The following is a tribute to Bertrand Russell as a philosopher (he was also an activist, essayist in matters of what he called "non-philosophical" ethics and politics, a writer of self-help books, and much more). The author, Andrew David Irvine, is very charitable to Russell, presenting what many see as an ever-changing set of philosophical positions and projects as a unified whole. In a certain sense there is thematic unity in Russell's overall body of work. As Irvine points out, Russell's animating question was always, "what can we know, and with what degree of certainty." But the doctrines he embraced in his long efforts to wrestle with those questions changed with some frequency, which led to criticisms of inconsistency. For my own part, I admire philosophers that can concede mistakes, change tack, and follow their best hunches and evidence in favor of the misguided need to appear "consistent" at all costs. Russell (with AN Whitehead) pioneered a great part of propositional and predicate logics which are at the root of most formal logics to this day. He developed analytic philosophy in its early phase, illustrating the power of conceptual analysis in such classic essays as "On Denoting." For one reason or another, there has not been a post in his honor here, so hopefully this excerpt from the TLS series, "Footnotes to Plato" will remedy that oversight. It is an abridged version of an article that can be read here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/a...
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Russell’s [overall] philosophy was motivated by a single question. As he explains in My Philosophic Development (1959), “There is only one constant preoccupation. I have throughout been anxious to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness” Initially, Russell turned to logic and mathematics in the hope that they would help him discover a body of eternal, objective truths capable of being known with absolute certainty. When Ludwig Wittgenstein convinced him that logic was simply a mechanism for discovering new ways of saying the same thing using different words, he was intellectually devastated. Even so, this disappointment led eventually to a much more plausible account of human knowledge. At its core was what Russell called the liberal or scientific outlook, summarized in his essay of 1947, “Philosophy and Politics”:
The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions of the Council of Nicaea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the USSR the dicta of Marx on dialectical materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experiment is the right way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.
This view soon became a core feature of what is now known as analytic philosophy.
Before Russell, two views about the relationship between science and philosophy dominated. The first was that throughout history the terms “science” and “philosophy” had been used largely interchangeably.“Philosophia”, meaning love of wisdom, happened to be a Greek word.“Scientia”, meaning knowledge, happened to be a Latin word. Both referred, not to a single discipline among many, but to all organized knowledge. As Descartes wrote in 1644, “all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences are the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics and Ethics”. It is in this sense that Isaac Newton titled his landmark work of 1657 not Mathematical Principles of Physics, but Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica)We still rely on this understanding of philosophy whenever we award those who have carried out advanced research, whether in the humanities,the social sciences or the bench sciences, a doctor of philosophy degree or PhD.
The second view is one that Russell himself initially accepted but laterabandoned. This is the view that while science and philosophy both help us understand the world, each has its own independent area of investigation. On this view, it is the scientist’s job to discover contingent, empirical truths about the natural world. Philosophy has a different job, namely the discovery of truths that are somehow universal or necessary, especially those relating to logic and to normative theories such as ethics. On this view, science uses observation to discover that copper conducts electricity, that wood does not, that the speed of sound is less than the speed of light and that species evolve through natural selection. In contrast, philosophy relies on reason rather than observation. It is through reason that we discover that nothing can be in two places at once, that modus ponens and modus tollens are just two of many universally valid forms of inference, that murder is always wrong. On this view, science and philosophy each contribute to our understanding of the world, but they do so by focusing on different branches of Descartes’s tree of knowledge.
Russell introduced a third view. On this view, it is not the job of philosophers and scientists to investigate different branches of knowledge. Instead, philosophy and science contribute different tools to the same job. While science does the heavy lifting of empirical observation, working to discover what the Australian philosopher David Armstrong calls the “geography and history of the universe”, taking geography in this sense to include all space and history to include all time, including the future, philosophy works at clarifying the concepts science uses to generate these observations. As Jerry Fodor summarizes, “Philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science”
More precisely, on Russell’s view, philosophy’s task is to develop a logically perfect language, an ideal language through which rigorous, reliable scientific investigation becomes possible Observations alone, without the proper concepts to express them, inevitably lead to Alice in Wonderland types of confusion in which we are misled by the surface grammar of natural language:
I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone.“To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
As trivial as these types of confusion might seem, Russell’s insight was that they underlie many of the most fundamental intellectual errors in human history.
Developing in-principle accounts of how to avoid such errors is not easy. Everyone knows that from “Men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man” we can infer that “Socrates is mortal”. We also know that from “Men are numerous” and “Socrates is a man” we cannot infer that “Socrates is numerous”, but without an explanation of why these two cases are different we are left wondering about the more general case, about whether from “Men are x” and “Socrates is a man” we can infer reliably that “Socrates is x” for other arbitrary instances of x. On Russell’s view, the analysis needed to resolve these kinds of puzzles does not focus primarily on the study of language, at least not initially. Hence, Russell’s spirited opposition to the mid-twentieth century turn towards ordinary language philosophy.
On Russell’s view,logical analysis is primarily a type of abstract investigation about the world. Only secondarily is it involved in developing a corresponding grammar and vocabulary. Without some principled account of why language and inference sometimes fail to mirror the underlying structure of the world, we inevitably have trouble placing even our most careful empirical observations into words. Without conceptual analysis, no scientific inference can be fully trusted. On this view, guidance comes, not from the surface features of natural language, but from the underlying structure of the world itself. As Einstein famously remarks, just as philosophy, when isolated from science, becomes intellectually empty, science without philosophy “is – insofar as it is thinkable at all – primitive and muddled”.
In a broad sense, this goal of having language mirror reality originates with Plato’s injunction to carve nature at its joints. In a more precise sense, it originates with Gottfried Leibniz, for it was Leibniz who first championed the use of a logically ideal language (or characteristica universalis), together with an effective calculus of deductive reasoning (or calculus ratiocinator). Only after developing these two tools are we able to reason about the world without fear of error. As Russell himself translate one of Leibniz’s most famous quotations in his book, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz,
We should be able to reason in metaphysics and morals in much the same way as in geometry and analysis . . . If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands, to sit down to their slates, and to say to each other (with a friend as witness, if they liked): Let us calculate.
On this view there is no hard line separating the philosopher’s armchair from the scientist’s workbench. Conceptual analysis may not have about it the same air of empirical discovery as science, but it is just as central to the scientific enterprise as observation and experiment. Empirical observations reporting how the world in fact is may not immediately tell us how the world should be, but they too are essential for understanding even the most normative of projects. As Wittgenstein sums up Russell’s insight, “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity”. Something similar might be said of science as well.
This view of philosophy did not come quickly or easily to Russell. The idea that philosophy’s purpose is to discover a body of eternal, transcendent truths was deeply embedded, not just in Russell’s early philosophy, but in the philosophical culture of his day. Gradually, though, Russell came to champion the idea that advances in knowledge begin as much with conceptual analysis as with observation. We start with beliefs that seem to be plausible but that we cannot express with any high degree of precision. We then go through a process that involves both observation and analysis. We search for more accurate language, we collect more data, we look for inconsistencies, we investigate more fully. This process, says Russell in My Philosophical Development, “is just like that of watching an object approaching through a thick fog: at first it is only a vague darkness, but as it approaches articulations appear and one discovers that it is a man or a woman, or a horse or a cow or what not”. The result requires the thoughtful integration of both empirical investigation and logical analysis. This view about the importance of analysis, concludes Russell, “is my strongest and most unshakable prejudice as regards the methods of philosophical investigation”.
As Russell sees it, this view of philosophy leads not just to a more accurate understanding of the world. It also leads to an increased appreciation of the importance of objective knowledge quite generally, a lesson that should not be lost on those of us living almost half a century after Russell’s death as we reflect on the social, political and educational issues of our day. As Russell puts it at the end of his History of Western Philosophy (1945),
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few
unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of
basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and
as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for
human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into
philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be
rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of
which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the
practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole
sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of
fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual
understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions,
philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.
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