Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume

George W Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317833024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume XXII of twenty-two in a collection on 20th Century Philosophy. Originally published in 1979, this volume attempts to assess some of the achievements of Bertrand Russell in philosophy, logic and mathematics, ethics and politics.

1

Bertrand Russell: 1872–1970

Gilbert Ryle

We members of the Aristotelian Society are here tonight to say ‘Goodbye and thank you’ to that grand philosophical thinker, Bertrand Russell, who gave his first paper to this Society in 1896.¹ This is not an occasion for an exegetic commentary on the almost infinite variety of his thought, but rather one for concentrating our gratitudes on those three or four determining impulses by which his thinking has given to the philosophical thinking of all of us, quite irrespective of our particular opinions and specialities, much of its whole trajectory.

For what concerns us today and, I maintain, for what should chiefly concern the future historians of twentieth-century thought, it matters comparatively little whether a few or many of us accept, or whether a few or many of us reject, this or that Russellian doctrine. The fact that he did not found a school or capture disciples was due partly to the accidents of his career, but especially to certain admirable features of his thinking. Among these was his immunity from reverence in general and especially from reverence for himself. He would have found Russell-acolytes comical and Russell-echoes tedious. On the other hand, what matters immensely is that, not what we think but, so to speak, the very style of our philosophical thinking perpetuates, where we are ordinarily least conscious of it, a style of thinking that had not existed in philosophy before, say, 1900.

(1) In speaking, metaphorically, of the Russellian style of thinking, though I am not alluding primarily, I am alluding secondarily to one particular intellectual temper for which the credit – the great credit as I think – needs to be divided between William James and Russell. For in one respect James and Russell were quite unlike Mill, Sidgwick and Bradley, quite unlike Brentano, Meinong and Husserl, and quite unlike even Moore, namely in their combination of seriousness with humour. Hume and Bradley had wit, and Hume could play. But James and Russell found out for themselves and so taught us at our best how to pop doctrinal bubbles without drawing blood; how to be illuminatingly and unmaliciously naughty; and how, without being frivolous, to laugh off grave conceptual bosh. Stuffiness in diction and stuffiness in thought were not, of course, annihilated, but they were put on the defensive from the moment when James and Russell discovered that a joke can be the beginning, though only the beginning, of a blessed release from a strangling theoretical millstone.

(2) Much more important was a new style of philosophical work that Russell, I think virtually single-handed, brought into the very tactics of philosophical thinking. Anticipated, I suggest, only by the unremembered Aristotle, Russell occasionally prescribed and often deliberately practised what can be called ‘aporetic experimentation’. In his Mind article of 1905 ‘On Denoting’, he says:

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them. ^;

In 1904, near the beginning of his first Mind article on ‘Meinong’s Theory of Complexes and Assumptions’, he had praised Meinong for the excellence of his quasi-empirical method of psychological research/His 1908 article ‘Mathematical Logic as based on the Theory of Types’ opens with a list of seven selected contradictions demanding some common solution. Now of course other philosophers, indeed all other philosophers worthy of the name, always had resolutely and conscientiously tried to overcome theoretical difficulties. They knew that their theories were in jeopardy so long as hurdles remained uncleared or uncircumvented. Nearly all of them, too, had from time to time opposed error by putting up obstacles in the way of the erroneous views or the bad arguments of others. It is not criticism or self-criticism that Russell invented. What was, I think, new was Russell’s heuristic policy of deliberately mobilising, stiffening and constructing his own hurdles against which to pit his own nascent speculations. Difficulties in the way of a theory are no longer obstacles to thought; they can be and should be constructed or collected as aids to thought. They can be the self-applied tests by which philosophical thinking may become a self-correcting undertaking. As in the laboratory a well-designed crucial experiment tests a physical or chemical hypothesis, so in logic and philosophy a well-designed conceptual puzzle may be the experimentum crucis of a speculation.

To us, in 1970, this heuristic policy is obviously right. The most modest discussion note in one of our philosophical journals presupposes that philosophical progress requires positive and planned operations of sifting the tares from the wheat of doctrines and of arguments. Criticism is now not hostility; self-criticism is now not surrender. But we should I suggest, search eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy in vain, and even search contemporary continental philosophy nearly in vain for cases of a philosopher actively hunting for and designing conceptual hurdles to advance his own future progress.

In his Principles of Mathematics, chapter X, entitled ‘The Contradiction’, and in its second Appendix, Russell had launched himself on what was to prove to be that most arduous of his theoretical undertakings which culminated many years later in his history-making Theory of Types. Already, in 1903, he was marshalling a battery of heterogeneous paradoxes against which he would test the desiderated solution of the special paradox of self-membered classes. Each of these auxiliary paradoxes, whether superficial or fundamental, was to serve as a testing device, with its own special edges, of the theory-to-be of self-reference.

Two precautionary words. By ‘aporetic experimentation’ I do not mean tentativeness, diffidence or even undogmatism. Russell meant some of his conceptual experiments to yield not ‘perhapses’ but definite results. Next, in using the notion of experimentation, I am not, of course, referring to physical tests; and I am not supposing that it is the mission of conceptual experiments – if anything has this mission – to engender inductive generalisations.

Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell was not focally, but only peripherally concerned to fix the places in human knowledge of logic and philosophy. When, as in Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, he did try to do this, he adopted too easily the idea that philosophy could and should be disciplined into a science among sciences. It was not, however, by this sort of promised assimilation of philosophy to science that he taught us a new kind of dialectical craftsmanship, but by the examples that he set of planned puzzle-utilisation. Like Moore, Russell constantly preached Analysis; but what, when pioneering, he practised included this far more penetrating, because self-testing, method of inquiry.

(3) At the end of the ninth chapter of The Problems of Philosophy (1912) Russell wrote:

The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan of arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or the other. The one we do not prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have the same claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both are important to the metaphysician. Indeed no sooner have we distinguished the two worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their relations.

Here Russell declares, what his writings show, that he himself knew and loved the views from the Alpine heights where there dwelled Plato, Leibniz and Frege, but also knew and loved the valleys that were tilled by Hume, Mill and James. Russell was that rare being, a philosopher whose heart was divided between transcendentalism and naturalism. His mind had been formed in his youth both by John Stuart Mill and by pure mathematics.

Indeed Russell got much of the impetus and nearly all of the turbulence of his thinking from his being homesick for the peaks while he was in the plains, and homesick for the plains when he was on the heights. However drastic, his reductionisms had some reluctances in them; however uncompromising, his Platonisms were a little undevout. Neither transcendent being nor mundane occurring felt to him either quite real, or gravely unreal. When in the mood he could think flippantly of either.

His ice-breaking and Ockhamising article ‘On Denoting’ came out only two years later than his ice-breaking, Platonising Principles of Mathematics; and in his Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) the second chapter ‘Logic as the Essence of Philosophy’, which is Fregean in inspiration, is immediately succeeded by two chapters entirely in the vein of the phenomenalism of John Stuart Mill. His paper of 1919 ‘On Propositions’, which is very largely in the idioms of Watson, James and Hume, succeeds by only a year his lectures on Logical Atomism, where he is talking as if in the hearing of Meinong, Whitehead and the youthful Wittgenstein.

In his very early Platonising days he submitted in the Principles of Mathematics, section 427, a list of terms or objects that possess being, though they lack existence, namely, ‘Numbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces . . . if they were not entities of a kind, we could make no propositions about them’. Though he wrote this with complete seriousness, yet we can surely detect in his list an accent of sly shockingness, as if he could already guess what it would be like to season this overhospitable platter of being with a pinch of salt; and even what it would be like one day, though not yet, to investigate the credentials of the argument ‘if they were not entities of a kind, we could make no propositions about them’.

Conversely, however far he moved away from the Platonism of his youth, he never conceded to Mill’s reductionism about the truths of mathematics anything more than the recognition that it really is one business of pure mathematics to be capable of being applied to what there is in the everyday world. In the Introduction to the 2nd edition (1937) of his Principles of Mathematics he rejects the formalism of Hilbert for, apparently, excluding applications of mathematics to the real world; he allows, with regrets, that mathematical truths, with those of formal logic, being ‘formal’ truths, cannot, as he had once thought, be construed as describing transcendent entities. He allows too, again with regrets, that there is something in some way ‘linguistic’ about these formal truths. But not for a moment does he concede to Mill that these truths are merely high-grade inductive generalisations about things that exist and happen down here. None the less he would quite soon be developing a theory of perception and, therewith, a theory of physical objects which does not do very much more than bring up to date the phenomenalism of Mill’s System of Logic.

It is sometimes said that Russell merely oscillated, pendulum-like, between transcendentalism and naturalism, or between Platonism and empiricism. The truth, I suggest, is that, anyhow in his formative and creative years, we find him neither at rest in the valley nor at rest among the peaks, but mountaineering – trying to find a way from the valley back to the peaks, or a way from the peaks back to the valley. He had two homes. But where he toiled, and where he was alone, and where he was happy was on the mountainside.

(4) The last of the four determining impulses by which Russell directed the course of subsequent philosophy is this. Russell was not only a pioneer formal logician, but, like Aristotle and Frege, he was a logician-philosopher. He saw every advance in formal logic as, among other things, a potential source of new rigours in philosophy; and he saw every philosophical puzzle or tangle as a lock for which formal logic might already or might some day provide the key. It was due to him, as well as, in lesser degree, to Frege and Whitehead that some training in post-Aristotelian formal logic came fairly soon to be regarded as a sine qua non for the philosopher-to-be; and debates between philosophers on philosophical matters quickly began often merely to ape but sometimes to apply or employ the blackboard operations of the formal logician.

Naturally it was, at the start, the more dramatic innovations in Russellian logic that were adopted by philosophers. The new term-relation-term pattern of simple propositions was for a time expected to accomplish nearly all the philosophical tasks at which the subject-predicate pattern baulked. But even if not into this new pattern, still formalisation into some newly sponsored pattern or other was for a time expected to make short work of any surviving philosophical problems. But to say this is only to say that Russell, Whitehead and Frege made many philosophers enthusiasts for their new so-called Symbolic Logic – and enthusiasts are always impetuous. The remarkable thing is that these three – and Russell more than the other two – did fire this enthusiasm. Even outside the English-speaking world they fired it, partly through the mediation of Wittgenstein, as far away as Vienna; and without this mediation as far away as Poland.

Doubtless some of these zeals were ephemeral or factitious; doubtless, too, some of the Frege-Russell hopes for a monolithic Euclideanisation of mathematics were doomed to disappointment; and certainly we have long since forgotten the promise, if it was ever made, that philosophical problems would now receive their solutions by instant formalisation. None the less, philosophy in the English-speaking world has inherited from the Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica, as well as from Frege’s logical writings, not only a respect for rigour, but a discipline in rigour, the absence of which from what, with reservations, I label ‘continental’ philosophy still makes cross-Channel discussion unrewarding.

However, I do not wish merely to acknowledge the huge effects of, especially, Russell’s logicising of philosophy. There was another massive legacy left by Russell, the logician-philosopher, which we can call the Theory of Types.

By 1903 Russell had found, and imparted to Frege, a contradiction in that notion of class which had been a central concept in the work of Cantor, as well as in Frege’s and Russell’s own definitions of number. With this contradiction the young Russell had associated a whole battery of partly similar antinomies, for all of which, it seemed, some general diagnosis and, hopefully, some general cure could be found. Either answer, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, to the question ‘Is “I am now lying,” true?’ seems to establish the other; ‘Yes, if no; but no, if yes’. To the question ‘Is the class of classes that are not members of themselves a member of itself?’ the only answer again seems to be ‘Yes, if no; but no, if yes’. Russell came, in the long-postponed end, to the conclusion that for a specifiable reason these questions are unanswerable by ‘Yes’ or by ‘No’; they are improper questions. Epimenides’s assertion was a pseudo-assertion; an assertion cannot be a comment upon itself; and a given class C can only be nonsensically spoken of as one of the items that belongs, or even does not belong as a member to C.

Besides the sentences that convey standard propositions that are true or else false, there are grammatically passable sentences which are neither true nor false, but nonsense. It was some, but only a very few, nonsense-excluding rules that Russell, in his Theory of Types, tried to formulate and justify.

It is of some historical interest that the Vienna Circle misappropriated Russell’s notion of nonsense for its own special Augean purposes. But it is of huge historical importance that the whole Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be construed as a Procrustean essay in the theory of sense/nonsense. The Philosophical Investigations also is, in large measure, an inquiry into the rules of ‘grammar’ or ‘logical syntax’ of which patent or latent absurdities are in breach. In his lectures on Logical Atomism Russell showed how he had already been glad and proud to learn from the young Wittgenstein of 1912–3 some of the expansions, extensions and new applications of which his former Theory of Types had now become capable.

In these different, though doubtless internally connected ways, Russell taught us not to think his thoughts but how to move in our own philosophical thinking. In one way no one is now or will ever again be a Russellian; but in another way every one of us is now something of a Russellian. Perhaps we do not even read Russell very much; but in at least four radic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Bertrand Russell: 1872-1970
• 2. Propositions and Sentences
• 3. Russell’s Paradox and Some Others
• 4. A Diagnosis of the Liar and Other Semantical Vicious-Circle Paradoxes
• 5. A Refutation of an Unjustified Attack on the Axiom of Reducibility
• 6. On Constrained Denotation
• 7. Is Philosophy ‘An Idleness in Mathematics’?
• 8. Post Principia
• 9. Russell and Modal Logic
• 10. Russell and Bradley on Relations
• 11. On Russell’s Critique of Leibniz’s Philosophy
• 12. On Some Relations between Leibniz’s Monadology and Transfinite Set Theory: A Complement to Russell’s Thesis on Leibniz
• 13. The Infinite
• 14. Belief as a Propositional Attitude
• 15. Truth, Belief and Modes of Description
• 16. The Concern about Truth
• 17. Russell and the Form of Outer Sense
• 18. Russell’s Theory of Perception
• 19. Russell and Schlick: A Remarkable Agreement on a Monistic Solution of the Mind-Body Problem
• 20. Self-Acquaintance and the Meaning of ‘I’
• 21. Some Aspects of Knowledge (I)
• 22. Russell’s Philosophical Account of Probability
• 23. Foundations
• 24. Russell’s Ethics
• 25. Russell’s Judgement on Bolshevism
• 26. Solipsistic Politics: Russell’s Empiricist Liberalism
• Index