WELBY’S INFLUENCE ON RUSSELL’S TURN TO USE?

SCOTT METZGER, MCMASTER UNIVERSITY [email protected] “Two really important works on logic are these [Welby’s What is Meaning? and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics]… Yet it is almost grotesque to name them together, so utterly disparate are their characters.”

–Charles Sanders Peirce, Review in The Nation, CP 8.171 A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE CORE PROBLEM: MY MOTIVATION

• Welby and Russell correspond about meaning and denotation in 1905.

• Russell dismisses Welby, claiming that she misunderstands the scope of his project. The early Russell was not interested in meaning.

• Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen: “In 1908 Russell confessed privately to Jourdain how he had “in the past been very rude to Welby, in refusing to go there” because he found it “quite impossible to be sincere” if he saw her. He no longer wanted “to be a party to” those philosophers encouraging Welby’s work, which in his opinion was “very wrong.”” (157) AND YET…

• In his later review of Ogden & Richard’s The Meaning of Meaning, Russell writes that: “When in youth, I learned what was called “philosophy”…no one ever mentioned to me the question of “Meaning.” Later, I became acquainted with Lady Welby’s work on the subject, but failed to take it seriously. […] I have now come to believe that the order of words in time or space is an ineradicable part of much of their significance—in fact, that the reason they can express space time occurrences is that they are space-time occurrences, so that a logic independent of the accidental nature of space- time becomes an idle dream.” (Russell 109)

• Also, Misak writes that, in My Philosophical Development, Russell “cites Welby and Schiller as those who sparked his interest in the topic [of meaning], although at the time they had pressed him on the point, he resisted” (Misak 143). SO…

• It is clear that Russell initially dismissed Welby.

• It is also clear that eventually he comes around to some of Welby’s concerns, especially in his later The Analysis of Mind (1921), where scholars like Misak and Levine have noted Russell’s turn to a use-based account of meaning.

• Interestingly, Welby was already grappling with meaning some 15 years before Russell finally comes around to the point. Her direct influence on Russell’s turn to use needs to be further excavated. THE AIM

• To come to grips with a narrow segment of Bertrand Russell and Victoria Welby’s Correspondence between November 14, 1905 and December 15, 1905.

• I argue that, while a shallow reading of their correspondence yields the interpretation that Welby has misunderstood Russell, a deeper reading reveals the ways in which Welby brings a pragmatic attitude to bear on Russell’s theory of descriptions in order to try to get Russell to extend the scope of his project into the domain of meaning. THE WAY FORWARD

• I outline 2 suggestions that Welby offers to Russell’s “On Denoting” and Russell’s dismissal of them.

• I then consider why Welby’s suggestions are important by building on some relevant aspects of her work.

• Finally, I conclude by showing how Russell begins to come around to Welby’s suggestions in his later The Analysis of Mind. WHO IS LADY VICTORIA WELBY?

• April 27, 1837–March 29, 1912, London England.

• Education: Travelled the globe with her Mother, the poet, Emmeline Stuart-Wortley

• Her mother died by her side during their travels in Syria and upon returning to England she became a Maid of Honour to her Godmother, Queen Victoria.

• Philosophical Work: Founder of Significs. Wrote on rhetoric, meaning, semiotics, and religion

• Corresponded with leading intellectuals of her time: Peirce, James, Russell, Schiller, Bergson and others.

• A mentor of the young Charles Ogden THE RUSSELL-WELBY CORRESPONDENCE

• Unpublished until recently by Susan Petrilli in her 2009 Magnum Opus Signifying and Understanding.

• Welby and Russell were in correspondence from 1904 through to 1910.

• They discuss many topics including, but not limited to, the philosophy of mathematics, logic, meaning, politics, and Women’s rights.

• I limit my scope to their correspondence between November 14, 1905 and December 15, 1905.

• Here they concern themselves with Russell’s famous (then, just published) essay “On Denoting.” WELBY’S FIRST SUGGESTION

• Targets the distinction Russell makes between “Acquaintance” and “Knowledge about”.

• Russell: “the distinction between acquaintance and knowledge about is the distinction between the things we have presentations of, and the things we can only reach by means of denoting phrases” (Russell “On Denoting” 41).

• Example: The centre mass of the Solar System, and Mind. WELBY’S FIRST SUGGESTION

• Russell: “all thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance” (Russell “On Denoting” 42).

• Welby targets this final point and wants to make the distinction threefold. WELBY’S FIRST SUGGESTION

• Welby’s Threefold Distinction: “Then we should have A. awareness which belongs to sensation and is shared by the simplest forms of life, B. acquaintance as direct experience of, and C. knowledge as you define it. We might be aware of other minds without being acquainted with them and without knowing them ‘through denoting.’ I venture to suggest this because the idea of awareness (earlier or lower than consciousness?) is associated in my mind with ‘Mother-Sense’—as it were the starting- sense” (Welby to Russell, 14 November 1905, qtd in Petrilli 321). MOTHER SENSE

• For Welby, thinking begins with Mother Sense, not acquaintance.

• Susan Petrilli: Mother-Sense (or Primal Sense) is the “necessary condition for the human signifying capacity” (Petrilli 142).

• We are first and foremost signifying animals and we must understand ourselves as such.

• That first which makes meaning possible.

• Mother-Sense as a “primordial method of mind, one which is necessarily the precursor and condition of all forms mental activity, including even that of logic itself.” RUSSELL’S DISMISSAL

• Russell is after neither the conditions that make meaning possible nor the psychological makeup of the signifying animal.

• Russell: Welby’s Mother Sense “is not relevant to my problem.”—a narrow focus in logic.

• Russell’s objective in 1905 is not to “give a complete account of (more or less) cognitive states of mind” (Russell to Welby 25 November 1905, qtd in Petrilli 322).

• In an earlier letter to Welby (Feb 3, 1904) he writes: “The concept which denotes is not mental: it is the object of an idea, not the idea itself. Thus denoting in this sense has nothing psychological about it.” WELBY’S SECOND SUGGESTION

• Targets the central principle of Russell’s “On Denoting”: “denoting phrases never have any meaning in themselves, but… every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning” (Russell “On Denoting” 43).

• Denoting phrases like “everything,” “nothing,” “something” and “a man” have no meaning in isolation, but only when put into a proposition.

• Example: “a man” vs. “I met a man” WELBY’S SECOND SUGGESTION

• Welby: denoting phrases can express meaning by themselves.

• Welby: “‘What did you give to Smith?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘And what to Jones?’ ‘Everything.’ The answerer hear emphatically intends (means) to convey a fact“ (Welby to Russell, 14 November 1905, qtd in Petrilli 321). RUSSELL’S DISMISSAL

• Russell: In the case Welby describes the use of those words (“Everything” and “Nothing”) no longer function as denoting phrases but as “mere abbreviations for propositions” (Russell to Welby 25 November 1905, qtd in Petrilli 322).

• Distinction: “logical isolation” VS “uttered by itself”.

• ‘Everything’ only gains meaning when uttered as a response to the question ‘what did you give Smith?’

• In this context, ‘Everything’ is no longer a denoting phrase, but itself, a proposition. WELBY’S REPLY TO RUSSELL’S DISMISSAL

• Welby: “…while words like ‘nothing’ are now as you say abbreviations from propositions, the case was originally and now is still in some minds, reversed. Once a word was the only sentence (as before that a sound the only word!) now the sentence—or proposition—is virtually the word. That is why the context becomes, in judging the value of a word, so important” (Welby to Russell 29 November 1905, qtd in Petrilli 323; my emphasis). THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

• The value of a word changes depending on the context that it is put to use in—context disambiguates.

• Welby: “We must postulate an analogy between Context and Environment: the adaptation of the word, as of the organism, to its surroundings and conversely, its effect upon these.” (Petrilli 361).

• Example: “Jack is a dog” vs. “Jack is a dog”

• 1) Qua denoting phrase: picks out the properties ‘Fury’ and ‘quadruped.’

• 2) Qua connoting phrase: picks out the property ‘adventurous in the bedroom’.

• In 2), the phrase extends its denoting capacity to suggest a metaphorical significance. MEANING QUA INTENTION

• In addition, there is a difference in intention that alters the meaning of my proposition depending on whether I mean my dog or my friend Jack.

• Some Psychology seeps into the logic here as to account for the meaning qua intention requires, by extension, an explanation of the speaking subject.

• For Welby (and contra early-Russell) we must account for the interplay between pyschology and logic, and logic and rhetoric when determining the value of a word or proposition in a given context. RUSSELL’S FINAL DISMISSAL

• Russell: “I am less concerned with what people do mean than with what things there are that might be meant… Thus when a single word was the only sentence, I should doubt whether, so far as anything definite was meant, what was meant differed from what we should express by some sentence of many words…” (Russell to Welby 15 December 1905, qtd in Petrilli 323)

• A difference in aim: Welby is interested in what people do mean when they use language, but Russell only in what things there are that might be meant. IDEAL LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY VS. NATURAL LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY

• Russell’s final dismissal seems to divide what we now call an “Ideal Language Philosophy” from a “Natural Language Philosophy”

• Graham Stevens: Russell’s “theory takes the surface grammar of English to conceal the true structure of the propositions these sentences express” (Stevens 184).

• Example: “The current president of the united states is a dipshit” vs. “There is one and only one x such that x is currently the president of the United States and x is a dipshit.”

• Stevens: “a logically perfect language will remove the disguise and unveil the true structure and semantic function of natural language expressions” (Stevens 189). SEMANTICS VS PRAGMATICS

• On Stevens’ account, Russell is interested in a natural language semantics.

• Welby’s significs, however, seems to take language pragmatics as the point of departure because a strictly semantic approach fails to recognize the plasticity of language. WELBY AS EARLIER LATER- WITTGENSTEIN

• Welby: “there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used—the circumstances, state of mind, reference, ‘universe of discourse’ belonging to it” (What is Meaning? 5; my emphasis).

• Welby: Meaning is always “changing on our very tongues” (“Meaning and Metaphor” 424).

• Meaning is never static, but plastic. Language is always on the move.

• We cannot limit ourselves to a semantic analysis of language nor seek logical foundations in an ideal language. We must begin with natural language expressions and the way that they are used, pragmatically, in particular instances. We must track how the uses of language determine meaning rather than suppose that meaning determines how we use language. A MORE FRUITFUL READING OF WELBY’S SUGGESTIONS

• The objective is not uncover an ideal language chalked out in advance, underpinning our use of signs, but to work from within particular universes of discourse where meaning is made, understand how signs function in those contexts, and build up our account of meaning out of the use of signs in those contexts.

• Use comes first, and (what could be called) the ideal language is built up out of the various uses that function to create it—the ideal language is contingent on use and generated out of it. RUSSELL’S TURN TO USE?

• While Russell initially dismisses Welby’s suggestions for a more logical project, he eventually becomes interested in language and meaning in The Analysis of Mind. LATER-RUSSELL AS EARLIER LATER-WITTGENSTEIN

• The Analysis of Mind: “Understanding words does not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or in being able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate… Understanding language is more like understanding Cricket: it is a matter of habits, acquired in one’s self and rightly presumed in others. To say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled out of it by observation and analysis.” (197; my emphasis)

• Here Russell echoes the aformentioned passage from Welby’s What is Meaning? CONCLUSIONS AND UPSHOTS

• I have tried to show that, while an initial reading of the 1905 correspondence may yield the interpretation that Welby has misunderstood Russell, a more fruitful interpretation would be to think of Welby as bringing a pragmatic attitude to bear on Russell’s theory of descriptions.

• I don’t claim to have exhausted the inquiry, only to have tried to paint a clearer picture of how Welby may have influenced Russell’s turn to use.

• Reinforcing Misak’s and Levine’s recent narratives about the blur between Russell and the Pragmatists.

• Welby, like James and Peirce, plays a role in Russell’s turn to use.

• Welby should not be understood as misunderstanding Russell, but rather, as attempting to re-orient his focus toward a use-based account of meaning as early as 1905.