monacojerry, posts by tag: bertrand russell - LiveJournal

In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory."

This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.)

For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book.

Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history.

Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.)

The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards.

In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell,

I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it.

How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services.

But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous.

This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge.

Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole.

There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system.

So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus.

Russell wrote back:

Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162)

I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged.

Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world.

More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge:

To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.

When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?

"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."

"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."

The question of what kind of a world [quantum mechanics] describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/

"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale."
Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy .

In having Experience in the way we do, we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality, as Russell and others have remarked – whether or not we just put what we known into words in any theoretically tractable way. And this is so whatever it is best to say about any non-Experiential ( e.g. dispositional) aspects of the mental that there may be. We may certainly hope to develop our understanding of the nature of the Experiential, but we can do this only by adding to what we already know of it by direct acquaintance.
…

[H]ow things appear or seem is how they really are, the reality that is at present in question just is the appearing of seeming. In the case of any experiential episode E, there may be something X of which it is true to say that in undergoing E, we only have access to an appearance of X, and not to how X is in itself. But serious materialists must hold that E itself, the event of being-appeared-to, with all the qualitative character that it has, is itself part of physical reality. They cannot say that it too is just an appearance, and not part of how things are, on the pain of infinite regress. They must grant that it is itself as reality, and a reality with which we must, in plausibility, be allowed to have some sort of direct acquaintance. As Russell says, we must 'treat "seeming" with respect". Real Materialism by Galen Stawson in Chomsky and His Critics, edited by Norbert Hornstein and Louis Anthony at p. 67, quoting B. Russell in An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.

If a dream or a table 'seems' to be one sort of thing, while it is 'really' another we shall have to admit that it really seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay, more, we only arrive at what it 'really' is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, i.e. the 'seeming' table. We must therefore treat 'seeming' with some respect. Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.

"The essence of matter appears to be this: We can distinguish series of events in space-time which have a certain kind of close resemblance to each other, such that common sense regards them as manifestations of one 'thing'. But when we look closely at the question, it turns out that what physics offers is something more abstract than this. Take, e.g. the continued existence of a certain electron. This means to say that events in a certain neighborhood will be such as can be calculated on the assumption that there is an electric charge of a certain standard magnitude, in the middle of that neighborhood; and that the neighborhoods of which this is true form a tube in space-time.

So long as we stick to the standpoint of pure physics there is a certain air of taking in each other's washing about the whole business. Events in empty space are only known in regards their abstract mathematical characteristics; matter is only an abstract mathematical characteristic of events in empty space. This seems rather a cold world. But as a matter of fact we know some things are a little more concrete. We know, e.g. what it feels like when we see things. 116 (Emphasis mine.)

It used to be thought 'mysterious' that purely physical phenomena should end in something mental. That was because people thought that they knew a lot about physical phenomena, and were sure they differed in quality from mental phenomena. We now realise that we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of physical phenomena except when they happen to be sensations, and that therefore there is no reason to be surprised that some are sensations, or to suppose that the others are totally unlike sensations. The gap between mind and matter has been filled in, partly by new views on mind, but much more by the realisation that physics tells us nothing as to the intrinsic character of matter. 117 (emphasis mine).

[F]olk psychology is a theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. In the everyday traffic of our lives we make remarks linking sensory experiences to mental states; mental states to other mental states; and mental states to behavior. Thus we remark that the smell of freshly baked bread made Sally feel hungry; that Sally wanted to go on a diet because she thought that she was overweight; and that Sally went to the fridge because she desired a piece of chocolate cake. According to some philosophers, remarks such as these (or suitable generalisations of remarks such as these) function as a term-introducing theory which implicitly defines terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire".

Collect all the platitudes … regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. … Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another … Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only the platitudes which are common knowledge amongst us: everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. Lewis, D. (1972): "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249-58.

In the case of the ideas we are concerned with…, the ideas that matter historically, it is possible to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, rivalries.

The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here – nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

From Richard Lewontin,, Billions and Billions of Demons, a review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale." Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy.