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Russell's Transcendental Argument in: An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry

I take the second point first, concerning the relation of a priori judgments to the branches of experience which presuppose them. Moore seems to be confused about what Russell is claiming here. He seems to take Russell's claim to be that unless such judgments are true, judgements about the subject-matter in question must be false (taking the modalities seriously). Moore thus reads 'inaccessible to cognition' as implying that there is something about which we are not in a position to make judgments. His realist commitment to the independence of judgments from knowledge of their truth or falsity accordingly portrays this as a straightforward mistake. But Russell is not saying this; his claim is the familiar Kantian one that there could be no such branch of experience as the one in question unless we know a priori the judgments that make it possible. He put the point by saying that the only thing that could make such a priori judgments false is if the branch of experience in question were impossible; again taking the incorporated modalities seriously, his talk of the 'inaccessibility to cognition' of a branch of experience is not to be read as implying or (as Moore sees it) conceding that there is something to be known if only we could get at it; this is Moorešs mistake; rather it says that if nothing constitutes the a priori condition of possibility for there being such cognition, there could be no such subject-matter.

Russell's point here in fact concerns the very nature of transcendental arguments. He offers a novel and interesting way of capturing what is essential about such arguments, which, contrary to what is often thought, are not in the least logically peculiar or special, but are distinguished from other argumentative strategies by a certain distinctive aim, which is to establish conceptual title to a principle or claim which, accepted as true, licenses our activity in some region of judgment (and I intend that to be a terminological variant for 'makes a certain kind of experience possible'.) Kant is somewhat to blame for leading some commentators–in this connection I have Griffin in mind, who in his discussion of Moore on Russell's EFG expects more from transcendental arguments without quite saying what–to think that transcendental arguments have to take us beyond their premisses, which concern the nature of a certain kind of experience (or thought), and establish something not already implicit in its character and conditions. But the attempt to show that we have a title to some principle or claim proceeds exactly by showing that we could not do something we in fact do–enjoy spatial sense-perception for example–unless a condition for doing so were satisfied; from which it follows that the principle is satisfied. For Kant as for Russell in EFG the spotlight of attention is on the conditions, because once the deduction of title (the legal metaphor was consciously intended by Kant) has been achieved, the next step is to note that, since the judgment–whose acceptance as true is a condition for the experience in question–could not itself have been derived from that experience but is logically anterior to it, it is a priori: and part of their transcendental task was to identify what has to be known a priori as a ground for that experience.

Put in the most schematic way, transcendental arguments state that there would not be A unless there were B, and that since there is A, there is B. Familiarly and prosaically, the underlying move is a statement of necessary conditionality: B is a necessary condition for A, and since A is the case, so therefore is B. (If one said: therefore B has to be the case too, the 'has to' has to be understood purely conditionally.) Arguments of this form are very common; they only cause a stir when applied in what might be called Kantian contexts. Russell in EFG succeeded in capturing their character by casting them as portrayals of presuppositionality in terms of truth-value, partially (but only partially: see below) anticipating later variants of the move. We see this by noting Moore's mistake in taking Russell to have asserted that there is a presuppositional relation between A and B such that if judgments as to B are false, those as to A must be necessarily false. This makes the relation very peculiar, for it issues in the necessary falsehood of A-judgments when B-judgments are false–which it is not clear how one might motivate. But the mistake takes us close to what Russell intended. In later debate, presupposition is more familiarly (if no less problematically) taken as a relation obtaining between judgments such that a given presupposing judgment has a truth-value only if a given presupposed judgment is true (I am adhering here to the Russell-Moore terminology of the day: mutatis mutandis, the same points can be made in more careful ways, thus bringing out the fact that it is as a semantic relation that the notion is now standardly understood–rather than an epistemic one between, on the one hand, an asserter or judger seeking to assert or judge a content p and, on the other, another content q required for p's being assertable or judgeable as true or false). This is only part of what Russell intends, for the good reason that it is only part of what is implied in a transcendental argument, in which a stronger claim is at stake, namely, that the falsity of a given judgment–a B-judgment, say–renders impossible even the circumstances for making or entertaining a would-be A-judgment, a matter far antecedent to the would-be A-judgment's having a truth-value. So on the Kantian view B's being true makes A either true or false; but B's being false makes it impossible to make or even entertain A-type judgements. Moore took it that Russell meant that B's being false makes A-judgements necessarily false. But the two claims are of course very different, and it is unclear whether what Moore imputes to Russell is even coherent. Russell, however, gives us an insight into the style of argument at stake.

In the foregoing there is no suggestion that either Moore or Russell had anticipated exactly what has come to be meant by talk of 'presupposition' since Pears and Strawson; rather, their debate illustrates the sense in which that later debate itself captures something close to but weaker than the relation which a transcendental argument asserts to hold between a given kind of experience (or conceptual practice) and what makes it possible. But in the uncertain oscillation between talk of experience and talk of judgments as we find it in Russell and Moore, it is easy to see that in one mode the appropriate locution is 'ground of possibility' and in the other, talk about the condition for possession by a judgment of truth-value as lying in the truth-value of another judgment. The two jargons are not the same in meaning, but once that is recognised there are no irreducible difficultes in straying between them as our protagonists do.

It is worth remarking at this juncture that this account of Moore's attack does not agree with the accounts given by Hylton and Griffin. On the reading we each give of Moore there might be a little latitude for interpretation because of the unclarities in Moore's presentation, but not that much: and Griffin, as noted, misidentifies the character of the transcendental strategy in general and Russell's in particular, chiefly by asking too much of it. I defer an itemised comparison here. But the crucial respect in which I hope that this supplements their discussions is in recognising that the more significant argument of Moore's is the one directed not against the style of argument Russell uses, but against the argument itself: this occurs as the first point criticised by Moore above, together with its all-important ancillary requirement.

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