Bertrand Russell and Origins of Analytical Philosophy 1855064766

Table of contents :
What is analytical philosophy?, Ray Monk; denoting concepts in "The Principles of Mathematics", Nicholas Griffin; The "Gray's Elegy" argument - and others, Harold Noonan; symposium - the unity of the proposition and Russell's theories of judgement, Stewart Candlish and Mark Sainsbury; the complex problem and the theory of symbolism, Anthony Palmer; beginning with analysis, Peter Hylton; Russell's perilous journey from atomism to holism - 1919-1951, Francisco Rodriguez-Consuegra; a certain knowledge? - Russell's mathematics and logical analysis, C.M. Kilmister; Russell's transcendental argument in "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry", A.C. Grayling; Bertrand Russell - a neglected ethicist, Charles Pigden; "The History of Western Philosophy" - 50 years later, Louis Greenspan.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE ORIGINS OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Edited and introduced by

Ray Monk and

Anthony Palmer University of Southampton

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THOEMMES PRESS

First published in 1996 by Thoemmes Press 11 Great George Street Bristol BSl 5RR United Kingdom

ISBN 1 85506 476 6

2nd impression 1998 Editor's Introduction and arrangement © Ray Monk and Anthony Palmer, 1996 Individual essays © respective authors, 1996

Front cover illustration 'Lucidity' mosaic depicting Russell drawing truth from a well. Reproduced with kind permission from The National Gallery, London

British Lib'rary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

CONTENTS Introduction .............................. vii 1. What is Analytical Philosophy? Ray Monk .............................. 1 2. Denoting Concepts in The Principles of Mathematics Nicholas Griffin ........................ 23 3. The 'Gray's Elegy' Argument� and Others Harold Noonan ......................... 65 Symposium: 4. The Unity of the Proposition and Russell's Theories of Judgement Stewart Candlish ...................... 103 5. How Can We Say Something? Mark Sainsbury ....................... 13 7 6. The Complex Problem and the Theory of Symbolism Anthony Paimer ....................... 155 �

7. Beginning with Analysis Peter Hylton .......................... 183

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Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy

8. Russell's Perilous Journey from Atomism to Holism 1919-1951 Francisco A.Rodriguez-Consuegra ......... 21 7 9. Russell's Transcendental Argument in An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry A. C. Grayling ......................... 245 10.A Certain Knowledge? Russell's Mathematics and Logical Analysis C.M.Kilmister ........................ 269 11.Will the Real Principia Mathematica Please Stand Up? Reflections on the Formal Logic of the Principia Gregory Landini ...................... 287 12.Bertrand Russell: A Neglected Ethicist Charles Pigden ........................ 331 13. The History of Western Philosophy - Fifty Years Later Louis Greenspan ......................363

INTRODUCTION Analytic philosophers in the mid twentieth century, asked to characterize their intellectual origin,s, would very soon have found themselves talking about Russell and Moore. In the last quarter of the century things have changed. Now there are even some, like Michael Dummett, who would claim that neither Russell nor Moore was even a source of analytic philosophy let alone singly or jointly the source. This revisionist thesis can find little to support it in the way of historical evidence and must rely upon what Dummett enigmati­ cally refers to as 'causal influences which appear to operate in the realm of ideas independently of who reads what or hears what'. Russell seems to be in danger of becoming relegated to the sidelines of the twentieth century's major philosophical development not by the unearthing of hitherto undiscovered evidence but by the invocation of that most unreliable of witnesses, a zeitgeist. This volume of papers by Russell scholars from around the world, given at a conference at Southampton University in July 1995 should go some way towards restoring Russell's role in the development of analytical philosophy. One reason, perhaps the main one, for the attempt to place Russell at the periphery of the development of analytic philosophy is a revaluation of the role Frege played in its development. Ray Monk in his contri­ bution points out that Dummett precisely dates the beginning of analytic philosophy to a specific moment

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viii Russell and the Origins of Ana.lytical Philosophy in Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic; the moment at which Frege begins by asking about the nature of number and ends by asking instead about the meanings of sentences containing number words; the moment, that is, when Frege made the linguistic turn. Now, as Monk points out, if, like Dummett, we make this linguistic move definitional of analytic philosophy then Russell would not count as an analytic philosopher. Nor would he have wanted to be counted as such. Monk is only one of several contributors to this volume to remind us that that in The Principles of Mathematics Russell insists that 'meaning in the sense that words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic'. Moreover, Monk argues, when, under Wittgenstein's influence, Russell did come to see logic as linguistic, this engendered in him not elation but despair. It also, in an attempt to explain the basis of language itself, threw him in the direction of a psychologism which was the exact antithesis of Frege. Constant to Russell's various changes of opinion was the conviction that 'merely' linguistic considera­ tions were trivial and not the chief interest of the philosopher, whose real task is to understand, n:ot language, but the world. Several of the contributors are concerned to show that it was precisely the anti-linguistic nature of Russell's early conception of propositions and therefore his early conception of analysis which generated the successive distinctions and theories in Russell's work between 1900 and 1919. One of these, the theory of descriptions, was famously described by Ramsey as a paradigm of philosophy. It would be difficult to argue that it has not remained a paradigm for analytic philosophy throughout the twentieth century. Nicholas Griffin argues that what has become the orthodox interpretation of Russell's celebrated 1905

Introduction ix paper 'On Denoting', in which the theory of definite descriptions is advanced, suffers from its failure to appreciate the Principles of Mathematics theory of denoting and denoting concepts which it was designed to replace. H�hows that the theory of denoting and denoting concepts in The Principles of Mathematics arises directly out of Russell's insistence that proposi­ tions are not essentially linguistic. Propositions, Russell argues, are made up of terms, a word which he takes to be synonymous with the words 'individual' or 'entity'. This generates the problem that the analysis of a propo­ sition destroys its essential unity. The terms, individuals or entities of which it is composed, placed side by side, do not reconstitute the proposition. Russell's early conception of propositions generated a paradox of analysis. Russell's first effort to get round this problem was to distinguish between kinds of terms. Holding on to the idea that the consituents of a proposition are terms he proceeded to distinguish between terms which occur in propositions as terms and those, which while remaining terms, occur in propositions other than as terms. He called the former 'things' and the latter 'concepts'. It was this capacity of terms to occur in propositions other than as terms which prevented analyis from destroying the unity of the proposition. Now, however, a question arises about concepts when they do appear as terms. For it soon becomes clear that when they do so the proposition is not about those terms themselves, ie. not about concept terms, but something else. That something else Russell argued is what is denoted by the concept. A concept term, when it appears as a term in a proposition is what he called a denoting concept, and the proposition in which such a term occurs is not about the concept, but about what the concept denotes.

x Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy Denoting, in the Principles, is a relation between a concept and a term, not a relation between a word or phrase and a term. While, of course, there are denoting phrases, it is not the phrases that do the denoting, but the concepts expressed by these denoting phrases. Griffin shows to what extent the interpretation of the theory of denoting in The Principles of Mathematics and its rejection in 'On Denoting' has suffered from the failure to appreciate this. He argues that it lies behind the almost universal interpretation of The Principles of Mathematics as being essentially Meinongian or quasi­ Meinongian in its ontology, hence turning Russell's rejection of the theory of denoting concepts in his 1905 paper 'On Denoting' into no more than an excercise in ontological pruning. Harold Noonan, whose views about the theory of denoting concepts in the Principles of Mathematics almost entirely coincide with Griffin's, argues that when 'On Denoting' is seen in the background of a properly non-Meinongian reading of the earlier work, it becomes clear that its central argument is one which is often taken to be both peripheral and confused. The argument is generally tefered to as the 'Gray's Elegy' argument. While the theory of denoting in the Principles had already provided Russell with a means of handling the problems in ontology which 'On Denoting' is usually thought to address, one problem remained, Noonan argues, which threatened Russell's Principles theory of propositions. If, as Russell insisted, terms, the constituents of propositions, were to be thought of as essentially language independent then denoting concepts themselves have to be thought of as essentially independent of language. Russell, however, realised that there did not seem to be any way of specifying a denoting concept except via its linguistic expression.

Introduction xi Noonan argues _that the real aim of 'On Denoting' was to safeguard the non-linguistic nature of the analysis of propositions by the elimination of denoting concepts. 'On Denoting' should really have been called 'On not Denoting'. The theory of terms not appearing as term� in the Principles wa� as we have seen, Russell's reaction to the problem of the unity of the proposition. It is sometimes referred to as Bradley's problem. · The extraordinary influence that this problem exerted on Russell's thinking is testified to by the contributions of Stewart Candlish, and Francisco Rodriguez-Consuegra. Candlish traces Russell's contorted efforts to solve it from his first attempt in the Principles through the multiple relation theory of judgement, which lies at the heart of Principia Mathematica, and the theory of propositional forms in the 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript, whch Russell abandoned because of Wittgenstein's criticism of it, to his virtual surrender in face of the problem in 'On Propositions: what they are and how they mean' published in 1919. In his reply to Candlish, Mark Sainsbury argues that the problem of the unity of the proposition (or judgement), which had so exercised Russell, is solvable using the techniques of modern (Davidsonian) truth-conditional semantics, and outlines a sketch of such a solution. In an appendix to his paper, Candlish gives reasons for denying that the problem is thus solved. Russell's virtual surrender to the problem of the unity of the proposition in the abandonment of his multiple relation theory of judgement was at least partly occasioned by Wittgenstein's criticism of it. One strand running through many of the contributions is the relation between Russell's ideas and Wittgenstein's in their discussions, which led ultimately to Russell's

xii Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy lectures on logical atomism and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Anthony Palmer argues that Wittgenstein's 'Notes on Logic' and 'Notes Dictated to Moore in Norway' show that Russell and Wittgenstein were at cross-purposes in their thinking from the very beginning. He argues that reflection on a correct symbolism for negation led Wittgenstein to the doctrine of the bipolarity of the proposition which, he argues, needs to be distinguished from Russell's insistence that a proposition is essentially either true or false. The doctrine of the bipolarity of the proposition is Wittgenstein's doctrine of the sense of a proposition, and one of its consequences was that propositions cannot have predicates or relations. He argues that many of the themes of the Tractatus follow from this, and that when they are seen so to follow it becomes apparent just how anti-Russellian and indeed anti-analytic the Tractatus is. This idea of the failure of analysis, at least in Russell's hands, is the theme of Peter Hylton's paper. As early as 1900 Russell thought it obvious that all ,good philosophy should begin with the analysis of proposi­ tions. We have seen how he begins by insisting that propositions are not essentially linguistic items. Hylton argues that for Russell declarative sentences were thought of as 'more or less defective expressions of propositions'. In so far as they are less defective expres­ sions then the structure of a sentence expressing a proposition will approximate to the structure of the proposition it expresses. If the sentence is not defective at all with regard to the proposition it expresses then of course it will have the same structure. Hylton charts the various ways in which Russell came to see more and more sentences as being defective in this respect until it became questionable whether there was such thing as a

Introduction

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non-defective expression of a proposition. At the root of his difficulties is, once more, his non-linguistic conception of propositions. Russell thought of a propo­ sition as being constituted by the entities which it is said to be about. Strictly speaking, on this conception, the constituents of a proposition cannot be about anything other than themselves. The idea of one thing designating another has no,place within a theory which insists that the items a proposition is about are constituents of the proposition itself. Russell's doctrine of acquaintance is a direct result of this. Our acquain­ tance with the constituents of propositions was designed to do the job that designation would do if it only could. All of Russell's difficulties with denoting concepts, false propositions, and true negative propositions stem from this. Hylton tries to show how Russell's idea of analysis as the attempt to produce sentences which reflect the structure of the propositions they express in the end was doomed to failure. Consuegra takes up the story of Russell's struggle with the problem of the unity of the proposition after 1919, after, that is, Russell's abandonment of the multiple relation theory of judgement, a theory which sought to solve the problem by denying the existence of proposi­ tions. This theory was in turn abandoned, Consuegra argues, because Russell came to deny the existence of judgements, at least as he had previously conceived them. In the multiple relation theory, a judgement needed a mind, a subject, to be in a series of relations with the elements of the complex judged. In Russell's theory of 'neutral monism', however, there were no such minds, and Russell was led, therefore, in a radically new direction. This new path Consuegra describes as Russell's 'perilous journey' from the atomism of his early philosophy to the 'holism' (as Consuegra calls it)

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xiv Russell and the Origins of Ana.lytical Philosophy of Russell's post-1919 works - The Analysis of Mind, The Analysis of Matter, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and Human Knowledge - all of which, on Consuegra's account, are less concerned with analysing knowledge into its atoms than in identifying its (irreducible) structures. For A. C. Grayling, the development of Russell's later philosophy runs along a course that is not so much perilous as disastrous, ending in what he describes as a 'crash-landing' in the 'crude biologism' of Human Knowledge. The flight was unnecessary, Grayling argues. Russell was on firmer ground than he had thought in his very earliest philosophical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, the Kantian transcen­ dentalism of which can be defended against the criticism it received from G. E. Moore if restricted to an Anti­ realist epistemology rather than extended to the untenable Idealist metaphysics to which Moore and Russell considered it to be committed. An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry receives a rather different, though no less sympathetic, interpre­ tation from the mathematician C. W. Kilmister, who sees in it an early manifestation of Russell's conviction that technical advances (in this case, the advance of projective over .metrical geometry) can help to solve philosophical problems. This conviction, Kilmister argues, is one of the central tenets of analytical philosophy, as Russell conceived it, and, Kilmister says, one that has left behind a legacy of doubtful value. Of more certain and lasting value, in Kilmister's view, are Russell's emphasis on the importance of definitions and his demonstration that numbers could be defined as classes. But if, as Kilmister insists, Russell's achievements in formal logic are his 'main contribution to the analytic

Introduction xv tradition', there has been, as Gregory Landini points out, little agreement on what those achievements are. The formal logic of Principia Mathematica, especially, has defied numerous attempts to render it consistent, intelligible and philosophically plausible. Especially difficult is to show how t� book's Introduction - with its theory of types, its theory of descriptions and the multiple relation theory of judgement - squares with the technical apparatus used in the proofs that follow. Is the formal logic of the book even consistent with the philo­ sophical theories that supposedly provide its founda­ tions? Many commentators have concluded that it is not, but Landini, insisting ( as Russell and Whitehead famously did not) on a clear distinction between the metalanguage and the object-language of the theory, shows how the heirarchies of orders and types in Principia can be understood in such a way that they are not only consistent with, but the natural outcome of, the philosophical ideas of the Introduction. Thus under­ stood, the formal logic of Principia can be seen as the expression of a coherent, and philosophically tenable, view of the nature of logical form . Russell's early works on logic, mathematics and episte­ mology have been a continuous source of discussion throughout the century, and will no doubt continue to be so well into the next. They are a permanent contri­ bution to the history of philosophy. The two final papers in this volume, however, stress the importance of his work in other areas of the subject. Charles Pigden argues that Russell's work on ethics, even though denigrated in later years by Russell himself, nevertheless repays study. It turns out that Russell has interesting things to say about most of the problems which have engrossed moral philosophers throughout the twentieth century. In particular his very early

xvi Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy 'apostolic' altercations with G. E. Moore, despite his ultimate capitulation to Moore's Principia Ethica, retain their value. One in particular, published in 1897, entitled 'Is Ethics a Branch of Empirical Psychology', in which Russell advances the view, as against Moore, that the good should be defined in terms of what we desire to desire, anticipated by a hundred years a view which now has currency through the work of David Lewis. Finally, Louis Greenspan maintains that Russell's work on the history of philosophy itself still has lessons to teach us. He argues that the continuing popularity with the general reading public of Russell's History of Western Philosophy, while not reflected in the attention paid to it by philosophers, nevertheless deserves their attention. The History of Western Philosophy, he argues, is not the obituary to a tradition which died at the hands of twentieth-century analytic techniques, nor is it remarkable merely for the the identification of the sources of totalitarianism in that tradition. It should rather be seen as an important contribution to the debate which has come to assume an increasing impor­ tance as the century has progressed - namely the place and role of ideas in history, or the relation of ideas to social structures. The History of Western Philosophy is a study of the political impact of ideas. It presents us, Greenspan argues, with a drama of ideas which like all good dramas is really a warning. In particular it is a warning against the political fallout of the sceptical trend in European thought which leads to the madness of romanticism via a relativism which deems madness to be no more than a minority view. We do not have to look far around us at the end of the twentieth century to discover the monuments to such an outlook. Ray Monk and Anthony Palmer, 1 996

WHAT IS ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY?