G.F. Stout and the Psychological Origins of Analytic Philosophy

Kenneth A. Loparo, Maria van der Schaar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230249783
• eBook ISBN: 9781137315403
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e filosofia della matematica

An investigatation of the influence of psychology and early phenomenology on the origins of analytic philosophy. This book is also of value for those interested in judgement, proposition, psychologism, logical realism, the problem of error, Gestalt theories, and tropes.

1

Judgement and the Emergence of Logical Realism in Britain

1 Introduction

Why has the theory of judgement and proposition been central for the transition from British idealism to early analytic philosophy? In order to be able to answer this question, one has to know more about the theory of judgement in British idealism and the nineteenth century in general. Early analytic philosophy, that is, before 1905, consists of at least these aspects: logical realism, an atomistic theory of wholes and parts and a new method of analysis. I will focus here on logical realism as it is defended by Moore and Russell. Leaving the theory of wholes and parts and the new method for the next chapter, the central question here is: How did a new, British variant of logical realism, that is, a new theory of judgement and proposition, emerge from British idealism?

Logical realism is the position that propositions and their parts, generally understood as concepts, or, in the case of Gottlob Frege, as senses, have some form of being independently of the mind that thinks them. This form of being is different both from the way that tables and trees are, and from the way that particular acts of thinking are. Propositions and concepts are taken to be outside space and time, and they do not change when someone thinks of them. We may distinguish three important representatives of logical realism in the early nineteenth century: J.F. Herbart (1776–1841), a psychologist and philosopher; Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), who got Herbart’s chair in Göttingen in 1844, and was primarily a philosopher, but one with a keen interest in science, including psychology; and Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), whose aim was to provide an objective foundation for science in general. Herbart and Lotze are of special interest, because their logical realism is motivated by their interest in psychology. The emergence of psychology as a science makes it necessary to distinguish between logical and philosophical questions, on the one hand, and psychological questions, on the other hand.

There are three different ways to categorise philosophers who defend a variant of logical realism.

I. Although all logical realists in the nineteenth century have in common that they aim to guarantee the objectivity of truth by acknowledging an objective bearer of truth, and that they defend some form of anti-psychologism, each variant has different aims besides.¹ Whereas Lotze and the Neo-Kantians introduce a realm of objective value (Geltung), or truth, in order to guarantee the objectivity of science and knowledge, Bolzano and Frege introduce a realm of both true and false propositions. Bolzano and Frege are thus able to account not only for the objectivity of knowledge but also for the objectivity of logic, semantics and thought in general. In Lotze’s variant of logical realism, the notion of value or validity plays a central role. In the first book of his Logic he uses value and truth synonymously, and uses non-validity in the sense of falsity.² In the third book of his Logic, called On Knowledge (Vom Erkennen), Lotze introduces the idea that the logical thought, in contradiction to the act of thinking (Lotze 1874, § 345), has objective validity (Lotze uses here the Kantian term objective Gültigkeit). Besides the value of truth there is the validity of meaning. Although objective validity seems thus to be a broader notion than validity as truth, Lotze’s primary aim is to guarantee the objectivity of the bearers of truth.³ The way the two meanings of validity are related will be explained under II below. A Neo-Kantian like W. Windelband, who adopts Lotze’s notion of validity, acknowledges a realm of validity, by which he means the validity of truth (die Geltung der Wahrheit, Windelband 1914, 212). Just as for Lotze, validity for Windelband has both a broader and a more specific meaning. Their form of logical realism involves the thesis that both concepts and truths are independent of empirical acts of thinking and judging. With respect to the notion of validity, Windelband says that one has to distinguish the psychological from the logical meaning of the word. He has only the validity of truth in mind when he asserts that the sense of truth is in need of a validity as such without relation to an empirical consciousness.⁴ On the Neo-Kantian account, there is apparently no need for objective falsehood. Falsehoods do not have an objective value; they are due to subjective conditions. It is possible to be a logical realist as far as knowledge and truth are concerned, and to give a psychologistic account of error and falsehood at the same time. I come back to this point in Chapter 3. Bolzano and Frege understand that we need both objective truths and objective falsehoods to account for the objectivity of logic and semantics; true and false propositions have the same kind of logical being. Like Bolzano and Frege, and unlike the Neo-Kantians, the early Moore and Russell aim for the objectivity of both truths and falsehoods, as we will see in Sections 4 and 5. What philosophical problem are they trying to solve by introducing both objective truths and objective falsehoods? Is their aim to guarantee the objectivity of truth and knowledge? Is their aim to guarantee the objectivity of logic and semantics? Or is another question leading them to their special variant of logical realism?

II. Some philosophers take concepts to be primitive, and explain propositions as complex concepts. Others take propositions to be prior in the order of explanation to concepts, which means that concepts are to be explained in terms of propositions. Traditionally, the act of judgement is to connect ideas in order to form a proposition that is true or false; truth and falsity thus seem to depend upon the judgemental act. In order to make clear that the bearer of truth and falsity is independent of our judgements, one needs to explain the unity of the proposition in another way. The problem of the unity of the proposition is thus central to logical realism.

It seems that a mere plurality of concepts is not able to explain the uniqueness of the proposition as bearer of truth and falsity. If the unity of the bearer of truth and falsity is not constituted by an act of the mind, how can one explain that the proposition is a unified complex? The problem of the unity of the proposition is thus a driving force for the development of analytic philosophy insofar as Moore and Russell claim that the bearer of truth and falsity is independent of the act of judgement, and of any act of the mind. Lotze and Bolzano were fully aware of this problem, and understood that concepts are to be explained as parts of propositions. For Lotze, the natural laws, which are propositions, have validity, whereas concepts have meaning. And the reason they have meaning is that propositions are valid for them (Lotze 1874, § 321). It is in this derived sense that meanings can be said to have value, too. Propositions are thus prior to concepts in the order of explanation. Lotze is fully aware of the fact that the act of judgement is categorically different from an act of mere thought. This makes it possible for him to understand that a logical realism of concepts alone is not able to account for the validity of truth: the objective content of a judgement ‘cannot be expressed in the form of singular concepts, for none of these contain an assertion’.⁵

Bolzano acknowledges both objective notions in themselves (Vorstellungen an sich) and objective propositions in themselves (Sätze an sich). And he acknowledges that propositions are entities of a different kind than their non-propositional constituents. For Bolzano, Sätze an sich are not a special kind of Vorstellungen an sich. Propositions are not explained in terms of notions; it is rather the other way round, which is that a notion is explained in terms of the proposition. A notion is whatever can be part of a proposition while not being a proposition itself (Bolzano 1837, I, § 48). Frege understood that if one analyses a proposition into its parts, these parts cannot all have an independent meaning; some of its parts are unsaturated (ungesättigt), so that other parts may be fitted in to constitute the unity of the proposition. The unsaturated parts can be obtained by the analysis of a proposition that is prior in the order of explanation to the unsaturated part. For Lotze, Bolzano and Frege, propositions are thus of a different category than their parts, whether these are called concepts, notions in themselves or senses.

In contrast to these philosophers, for Moore there is no categorial distinction between concepts and propositions. Moore understands propositions as complex concepts, and the fact that propositions have the characteristic of being true or false is taken to be primitive, and thus left unexplained. This problem is directly related to Moore’s atomism, which makes it difficult to explain the difference between the sum of the concepts John, love and Mary, and the proposition that John loves Mary. Because Moore combines logical realism with a conceptual atomism, which implies the idea that concepts are logically prior to judgements and propositions, he cannot explain that propositions form a unity that is more than the sum of its parts. Russell was fully aware of the problem of the unity of the proposition. It is especially this problem that made him move from one theory to another between 1900 and 1918, as I hope to show in the section on Russell below.

III. Different variants of logical realism may be distinguished by the different roles the objective proposition is supposed to play. The proposition may be

(a)the bearer of truth and falsity;

(b)the meaning of a declarative sentence;

(c)premise and conclusion in inference;

(d)the content of judgement and thought; or

(e)the object of judgement and thought.

Lotze not only makes a distinction between the subjective act of thinking and the objective content of thought, but he also distinguishes between the objective content of judgement and a state of affairs with which these different contents may be concerned. Different logical thoughts, that is, different objective contents, may concern themselves with the same real content (sachlicher Inhalt, sachlicher Ergebniss, Lotze 1874, § 345). Lotze compares the distinction between the real and the logical content with the distinction between a mountain and the different perspectives one may have on the mountain on one’s way to the top. Just as each person has his own subjective thoughts, each walks his own way to the top of the mountain. What he sees on his way to the top gives a certain perspective on the mountain, and can be taken up by other persons. What is seen has therefore an objective validity like the logical thought. Just as one may distinguish the different perspectives on the mountain from the mountain itself, the objective validity of the logical thought should be distinguished from the state of affairs that the different thoughts may be concerned with (mit dem sie sich alle beschäftigen, idem, p. 570). Instead of speaking about two notions of content, the objective and the real content of judgement, I will speak of the content and the object of judgement.

The term ‘object of judgement’ is ambiguous, for it may either stand for (1) the topic of the judgement, that is, what the judgement (or proposition) is about or (2) that to which the judgement as a whole is directed. I speak here about the object of judgement in this second sense. For Frege and Bolzano, propositions have the role of judgemental content, rather than that of the object of judgement. It is rather truth to which the judgement is directed, on Frege’s account. The point can also be formulated in terms of the parts of a proposition. For Frege, the proposition or thought is the sense of a sentence, and its parts are the senses of the parts of this sentence. A proposition about the Mont Blanc does not contain the mountain with all its snowfields, but the sense of the name ‘Mont Blanc’, that is, what we understand when we understand the words ‘Mont Blanc’.

Moore and Russell consider the content of judgement to be a psychological entity dependent upon the act of judgement. This means that the bearer of truth and falsity, the proposition, is not given the role of content of judgement, but rather that of object of judgement. To formulate it in terms of the parts of the proposition, for Russell, the mountain with all its snowfields is part of the proposition about the Mont Blanc. If propositions are understood as objects of judgement, then judgement is one of the propositional attitudes, that is, judging is a two-term relation between a subject and a proposition. If the proposition functions as object of judgement, and of propositional attitudes in general, it seems that there is no conceptual space for states of affairs, or that states of affairs are identified with propositions. In the latter case, one is in need of an account of the ontological difference between true and false propositions, that is, between actual and non-actual states of affairs.

One of the aims of the book is to explain the above-mentioned differences between logical realism as we may find it in Bolzano, Lotze and Frege, on the one hand, and the British variant of logical realism, on the other hand. The story is primarily historical: What influences on Moore and Russell made it possible that this British variant of logical realism could emerge? The philosophical question ‘Which variant of logical realism has more explanatory power and better suits the demands of logic and the sciences?’ will not be neglected, though. As far as the historical question is concerned, part of the answer must be sought in the reaction to F.H. Bradley’s philosophy. As is now well known, idealism had a considerable impact on the young Moore and Russell. Soon, they would react to this idealism and develop their special variant of logical realism in reaction to Bradley’s philosophy. In order to understand the special way in which Moore and Russell reacted to absolute idealism, one cannot neglect the empiricist tradition with its science of the mind, and the psychological theories that Moore and Russell had become familiar with when studying in Cambridge.

2 The empiricist tradition

There are ten aspects of the empiricist account of judgement that are relevant to Bradley’s account of judgement, and, eventually, to the account of judgement given by Stout, Moore and Russell. First (1), ideas can be understood as mental acts or as objects of mental acts, and this distinction is often neglected in the empiricist tradition, although not, in general, by Locke himself. Locke restricts the term ‘idea’ to the object of the understanding when a man thinks (Locke 1690, i.i.8: 47). Second (2), the idea is understood as being dependent upon the act of thinking; there are no ideas without an empirical mind that has them. And, because ideas are understood to be the meanings of our terms, meanings are dependent upon the mind, too. Third (3), ideas are conceived as prior in the order of explanation to judgement. And, because relations are understood to be of a subjective nature, this means that, fourth (4), propositions, the primary bearers of truth and falsity, and the objects of judgement and knowledge, are thought to be constituted either by the act of judgement, an affirmation or a denial relating two ideas to each other, as in the Port-Royal logic, or by a separate mental act that unifies the ideas into a proposition, to which an act of judgement is added, as in Locke’s Essay (cf. Arnauld & Nicole [1662] part II. ch. III., 113, Locke [1690] iv.v.5: 575). The bearers of truth and falsity are thus dependent upon the mind, in the sense that their constituting parts are, and in the sense that a mental act is needed to unify these parts into a proposition. The thesis that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a mental act is a special case of the empiricist thesis that all unities and relations are constituted by mental acts, and that relations are not given in experience. Because of its atomism, the empiricist tradition is not able to account for relations at the level of (experienced) objects (see point [7]). Fifth (5), because ideas are the objects of our acts, Locke is in need of an account of how judgements and knowledge can be about the objects in the world. The relation between idea and object is given an account of in terms of representation, but not necessarily in the sense that an idea is like a picture of the object. This explanation leaves us in doubt about the relation between ideas and their objects, and it also means that an idea may be radically different from its object, as in the case of our ideas of secondary qualities.

We can see now in what sense the empiricist tradition may be called ‘psychologistic’: the object of our mental acts is dependent upon these acts, and functions as a substitute for the object in the world. Judgement has thus a problematic relation to the thing on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Introduction
• 1 Judgement and the Emergence of Logical Realism in Britain
• 2 From Descriptive Psychology to Analytic Philosophy (18881899)
• 3 Psychologism and the Problem of Error (18991907)
• 4 Judgement, Propositional Attitudes and the Proposition (19081944)
• 5 Tropes and Predication
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index