RUSSELL, WITTGENSTEIN, AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

[Readers will notice some overlap in this essay with my pieces on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. I anticipate these three essays will at some point merge.]

Britain was one of the most fertile centers of 20th century philosophical thought. In 1971 British philosopher and journalist Bryan Magee conducted a series of interviews with his fellow island philosophers in a book called Modern British Philosophy. In the revised 1986 edition of this book, interviewees expounded on the state in the 1970s and 1980s of their areas of philosophy.

Stuart Hampshire (1914-     ) stated he believed the current philosophic age was that of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970).

Russell's status in British philosophy, Magee remarks in Modern British Philosophy, is that of a rejected father. Succeeding British and American philosophers have studied Russell's work, agreed with him on a few points, then liberated themselves by rejecting or attempting to correct other of his views.

# # #

Who was Bertrand Russell, and What were his views, that they have been so stimulating to British and indeed American philosophy?

Bertrand Russell was born into the English aristrocracy. His father was a viscount, his grandfather a two-time prime minister of Britain. His godfather was the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). When he was still almost an infant Russell's mother, then his father, died.

Russell was raised primarily by his grandmother, a Unitarian with a strong sense of sin. Although his childhood had happy moments, Russell remained possessed throughout his life by a strong sense of the gloomy unsatisfactoriness of the world. In several of his books he expressed eloquently his melancholy sense of life.

From an early age Russell's consolation was mathematics. He learnt Euclid's geometry easily, and loved to read as much mathematics as he could find. But he also learnt Greek, Latin, and German.

Bertrand went up to Cambridge University in 1890. There he met and became friends with the English philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958).

Now at this time a revival of the philosophy of the German Protestant philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was occurring. This revival had produced variants of his philosophy by such English philosophers as John McTaggart McTaggart and Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923). Hegel's philosophy involves absolute metaphysical idealism. Now the branch of philosophy called metaphysics remained under a dark philosophical cloud. (Metaphysics deals with the ultimate nature of reality. See my essay on this site.) Under the influence of his good friend Moore, Russell about 1898 rejected Hegel's philosophy. Hegel had advanced a detailed and profoundly influential philosophy of history. The proof of his theory, Hegel thought, was to be found by studying the history of philosophy.

Please bear with me as I explain Hegel's philosophy.

Hegel thought that Geist (German, "mind" or "spirit"; thought of not only as a mental faculty or abstract force but almost as a person) had advanced through the successive cultures of history growing more and more conscious, self-conscious, and rational. This process had culminated in Geist's realization as what Hegel called the Absolute Idea (Geist in another guise, perhaps as God). God or the Absolute Idea had realized itself as the best contemporary, that is, the best 1820s European, philosophy and political culture. By implication, the philosophers, philosophy, and political and cultural systems of Hegel's time were the best that had ever existed, the realization of complete liberty, and the goal of all history. And the philosophic method of the philosophers of Hegel's time -- reason (Verstand), was somehow superior (it was implied) to the method of thinking used by ordinary people and scientists. In contrast to philosophical reason, these lesser beings used the (by implication inferior) mental faculty most philosophers since Locke call understanding (Vernunft).

"A tidy system it was," said Russell in 1959. "Once we [Moore and himself] applied rigorous logic to Hegel, he became fragmentary and puerile."

Having rejected Hegelian absolute idealism, Russell looked for a new basis on which to have the absolutely certain knowledge of the world that Hegel had believed his philosophic system delivered.

Russell thought that one might discover the basis of certainty in mathematics.

At a mathematics conference in Paris in July, 1900, Russell was greatly stimulated by the mathematical work of the Italian mathematician Giuseppi Peano (1852-1928). He returned to Cambridge, read all of Peano's mathematical papers, and quickly began to write a book on the foundations of mathematics. By the end of the year he had written a draft. In 1903 he published it as The Principles of Mathematics.

According to the vitally important Austrian-British philosopher Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994):

"The achievement of this book is without parallel. Russell rediscovered [German mathematician Gottlob] Frege's logic and theory of numbers, and he laid the foundations of arithmetic and analysis. He gave the first clear and simple definition of real numbers on this basis (an improvement on Cantor, Dedekind and Peano). And he not only gave a theory of geometry but a new approach to mechanics."¹

Russell then struggled for nearly ten years with what he felt was a trivial difficulty, a logical paradox or antinomy he had discovered which he felt nonetheless vitiated not only his own work but that of his predecessors. The effort to solve this problem, Popper believed, "almost destroyed" Russell. Despite his having in the Principles "been the first to give a satisfactory explanation of the irrational numbers (a problem, says Popper, that had "agitated mankind for 2,400 years") and despite having given "a really brilliant solution" of the ancient problem of motion, Russell was vexed and frustrated.

Nonetheless, in 1910, with his teacher the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Russell published the first volume of another book, Principia Mathematica. This was a revolutionary effort to derive all pure mathematics from purely logical premises. According to Bryan Magee,

"In the course of this attempt he and Whitehead developed a very powerful and suggestive system of notation which was to have great influence of philosophy -- not only on symbolic logic but on general philosophy, partly through Russell's own Theory of Descriptions."²

The new work, Principia Mathematica, involved a theory that became known as Logical Atomism. It was an attempt to analyze language down to its basic parts in logic. Its most important part was a Theory of Descriptions. Russell had first published a very important piece on the Theory of Descriptions, "On Denoting", in the journal Mind in 1905. The Theory of Descriptions is regarded as the most important part of Russell's contribution to logic; indeed, perhaps the most important part of Russell's work as a philosopher.

The Theory of Descriptions held that every meaningful assertion must be true or false. Propositions can be examined; and, if their subjects exist and if it can be ascertained that they fit or don't fit the criteria of the proposition, one can decide that the proposition is true or false.

But . . . what if the subject of the proposition doesn't exist? What if the proposition is "The present king of France is 30 years old" and there is no present king of France? Is the proposition true or false?

It is neither. This is a pseudo-proposition that looks like a real one. It is of a different "logical type" than a real one. Russell's solution to this problem, the problem of how to distinguish pseudo-propositions from real ones, was to translate them into a logical notation for examination. This would make their logic (or lack of it) manifest.

(The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) had had a similar idea in the 18th century. He had been interested in discovering a logical language in which it would be impossible to state any false propositions. In this language all propositions would be true propositions. The language would give absolutely certain knowledge of things. See Leibniz's writings.)

NOTE: Those who have read Principia Mathematica seem to think that Russell and Whitehead went wrong near the beginning. And the Theory of Descriptions, though interesting and highly influential, was strongly criticized by Oxford philosopher Peter Strawson (1919-     ) in the 1950s.

Back to our story.

Russell's pioneering work in mathematics, trying as it did to establish perfectly true and certain propositions about the world, attracted to him a student, the deeply spiritual and ascetic Austrian genius Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), then studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. Wittgenstein came to Cambridge in 1911, and became a student of Russell's in 1912. After being stimulated for five terms by Russell's (and Moore's) thought, Wittgenstein began working on an extension of Russell's ideas. He wrote this down in notebooks.

World War I broke out. Wittgenstein returned to Austria, served bravely on the Austrian side, and was captured by the Italians near the end of fighting. By then he had finished a short book of his philosophic ideas; he published it in German in 1921. (Russell helped Wittgenstein publish an English translation in 1922.) The work was titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Russell was for a time, in his own words, "wildly enthusiastic" about the Tractatus. After all, It was an expansion of some of his own ideas. Nonetheless, he seems not to have understood part of it. The Tractatus was actually a rejection of some of Russell's ideas.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein holds that the world "is all that is the case." This seems to refer to facts, which are not facts as you or I think of them. In fewer than a hundred pages Wittgenstein creates an interlocking structure of numbered and consistent propositions; these, he believed, described the world as far as it can be described. For Wittgenstein, a Catholic Christian touched by mysticism, believed that some parts of the world can not be described in words.

As he rather mysteriously put it at the end of the Tractatus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."

Perhaps the most novel and arresting of the propositions that Wittgenstein advanced in the Tractatus was that propositions (in some important and deeply meaningful sense) are a picture of the world. This idea fascinated contemporary philosophers (it still does) and made Wittgenstein hugely famous among them.

Wittgenstein believed that arrays of facts justified the truth of propositions. The Tractatus was rather sketchily and abstractly written. The Tractatus concludes rather mysteriously that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." -- a sign of Wittgenstein's belief that the world held many mysteries of which it was more appropriate not to speak.

With the Tractatatus Wittgenstein truly believed he had solved all the outstanding problems of philosophy. He believed that he had dealt not only with metaphysics and epistemology, but also with ethics. He therefore retired from philosophy and devoted his attention for some years to teaching primary school in rural Austria and building his oldest sister a modern and beautiful Vienna mansion.

While Wittgenstein was in Austria he attended and spoke to a high-powered group of Viennese philosophers and physicists known as the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis). Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), a logical empiricist philosopher, was the leader of the Circle; Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath, and the revolutionary mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel were some of the members.) The Vienna Circle were much affected by Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Since the book was rather abstract, they took the opportunity to apply it to concrete situations, instantiating it, so to speak. Wittgenstein was unhappy with this development; he felt the Circle had misunderstood his book.

Now in the 19th century the French philosopher and creator of sociology Auguste Comte (1798-1857) had put forth a philosophy called Positivism. It was a philosophy much influenced by the development of modern science. Comte believed that society went through three historical stages; the last culminated in the development of experimental science. An implication of this development was that metaphysics had been superseded and was obsolete (see my essay on the development of metaphysics).

Comte later created his own religion. So the Vienna Circle, having (they thought) triumphantly seized on a powerful logical tool (Wittgenstein's Tractatus) for having certain knowledge of the world, began to call themselves Logical Positivists. Presumably they were contrasting their approach to philosophy with Comte's (by implication illogical) one.

Back to our story.

Urged by Russell and others, Wittgenstein eventually returned to Cambridge in 1929. The university accepted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis. For some time he remained interested in Russell's Logical Atomism.

But conversations with an Italian friend in 1931 caused Wittgenstein to become deeply dissatisfied with the main idea of his Tractatus. He realized that this book had been a mistake. Some propositions couldn't be pictured.

Wittgenstein now further realized that the Tractatus had unfortunatly been an instance of something he had warned against in its preface; namely, the errors that are bound to result when we misunderstand the logic of our language. Therefore, confused, he began to rethink his ideas.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, therefore, Wittgenstein began making systematic investigations of the ways language misleads us. He thus created a new and different philosophy; it was to deeply affect late 20th century thought. This philosophy, Wittgenstein's second, is called linguistic analysis, ordinary language philosophy, or -- occasionally -- philosophic analysis. It concerns itself with the philosophical analysis of ordinary language, which Wittgenstein believed ordinarily misleads both speakers and listeners. To solve philosophic problems by clarifying at least some of ordinary language was Wittgenstein's goal.

Wittgenstein wrote a great deal after his return to Cambridge, but, though extremely influential on others (for example, John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) at Oxford), he never published again in his lifetime. By his retirement in 1948 Wittgenstein had essentially finished a book; two-thirds of it was finished. But he went on revising and picking at it until his death from cancer in 1951. After his death, his students arranged and published his notes, most powerfully in Philosophical Investigations (1953), but also in the Brown and Blue Notebooks and in On Certainty.The resulting philosophy became a dominant influence in English-speaking philosophy departments in the 1960s and 1970s and -- I suspect -- remains (for lack of much else) vestigially strong.

However, Wittgenstein's philosophical activity after his return to philosophy in 1929 was not universally accepted. Russell, for instance, rejected it as unimportant linguistic games. Continental philosophers were long immune, being much more interested in Existentialism and Marxism.

Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis is the (philosophic) study of how people actually use words; and, by this, the study of how language -- especially philosophic language -- really works. Wittgenstein believed that there is no other way to do philosophy properly. For Wittgenstein philosophy was an activity. That activity consisted of trying to study and understand ordinary language so as to outwit its constant tendency to mislead and deceive us in the study of philosophic problems.

To me, language -- like other phenomena of life -- is a worthy subject for philosophy.

But I believe we should see linguistic analysis as a 20th century phase of developments which can certainly be traced far back to the beginning of the 19th century. One of these developments was, for example, the gradual development through the 19th century of the study of language from classical philology to modern linguistics.

In the early 19th century scholars studied the classical languages of Greek and Latin. The study of modern languages, necessary for trade and scholarship, led perhaps inevitably to the development of linguistics. One of the philosophers who emerged from this environment was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). He had begun as a philologist; his philosophy gradually emerged from the study of the genealogy of moral words.

Another vital development in this growth of linguistics was the book A Course in General Linguistics (1916), constructed posthumously from his notebooks by students of Swiss professor Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1916). Over his life as a Geneva professor, Saussure investigated the nature of language; in the influential book put together by his pupils he laid the foundations of modern linguistics.

Saussure's work led, among other things, to the influential school of structuralism, including the structuralist studies of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908), the sociological-historical analysis of power of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the psychological structuralism of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), post-structuralism, and the "deconstruction" of Jacques Derrida (b. 1930).

Another development which preceded and led to Wittgenstein's philosophy was the 19th century development in mathematical foundational thought. Clashes between such mathematical luminaries as Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897) and Georg Cantor (1845-1918) led to the attempts of mathematicians like Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and Russell to work out the absolute foundations of mathematics.

Developments in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy cross-fertilized each other and influenced philosophy's mindset in the last half of the 20th century.

[To Be Continued and Expanded]

Notes

¹

² Modern British Philosophy, p. .

Sources and Further Reading

Ayer, A. J. Russell. London: Wm. Collins Sons & Co., 1972.

Barrett, William. The Illusion of Technique. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.

Cranston, Maurice. Philosophy and Language. Toronto: CBC Publications, 1969.

This book gathers six talks Cranston made for CBC Radio. The first contains one of the best very short lives of Wittgenstein, and a remarkably clear view of his most important ideas.

Grayling, A. C. Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Heaton, John and Groves, Judy. Wittgenstein for Beginners. Barton, Cambridge, U. K.: Icon Books, 1994.

Klagge, James C., ed. Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: 1690.

Magee, Bryan. Modern British Philosophy. London: Secker & Warburg, 1971. Corrected edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.

Wittgenstein was a very difficult, irascible, puritanical homosexual. Malcolm was one of the few people who remained his friend. This is the basic book about Wittgenstein's life and personal character. Short and entertaining.

Mehta, Ved. Fly and the Fly-Bottle. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963.

Very entertaining interviews with the chief modern British philosophers (including Russell) alive at the time.

Rhees, Rush, ed. Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

van Peursen, C.A. Ludwig Wittgenstein. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1969.

White, Morton, ed. The Age of Analysis. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955.

A standard little gathering of influential excerpts from 20th-century philosophers preceding or associated with linguistic analysis.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.

This is the first English translation of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein was dissatisfied both with Russell's introduction and with the translation. It has since been re-translated.

-------. Philosophical Investigations. 1953.

-------. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the 'Philosophical Investigations'. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

-------. Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics.

According to Maurice Cranston, in this posthumous book Wittgenstein disagreed with Russell on the foundation of mathematics. "Wittgenstein attacks Russell's theory that mathematics can be derived from logic. Wittgenstein claims that 'mathematics is a motley of techniques of proof'. And this, he argues, is the basis of its 'manifold applicability and its importance'. In this book, he also suggests that the mathematician is an inventor, not a discoverer." (Philosophy and Language, 1969)

-------. On Certainty.

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