Malcolm, Norman (1911–1990)

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MALCOLM, NORMAN
(1911–1990)

Norman Malcolm, one of America's best-known philosophers, was born in Selden, Kansas, in 1911. After studying philosophy with O. K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard in 1933. The decisive period for Malcolm's career, however, was probably the time he spent at Cambridge University in 1938–1939, when he met G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although Moore exerted a strong influence on him, it is perhaps not unfair to say that most of Malcolm's published work was an attempt to understand Wittgenstein, to explain his thought to others, and to apply Wittgenstein's characteristic manner of approaching philosophical questions to areas the latter did not directly treat.

Malcolm's published work deals especially with the nature of necessary truth; empirical certainty; the connections between common sense, ordinary language, and philosophy; knowledge and perception; and such topics in the philosophy of mind as memory, dreaming, and the problem of other minds. He also wrote on topics in the philosophy of religion. What follows will be confined to the first three topics.

Necessary Truth

"Are Necessary Propositions Really Verbal?" and its companion piece, "The Nature of Entailment" (in Knowledge and Certainty ), together form an interesting statement of the linguistic theory of the a priori. In the former, Malcolm points out that some philosophers (for example, C. D. Broad, Moore, and A. C. Ewing) hold that necessary propositions state very general truths about reality—for instance, that nothing is both red and green all over. Others (for example, A. J. Ayer and the early Wittgenstein) apparently believe that if necessary propositions state anything at all, they state truths about language; they are "merely verbal." Malcolm tries to show that, although it is false, literally speaking, that necessary propositions are merely verbal, there is nonetheless considerable merit in saying that they are. He argues this point by claiming that we learn necessary truths by observing how people use certain expressions. Finding out that a pair of propositions are equivalent, for example, is the same thing as finding out that some pairs of expressions are used interchangeably. What makes a given statement necessary is some empirical fact about linguistic usage. (Although Malcolm considers the objection that on this account any necessary statement turns out to be identical with or equivalent to some contingent statement about linguistic expressions, he does not, it seems, have a clear answer to it.) Accordingly, he says, it is false that necessary statements are merely verbal or are rules of grammar or are not really propositions; it is nonetheless worthwhile to say these things in that they prevent one from supposing, for example, that there are two kinds of facts or truths, necessary and contingent, a supposition that is, literally speaking, true but nonetheless misleading. Why? Perhaps Malcolm believed that in saying this one minimizes the vast and important difference between necessary and contingent truths, the difference being that the necessary truths depend upon or reflect facts of linguistic usage in a way that the contingent truths do not.

Empirical Certainty

In "The Verification Argument" and "Certainty and Empirical Statements" (in Knowledge and Certainty ), Malcolm objects to the view that no empirical statements are ever really certain. "The Verification Argument" is a careful, clear, and very impressive examination of the arguments philosophers (in particular, C. I. Lewis, who was a teacher of Malcolm's at Harvard) have offered for this skeptical view. Where S is any empirical statement, Malcolm points out that these arguments always invoke as a premise the claim that the consequences of S may not occur and deduce from this that it is not certain that the consequences of S will occur. What Malcolm shows is that there is no interpretation of the former statement according to which it both is true and entails the latter.

Ordinary Language

In several essays, Malcolm dealt with certain questions about the relationships between ordinary language, common sense, and philosophy. Essentially, what he says is that if a philosopher is investigating a concept of ordinary language (for example, seeing ) and comes to conclusions at variance with ordinary language, then we may be sure that he has made a mistake. What is it to come to a conclusion that goes against ordinary language? One way of doing this is to hold that a sentence with an ordinary use expresses a logical impossibility: some philosophers, for example, appear to insist that it is logically impossible to see physical objects. We may recognize their error by noting that such sentences as "I see the table in the corner" have a perfectly good ordinary use and therefore cannot be self-contradictory. But it is impossible to convey the full power of Malcolm's arguments without a very detailed consideration of particular cases.

Bibliography

works by malcolm

"Defending Common Sense." Philosophical Review (1949).

"Philosophy and Ordinary Language." Philosophical Review (1951).

"Dreaming and Skepticism." Philosophical Review (1956).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Dreaming. London: Routledge, 1959.

Knowledge and Certainty. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963.

"Behaviorism as a Philosophy of Psychology." In Behaviorism and Phenomenology, edited by T. W. Wann. Chicago: William Marsh Rice University by the University of Chicago Press, 1964.

"Is It a Religious Belief That God Exists?" In Faith and the Philosophers, edited by John Hick. New York: St. Martin's, 1964.

"Scientific Materialism and the Identity Theory." Dialogue (1964).

Alvin Plantinga (1967)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy