Shepherd vol 2 ebook: Chapter 7: Engrafting Errors

Chapter 7: Engrafting Errors

In her Treatise ‘An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect’¹, Shepherd addresses the problem of accidentally introducing clear errors into your philosophical system that you have picked up from a philosophical treatise you have read. In Shepherd's words, she writes: 

“Had Mr. Lawrence, however, paid more attention than he has done to the concluding sentence I have quoted from Dr. Brown, he had not engrafted these errors into his system….”² 

Here we see Shepherd accusing Lawrence of over absorbing Brown unthinkingly, despite the two men being different types of thinkers. 

Nevertheless, I would also add that engrafting other philosophers' errors into your system is not just about agreeing with them or failing to be critical enough. I argue that another way one can map errors, which Shepherd has not mentioned here, is by assuming that secondary literature has done all the work for you, and all you have to do is criticise what is already there and find fault with their arguments. But in doing, so you have also inadvertently mapped their approach onto your system if you:

1) conflate putting forward a contra with being critical: critical thinking and contras are two different things

2) treat other philosophers' arguments as covering everything there is to know about the topic and so make the error of not thinking through other related, relevant issues that most of them may not have mentioned or expanded on. 

Hence, I suggest that not absorbing concepts, arguments and scholarship uncritically is even more complex than Shepherd explains in this passage, for many different reasons. I have simply added one common way philosophers may overlook things as a result of mapping other thinkers' systems onto theirs, either by appropriating it or by over-relying on their structure. 

3) Secondary literature and scholarship is not there to act like a revision guide that tells you all about the primary text and gives you an easy to read version of it. You need to construct your own interpretation and arguments from ground zero, even when responding to scholarship and secondary literature, irrespective of whether you wish to agree or provide a contra. 

Now I shall analytically analyse the context of this passage in Chapter 5 ‘Observations on Mr Lawrence’s Lectures’ in her 1824 Treatise, in which Shepherd points out that Lawrence has engrafted errors into his system. 

In this chapter, I shall keep my focus tight to Shepherd's two main refutations that answer Lawrence's two examples of sentences which he thinks amount to the same type of statement. 

Both of Shepherd's objections are rooted in logic: 

1)The first being linguistic in nature, so falling under the branches of Philosophy of Language and Logic; 

2)Her second refutation revolves around highlighting that Lawrence has committed a logical fallacy about causation. 

We can hear Shepherd's logical, rational approach and technical vocabulary in philosophy when she writes that she intends to show that Lawrence has made: 

"what I consider FALSE instead of LOGICAL deduction, and confused instead of "simple" argument into important practical theories, cannot be too strongly deprecated, and I wish to give my reader full possession of the grounds of my reasoning.”⁴

A few pages earlier, Shepherd repeats one of Lawrence's sentences, which amounts to the claim that gold is ductile, yellow, soluble in nitro-muriatic acid, because we have always found it to be so when it is pure gold.⁵

Another of Lawrence's sentences that Shepherd brings out, is his claim that:

"We assert the living muscular fibres "to be irritable, and the living nervous "fibres to be sensible for the same reason".⁶

Shepherd often summarises this claim with the sentence: “the living nerve is sentient”.⁷

So what is the problem with these two factual sentences? They seem to simply state a couple of scientific facts: one a geological description of gold and one a biological description of the nervous system. 

I shall now analytically set out an overview of how Shepherd logically deconstructs Lawrence's statements about gold and nerves. 

Lawrence argues that both his sentence about gold and his sentence about nerves are the same type of sentence. In Philosophy and Logic, such sentences are what we refer to as a proposition. So he maintains that there is not the "faintest shade of difference"⁸ between these two propositions, which I shall simplify to: 

Proposition 1: Gold is yellow

And 

Proposition 2: Living nerves are sentient

Shepherd's concern is that this approach is conflating two very different types of propositions as being the same when they are clearly not, which results in Lawrence committing two logical errors. 

One, the propositions about gold and nerves are linguistically dissimilar. Briefly and simply put: the word gold is merely a straightforward noun that tells us about its properties and qualities, such as it is the colour yellow. Whereas the noun nerve is termed a qualified noun because it is preceded by the adjective living. 

What is the significance of the difference between calling it just by the noun nerve or by using the qualified noun living nerve? Shepherd argues that the qualified noun phrase living nerve:

"....assigns a cause and producing principle for sensation...."⁹

So, I interpret Shepherd as arguing thus: the significant difference, for Shepherd, is that the nerve proposition basically reads as the statement that a nerve is alive and causes sensation, unlike a deadened one. This also means, contra Lawrence, that such nerves function as a producing principle for sensation. The importance of this is that this means it is worth examining and researching, for instance, how and why nerves cause us to feel sensations such as heat, cold, pain and so on and think about what philosophical and scientific principles we can suggest as to how they produce these sensations. Otherwise, if we conceptualise it as Lawrence does, there is nothing to really think about or research: it is just presented as an unquestionable fact to be taken at face value that nerves are sentient. Similarly, it is as bland as the description of gold being yellow. This is an oversimplification, given that nerves need not be alive and sentient, such as deadened nerves and gold need not be yellow. Pure gold has a red hue and gold can look a variety of colours, depending on how it has become a mixture of various elements. Mixtures in Chemistry is a favourite topic of both Cavendish and Shepherd. Indeed the concept of mixtures shapes Shepherd’s reconceptualization of the topic of Causation. 

I can appreciate why Shepherd thinks Lawrence’s approach is unhelpful for scientific progress and why she thinks philosophers are right to apply causal reasoning and explanation to such causal functions in physiology. I suggest that Shepherd's approach has the potential to eventually give us improved knowledge of the nervous system in the future, even if it may have been too complex for 19th century researchers to fully grasp. 

I shall continue this discussion in my next chapter. 

References: 

¹Shepherd, Mary. An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect : Controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, Concerning the Nature of That Relation, with Observations upon the Opinions of Dr. Brown and Mr. Lawrence Connected with the Same Subject 

(London, United Kingdom: Printed for T. Hookham, 1824),

 http://archive.org/details/essayuponrelatio00shepiala 

²Ibid p161 

³Ibid 

⁴Ibid p158-9

⁵Ibid p153

⁶Ibid

⁷Ibid p163 

⁸Lawrence in ‘Mary Shepherd, An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect ’ p165

⁹Shepherd, An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect p163-4