Was C.S. Lewis refuted by Elisabeth Anscombe?

New blog on the kid: Was C.S. Lewis refuted by Elisabeth Anscombe? · somewhere else: The One Myth that is True?

C.S. Lewis

(referred as having written):

If everything we see (say?) and think is the process of purely mechanical processes in our brain, then there cannot be any value, there cannot be any truth. Nothing can be either true or false.

Elizabeth Anscombe

(referred as saying in Socratic club)

Suppose I stand on one of these weighing machines, that say "I speak your weight", and it says to me "you weigh fifteen stone", that is true*, even if it is produced by totally mechanical means.

Sir Anthony Kenny was a priest before he became a philosopher. He gave these summaries of the arguments.**

While I am not subscribing to the idea that the summaries are perfectly accurate, I will deal with the rebuttal.

Yes, in the immediate, the answer spoken "you weigh fifteen stone" is produced by purely mechanical means. But this is informative only to a mind that can grasp what fifteen stone mean. You allow a Mongolian to put a burden of fifteen stone on that machine, the sounds will be the same, but the Mongolian can't understand it.

Then again, the means in the immediate are purely mechanical (if you don't attend too much to the fact that the machine must be handled by biological and presumably spiritual creatures, it won't handle itself), but the machine was built by minds. Not by mindless machines accidentally happening to be worked by other mindless machines.

These conditions are also present about books "speaking" the truth. The letters can only be read as meaningful information by men, and are only arranged on the pages by men. The machine certainly differs in giving different answers according to different weights, and the weighing is mechanical, but the automatised choice of soundtrack - like the one saying "you weigh fifteen stones" - is programmed to different mechanical results of the weighing process. Suppose one had instead added a soundtrack saying "you weigh five stones" to that result, quite a few people would have exclaimed "what??!!" and I suppose Elisabeth Anscombe would have been more concerned about truth than charmed at the flattery. But after such a programmation, that erroneous result would have come by by an equally purely mechanical result.

So, truth in the last analysis did not come by purely mechanical means in that weighing machine, and C. S. Lewis' point was not actually refuted. Even more so, as the analysis in Miracles concerned truth in the mind, and not truth "equivocally present" in a mechanical contraption, like a book or a weighing machine.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Henry, Emperor
13.VII.2021

* We are charmed to know her weight was 95.25 kg in European measures and that she had the courage to admit that!

** In the not quite accurate documentary by A.N. Wilson:

Inside The Mind That Created Narnia | The Real Life Of C.S Lewis | Absolute History
25th June 2019 | Absolute History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgj3ctK7o30

Notably, Minto the stability and maternal replacement figure and mixture of maternal and romantic feelings ... not impressed. C. S. Lewis estate has replied to the biographer who stated such nonsense./HGL