476
HENRY
DAVID AIKEN
as "the prisoner cannot escape now." (The difference of course is that
the behavior of gases, like that of other natural phenomena, and unlike
human behavior, is not thought of as determined by the gases' active
concerns.) Hampshire goes on to discuss other no less distinctive features
of statements of personal impossibility (and, now, possibility). For ex–
ample, "He can't do it" may be offered in certain contexts as one of
three characteristic alternative reasons why a person won't perform
an
action, the others being that he really doesn't want to or else that he
believes he ought not to do so. This point is significant for it brings out
the fact that in the case in which a person doesn't want to perform a
certain act, it is assumed that if he possessed the will, or power, to act,
and this in full measure, he normally would do so. The powers of
physical objects have nothing to do with matters of volition or will,
and hence nothing to do with freedom, in the active sense in which we
ascribe it to individual persons.
By many such stages it is thus made to appear (though with con–
tinual hesitations and qualifications which begin after a while to suggest
a deep uncertainty in Hampshire's own mind about the full scope or
significance of his contentions) that what he means to establish is a
difference, not between two species of a common genus called "be–
havior," but rather between two whole forms of thought in which, at
the least, the term "behavior" works in entirely different ways. Briefly,
the differences between the behavior of prisoners and that of gases, un–
like those between the behavior of gases and solids, is not an empirical
or natural difference, but a difference between two categories of dis–
course in which different things are being
done
by the speaker himself.
And (so it would seem) it is for this reason, and not because of its
allegedly greater complexity or subtlety, that the behavior of man has
not hitherto been explainable in terms of reliable laws of nature.
In general, it appears that in talking and thinking about the
pos–
sible behavior of physical things, we place ourselves outside of any
frame of reference in which, on principle, what we say about it could
have any necessary beariI}g upon the nature of the changes in question,
or, no less important, upon our own bearing, as speakers, toward it. On
the other hand, in speaking about the conduct of persons whom we
are prepared to treat as agents responsible for their own behavior, we do
in principle believe that what we, or they, say and think could
of itself
significantly affect our demeanor toward it. Our thinking about physical
objects would be self-defeating if, as such, it affected either their behavior
or our own conduct toward them, whereas our thinking about men, their
purposes, their actions, their works and achievements would
be
self–
defeating could we not thereby affect either their conduct or our own.
