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1) In short, what are the three ways Chambers says one might “not add to the facts we
know—and yet…[still say something] valuable?” Can you think of other categories?
2) Read Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Read it
something everyone knows”? Might the case, carefully read, deserve to be placed in one
3) Consider the “dejected” speaker in Chambers’s example of “snark.” He’s not saying
anything we don’t know. Why, then, is it worthwhile to say it? Is this covered by one of
4) Notice Chambers’s shift between Chambers’s main question (at paragraph 4) and his
answer (at paragraph 5). Specifically, are the following two claims equivalent?
Think of some examples. Is it possible for (a) to be true of a situation, while (b) is false
5) Chambers compares the effect of Sylvia Plath’s metaphor to “the exhilaration we feel
when we spy a clever optical illusion.” How good is this simile? Discuss Chambers’s
1
The duck-rabbit is classically discussed in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (§§ 118ff).
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Wittgenstein was John Wisdom’s most influential teacher.
6) Compare Chambers’s thesis to the following passage by philosopher John Wisdom
(emphasis added):2
I should like to say what I aim to do in these lectures and then do it. But there are
difficulties about this. [As a philosopher,] I have nothing to say—nothing except
what everybody knows….Now scientists don’t have to feel like this. They tell us
what we don’t know until they tell us—how very fast germs in the blood breed
and that this stuff will stop them….Even if I were a historian it would be better.
Maybe you don’t want to know just how the Abbey at Bury St. Edmunds was run
in the time of Abbot Samson, but at least you probably don’t know and if only I
did I could tell you. But as it is: [1] I haven’t anything to say except what
everybody knows already. And this instantly puts into my head a thought….
‘Have I [as a philosopher] anything to say at all worth saying?’….[But] I want
to urge that [2] one who has nothing to say except what everybody knows
already may yet say something worth saying and I want to bring out a little
how this happens.
More specifically, Chambers’s essay concerns point [2].3 But we can also consider
Wisdom’s first question:
(a) Is philosophy a case where we only say things that “everybody knows”?
2
From: John Wisdom, “The Modes of Thought and the Logic of God,” in The Existence of God, edited by
John Hick (NY, 1964), pp. 275-298. The essay also appears in Wisdom’s essay-collection, Paradox and
Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 1-22. For further discussion of these matters, in a different spirit,
see Wisdom’s dialogue, “Epistemological Enlightenment,” in Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy
edited by Charles J. Bontempo and S.Jack Odell (McGraw-Hill, 1975), chapter 18. (“Epistemological
Enlightenment” was originally an address before the American Philosophical Association, in 1971.)
3
As best as I can tell, Wisdom seems to place philosophy in Chambers’s third “metaphor”-category. An
example of his from “Epistemological Enlightenment” (op cit) seems to fit in with his second “cliché”-
category. But don’t take my word for it: read John Wisdom’s essays—they’re well worth it.