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An angry young man

A close reading of Arthur Prior’s contribution to social ontology

  • S.I. : The Logic and Philosophy of A.N. Prior
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Abstract

This paper is about one of Arthur Prior’s earliest publications in philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual” (Austral J Psychol Philos 15:394–398, 1937). Its aims are (1) to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s which should be read with some attention to its historical background, which closely follows John Wisdom as to its theoretical elements, in particular the notion of a “logical construction”, but which is more clearly eliminativist with regard to nations and which is original in terms of rather bold ethical consequences; (2) to interpret Prior’s/Wisdom’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation and to connect Prior’s/Wisdom’s ideas with John Searle’s recent work on social ontology.

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Notes

  1. Prior (1933a, b, 1935) may be said to be philosophical in nature, even though they concern theological questions. Prior (1935) might even be regarded as a paper on the philosophy of religion.

  2. For Prior’s position as a (reformed, Barthian, socialist) Christian at the time cf. the article by David Jakobsen in the present volume.

  3. Cf. [New Zealand] Ministry for Culture and Heritage (2012a): “Just over 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas in the First World War [...]. More than 18,000 died [...] and over 40,000 more were wounded. [...] The total population of New Zealand in 1914 was just over one million.”

  4. Cf. ibid., /conscientious-objection: “People could gain exemption from conscription on very limited grounds. By the end of the war only 73 objectors had been offered exemption, and 273 were in prison in New Zealand for refusing to serve. As a consequence of their actions, 2600 conscientious objectors lost their civil rights, including [...] being barred from working for government or local bodies.”

  5. Cf. [New Zealand] Ministry for Culture and Heritage (2012b): “Over 800 conscientious objectors were sent to detention camps.” In the long interview Mary Prior gave to Per Hasle, she says about the period between 1946 and 1949 (Prior 2003a, p. 294): “Returned servicemen and former conscientious objectors filled the classrooms along with people straight from school.”

  6. Cf. the website of the Imperial War Museum, London, http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/28305.

  7. For details cf. the editors’ introductions to volumes 13 and 14 of Russell’s Collected Papers (=Russell 1988a, 1995).

  8. Cf. the excellent survey in Linsky (2012), cf. also Linsky (2007). I am grateful to Martin Pleitz for drawing my attention to it and, in general, to the importance of Russell in connection with the topic of this paper. Stebbing (1930), p. 157, and Wisdom (1931a), p. 188, are right to criticize Russell for identifying logical constructions/fictions and “incomplete symbols”. Russell’s examples (numbers, classes, desks, persons) are clearly not examples of symbols. So Linsky (2012), too, is right in not taking them to be examples of symbols, at least in general.

  9. “Nationalism, in theory, is the doctrine that men, by their sympathies and traditions, form natural groups, called ‘nations,’ each of which ought to be united under one central Government. In the main this doctrine may be conceded. [...] When an Englishman returns to Dover [...] after being on the Continent, he feels something friendly in the familiar ways: the casual porters, the shouting paper boys, the women serving bad tea, all warm his heart, and seem more ‘natural,’ more what human beings ought to be, than the foreigners with their strange habits of behaviour.” (Russell 1916, p. 30, 37). “Switzerland is a nation [...] Great Britain was one state before it was one nation; [...] Germany was one nation before it was one state. What constitutes a nation is a [...] sentiment of similarity and an instinct of belonging to the same group or herd. [...] like a milder and more extended form of family feeling. [...] There is an instinctive and usually unconscious sense of a common purpose animating the members of a nation.” (Russell 1917, Chap. 5).

  10. Coombe-Tennant’s paraphrase of these aspects of Wisdom’s papers (Coombe-Tennant 1936) is not only valuable, because it is more readable than Wisdom’s texts, but also because it makes clear that the papers are concerned in an interesting way with what today’s ontologists call granularity.

  11. I am grateful to Jørgen Albretsen for kindly providing me access to digital photographs of the context of box 11 which were taken by David Jakobsen. Numbers refer to the jpg files I used.

  12. For instance, Prior included articles on Rosa Luxemburg (467), Lenin (445) and Trotzki (437), but also on show trials in Moscow (436), as well an article by Prior’s friend Alex Miller on “Pacifism as a civic duty” which is dated on September 20, 1940 (554).

  13. Wisdom’s influence is globally acknowledged (Prior 1937, p. 294). A proper footnote would not have been out of place, but the text is easy enough to trace. For a synopsis cf. the appendix to the present paper.

  14. Systematically, the position that Prior is paraphrasing here is position (a) in Wisdom (1933b, p. 197), which, without any mention of Fascism or organicism, is characterized by the claims “England is something over and above Englishmen” and “When we say England is a monarchy we are not just speaking about Englishmen.”

  15. Note, however, that even Prior’s example is war against France, which was not on the agenda in 1937, but had been a commonplace for half a millennium and is used as such in Wisdom (1931a), 191 f., p. 215; (1933a), pp. 46–55, 65, and in Coombe-Tennant (1936), pp. 437–441.

  16. Wisdom is aware of such predicates and calls them “grammatically polygamous” (Wisdom 1931a, p. 190). Coombe-Tennant (1936, 438 f.) provides the following example: “to say that a man loved England and his friend would be like saying that he took his hat and his leave.”

  17. for an impression, cf. the appendix.

  18. One translation project that worked out remarkably well is Prior’s translation of B-series talk to talk about tensed facts in A-series idiom in Prior (2003b).

  19. Both Margaret Gilbert’s and Russell’s views (cf. Gilbert 1989 and the quote from Russell 1917, Chap. 5, in footnote 9) are, in my opinion, open to the charge of what Popper criticizes as “tribalism” (Popper 1945).

  20. From “the formation” to “his needs”.

  21. The slogan is from Marx’ Critique of the Gotha programme of the German social democratic party, written in 1875. The German original, derived from a French socialist slogan of the 1840s, reads: “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, Jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!” (Marx 1985, p. 15). Prior accurately quotes a widespread English translation whose author I have been unable to identify. The recent translation by Carver retains the punctuation (Marx 1996, p. 215). The context of the slogan is a vision of classless society. The German original is paratactic. Here, “Jedem” (“to each”, dative case) is not the indirect object of any sentence of which “Jeder” (nominative case) is the grammatical subject. Both the comma and the capital “J” of “Jedem” exclude this. Nothing corresponds to “from” in the English translation.

  22. Cf. footnote 12 on the date of the clipping visible in jpg file 554.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Domplatz 6, 48143, Münster, Germany

    Niko Strobach

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  1. Niko Strobach
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Correspondence to Niko Strobach.

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This text is dedicated to my uncle Herbert Strobach, who, aged 17 in 1945, saw no point in defending a country road in northern Germany against British tanks and was lucky to escape execution.

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Strobach, N. An angry young man. Synthese 193, 3417–3427 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0901-3

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