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

One characteristic reaction to this application of the Davidson argument–here cavalierly seeming to keep the 'Ptolemaic counter-revolution' going–is to say that no contradiction infects the idea of something which is recognisably an untranslatable language. The usual example offered is the Minoan linear script. A response to this example is to point out that the inaccessibility here at issue is not to a language but to a script embodying a fragment of what we suppose to be a language, and moreover one not in use, which places a contingent barrier to translation which by itself is not relevant to the question of its languagehood. But another, more general, response is to contrast the notion of an untranslatABLE language with that of an untranslatED language. Contingent barriers to translation of one established language into another (such as the current but, I surmise, reducible inability of most of us here to translate Magyar into English) do not, obviously, put them beyond the pale of languagehood; which tells us much, on reflection, about what would. Rather, the accessibility point rests on these general thoughts: that the concept of differences between languages, or schemes, or ways of having experience, essentially trades upon there being enough access between supposed alternatives for the differences to be apparent. There has to be a background of shared assumptions and beliefs giving rise to the degree of mutual comprehensibility which alone makes differences recognisable. And this is not a point about mere cultural relativities–about what might be called anthropological divergences, differences of opinion and high-level social practices–but about the most basic levels of cognitive activity turning on individuation, reference, property-attribution and assent. In the fuller treatment of these points referred to above, I argue that this shared basis has to be rather rich and fine-grained, to the extent that it rules out indeterminacy of reference . As applied to the question of language, one can connect points about shared background beliefs and holdings-true as a condition of getting translation started, with points about the recognisability of devices in the language for reference, predication and assent and dissent: so a much more articulated grasp of an alien tongue is required even by Quine's philosophical anthropologist before he can fairly get going. Alternatively put, the requirement for starting a translation manual is that there should already be one available.

Another response to these claims is that there are certain identifiable possessors of conceptual schemes which are not possessors of language, for example cats and cows, so the identification of schemes and languages fails, and with it the putative access required and therefore afforded by translation. One can leave aside the short answer from the inescapability of 'reading-in' in such cases–which might be (so say those who do not belong to a cat) what our attribution of concept-possession to languageless creatures consists in. We can leave this aside because it is obvious that one can give a strongly motivated and cogent argument for attributing concept-possession and attitudes, at least to a certain level of complexity (remembering the strictures of Frege and Wittgenstein on this subject), to at least the higher mammals, among other things on the grounds of the successful pragmatics attached to doing so: as witness Fodor's cat. The point might be put by saying that much of what can be attributed concerning the beliefs and intentions of such mammals is representable in one's own language in statements having as good a chance of being true on the evidence as those about creatures capable of making their own avowals. On this head, there is nothing second-class about third-party attribution.

These points are made, remember, in response to questions about the intrinsic merits of Moore's attack on EFG, and whether Russell was without recourse in defending the philosophical strategy there adopted. These points at least show that both Moore and Russell were too swift here. And this can be substantiated by noting that there is of course a similar but much weaker response, or set of responses, that can be made to this aspect of Moore's criticism. As Strawson has argued (in Scepticism and Naturalism and elsewhere) there is much to be gained from an investigation of what our kind of experience requires, even if it is not the only kind there can be. This either allows philosophical interest to what Moore dismisses as merely parochial, or it refuses to interpose so impermeable a membrane between psychological and philosophical considerations as was all the rage at the turn of the century. But in the presence of a stronger argument for the cogency of the general enterprise–I do not say, Kant's or Russell's in particular–it is worth contesting Moore's rejection of their style of argument more vigorously.

It might be asked what difference would have been made, outside his philosophy of mathematics, if Russell had retained some part of his early convictions about a priori knowledge. With the exception granted, one answer is: less than one might suppose, since it would not have interfered with his pluralism, his atomism or with his adoption of certain sustainable versions of non-Platonic realism; and another answer is that it might have offered resources to his epistemology from the lack of which they badly suffer. This is well illustrated by one salient consequence of dispensing with a priori constituents in knowledge, namely, Russell's reliance on the notion of acquaintance. His response to Moore's Platonism about concepts and judgments–which remained when the objects of acquaintance had become simultaneously far more various and refined–was to treat our relation to them as direct, theory-free, unmediated and conditionless. The relation is curiously thin and undefined; it comes without constraints, as if it were primitive; and in so far as it admits of being described as a mental operation, it is distinctively passive, the very opposite, one might say, of a relation in thought or experience in which some act–of perceiving or judging–plays a constitutive or partly constitutive role with respect to its objects. Now one need not be interested in specifically Kantian strategies for understanding how this works to feel the deficiency in the theory of acquaintance. One thing one can safely say is that if he had not abandoned the approach in EFG so entirely, Russell would have written differently later about knowledge and perception.

One of the really interesting features of EFG is that in it Russell is not an idealist; he as an anti-realist. (So is Kant in fact, on a certain best reading). The differences are considerable. Idealism is a metaphysical thesis which asserts that reality is fundamentally mental; it is a Mind (e.g. Bradley) or it consists of minds and their ideas (e.g. Berkeley). Anti-realism is an epistemological thesis, which asserts that the relations between thought and its objects, perception and its accusatives, experience and its targets, language and the world, or whichever of these (different) pairings one takes as the focus, is not external, as realists claim. To say that the relations in question are internal is far from saying that thought or experience creates the world or is in some other way ontologically responsible for them: that is metaphysics, and specifically idealist metaphysics. talk of the nature of the relations between mind and world is purely epistemological; it is not of course independent of considerations about what there is, but it does not by itself involve constitutive ontological claims. Now, Russell did not see the difference, so his unpreparedness to defend against Moore's attacks on idealism led him to abandon his anti-realism, a much more moderate position which he replaced, at first, with a very immoderate realism. It is the anti-realist features of Russell's thought in EFG which would have served his later epistemology well.

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