page 2 of Russell, Experience, and the Roots of Science

A corollary of the consistency thesis which I here argue on Russell's behalf is that the celebrated derailment of Russell's project in TK, ascribed to Wittgenstein as a result of some (characteristically hyperbolic) remarks by Russell in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, might not be quite what it seems; for in a footnote added to the text of 'On Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description' when this 1911 essay was reprinted in ML in 1917, Russell remarks of his multiple relation theory of judgment, 'I have been persuaded by Mr Wittgenstein that this theory is somewhat unduly simple, but the modification which I believe it to require does not affect [its fundamentals].' The same point occurs more fully in LLA where Russell discusses the difficulties faced by the theory, involving subordinate 'verbs'. He subsequently, somewhat without fanfare, abandoned the theory; but it is clear from the fact that he continued to the end with the larger project of clarifying the experience-science connection that he found his multiple relation theory of judgment to be inessential to it; and therefore the fact that Russell dismembered TK and left some parts of it unused is not the same as his abandoning the project in whose working out TK was a chapter.

II

A good way to begin is to observe the images Russell employs early and late in preparing readers for the epistemological task as he conceived it. In the Preface to HK he observes that the terms 'belief', 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'perception' all have imprecise common uses which will require progressive clarification as the enquiry proceeds. 'Our increase of knowledge, assuming that we are successful, is like that of a traveller approaching a mountain through a haze: at first only certain large features are discernible, and even they have indistinct boundaries, but gradually more detail becomes visible and edges become sharper.' Compare this to what Russell says in TK of the ambiguities of the words 'experience', 'mind', 'knowledge' and 'perception': 'The meanings of common words are vague, fluctuating and ambiguous, like the shadow thrown by a flickering street-lamp on a windy night; yet in the nucleus of this uncertain patch of meaning, we may find some precise concept for which philosophy requires a name' ‹ which, Russell concludes, should best be the common expressions themselves, made suitably definite. Imagery aside, part of the method of both early and late epistemology is thus characterised as the same: clarification of concepts, on one familiar view the central task of analysis characteristic of 'analytic philosophy'. But Russell also took the view that analysis is only the propaedeutical part of the story; more important (so he early believed and hoped) was the constructive task of showing how complexes of various kinds – and not least, knowledge of complexes – can be constructed out of simples – early on, the simples with which we are acquainted. The constructive task is the one which ended in failure, and the changes in Russell's epistemology are a direct function of the difficulties met with in the course of the project, which he increasingly saw as insurmountable. The hope had been to couple analysis and synthesis, the first activity preparing the way for the second, reflecting Russell's early ambition, formed on a walk one day in Berlin in the 1890s, to link abstract and scientific knowledge into a grand synthesis.

The synthetic task failed, but one thing which did not change was the aim subserved by the method developed to carry it out. In TK Russell plunges straight into the task of analysing acquaintance, which he calls 'the simplest and most pervading aspect of experience', a dyadic relation (an important point, for cognate polyadic relations of higher order constitute something significantly different, namely, judgments) between a 'mental subject' and what turn out to be the catholically-conceived objects of its attitudes. This was to fulfil a promise implicit in the outline of a programme given in March 1911 in three lectures: the Aristotelian Society address 'Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description', and two lectures delivered in Paris, 'Le Realisme Analytique' and 'L'importance philosophique de la logistique'. In the first of these latter he reasserts his commitment to realism both in epistemology and as regards universals, and outlines the technique of analysis of complex into simples to which he there first applies the name 'logical atomism'. In that and the companion lecture he launches the work characteristic of the 1911-14 period, worked out in most detail in a series of papers ‹ 'On Matter' (1912), 'The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics' and 'On Scientific Method in Philosophy' (1914), and 'The Ultimate Constituents of Matter' (1915; the three latter are reprinted in ML) ‹ whose chief precipitate constitutes OKEW (1914). Notoriously, the project was first planned to result in TK; but the difficulties over the theory of judgment obliged Russell to dismantle the task into what he doubtless hoped would be more manageable components.

The project is sketched in a letter from Russell to Ottoline Morrell in October 1912. 'The sort of thing that interests me now is this: some of our knowledge comes from sense, some comes otherwise; what comes otherwise is called "a priori". Most actual knowledge is a mixture of both. The analysis of a piece of actual knowledge into pure sense and pure a priori is often very difficult, but almost always very important.' Russell had chosen both parts of the task: to trace the transition from sense to science, and to isolate the a priori elements of the latter and to axiomatise them, as a preparation for defining the central concepts (space, time, causality and matter itself). Arguably, the epistemological task came to seem pressing to Russell for the two reasons that whereas, at the outset, the business of defining the fundamental concepts of physics appeared to be a straightforward parallel to defining the fundamental concepts of arithmetic, it quickly transpired that the relation of sense to science was not easy to carry out, and moreover that it was a necessary preliminary to completing the task of logically constructing the concepts of physics from whatever primitive concepts could be discovered in the then fundamental areas of physics, electrodynamics and classical mechanics, together with the relations between them. The reason for the latter is that the empirical content of the primitives requires that they themselves be constructible from sensory experience, as required by the principle that everything we know must be anchored at last in acquaintance.

Russell accordingly deferred the attempt to construct science's central concepts to deal with the epistemological questions first. It is instructive to see how these, in their own right, came to seem to him problematic, given that his first sketch of them (in PP) was an optimistic one, in that it canvassed the traditional questions about the relation of experience to knowledge with a robust acceptance of the fallibility of such knowledge, and the presence in it of assumptions or principles themselves neither independently testable nor matters of logic alone.

III

In PP Russell introduced the label 'sense-data' to designate what is immediately known in sensation: particular instances in perceptual awareness of colours, sounds, tastes, smells and textures, each class of data corresponding to one of the five sensory modalities. Not only must sense-data be distinguished from acts of sensing them, they must also be distinguished from objects in space outside us with which we suppose them associated. Russell's primary question therefore was: what is the relation of sense-data to these objects?

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