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THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILBERT RYLE

© Colin James Hamer 1966
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P R E F A C E

Gilbert Ryle has been described as "one of the most powerful, original and ingenious thinkers in contemporary philosophy."1 Passmore, the historian, calls him "the best known of Oxford 'ordinary language' philosophers,"2 and he is, infact, "one of the foremost exponents of that kind of 'linguistic analysis' which has been evolved and developed during the last two decades or so, and mainly in England."3 "Linguistic Analysis" is a brand of philosophy that is much discussed, but, perhaps, not always adequately understood. This justifies the present work, which aims to make some contribution to a growth in understanding of linguistic philosophy, not by concentrating on the general history of the movement - since others have already provided us with good general introductions4 - but by studying the thought of one of its most prominent spokesmen.

In the light of studies which have already been made an introductory chapter will trace the history first of linguistic, then of phenomenlogical philosophy, indicate the sort of problems analysts and phenomenologists want to solve, show how Gilbert Ryle's problems fit in to this general picture, and how he has worked towards their solution. The body of the work falls naturally into two parts. In the first, Ryle's philosophy is expounded and as far as possible interpreted; in the second, the aim is to citicize and evaluate. Whenever Ryle himself has provided a direct reply to his critics, it has been thought more suitable to incorporate at least part of such criticism in the first mainly expository part.

As well as being a contribution to a growth in understanding of recent and especially analytic and phenomenological philosophy, the present work is the first general study of Gilbert Ryle. His major work, The Concept of Mind, which appeared in 1949, "was one of the first, is still perhaps the most large-scale, and hence has been one of the most widely influential, attacks in the new style upon an old family of problems," and its publication was "one of the most important events in post-war philosophy."5 The impact made by this book was such that close on a hundred articles or short notices were published in connection with Ryle's work. This is in contrast with only three articles having dealt with his thought during the period 1927 to 1949. But while The Concept of Mind has been carefully studied in itself, little would appear to have been done in the way of presenting Ryle's philosophy as a whole. An attempt will be made to fill in this gap.6

The Introduction will give a general account both of Ryle's work and the scope of the present study. Here it will be sufficient to present the author himself. Gilbert Ryle was born on August 19th 1900, the son of Dr. Reginal John Ryle and Mrs. Catherine Ryle, née Scott. His father was a general practitioner in Brighton, and an early member of the Aristotelian Society, to which he contributed some papers. Gilbert Ryle was educated at Brighton College and at Queen's College, Oxford, of which he was a Classical Scholar. He obtained first Classes in Classical Honours Moderations, Litteræ Humaniores, and Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was at one time Captain of Queen's College Boat Club, being in the Trial Eights in 1923. In 1924 he became a Lecturer in Philosophy, and in 1925 a Student and Tutor in Philosophy at Christ Church. He also held for some time the offices of Junior and Senior Censor at Christ Church, and of Junior Proctor in the University. Along with L. S. Stebbing, C. A. Mace and A. Duncan-Jones, its first editor, he was one of the first contributors to Analysis when it was founded in 1933. In 1940 he was commissioned in the Welsh Guards and, after about a year with the regiment, he worked till the end of the war in Military Intelligence, ending with the rank of Major. In 1945 he was appointed to his present post as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College. He was President of the Aristotelian Society in the same year. He 1947 he became the Editor of Mind in succession to g. E. Moore. He delivered the Tarner Lectures at Cambridge in 1953. Professor Ryle has had much to do with the organization of post-graduate studies at Oxford in recent years, and he has paid visits to many Universities abroad. He is an Honorary Student of Christ's Church, an Honorary Felow of Queen's College, a member of the Travellers' and Leander Clubs, and is unmarried.7

The Bibliography comprises a complete chronological list of Professor Ryle's writings to date and a guide to published studies of his thought. All references in the text to Ryle's writings are followed by the page number of the relevant page in the original edition. But in the case of Systematically Misleading Expressions, Categories, Conscience and Moral Conviction, Philosophical Arguments, Feelings, Heterologicality and Ordinary Language the reference is to the volume mentioned in the Bibliography reprinting the article in question. References to other authors give the name of the book or the publication containing the article together with the year of publication and the page reference. Other details may be found in the Bibliography, which is chronologically arranged.

Notes:
1. 1953, Campbell, 115.
2. 1957, Passmore, 440.
3. 1950, Sibley, 259. Cfr 1956, Collins, 131: "Gilbert Ryle… of all the proponents of ordinary usage has the finest grasp upon that elusive and partly illusory medium." 1956, Götlind, 70-71: "The strength of Mr. Ryle lies in an extraordinary sensibility for the ways in which words are used." 1954, Abbagnano, 439: "Non c'è dubbio che tra i rappresentanti di questa filosofia, il Ryle sia una delle mentalità più aperte, equilibrate ed autenticamente filosofiche."
4. E.g., 1957, Passmore; 1958, Warnock; 1959, Charlesworth.
5. 1958, Warnock, 94.
6. An analysis of the published studies of Ryle's work shows not only that little attention, comparatively speaking, has been given to his articles, but also that his second book, Dilemnas, provoked far less written comment than did The Concept of Mind.
7. Cfr., 1956, Lewis, 496-7; 1957, Mace, 50. 238; Who's Who, 1964.

The following abbreviations are used:

CM = The Concept of Mind, 1949.
D = Dilemnas, 1954
PA = Philosophical Arguments, 1945.
Ph = La phénoménologie contre The Concept of Mind or any one of the discussions in the volume containing this article, 1962.
v.s. = Vide supra.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILBERT RYLE

Preface

CONTENTS

Bibliography

Introduction

PART ONE - EXPOSITION AND INTERPRETATION

The Nature and Method of Philosophy

Ryle's Philosophy of Man

Characterizing Ryle's Philosophy

PART TWO - CRITICISM AND EVALUATION

A General Appraisal of Ryle's Philosophy

Some Points in Ryle's Philosophy of Mind

Conclusion

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Chapter One Introduction

The relevance of Gilbert Ryle's philosophy to history of philosophy in its totality will not be fully dealt with here. But it may be useful to prepare the way for the study of Ryle's own philosophy by trying first of all to relate him to the English Analytic School, though School is ardly the best word, and to the Phenomenological Movement. For Ryle is himself an important figure in Analytical circles, and has given considerable attention to the works of Continental Phenomenologists. This Introduction will also provide a general account of Ryle's own work, and of the scope of the present study, placing Ryle in his historical setting.

Ryle and the Analytical Movement

Linguistic Analysis has been the dominant influence in English Philosophy over the last forty years.1 Like much philosophy written in English, that which has issued from this movement is vastly different from most philosophy in other languages.2 Linguistic Philosophy, Analysis, Linguistic Analysis, or Logical Analysis, as it is called, is a movement that until recently was little known outside England. In Europe it has been usually dismissed as another form of empiricism. In America it is often understood as a kind of poor relation of Logical Positivism or Logical Empiricism. But it claims to be totally distinct from these movements, and it has nothing to do with either mathematical logic or with the American movement of Semantics.3

It may be mentioned in passing that Analysis is not the only current English philosophy. N. Kemp Smith and Sir W. D. Ross draw their inspiration from Kant. The Philosophical Quarterly testifies to the continued vigour of the Scottish school.4 But while the title of Warnock's book, English Philosophy since 1900 could be misleading, it is true that Analysis is the main though not the only strand in contemporary philosophy.

Strand is not, perhaps, the best word. It could suggest that there is some precise set of doctrines that go to make up the analytical position. This is not so. The Analysts are better regarded as a group of philosophers loosely linked by their developing views on the nature and rôle of philosophy. Among the main names in this development are those of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Wisdom, Austin and Ryle.5

Linguistic Philosophy is sometimes presented as a reaction against Idealism, a sort of return to the traditional national sanity and balance after the excesses of a brief flirtation with an exotic and too exuberant Idealism. As far as style goes, it is, indeed, true that Hume or Berkeley "would have been sadly puzzled by the pages of Bradley, to say nothing of Hegel's. But either might have conversed quite naturally with Moore, and with Russell too, at least in his less technical moments."6

Thomas Case published his Physical Realism in 1888 when Idealism was at the height of its success at Oxford. But it was another Aristotelian, John Cook Wilson, who turned the tide in favour of Realism. Trained in neo-Kantian and Lotzean as well as in Aristotelian Logic, he was professor of Logic at Oxford from 1899-1915. He conceived logic to be the philosophical investigation of thought. Accordingly he condemned the Boole-Schöder system as merely trivial as logic, and found it grossly defective as a calculus. He thought Russell's logic puerile, and expressed surprise that Russell had found a publisher. He was dissatisfied with the logic of the Idealists because their theory of judgment confuses into a single act of thought such distinct acts as knowledge, opinion, belief, supposition and the like. Ryle, born in 1900, never knew Cook Wilson, but he adopts his view that knowledge, opinion, belief, etc., need to be distinguished. And it was Ryle's esteem for Cook Wilson that led him to be suspicious of the Phenomenologists' theory that consciousness is central in epistemology, and that all consciousness is consciousness of. Ryle shares Cook Wilson's view that knowledge is the basic form of thought.

All our direct knowledge of Cook Wilson's theory of knowledge rests on his fragmentary, posthumously published Statement and Inference (1926). Knowledge, he says, cannot be defined, but only exemplified. All other forms of thinking involve knowledge, although the opposite is not the case. He would have liked to indicate in detail the ways in which opining, believing, wondering, work towards, but differ from, knowledge. He was also interested in the connexion and distinction of grammatical and logical analysis, and has a characteristically Aristotelian respect for ordinary usage. Statement and Inference abound in careful linguistic analyses. He dismisses Mill's theory of denotation and connotation as a fragment of grammatical analysis of the function of nouns, and not logic at all. Confusion comes from forgetting that logic is a theory of the forms of thought. Only by holding grammar, logic and metaphysics apart can logical issues be clarified. This does not exclude a certain cross-fertilization. If one is asked, for example, to give an instance of elasticity and one replies that "glass is elastic," then the grammatical subject is glass, but the logical subject is elasticity, as is clearly indicated both by the context and by such devices as stress. Yet the Idealists, he complains, try to base metaphysics on a grammatical analysis. There are, no doubt, substances independently of our thinking, but nothing in its own metaphysical nature is a subject or a predicate, nor does the substitution of the words substance and attributes alter matters. Cook Wilson rejects the Idealist doctrine that relations, and indeed things, are themselves nothing but forms of thought. Making is one thing, he says, knowing another. It follows from the nature of knowledge that what we know must be there to be known, independently of our knowledge of it. He rejects Bradley's argument that relations are self-contradictory, maintaining that an appearance is no more than and no less than an object appearing. In our perception of spatial properties we are directly aware of the nature of a physical body, which we only infer to in our perception of colours, tastes, and heat.7

Passmore tells us that "Ryle was educated in the Cook Wilson tradition" and that "Aristotle is always his natural point of departure."8 And it is even possible to consider the philosophy of Gilbert Ryle as an implementation of Cook Wilson's programme for the study of knowledge, opinion, belief, etc. On the other hand, Ryle has shown, against Cook Wilson, that being-an-instance-of cannot itself be a relation.9

But whatever the relation of Cook Wilson to Idealism, it would seem mistaken to regard Analysis as a straightforward development of English Empiricism. The classical empiricists and the Analysts may resemble each other in point of style, but that is all. Indeed, with the later Analysts the influence of empiricism is sometimes explicitly repudiated.10

Linguistic Philosophy is a revolution, not a restoration. It would have been almost unthinkable for either the Idealists or the pre-Idealists to separate philosophy from belief. Such a separation was never entertained by them, except possibly by people wishing to use it, like, perhaps, Siger of Brabant with his double truth theory, to avoid persecution by those in authority. And yet this separation is fundamental in Linguistic method. Linguistic Philosophy has a completely new conception of the nature and rôle of Philosophy, of the kind of activity which Philosophy is.11

Let us take a glance at the situation prior to this revolution. "From the publication in 1865 of J. H. Stirling's The Secret of Hegel… German Idealism began to find a home in British universities."12 Muirhead's two bulky volumes of Contemporary British Philosophy, published in 1924 and 1925, give pride of place to F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. These men were exponents of Absolute Idealism, "Hegelianism modified by Anglo-Saxon caution," a highly and ambitiously metaphysical sysem, in which "the philosopher's concern with the whole was constantly and powerfully contrasted with the merely partial or fragmentary interest of other disciplines."13 Somewhat as fear of the spectre of Associationism and mental chemistry compelled Bolzano, Frege, Brentano and Husserl into the realization that mathematics and logic were neither inductive nor mental, that logic was not a branch of the introspective study of human behaviour14 - somewhat as Meinong, Husserl, Frege and Russell decided, Ryle tells us, that Plato was right after all, and that Philosophy was the observational science of the inhabitants of the Third Realm,15 so, according to Warnock, Bradley was impelled by a dissatisfaction with a view of the universe as base conjunction, a mere plurality of items, and Bosanquet hoped to discover some ultimate, unshakeable basis for ethics, or more generally some sort of guarantee for all judgments of value.16

Nor were English Philosophers alone in their preoccupation with the problem of escaping from the sceptical Heraclitean flux of David Hume. It was partly under the influence of Hume and Associationism that both in literature and in painting the Impressionists tried by surrendering themselves to what entered sensation and feeling from the outer world, to see the world with the physical eye alone, and to capture the passing moments, giving accurate expression to the interplay of sense-impressions and emotions.17 There is, of course, a certain amount of pleasure to be had by careless abandonment to the chaos of a world in which men are regarded only as talking, laughing, machine-making animals. But there have always existed a number of persons who believed in the existence of higher values, and tried to live their lives accordingly. Such people refuse to be satisfied with the Humean flux.

Religion might appear their most obvious sheet-anchor. In fact, in Bradley's youth most Fellows of Colleges were in Holy Orders and they imparted to their students a certain mixture of Classics and Religion. But as the Higher Criticism turned its batteries on the Scriptures, and progress in the Sciences highlighted the range of purely human achievements, revealed Religion lost something of its hold, and Idealism was, for a time, offered as a substitute in its place. Warnock admits that the style of the Idealists had at its best an undeniable splendour, but, when this highly rhetorical dress is stripped off, the doctrine itself is very much less appealing, and perhaps it can be said that one arrives, as with an onion, at nothing in the end.18

But whatever the merits and demerits of Idealism, the majority of University Profesors of Philosophy abhorred neo-Hegelianism on account of its complex technicalities. They were literary men, but no longer clerks. They were not specialists in natural science. They felt neither the duty nor the urge to guide their students in the living of their lives. They were, Gellner continues, largely conservative and formalist in outlook, natural enough, perhaps, since the trends at the Universities did not favour historical or social awareness. They wished simply to be respectable intellectuals, and were not remarkable for substantive or committed thinking. Hence transcendental possibilities came to be excluded from philosophy to a great extent, and there was a predisposition to see problems in terms of logic and language - scholastic, minute, idiographic studies being in high favour. This generally epistemological orientation of philosophy made possible and indeed favoured the emergence and development of Analysis.19

Analysis, then, differs from other philosophical movements in that it separates philosophy, to some degree, from questions of belief, confining it to academic problems, and insisting that faith must rest on other than philosophical grounds, if on any grounds at all. As Charlesworth points out, for the Analysts, of whom Wittgenstein is the central figure, the task of philosophy is to show that philosophical questions or problems do not arise when we understand what we are talking about.20 The Analysts translate all philosophical problems into linguistic or grammatical terms. For them one can discuss our concepts, and reality itself, only by examining our linguistic forms. Thus Ryle and all Oxford analysts deny the existence of ideas as mental objects, and set out to confute the Descriptive Fallacy, which he has called the "Fido"-Fido theory of meaning.21 As Ryle puts it: what we know are not ideas but facts; knowledge and on consciousness is basic in human experience; ideas are a myth due to linguistic confusion. With the Analysts the inflated method of discussion of the neo-Idealists who dismissed the most momentous issues with a few philosophical epigrams, gives way to a minutely detailed and piecemeal treatment.22

Idealism has offered a metaphysical theory, a new account, as it were, of familiar facts, intended to transform the whole intellectual scene, and to do this directly, not merely by implication, or in virtue of some quirk of psychology or association of ideas. But Idealism is no longer fasionable. Metaphysical theories, such as it offered, can have the intrinsic value of being admirables intellectual achievements. But they are always rare achievements, says Warnock; there have never been many real metaphysicians. Today it is, perhaps, somewhat difficult to attain metaphysical fervour. Metaphysical speculations have often arisen from, and often too been a substitute for, religious or theological doctrines. And while there may be no warrant for saying that the many people who lack any serious religious convictions are not much disturbed by this, it would be highly undesirable for philosophers to promise more than they could give - and he would be a bold man indeed who tried to persuade people today that some one human way of seeing, some one sort of man-made theory, had any exclusive claim to be the right way. In any case, if past metaphysicians have ever made any actual difference, it has seldom been quite the difference they had in mind. Man's ordinary way of seeing things is highly stable and very difficult to change. The relation of earlier philosophy to questions of Weltanaschauung is a matter so ramified and complex that hardly anything of a very general sort can usefully be said about it. It is at any rate certain that questions of a religious, moral, political, or generally cosmic variety are seldom directly dealt with in contemporary philosophy, though a certain interest in such topics appears to be at present reasserting itself. But while Warnock admits that questions about life in general, questions about attitudes to life are vital and interesting, he doubts that all attempts to answer have the same character. Many exclude such topics from Philosophy, maintaining that it is the study of the concepts we employ, and not of the facts, phenomena, cases, or events to which those concepts might be or are applied.23 To what extent this represents Ryle's own view we will see in due time.

In the words of Charlesworth, "Analysis is not connected necessarily with any particular view of the world or of man's destiny, and such questions are hardly, if ever, discussed."24 The importance or non-importance of beliefs is considered to be irrelevant to Philosophy, but it would be wrong to think that the Analysts consider attitudes and beliefs unimportant. Their attitude is well expressed by the saying of Moore: "I am concerned with knowledge only - that we should think correctly and so far arrive at some truth, however unimportant."25

Not belief but knowledge, not large scale syntheis but piecemeal analysis, not the desire to convert others to one's way of thinking but the survey of the way of thinking implicit in the ordinary use of language, not knowledge of philosophical facts but a philosophical understanding of language. This is Analysis as we have so far seen it: a philosophy which is for the most part admittedly unmetaphysical. At the same time Warnock claims that it is not doctrinally anti-metaphysical, and points out that philosophers themselves actually exhibit a quite striking ideological range. Some religious and even political authorities have seen in contemporary philosophy implications sufficiently grave and substantial to merit suspicion or open hostility, and it may be that underlying surface differences there is some deep-seated similarity of attitude and outlook.26

Philosophers are now rather conscious of their only rather recently achieved professional status, and like to think of themselves as standing firmly on their own feet in their own territory. They resent, says Warnock, amateur interference in their specialization. On the other hand, they attempt like Kant to clearly distinguish philosophical questions from questions of empirical fact, and from formal mathematical or logical questions. In all cases of philosophical problems, they would hold, light is to be found, if it can be found, from a grasp of our concepts, of the ways in which we think and communicate. It follows that the use of words must be a main topic of inquiry. Hence the movement has come to be called the Linguistic movement.27

There is obviously a danger that a philosophy that professedly concentrates on words will forget that words are not important in themselves, but only indirectly on account of the use to which they are put. While expressing his respect for such men as Ryle, Urmson, Hare and MacIntyre,28 Gellner severely criticizes linguistic philosophy. If Idealism was a substitute for religion that soon passed out of fashion because it was extreme and fanatical, Analysis owes its success to being a mellow, tolerant, venerable, roomy, philosophical institution for the exegesis of the Oxford English Dictionary, a secularised, sound, broadly-based, established religion, Low Church and doctrinaire only in the red-brick Universities, at Oxbridge High Church and ritualistic with a worldly-wise watering down of doctrine: Analysis is what you make it! Existence precedes essence!29

Comparing Analysis with Existentialism, Marxism, Natural Science and Psycho-analysis, the same author has lightheartedly remarked that Analysis and Existentialism both appear to adopt a neutral or passive attitude to life, and to regard the human situation as unadjustable. But while Existentialism dramatizes things in an ever more complex miasma of terminology, Analysis sidesteps the frenzy of endless linguistic complication, and prefers to play it cool, adopting a gentlemanly amchair approach to it all. As Marxism sees all problems in the light of the Class Struggle, so Analysis tends to pin everything down to linguistic confusion. Analysis uses the same methods as Natural Science, but differs from it in its absence of results. Like psycho-analysis it does not promise to cuse the sickness of the mind diseased, but would seem to establish a mental routine that induces a comfortable habitual torpor and innoculates against anxiety about the real problems of life.30

There have also been somewhat more serious attempts to associate Analysis with Marxism. Thus commenting on The Concept of Mind, Gianquinto says that while Marxism presents the fact of the dissolution of body-soul categories, Ryle provides linguistic evidence of the fact. Ryle's position and Marxism are, in his view, complementary ones, the one based on ordinary language, the other on common sense.31 Weldon is somewhat less optimistic about Marxism. Karl Marx saw 2that a categroy mistake in this sense was involved both in attempts, like that of Feuerback to 'reduce' truths about mental operations to physical and biological terms and in the claims of idealists and utopians to make statements about minds refer to a shadow world divorced from physical and biological facts… But Dialectical Materialism is a blind alley because it only goes on teaching us what we ought not to say… The essential part of [Ryle's] argument is the distinction between disposition words and occurrence or episode words."32

Whatever may be the truth about other Analysts, Ryle's position is quite different from that of Marx. He rejects any theory of the soul as a Cartesian ghost, but that is not to say he rejectes the view of the soul as entelechy or form of the body, even if he does not use this terminology. Moreover, while Marx seems to have been content with Feuerbach's arguments against the existence of the soul, and not to have advanced arguments of his own, it is characteristic of Ryle to provide reasons for his views. These reasons, as we will wsee, do not consist either in ivoking the authority of ordinary language, nor that of common sense - they are appeals to understanding, what Aquinas calls the proper or characteristic activity of the soul.33

And having mentioned Gellner's comparison of Analysis with Existentialism, this is perhaps the best place to note that, in Walker's view, The Concept of Mind not only appeared in the same year as the first English translation of Sartre's La Nausée (1949), but dealt "with precisely the same topics." "There is scarcely a problem which Sartre has raised that the Oxford Professor has not sought to solve." Walker admits that to all appearances Ryle and Sartre are poles apart. "The Waynflete Professor has made a careful study of how the English language is used… and is of the opinion that, if we would but use it correctly, most, if not all, philosophical problems can be solved… Sartre mistrusts words… It may be claimed that there is a yet deeper cleavave… Existentialism is admittedly a form of Cartesianism, based on the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum," while Ryle opposes Cartesian dualism. But Walker thinks these appearances of difference are deceptive.

"A careful comparison of what Sartre has said, notably in La Nausée and in L'existentialisme, will, I submit… leave us with two metaphysics which in essentials are one and the same." Interpreting Ryle as a behaviourist and materialist, he is able to submit this evidence in support of his contention: " 'I want no secret or soul-states,' says Sartre alias Roquentin; 'I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life… But I very much like to pick up chestnuts… It is only through others that I can come to know anything about myself… I exist only in so far as I act'… 'Now when I say "I," it seems hollow to me… I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin… and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out'."34

The plausibility of this comparison presupposes the behaviourist interpretation of Ryle's philosophy, which we will consider in its due place. On the other hand, there is considerable truth in Furlong's view35 that Ryle's theory of imagination has much in common with that of Sartre. What they share is the argued negative thesis that imagination is not the imagination of Cartesian mental images. But their positive account of imagination is not identical. In any case this is to discuss Sartre the Phenomenologist rather than Sartre the Existentialist.

Summing up this general presentation of the Analytical Movement, before going on to consider the individual analysts, we can say that the analytical philosopher pays great attention to detail, and denies in practice, when he does not do so in words, any concern with a system of philosophy. He is more interested in the nature and meaning of questions than with their answers. His aim is mainly, if not exclusively, therapeutic, criticizing language and laying down rules for its improvement. He sets out, in a word, to clarify language, and to do so in a way that is doctrinally neutral.

Gellner refers to this doctrinal neutrality when, in his Words and Things, he says that Analysis is a third person philosophy, in a way in which other philosophies are not. But his book, which is avowedly polemical, and which gives scant attention to the history of the movement, perhaps labours under the very defect which it so vigorously castigates. Gellner examines Analysis in a third person way. He does, it is true, suggest motives for the emergence of Analysis and for its successful establishment, but they are social motives, not personal ones. I would incline to the view that no philosopher can be rightly understood unless we know not only what he says, and why it is possible to say it plausibly on such and such an occasion, but also why he says it. Philosophers being, like the rest of us, reasonable beings in their better moments, do have personal reasons for what they say, do hold by values they wish to defend, and this should be remembered. Ayer has written: "No record of the facts can be free from all interpretation. One's account of what actually happens is governed by one's idea of what is possible… So long as it is free from inner contradiction, it is hard to see how any philosophical thesis can be refuted, and requally hard to see how it can ever be proved."36 If by proof is meant logical reduction to the principle of non-contradiction, neither the Analytical nor the anti-Analytical positions can be proved or disproved. But if the requirements of reasonableness be accepted, a philosophy is disproved when there is a contradiction between its tenets and the fact of its reasonable affirmation by a philosopher, and it is established when there is a contradiction between its tenets and the attempt rationally to deny them.

Language is objective, but it has in use a subjective reference. The horizon of our world is determined, too, by a subjective as well as by an objective pole. So when we consider the linguistic approach to philosophy we may well ask, with Rossi-Landi, "What are we saying about the world when we study how we talk about it? and how are we advancing our knowledge of the world when we study how we talk about it already?"37 Further along we will notice some suggestions as to how these questions are to be answered.

The classic example of an Analytical Philosopher is Wittgenstein, but his work rests on foundations laid by Russell and Moore.

Notes:
1. Cfr. 1959, Charlesworth, xi.
2. 1958, Warnock, v.
3. 1959, Charlesworth, 1
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. 1958, Warnock, 9
7. Cfr. 1957, Passmore, 242-49
8. ibid., 440.
9.
10. 1959, Charlesworth, 4-5
11. 1959, Gellner, 227: "The idea that the revolution is after all a restoration is absurd. In some ways it may be true that it has greater affinities with pre-Idealist styles of thought than it has with Idealism. But pre-Idealist styles of thought never separated themselves from issues of belief: such a separation had seldom occurred to anyone, except perhaps to people wishing to use it to avoid persecution by the authorities on belief, and indeed it is absurd." The view of philosophy as an activity is not peculiar to Analysis. Cfr 1956, Rossi-Landi, 281. He brings out the merits of Ryle's attack on -isms, and traces it to its roots in the view of philosophy as an activity: "È in parte originale di Ryle quella singolare battaglia control gli 'ismi nella quale si può ravvisare uno degli aspetti più ragguardevoli non solo della filosofia di (o alla) Oxford, ma di tutto il moto di rinnovamento analitico-linguistico del filosofare, e che è presente anche in altre correnti del pensiero contemporaneo, per esempio negli ultimi sviluppi dello strumentalismo deweyano e anche in certi aspetti dell'esistentialismo e del marxismo metodologici. Si tratta di una conseguenza, o meglio di una applicazione, della concezione del filosofare come attività."
12. 1958, Warnock, 8.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. review of Sein und Zeit, 360; Are there Propositions?, 97; Phenomenology, 68-69; review of Communication, 366; The Theory of Meaning, 259-61.
15. review of Sein und Zeit, 357-59; Phenomenology, 72-73; review of Communication, 366; Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1-3.
16. 1958, Warnock, 4-5: note that while Bosanquet saw philosophy as an authoritative guide to positive action, J. E. McTaggart was a little less ambitious. The utility of metaphysics is to be found, he said, in the comfort it can give us, in the chance that it may answer this supreme question - whether good or evil predominates in the universe, in a cheerful manner.
17. To quote PATER W.: "Each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture - in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects… but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contrasts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind… Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world… Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end… How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life… While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend." (The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1910 ed., pp. 233ss, quoted in BULLOUGH G., Mirror of Minds: Changing Psychological Beliefs in English Poetry, Athlone Press, London, 1962, pp. VIII-271, pp. 192-93.)
18. 1958, Warnock, 6-7.
19. 1959, Gellner, 247-54; 217-19; 138-40; etc.
20. 1959, Charlesworth, 2.
21. 1964, Gozzellino, 166-67.
22. 1959, Charlesworth, 7-8.
23. 1958, Warnock, 137-45; 166-69. One may doubt the truth of the affirmation (p. 145) that "many people neither have, nor appear to be much oppressed by the want of, any serious religious convictions."
24. 1959, Charlesworth, 8.
25. Ibid.
26. 1958, Warnock, 160; 170.
27. Ibid., 162-63; 171-72.
28. 1959, Gellner, 21 note.
29. Ibid., 249-55.
30. Ibid., 20-21; 72-77; 111-12; 168-69; 173; 234-37; etc.. Cfr 1955, Rossi-Landi, XXXII: "Non ci si fida del linguaggio: bisogna non fidarci di noi stessi, animali parlanti. La filosofia diventa così anche una forma di auto-analisi e di etero-analisi (Le due in circolo fra loro). Ciò non ha nulla a che fare, però, con una supposta nevrosi, di cui questi filosofi sarebbero preda perché… paurosi di parlare. A me risulta il contrario: essi sono, semmai, troppo 'sani,' troppo 'normali'; difettano semmai di fantasis perché rifiutano l'apporto dello stravagante, dello straordinario, del molto personale."
31. 1955, Gianquinto, 378.
32. 1950, Weldon, 267
33. Aquinas, S.T., I, q.88, a.2, ad 3m., "Dicendum quod anima humana intelligit seipsam per suum intelligere, quod est actus proprius eius, perfecte demonstrans virtutem eius et naturam."
34. 1950, Walker, 432-43.
35. 1961, Furlong, 16.
36. 1963, Ayer, 26-27.
37. 1955, Rossi-Landi, XXIV-XXV: "Cosa vuol dire analizzare un giudizio, un'espressione, una parola? Cme si distinguano le espressioni significanti da quelle non significanti?… Se il filosofo si occupa di linguaggio, in che senso il suo lavoro è linguistico e in che senso no?… Che cosa diciamo del mondo quando studiamo il modo in cui ne parliamo? E che contributo diamo alla conoscenza del mondo quando studiamo il modo in cui già ne parliamo? Quali sono i rapporti della filosofia con le varie scienze? Quali qelli con altre discipline che si occupano del linguaggio, per esempio con la linguistica?"

 

G. E. MOORE

The appearance in 1903 of G. E. Moore's essay The Refutation of Idealism marks, says Charlesworth, the beginning of Linguistic Philosophy. Idealism continued to be the main influence in English philosophy until the 1920's, when the death of its leaders administered the coup de grâce, but Moore had already sown "seeds of doubt about its foundations."1 Ryle was certainly influenced by Moore in his rejection of the view that ideas are entities.2 And even if Moore's essay did not really refute Idealism, it did, perhaps, refute the commonest and most plausible arguments for it, so that after discussion with Moore, Bertrand Russell found himself unable to believe that knowing makes any difference to what is known.3

Although, as Warnock mentions, Moore had the character required to resist the temptation to conform himself with the Idealism of his environment,4 it would be wrong to think that either he or Russell was opposed to metaphysics in general. Moore said that the most important and interesting thing which philosophers had tried to do was to give a general description of the whole of the universe. At the same time, unlike Russell, he never desired to replace Absolute Idealism with a different system of his own.5 He "did not hanker for any system on his own account."6 Nor did he imply that the strange things the Idealists said were necessarily false, he only emphasised that true or false they were strange,7 and this view of his was respected.8

Idealism, then, fell into disrepute not because it was disproved, but because people were bored with it, and Moore's new style of philosophizing was the catalyzing influence which finally broke its spell.9 Not that, in Ryle's view, Moore generalized "his procedure as a maxim for all philosophical inquiry, but his influence has been in this direction."10

The Refutation of Idealism is the first example of that minute philosophical procedure, with its careful distinction of issues, its insistence that this, not that, is the real question - where this and that had ordinarily been regarded as alternative ways of asking the same question - which was to be Moore's distinctive philosophical style, exercising, as such, considerable influence on his successors, particularly at Cambridge. Leaving aside the central Idealist thesis - that Reality is Spiritual, Moore deliberately restricts his criticism to the analysis of the trivial proposition that "to be is to be perceived." If the subject and predicate are identical, the proposition is a tautology; if they are distinct, the proposition is not analytic - the very notion of a necessary synthetic truh is contradictory.11 Charlesworth remarks that Moore seems never to have realized that this sort of criticism would apply equally to all attempts to formulate meaphysical propositions.12 The idea that metaphysics is in principle impossible, or meaningless, did not appear until many years later, and even then, Warnock adds, it was an idea which Moore neither sponsored nor accepted.13 If Moore had himself generalized his criticism, he would have seen that it proved too much "and that the distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions was more complex a matter than he thought."14

The second part of Moore's argument is based upon an epistemological inquiry into the nature of sensations and ideas. Both Ryle and Moore give particular attention to the theory of ideas, sensations and judgments. According to the empirical tradition a concept is an abstraction which the mind manufactures out of the raw material supplied by perception. In The Nature of Judgment (1899) Moore had argued, in complete contrast, that conceptions cannot be regarded fundamentally as abstractions either from things or from ideas, since both alike can, if anything is to be true of them, be composed of nothing but concepts. A thing is a bundle of concepts. To define a thing is to enumerate its different properties and qualities and their definite relations to one another; to set out its parts and their arrangement. Moore writes as if a concept were a building-block out of which propositions are constructed; Ryle will argue, in opposition to Moore, that a concept is merely a handy abbreviation for a 'family' of propositions,15 that is for a class of propositions sharing some common logical power. On Moore's showing one will, apparently, have no right to apply the word "horse" to more than one particular object, while, on the other hand, definitions will only be of complex things. Indefinable simple elements are postulated by Moore because they are logically necessary, without his implying anything at all as to the manner and origin of our knowledge of them. Whether they are or are not, in the last resort, to be identified with sense-data is, he thinks, an open question. What is certain is that "thing," "complex conception," "proposition" are different names for the same entity. Moore identifies true propositions and reality. Truth is a simple, unanalysable, intuitable property, belonging to certain propositions and not to others. To know is to be aware of a proposition, of a relation between concepts. Even in perception one cannot possibly know anything which lies beyond concepts. The world is made up of eternal and immutable concepts; propositions relate concepts one to another; a true proposition predicates truth of such a relation of concepts, and is a fact or a reality. Thus Moore overcame Bradley's relegation of the world of everyday life to the realm of appearances, and reaffirmed that grass was green, that the sun and the stars would exist if noone was aware of them, and that there was a pluralistic world of Platonic ideas. The world was, in Russell's words, rich and varied and solid.16

Passmore points out that those who have never felt the strength of the Idealist position find it hard to understand Moore's insistent returning on the obvious. Since he lays great stress on ordinary language it is suggested that, in the manner of Wittgenstein, he is really concerned with the defence of ordinary usage, of ordinary language. But this is not so. Moore defends common sense and ordinary beliefs as such, because he thinks they need defending. His positive views are thus a cult of common-sense as such, and he does not claim - as some later Analysts have done - that reference to ordinary usage is in some way an infallible test of the meaningfulness of any proposition. However, in his demolition of the views of other philosophers he does make great use of their unacknowledged deviations from common language. He defends the truth of common-sense statements. For him, the world is what it is and not another thing,17 as he expressed himself in Principia Ethica (1903), quoting Butler. Thus in an article in Baldwin's Dictionary he defended external relations, as against the theory of internal relations favoured by the Idealists. Ryle also rejects Idealism and denies that all relations are internal, examining, like Moore, each issue on its merits in the light of ordinary language. We have already mentioned that Ryle also gives particular attention to the theory of ideas, sensations and judgments. Unlike Moore, he is ready to go against common sense when need be, and denies that philosophy is merely therapeutic analysis. There are no such things as concepts, Ryle claims, and propositions are not prior to their component parts, and are not names; neither are sentences mere lists. All expressions are syncategorematic. Ryle's view of philosophy is essentially synoptic. Concepts cannot be taken in isolation. But Moore urged against Bradley's monism that nothing could be constituted by the nature of the system to which it belonged, that the essence of a thing is always distinct from its relations, that to be at all is to be independent.18

We have been leading up to the second part of Moore's argument in The Refutation of Idealism. It is briefly this. The sensation of blue contains two elements; the first that which it has in common with other sensations, and which he calls "consciousness," the second that which distinguishes it from other sensations, which he fallls the "object" of the sensation, the blue which the sensation of blue is of. Now, Moore argues, to have a sensation of blue is not to have a blue sensation for which one must seek an object; it is precisely to have a sensation of blue, "consciousness" of an "object." It is only fair to add that Moore himself has since disowned this particular proof of his contention that knowledge is knowledge and not another thing.19 But what did he think to be the "object" of which "consciousness" is of? In The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception (1905) he distinguishes what we actually see from the object we think we see. We actually see sense-data, but it is not the essence of sense-data to be perceived, since they can exist without being perceived, and so it is confusing to call them sensations. Though we do not actually see three-dimensional physical objects, neither do we need evidence for their existence, says Moore. This, as Thomas Reid pointed out, is something we already know.20

Such an appeal to common sense is characteristic of Moore. While philosophy and thought traditionally begin in wonder, and Ryle for instance shares in this Aristotelian wonder, Moore seems only to wonder at wonder, to champion matter-of-fact-ness.21 His attitude kills the usual kind of philosophic curiosity, and insinuates the view that everything is as it seems. Thus he strikes at the very foundations of all current philosophical structures. Appealing to common-sense, he asks why they are needed. What exactly, he wants the Idealists to tell him, is supposed to be wrong with very ordinary opinions? What does a philosophical proof or justification add to what we already know? An enormous amount of philosophical writing, he concludes, is marred and frustrated by hastiness and confusion. It is not because I know first of all in a philosophic way that external things exist that I know the fact that my hand exists. If Hume's principles were true, he argued in the 1910-11 lectures, I could never know that this pencil exists, but I do know that this pencil exists, and therefore Hume's arguments cannot be true. Philosophical explanations are redundant. The main task of Philosophy lies elsewhere.22

Moore's theory of Common Sense has been the most criticized part of his philosophy. If the world is what it is and not another thing, then past philosophy is presumably just what it is. If Moore does not think so, his critics say, he should set out his reasons, but if he agrees, then as a philosopher he should try to continue from where his predecessors have left off. Perhaps this is what Moore tries do do. But a dogmatic cult of commn sense, caution and literal mindedness would seem small guarantee for the avoidance of error, let alone for the promotion of truth. Moore nowhere offers a criterion for distinguishing those truths which belong to Common Sense from those which do not, and yet he himself admits that in some cases ordinary language is inadequate and misleads us. The fact that a proposition is expressed in a particular form of words which we would not ordinarily employ is a rough and ready sign that Common Sense is being violated. But philosophy goes beyond verbal expressions. Some truths may be indubitable, at least in appearance, and may hence be taken to belong to Common Sense, and yet upon examation be discovered to be open to serious doubt. There are, then, for Moore, such things as real philosophical doubts, but how there can be, he does not explain. We do know many things, Moore claims, and yet we do not know how we know them - I may have conclusive evidence that I am awake, but this is a very different thing from being able to prove it. Only in this common sense way can one show that there is an external world.23

But while it is the height of absurdity to question whether truisms are true, or whether we know them, it is quite proper to wonder what is their correct analysis. Part of the difficulty in giving correct analyses may consist in the difficulty simply of saying quite clearly what it is that some phrase or proposition, whose meaning is probably not in doubt, does actually mean. To give an analysis of a concept is, Moore suggests, to discover some concept which is the same as the concept being analysed, but which can be expressed in a different way, by referring to concepts which were not explicitly mentioned in the expressions used to refer to the original concept. Moore does not agree with those who hold that to give an analysis is to describe how to use a certain expression. Unlike Ryle he thinks that analysis is of concepts, not of expressions. But he frankly admits that he cannot explain how it happens that by pointing to the identity of two concepts we can provide information about one of them. Nor does he give us any criterion by which to judge whether any given analysis is complete and sufficient or not. And he involved both himself and others in difficulties resulting from the unquestioned assumption that any analysis must be of a standard pattern.24

As Warnock points out, the word "analysis" carries the suggestion that something complex is to be decomposed.25 Moore had no doubt that there were simpler entities of some sort on which our knowledge of ordinary thing was in some way based, and which were indeed what we always directly referred to in uttering such propositions as "this is a hand." He called these entities sense-data and then had to try and make clear how he used the expression sense-data and what he meant by it, and also how by its employment such propositions as "this is a hand" ought to be analysed. He holds that whenever one knows or judges such a proposition as "this is a hand" to be true, there is always some sense-datum about which the proposition in question is a proposition, and that what one is knowing or judging to be true about this sense-datum is not, in general, that it is itself a hand. This is the positive aspect of analysis. But it does not give us any more knowledge, or any more certain knowledge, than we already possess by common sense. It is, besides, extremely difficult. Even if analysis were complete, nothing could be deduced from it with respect to the real world. What is it then that provokes one to look for an analysis? Moore is quite vague when confronted with such a question as this. There is philosophic doubt, but he does not explain how there is.26

Moore, to give a particular and characteristic example, discusses goodness. Goodness is simply unanalysable. Good is obviously not something which can be analysed into parts. Like yellow it is the name of a simple quality. Like all other terms it cannot be the subject of a necessary synthetic proposition, and being a simple term "good" cannot be the subject of any definition. The attempt to define what ought to be in terms of what is, is what Moore calls the Naturalistic Fallacy. Given his notion of definition, good is simple, ultimate or unanalysable, non-natural since undefinable in non-moral terms, and known only by intuition. Thus Ethics simply disappears, and its place is taken by an examination of the logical status of ethical propositions and ethical terms. As a corollary we can never assert any action or state of affairs to be universally and certainly good. No sufficient reason can be found, he thinks, for considering one action more right or more wrong than another. All the same, he lays it down that the good is that which ought to exist, thus indicating some necessary connexion between goodness and existence.27

When Professor Frankena objected that, on Moore's premisses, we cannot even define good as that which ought to be done or promoted, Moore admitted that his identical with was a sheer error; what he really meant was logically equivalent. In this connection Charlesworth says that Moore seems never to have realized that if analytic propositions are simply tautologies, as he holds, then every attempt at analysis will involve tautology, it being meaningless to assert that X is Y unless X is distinct from Y. What he calls the Naturalistic Fallacy is simply a species of Frankena's Definist Fallacy. These difficulties provide a kind of practical demonstration of the general inadequacy of Moore's theory of definition and of his analytic-synthetic distinction. This has led the later Analysts to develop their theory of linguistic use. There are very great and important differences between the uses of the adjective "good" and the adjective "yellow" that Moore seems not to have noticed, and that cannot be made to emerge within the pattern of an analysis conceived as rigidly as Moore conceived it.28

Moore in theory never abandoned the idea that the goal of philosophical inquiry is to establish very general truths about the world. But taken as a system his own philosophy is inadequate and disappointing. His practice, says Warnock, tended to give rise to the idea that the business of philosophy is clarification and not discovery; that its concern is with meaning, not with truth; that its subject-matteer is our thought or language, rather than facts. He does, indeed, hold that the main task of philosophical analysis is a therapeutic one, and it is as a concrete example of a new way of philosophical enquiry rather than as a body of doctrine that Moore's thinking has been influential.29

Moore's method claims to be philosophically neutral and devoid of any epistemological or ontological assumptions. But behind the stress on particular and concrete examples and on common-sense and ordinary language, behind the insistence on the need to get clear about what a proposition means and about what reasons can be given for it, about what kinds of question are at issue, and what kinds of reason are relevant, Gellner would tell us that there is a very important innovation.30 Language is now being looked upon as something public rather than personal, and a third person approach hitherto confined to ontology replaces the traditional first person approach to epistemology. Language is assumed to be public, and since it is public, it could not possibly have been constructed out of a first person language, and so first person language is taken to be impossible. It is then denied that the public world can really be a problem, since public language presupposes a public world about which it is about. Later the first person approach of logical positivism to language is covertly drawn upon to deny standing to all rival metaphysical statements.

Ryle considers it to have been the merit of Moore to realize that all existence-propositions are synthetic, and that, consequently, they can always be denied without absurdity.31 This influences Ryle's own treatment of the Ontological Argument, as we will see. Moore's view of knowledge as the awareness of a relation between concepts suggests that knowing is something like looking, and Moore's talk of sense-data strengthens this impression. This view Ryle has grown out of not without difficulty.

Notes:
1. 1959, Charlesworth, 11.
2. 1955, Rossi-Landi, xxxvi-xxxvii: "C'è chi ha interessi prevalentemente logici, ed è venuto occupandosi di linguaggio perché linguistico è il medium di tutto ciò che può e che non può essere detto; c'è invece chi ha per il linguaggio un interesse per così dire più diretto, originario, e coltivandolo si è ritrovato alle prese con questioni di logica. Ryle appartiene al primo gruppo; e, personalmente, è giunto a servirsi delle accennate techniche linguistiche seguendo un duplice filone. Da una parte, la scoperta di Russell, che noi ci serviamo di certe espressioni… sprovisti di senso; e la generalizzazione di ciò… nel Tractatus. Dall'altro parte, la campagna di G. E. Moore e altri contro quelle mistiche entità psicologiche ('idee,' 'giudizi,' 'volizioni')… Con il confluire di queste due correnti fu chiaro a Ryle che il maggior nemico da combattere era la psicologia nella logica."
3. 1959, Charlesworth, 12.
4. 1958, Warnock, 12
5. Ibid., 9-10.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 10-11.
10. review of Communication, 368; cfr Logic and Professor Anderson, 151-52; Ludwig Wittgenstein, 79; The Theory of Meaning, 262.
11. 1959, Charlesworth, 14-16; 1957, Passmore, 210-11.
12. 1959, Charlesworth, 17.
13. 1958, Warnock, 10.
14. 1959, Charlesworth, 17
15. 1957, Passmore, 443.
16. 1959, Charlesworth, 24-26; 1957, Passmore, 205.
17. 1957, Passmore, 207; 1958, Warnock, 21-23; 1959, Gellner, 92
18. 1957, Passmore, 209.
19. 1959, Charlesworth, 18-19.
20. 1957, Passmore, 211-12.
21. Cfr 1959, Gellner, 218-19. Re Linguistics in general: "Boredom is the really harmful and dangerous consequence of Linguistic Philosophy. It kills curiosity, it insinuates the view that everything is as it seems… Philosophy and thought began in wonder: Linguistic Philosophy tries to turn wonder into an index of confusion." 1957, Passmore, 440 re Ryle: "Ryle was educated in the Cook Wilson tradition; Aristotle is always his natural point of departure."
22. 1958, Warnock, 15-16; 1959, Charlesworth, 13-14; 1957, Passmore, 213.
23. 1959, Charlesworth, 19-22; 42-43.
24. 1958, Warnock, 19. 25-27; 1959, Charlesworth, 44.
25. 1958, Warnock, 25.
26. Ibid., 26; 1959, Charlesworth, 36; 1957, Passmore, 213-15.
27. 1958, Warnock, 28; 1959, Charlesworth, 28-31.
28. 1958, Warnock, 28; 1959, Charlesworth, 26-27; 32-33.
29. 1958, Warnock, 28-29; 1959, Charlesworth, 45.
30. 1959, Gellner, 81-85.
31. review of Communication, 368.

 

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Russell has written: "On fundamental questions of philosophy my position in all of its chief features is derived from G. E. Moore."1 The significance of this affirmation may be somewhat lessened by the fact mentioned by Charlesworth, viz., that Russell is a kind of philosophical Picasso who has written on an immense range of philosophical issues, and has tried out almost every philosophical position.2 Still, from the very beginning there has never been any great change in his actual approach to philosophy. Passmore states that he is always ready to learn from his predecessors and from continental thinkers, that he always sees science and philosophy as somehow part of a greater whole, that he always finds a close link between philosophy and logic and mathematics.3 On the other hand, these are hardly all things he learned from Moore. His most serious thinking would appear to have been done before 1930, and during that period his philosophy of language was elaborated.4

"Russell felt a strong desire to bring into philosophy some sort of professionalism, some technique, which would enable the subject genuinely to bear comparison with such patronized, supposedly inferior disciplines as those of the scientist and the mathematician."5 He would never have dreamed of defending common-sense as such. In some ways this brings him closer to Ryle and further away from Moore. Ryle also shares Russell's willingness to learn from others and, with reservations, I think, his view of philosophy as part of a greater whole and his correlating of philosophy with logic and mathematics. But although Russell was the first explicitly to emphasize the philosophical importance of ordinary language, he thought it part of the main task of philosophy to reform ordinary language.6 He aimed to "strip off the surface complexities of the world, and so to arrive at and isolate the last residue in analysis." The point of philosophy, he said, is to start off with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.7 The philosopher exposes specious a priori arguments, and then proceeds to settle any remaining questions on empirical grounds, while leaving aside as not directly of philosophical importance save in its beginning the mathematical logic that treats of and dorces us to admit the existence of irreducible universals which any theory of pure empiricism cannot account for.8 This view of Russell, shared by Meinong, Husserl and Frege, for instance, that Plato was right after all, that philosophy is somehow the observational science of the inhabitants of the Third Realm, certain extra-spatio-temporal entities, Ryle refers to,9 but decisively rejects. Russell's general ideal was a scientific, neutral, disinterested inquiry that prescinded from the desire for comfort, from religious beliefs, and from moral convictions.10

It has been said that in adopting the general aim of arriving at the simple by analysis of the complex, Russell and his followers were continuing a tradition. He was also influenced by recent developments in logic.11 Euclid's geometrical axioms, as is well known, are assumed, not proved. Peano reduced such mathematical assumptions to a minimum. Frege strove to define Peano's primitive mathematical conceptions in wholly logical terms. In The Principles of Mathematics (1903) Russell was able to define pure mathematics as "the class of all propositions of the form 'p implies q,' where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants." Logical constants are said to be indefinable, but they are enumerated: implication, the relation of a term to the class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, propositional function, class, denoting, and any or every term.12

Russell, says Charlesworth, was the first to call attention to the importance of logical form. The grammatical and syntactical form does not always correspond to the logical form. Language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax. Syntax leads us to infer that every fact has a corresponding form and consists in the possession of a quality by a substance. Vocabulary leads us to accept a kind of platonic pluralism of things and ideas. In fact, propositions are not necessarily true or false, for they may be meaningless, as happens when there is a confusions of logical types.13 Rossi-Landi tells us that Russell's distinction between true/false and meaningless expressions was influential in moving Ryle to his campaign against psychologism in logic.14 Thus in Systematically Misleading Expressions, which belongs to the first Wittgenstein period, Ryle, "distinguishing - like Bradley, Frege and Russell - between the syntactical form of an expression and the form of the facts that it depicts, argues that a great many of the expressions of everyday life are, in virtue of their grammatical form, 'systematically misleading'… Russell's theory of descriptions for Ryle, as for Ramsey, was 'the paradigm of philosophy',"15 only, however, for a time.16

Russell's theory of types was especially developed in Principia Mathematica (1910-13), a three-volume work written in collaboration with his former mathematics teacher A. N. Whitehead. The theory tries to solve the anomaly of the class of classes which are not members of themselves being a member of itself. Consider the sentence "I am a liar". If this sentence is true, then I am a liar, and so the sentence is false. If, on the other hand, the sentence is false, then I am not a liar, and so the sentence is true. The study of well known puzzles of this sort, Ryle explains, led Lord Russell to distinguish between true-or-false statements on the one hand, and nonsensical expressions such as "I am a liar" on the other. It was then realized that to say an expression has a meaning is to say that it is not nonsensical. It is always possible to distinguish the question whether a given expression expresses a true or false opinion or true or false knowledge, from the question whether or not the expression has any meaning at all. The question whether an expression is meaningful or nonsensical is not an empirical one, and it is, in principle, logically prior to the empirical question of the statement's truth or falsehood. In this sense it is an a priori question.17 In Russell's view, then, there is said to be not only one relation of meaning between words and what they stand for, but as many relations of meaning, each of a different logical type, as there are logical types among the objects for which there are words. The theory obviously is of value as a methodological device, comments Charlesworth, but it has the inconvenience that one cannot, without violating the theory, state that expressions are of different types. Moreover, the criterion Russell uses for distinguishing different logical types leads to an impossible multiplication of them.18 "If we adopt what Russell said to differences of type amongst expressions, his view was that two expressions belong to the same type, if they can fill the same sentence-frame. As Ryle has shown, this account is too simple… What we have is really a negative criterion: given two expressions, if there is at least one sentence-frame in which one expression can occur and the other cannot, the two expressions belong to different categories."19 We will consider this view of Ryle more fully in its proper place. Charlesworth thinks that since the form of a sentence cannot be dissociated from its meaning, the notion of logical form is a fiction which explains nothing, that has never been taken seriously, and that Russell has admitted to be insufficient.20

Other difficulties caused Russell to modify his view of denoting as presented in The Principles of Mathematics,21 and to elaborate his theory of definite descriptions. A definite description is a descriptive phrase so used that it could describe only one thing. If it be assumed that definite descriptions, "the author of Waverley" say, or "the present king of France," have the same logical functions as names, the stage is set for argument in favour of the objective status of fictions, self-contradictory entities and even nonentity itself. If the sentence "the present King of France is not bald" is an ordinary subject-predicate sentence, either it is meaningless or there is a King of france. Thus, it cannot be a subject-predicate sentence. Definite descriptions, according to Russell, are not independent symbols, like names, but rather incomplete symbols. Thus, the sentence, "Scott is the author of Waverley" makes the conjoint assertion that at least one person wrote Waverley, that at most one person wrote Waverley, and that there is nobody who both wrote Waverley and is not identical with Scott. And these three propositions, as Professor Stebbing points out, resemble general expressions in being directly about properties and not directly about objects possessing those properties. Exists is not a predicate at all really, although it appears to be one. If I name an object, say A, I thereby affirm its existence. It is meaningless to say "A exists" unless A itself is an existent. There is therefore nothing to be gained by saying that A exists, and, Russell concludes, "this clears up two millennia of muddle-headedness about existence beginning with Plato's Theætetus."22

Unlike Russell, Ryle does not regard words or propositions as symbols, even incomplete symbols; he accepts Russell's realization that "Brutus assassinated Cæsar" is not the same as the list "Brutus, assassination, Cæsar", that the sense of a complete sentence is often logically prior to the senses of at least some words in it, or that, in his own words, not all expressions are "Fido"-Fido type, only to exploit it much more fully than Russell himself has done.23 As we shall see in detail later, Ryle also agrees with Russell that it is nonsensical to say that such-and-such exists, because existence is not a predicate, and to say that such-and-such exists or does not exist is to say nothing.24

The theory of descriptions has enjoyed, as Charlesworth claims, extraordinary influence because it seems to analyse away metaphysical problems and yet remain a purely neutral method. With its help one can do philosophy without taking up a philosophical position. But, as both Stebbing and Moore have pointed out, it is not possible to translate or analyse all propositions containing definite descriptions in the way in which Russell claimed, for instance "the whale is a mammal" is not amenable to such treatment. Russell's defence is that the English language (in which the word "the" is capable of various different meanings) is to blame for this. But if the logical form in each case is to be discovered only by examining what a word is actually used to mean, we must agree with Charlesworth that the whole idea of logical form becomes redundant, and the project of providing a ready-made technique of analysis for expressions of a certain grammatical form is illusory.25 The theory of descriptions has some value, and Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy as a therapy can be seen as a development of its implications, but the theory is not a final solution and can hardly be called neutral. Nor is it very clear that "exists" is a pseudo-predicate, since existential statements can never be wholly translated into non-existential ones without remainder. Again, Russell provides no criterion for the distinction of meanings, and indeed he himself often slides from the universal "the" to the singular "the," and from the notion of a name to that of a logical subject.26

Philosophic confusion is often a result of linguistic confusion. In Principia Mathematica Russell sets out the syntax of a perfect language with the help of an explicitly truth-functional notation. This new calculus is a language which has only syntax and no vocabulary. If a vocabulary were added, the result would be a logically perfect language. Russell, Warnock tells us, seems to have assumed that the perfect language was the language we commonly employ, as that would look if all removable imperfections were removed, i.e., the essence of language. This led to the enormous assumption that all propositions whatever which do not themselves state simple facts must be truth-functions of those which do.27 The truth is, of course, that there are many uses of language other than that of making statements, so that the syntax set forth in the logicians' calculus could at best be the syntax only of a part of language.28 Russell holds that the general rules of language can be stated by the employment only of logical constants and variables, but he does not tell us how the logicians decide which words to pick as being constants, nor which patterns of inference are valid. The logician's task seems to be simply to discern and codify existing and well-established practices. But if meaningless sentences like "Monday is square" are to be ruled out as syntactically wrong, then the syntax of any language will have to be prodigiously elaborated. In most cases, too, Warnock adds, unless a statement's context is known we cannot decide its truth or falsity, and context is not learned from syntax. If then the calculus is offered as the picture of an actual language it is incomplete and also highly idealized.29 But Russell has never pretended that what he terms the ideal language should be created in actual fact, except in certain fields and for certain problems. Some logicians see it as their aim to display the anatomy of the language of science. Others regard their calculus simply as an ideal construction. The calculi of logicians can also be regarded as interesting derivations from certain features of language, exhibiting certain features of discourse which can, perhaps, be best examined in this unrealistic, highly abstract way.30 Russell believes that with sufficient caution, the properties of language may help us to understand the structure of the world. But he nowhere tells us what characteristics about the structure of the world his own studies have revealed.31 He says the Idealists erred by inferring facts about the world from the examination of incorrect or unreformed language. But he cannot meaningfully claim to infer anything about the world from correct language, without inviting inquiry into his criterion of correctness. Of course, no damage is done to the rigour of logic by the discovery that a natural language has less. But this discovery does effect the status of logical atomism.32

Ryle, who disagrees with them on this (since while he regards philosophy as logic, he denies that it is formal logic), points out that Russell and Wittgenstein once thought all genuine general propositions were so many truth-functions of atomic propositions (although they never went so far as to think that our actual daily assertions are usually atomic in form).33 According to Russell the analysis of apparently complex tings can be reduced to the analysis of facts which are apparently about those things. Facts are stated in propositions. The simplest sort of proposition consists solely of a proper name and a simple predicate. This sort of proposition Russell calls atomic, and the facts that such propositions state are atomic facts. There are also molecular propositions, truth-functions of atomic propositions. But there are no molecular facts. The world is made up of atomic facts and language is made up of linguistic atoms.34

Wittgenstein says that the doctrines of Logical Atomism if true could not be stated without contradiction, since one cannot add to the facts, and the propositions enunciating Logical Atomism mostly do not state facts, but purport rather to say something about facts, in particular about the relations between facts and propositions. Moreover logical Atomism leaves all purely formal concepts without justification. The doctrine leaves no room for our human world of ethical, æsthetic and religious values. It compels one to admit general as well as singular, negative as well as positive facts. Aso, the non-interchangeability of "Jones believes the dog is in the kennel" with "Jones believes the cat is on the mat" becomes a puzzle, when the cat is on the mat, because the same atoms seem to be involved - Russell himself tried to surmount this hurdle by accepting a peculiar species of facts corresponding to such propositions as "Jones believes the dog is in the kennel." Finally, we can ask how scientific and ordinary discourse were initially constructed from linguistic atoms, and which are these atoms.35

Even though Russell's theory has been questioned and criticized by Ryle and others, his general conceptions are, as Charlesworth says, of basic importance for the understanding of the Analytical movement.36 According to Warnock, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and Wisdom all shared Russell's ambition of establishing the thesis that there are in reality only atomic facts, and in language only atomic and molecular propositions. And even if Wittgenstein though that he head not really said anything at all, not being able to add to the facts, he hoped that he had shown something.37 But we will consider Wittgenstein separately.

We will not discuss here the later philosophy of Russell. He is still trying to work towards a satisfactory theory of belief, still worried about the relation between physics and perception, and coming, too, to see new difficulties in his earlier views.38 He is also critical of contemporary linguistic philosophy, and writes: "The later Wittgenstein seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. The desire to understand the world is, they think, an outdated folly."39

The desire to understand is, however, evident in Ryle. Summarizing his relation to Russell we may note that he rejects the latter's view that all words are symbols, a corollary to his mathematical ideal. For while Ryle agrees that Philosophy is Logic, he insists that it is not Formal Logic. He never fully accepted Russell's Logical Atomism, although he does pay great attention to logical form, to the theory of types, and to the theory of definite descriptions. Ryle regards Russell's dream of a logically ideal language as an idle fancy. Just as birds must die before they can be stuffed, so the language susceptible of logical formulization is useless for ordinary purposes of human communication. It is not, Ryle would say, by constant drilling in respect for the logical principle of non-contradiction that one avoids nonsense, but by the intelligent acquisition of sound linguistic disciplines as correctives to one's haphazard linguistic habits.

Notes:
1. 1959, Charlesworth, 48.
2. Ibid., 52.
3. 1957, Passmore, 216-17.
4. 1959, Charlesworth, 52.
5. 1958, Warnock, 31.
6. 1959, Charlesworth, 51.
7. 1958, Warnock, 33.
8. 1959, Charlesworth, 50.
9. review of Sein und Zeit, 357-59; Phenomenology, 72-73; review of Communication, 366; Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1-3.
10. 1958, Warnock, 31.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. 1957, Passmore, 218-20.
13. 1959, Charlesworth, 52-54.
14. 1955, Rossi-Landi, xxxvii.
15. 1957, Passmore, 440-41.
16. Ph., 29: "Il est bien certain que lorsque j'écrivais l'article qu'on a cité Systematically Misleading Expressions j'étais encore sous l'influence directe de la doctrine du langage idéal."
17. Phenomenology, 71; Logic and Professor Anderson, 150; Thinking and Language, 81; Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1; The Theory of Meaning, 254.
18. 1957, Passmore, 218-27; 1959, Charlesworth, 55-58.
19. 1956, Baker, 13.
20. 1959, Charlesworth, 58.
21. 1957, Passmore, 228-29.
22. 1959, Charlesworth, 59-63.
23. Letters and Syllables in Plato, 447-48; The Theory of Meaning, 245-46.
24. This must not be misunderstood: "I never said that assertions and denials of existence are nonsense - only when the subject to the verb purports to designate. 'Unicorns don't exist but cœlocanths do' is O.K. 'I (or this) doesn't (or does) exist' does not go." Personal communication from Ryle to the author, 31/12/1965.
25. 1959, Charlesworth, 65-66.
26. Ibid., pp. 66-68.
27. 1958, Warnock, 37-38.
28. Ibid., 129.
29. Ibid., 126. 130-32.
30. Ibid., 133-34.
31. 1959, Charlesworth, 70.
32. Ibid., 71
33. Logic and Professor Anderson, 142; The Verification Principle, 24.
34. 1958, Warnock, 34. 127.
35. Ibid., 35. 41.
36. 1959, Charlesworth, 72
37. 1958, Warnock, 36. 42
38. 1957, Passmore, 239.
39. 1959, Gellner, 5.

 

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