"Some like Moore; indeed all do" -- H. P. Grice.

Moore, G(eorge) E(dward) (1873–1958), English philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his undergraduate work at Cambridge University; spent 1898–1904 as a fellow of Trinity College; returned to Cambridge in 1911 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 1925. He also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics. In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), he argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental (spiritual).” This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” (in the broad sense of ‘perceive’). Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense” (1925), that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in some cases there is no good reason to believe them. Among the claims that Moore attacked are these: “Propositions about (purported) material facts are false”; “No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every (purported) physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and later to give a “Proof of an External World” (1933). Epistemology. Most of Moore’s work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and chapters (e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 1906) he examined and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism, representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What is their (ontological) status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge (or ways of knowing), Moore made a distinction between dispositional (or non-actualized) and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made distinctions between direct apprehension (often known as knowledge by acquaintance), indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper (or propositional knowledge). He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica (1903), Moore maintained that the central problem of ethics is, What is good? – meaning by this, not what things are good, but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer, one that may seem disappointing, namely: good is good, or, alternatively, ‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought” that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object (i.e., to define ‘good’) is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions – ethical propositions would be tautologies! For example, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy – the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of various methods of (philosophical/conceptual) analysis. “A Defense of Common Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies(1922) and Philosophical Papers (1959). These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”; distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis (either definitional or divisional); and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher. Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm and grateful terms.