolutionist Theory of the Axioms, An InauguralLecture, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1889.
[APT] ‘Apelt’s Pseudo-Aristotelian Treatises’,The Classical Review 6 (1892): pp. 16–19,100–107, 156–162, 209–214, 441–446 & 7(1893): 33–39.
[IP] ‘Inverse or “a posteriori”Probability’,Nature, December 13, 1900, pp.154–6. Reproduced partly as (SI, §§325–327).
[PBT] ‘Probability—James Bernoulli’sTheorem’,Nature, March 14, 1901, pp. 465–6.
[GPP] ‘On the Geometrical Problem in Plato’sMeno, 86e sqq.: With a Note on a Passage in the Treatise DeLineis Insecabilibus’,The Journal of Philology,January 1, 1903, pp. 222–240
[OPD] ‘On the Platonist Doctrine of theἀσύμβλητοιἀριθμοί’,The ClassicalReview, 18 (1904): 247–60.
[TGF]On the Traversing of Geometrical Figures, Oxford,Clarendon Press, 1905.
[CLP] ‘Lewis Carroll’s Logical Paradox’,Mind, 14 (1905): 292–293. With correction,Mind, 14 (1905): 439.
[SI]Statement and Inference with other PhilosophicalPapers, 2 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1926; reprint: Bristol2002.
[UL]Unpublished Lectures from 1913–1914(Charlottesville VA, Intelex, 2005). Electronic edition in the PastMasters seriesavailable online.

For a complete list of Cook Wilson’s publications during hislifetime, see (SI, lxv–lxxii). Cook Wilson’s papers weredeposited at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford in 1970, ref.GB 161 MSS. Top. Oxon. c. 580–4, and a carbon copy of hislecture notes on Plato’sThe Republic, that had been inpossession of A. D. Woozley, was donated to the Houghton Library,Harvard University in 2008. Another such typescript was depositedamong the papers of Percy William Dodd at Jesus College, Oxford(JC:F12/MS5/I).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Guy Longworth, whose comments greatly improved this entry,along with Benoît Castelnérac, Maxime Deschênes,Cora Diamond, Pascal Engel, Mark Kalderon, Vincent Lizotte, AlessandroMoscarítolo, Colin Tyler and two anonymous referees.

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