Abstract
The theme of this paper was inspired by studies related to the subject of my doctoral dissertation,1 and, more specifically, by the work of A. Richardson and M. Friedman on the same subject presented in their two recently published books.2 The material in these books which addresses the connection between Russell and Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt reveals the same basic perspective in both authors and, in fact, represents the first in depth enquiry of this connection, despite certain fairly essential limitations which I hope to reveal in this paper. The line of investigation I intend to take in the following may therefore be outlined as such; to examine, albeit briefly, the extent to which Richardson’s and Friedman’s perspective can offer us a correct historical and philosophical approach to the influence of Russell’s philosophy on the Aufbau, and, by confirming the existence of the limitations alluded to, to determine whether this perspective may be adequately reformulated independently of their existence, and to determine how, in general terms, it may in fact be reformulated. Thus, although my analyses and commentaries do not fall within a strictly historiographical framework, as is the case in the work developed by Richardson and Friedman, it is nevertheless possible to achieve certain objectives characteristic of this framework which, eventually, may become the subject of a future historiography of the philosophy of Russell and his influence on the Aufbau.3 In order to achieve these objectives my main aim is neither negative nor destructive but essentially philosophical; I see myself (somewhat immodestly perhaps) together with the authors in question as partners in the investigation and resolution of problems arising from the presentation, discussion and testing of competitive theories, an example of what occurs in the scientific enquiry. In these circumstances, and from this point of view, I see myself as a philosopher who points to certain difficulties and problems in the theory put forward by these authors to explain the Aufbau, and, with particular reference to Russell’s philosophy, concludes by suggesting an alternative theory.
Paper presented at the Institut ‘Wiener Kreis’, 15th November 1999, with the support of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Av. de Berna, 45-A Lisboa Portugal).
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Notes
H. Ribeiro, Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy. The Impact of L. Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ upon Russell’s Philosophy. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra 1999.
A. Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World. The ‘Aufbau’ and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998; M. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999.
It is necessary to say, right at the outset of this paper that apparently, Russell didn’t read the Aufbau until very late, probably the forties and the writing of his book Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. In this book he makes for the first time some (important) references to Carnap’s Aufbau,but the problem of the influence of his own philosophy on this book is not discussed. (See B. Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits,London: George Allen and Unwin 1966, p. 90ff.) As a reading of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell could demonstrate, not a single reference to the Aufbau exists in all the books and papers of Russell before 1948. Furthermore, no copy of the Aufbau exists in the Bertrand Russell Archives (McMaster University, Hamilton-Ontario, Canada). Russell may have read the Aufbau when he was in the U.S.A. (1939–1943), but we cannot be sure of that.
See W. V. Quine, “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism: Empiricism without Dogmas”, in: From a Logical Point of View. Logico-Philosophical Essays. Cambridge-Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1994, p. 24ff.; and H. Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984, pp. 441–451. N. Goodman, without mentioning Russell, apparently also subscribed to such an interpretation. See “The Significance of Der logische Aufbau der Welt”, in: P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. La Salle-Illinois: Open Court 1963, pp. 545–558.
M. Friedman sums up in the following words the traditional interpretation: “The epistemological point of the Aufbau is to develop a traditional phenomenalist or reductionist solution to this problem: the external world does not lie behind, or correspond to, the immediate sense data; rather, it is nothing but a complex logical construction out of such immediate data. Our claims about the external world are, in the end, complex claims about the immediate sense data and hence thus justifiable in principle. What then distinguishes the Aufbau within the empiricist tradition is simply the greater detail and rigor with which it attempts to carry out this phenomenalist program” In: Reconsidering Logical Positivism,p. 117.
Ibid.,p.124ff.
A. Richardson says, for example: “No concerns of an epistemological nature about logic are in evidence in his book. Indeed, the role that structure plays in the account of objectivity indicates that logic must be in place before any epistemological question can be raised.” And: “For Carnap, unlike Russell, the rejection of metaphysics is not governed by the acceptance of an ontology of objects of acquaintance and a method that shows how to do without anything else. Carnap seeks to reject all questions of ontology; epistemology has nothing to say about such questions.” In: Carnap’s Construction of the World,pp. 25–26.
M. Friedman says in this regard: “The Aufbau is not best understood as starting from fundamentally empiricist philosophical motivations and then attempting to put these into effect — on the basis of the new mathematical logic of Principia Mathematica — in a more precise and rigorous way than had been previously possible. The epistemological motivations of the Aufbau begin rather with the concerns and problems of the neo-Kantian tradition… In the Aufbau,however, the new mathematical logic of Principia Mathematica provides Carnap with all the philosophical concepts and distinctions he needs. Camap thereby achieves a standpoint that is both non-psychological and truly metaphysically neutral, and, at the same time, he transforms the neo-Kantian tradition into something essentially new: logico-analytic’ philosophy.” In: Reconsidering Logical Positivism,p. 141.
Thus conceived, this is the main project of Russell’s lectures on “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, and, in particular, of his conception of a “logically perfect language”, as I will try briefly to show later (section 4). The onto-epistemological nature of the theory of types is a consequence of Russell’s theory of meaning. As he asserts: “I think that the notion of meaning is always more or less psychological, and that it is not possible to get a pure logical theory of meaning, nor therefore of symbolism… At any rate I am pretty clear that the theory of symbolism and the use of symbolism is not a thing that can be explained in pure logic without taking account of the various cognitive relations that you may have to things.” In: John Slater (Ed.), B. Russell. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914–1919, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8, London: George Allen and Unwin 1986, p. 167.
See A. Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World,specially, chap. V, “The Fundamentals of neo-Kantian Epistemology”, pp. 116–138. Nevertheless, Richardson is forced to admit some essential difficulties in his own interpretation. At a certain moment, he acknowledges “the inchoate account of logic found in the neo-Kantian literature”,and the fact that “Despite calling their project `the logic of objective knowledge’ and investigating `the logical conditions of measurement’, there is very little by way of delimiting the principles of logic.” Further, he acknowledges that the framework of Cassirer’s philosophy ignores “Frege’s conceptual notation” or “Russell’s type theory”, and that, finally, “the neo-Kantian account of the primacy of logic is hollow; ultimately, logic itself requires an ontological foundation”. In: ibid.,pp. 136–137 (all the italics are mine).
See M. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism,p. 124.
See A. Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World,chap. 9, “After Objectivity: Logical Empiricism as Philosophy of Science”, pp. 217–229.
I recall here some relevant passages of Carnap’s Autobiography. Concerning the influence of Russell’s books on the Aufbau,and, in particular, of Our Knowledge of the External Word,he says (without mentioning any distinction whatsoever between a logical and mathematical context, and a philosophical one): “Some passages of the book made an especially vivid impression on me because they formulate clearly and explicitly a view of the aim and method of philosophy which I had implicitly held for some time… I felt as if this appeal [Russell’s appeal to the study of logic as the central study in philosophy presented in the very last past of the book] had been directed to me personally. To work in this spirit would be my task from now on! And indeed henceforth the application of the new logical instrument for the purposes of analyzing scientific concepts and of clarifying philosophical problem has been the essential aim of my philosophical activity. I now began an intensive study of Russell’s books on the theory of knowledge and the methodology of science. I owe very much to his work, not only with respect to philosophical method, but also in the solution of special problems. I also continued to occupy myself with symbolic logic… In 1924 I wrote the first version of the later book, Abriss der Logistik [1929]. It was based on Principia [Russell’s Principia Mathematica 1910–1913]. Its main purpose was to give not only a system of symbolic logic, but also to show its application for the analysis of concepts and the construction of deductive systems.” In: The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap,p. 13f.
Ignoring, for the moment, Russell’s theory of types, some of these affirmations concern, for example, Russell’s “structuralism” in logic and mathematics. Nevertheless, in Richardson’s and Friedman’s works the relevance of the concept of “structure” in the Aufbau,which is connected with the problem of the objectivity of the empirical sciences, is only explained by the influence of neo-Kantianism. In this regard, the fact is that in the Aufbau Russell’s influence is always quoted in the first place several times: “From the relations, we must go on to the structure of relations if we want to reach totally formalized entities. Relations themselves, in their qualitative peculiarity, are not intersubjectively communicable. It was not until Russell… that the importance of structure for the achievement of objectivity was pointed out.” (In: R. Camap, The Logical Structure of the World. Pseudo problems in Philosophy,London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1967, p. 29, italics mine.) On the other hand, conceming the importance of the concept of objectivity, which, in contrast, has been stressed especially by neo-Kantianism, Carnap explicitly saw his philosophy in the Aufbau as a development or enlargement of Russell’s philosophy of mathematics (not as a rupture with it, as these authors held): “Whitehead and Russell, by deriving the mathematical disciplines from logistics, have given a strict demonstration that mathematics (viz., not only arithmetic and analysis, but also geometry) is concerned with nothing but structure statements. However, the empirical sciences seem to be of an entirely different sort… ” (ibid.,p. 23) Again, as I anticipated previously, this relationship between the concepts of structure and objectivity points out to the existence of an essential complementarity between the influences of Russell’s and neo-Kantian’s philosophies on the Aufbau.
I use here the concept in the sense used by R. Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres”, in: R. Rorty/J. B. Schnewind/Q. Skinner (Eds.), Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984, pp. 49–75.
M. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism,p. 5.
See M. Friedman, “Philosophy and the Exact Sciences. Logical Positivism as a Case Study”, in: J. Earman (Ed.), Inference, Explanation and Other Frustrations. Essays in the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press 1992, pp. 84–98. Unfortunately, this very important paper was not published in Friedman’s book. When compared with his other papers, it seems to develop a different line of thought, because logical positivism is accused of being at the origins of contemporary philosophical relativism. On the other hand, also in contrast with his later book, Friedman clearly insists in that paper on the failure of logical positivism, and, in general, on its negative aspects.
This is not, however, A. Richardson’s view: he thinks that he can hold precisely the same theory even if Russell was not an empiricist, as I claim. In some public discussion on this subject, he wrote to me: “I.) I am interested in Camap’s project in the Aufbau and in avoiding an easy assimilation of it to Russell’s project in OKEW [Our Knowledge of the External World]. 2.) The connection to OKEW (and not all the other writings you mention) [see the points I-IV listed below in my text] is made both by Camap in his autobiography and by Quine in his many writings. 3.) Thus, for the purposes of the book, I am interested only in Russell’s OKEW project and that only as a source of influence on Carnap or as a way to understand what Camap’s is doing. 4.) A careful reading of my book would see that I acknowledge that Russell’s work is more complicated than Quine’s reading of it allows and that, thus, Quine’s account of Carnap’s motivations may be doubly wrong — i.e. wrong about Carnap in part of being wrong about Russell [the italics are mine]. See the footnotes on p. 21, for example [where Richardson, having as a base N. Griffin’s and P. Hylton’s books on Russell, mentions Russell’s idealistic perspectives]. In short: It is wonderful that you care so deeply about Russell’s project and want to get it right. I, on the other hand, care deeply about rejecting a certain story about Carnap’s project. This story starts from a certain understanding of Russell’s project. In order to be clear in my exposition, I wanted to motivate that reading of Russell and then explain why that project is not what Carnap is up to. Whatever more complete version of Russell you eventually come up with, I feel quite confident that is not Carnap’s project either [the last italics are mine].” Quotation of A. Richardson’s message to “Russell-I” (received 7 March, 1999), the electronic list of the Bertrand Russell Society.
Each of these points (the multiple relation theory of judgment, the theory of types, and the theory of logical atomism) is completely ignored. Perhaps the excuse (unacceptable, as we shall see) would be to say that such theories are not explicitly presented in Our Knowledge of the External Word. But what about the Principia Mathematica? And what about the explicit connection, acknowledged by Carnap in his Autobiography,between the Principia and Our Knowledge?
I will develop this point in the section 4 of this paper: “The onto-epistemological interpretation of Russell’s theory of types and Camap’s Aufbau: the key of Russell’s influence”. Note that, as I have already said, neither Richardson nor Friedman study anywhere that kind of connection in their respective works on the Aufbau; in particular, the theory of types is clearly ignored, be it in its logico-mathematical aspects or in its philosophical ones.
Apparently, Carnap did not study the Tractatus until the completion of the manuscript of the Aufbau. But, of course, insofar as Wittgenstein’s contribute for Russell’s logical atomism was important, and in so far as his criticism of Russell in the Tractatus were also essential, he cannot be ignored by any serious investigation. Note that A. Richardson, for example, explicitly ignores the study of the relationship between Camap’s Aufbau and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
Russell’s neutral monism, as Mach’s, is completely ignored by Richardson and Friedman. This concept seems to anticipate, in its own way, Camap’s idea of logic as the neutral framework of different (metaphysical) languages on the problem of the existence of the external world (such as realism and idealism). When applied to just the very same problem throughout the theory of logical constructions, neutral monism, too, arrives at the idea that logic (that is, the theory in question) is a neutral framework within which the traditional metaphysical conflicts can be solved. We must emphasize that neutral monism, in Russell’s philosophy, is not simply a philosophical theory amongst others, but is, in fact, the final step of his external world program. After an initial rejection of neutral monism in Theory of Knowledge (1913), Russell adheres to it in “On Propositions” (1919), and specially in An Analysis of Mind (1921).
Concerning English analytical philosophy in the 1950s, see J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis. Its Development Between the Two World Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1956; and J. O. Urmson, “Histoire the L’Analyse”, in La Philosophie Analytique. Paris: Minuit 1962, pp. 1122. Concerning analytical philosophy afterwards, M. Dummett’s views are surely an essential reference. See M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. Worcester-London: Duckworth 1981, pp. 664–684. This conception is clearly suggested by some references of A. Richardson. At a certain point, he says about Camap’s project: “The new logic is, thus, not a toll to use in pursuit of a reductive epistemological-cum-ontological project bequeathed to us by the British empiricists, but rather a way of reformulating the whole question of what is at stake in philosophy. Carnap’s antimetaphysics is surely the consequence of a much more fundamental understanding of `logic as the essence of philosophy’ than is Russell’s empiricism of 1914.” In: Carnap’s Construction of the World,pp. 26–27.
The theory was first presented by Ayer in the paper “The Analytic Movement in Contemporary British Philosophy”, in Actes du Congrès International the Philosophie Scientifque (Paris, 1935). It was developed in several works after that, as, for instance, in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936. Recall Ayer’s first words in this book, where we can find too a surprising identification between Wittgenstein and empiricism: “The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and D. Hume.” Ibid.,p. 11.
As I showed in my dissertation, neither Quine and Putnam, nor Goodman, in spite of the originality of their respective philosophies, have a reading of the history of analytical philosophy autonomous and independent of the English analytical philosophy of the fifties. This explain why they have accepted, in general, the views of the English philosophers on the subject, without even trying to discuss them.
See J. O. Urmson, “Histoire de l’analyse”, p. 17ff.
See, for example, B. Russell’s words in the paper “A Microcosm of British Philosophy” (1919): “Traditional British Philosophy, as represented by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill and Spencer, never became technical. It could be read by gentleman of leisure, and was read by artisans. It started from common sense, criticizing its inconsistencies with more or less severity in ordinary language and usually in a excellent literary style. It arrived in the end at scepticism — at least that was its logical outcome, explicit in Hume, but concealed from the others in proportion to their muddle-headness. Dr. Moore is an admirable representative of this method, by no means sceptical in temperament, but often driven into sceptical conclusions by his perfect intellectual integrity.” In: B. Russell. Essays on Language, Mind and Matter: 1919–1926, p. 385.
See P. Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990; and N. Griffin, Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991.
See P. Hylton, “Logic in Russell’s Logicism”, in D. Bell and N. Cooper (Eds.), The Analytic Tradition: Meaning, Thought and Knowledge. Cambridge-Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 137–172.
See B. Russell, “The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics” (1907), read before the Cambridge Mathematical Club, 9 March 1907. In B. Russell, Essays in Analysis. London: George Allen Unwin 1973. And A. D. Irvine, “Epistemic Logicism and Russell’s Regressive Method”, in A. D. Irvine (Ed.), Bertrand Russell. Critical Assessments. London and New York: Routledge 1999, pp. 172–195.
It is in this sense that the concept of “acquaintance” is introduced in the manuscript Theory of Knowledge. See Part I, chap. II, “Neutral Monism”, in particular, p. 22fí In the Part I, “Preliminary Description of Experience”, Russell presents even, at a certain moment, a refutation of empiricism, or as he calls it, “the older empiricism philosophy”: “it is certain that the world contains some things not in my experience, and highly probable that it contains a vast number of such things.” In: E. R. Eames (Ed.), B. Russell. Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript. (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 7), London and N. York: Routledge 1993, p. 11.
See B. Russell, “The Philosophical Analysis of Matter” (1925), in Bertrand Russell. Essays on Language, Mind and Matter: 1919–1926, pp. 275–284. Russell says, for example: “There is a philosophy called `phenomenalism’ which is attractive, but to my mind not practically feasible. This would base physics upon phenomena alone. I think those who advocate this philosophy have hardly realized its implications.” Ibid., p. 281.
In my dissertation I studied the emergence and development of the concept of “vagueness” in Russell’s philosophy, and its historical and philosophical implications, from the manuscript Theory of Knowledge to his later works. My point is that, contrary to a well-known interpretation (according to which such concept must be opposed to the “exactness” and “precision” of an ideal language to be constructed), the vagueness of ordinary language, as the vagueness of our “systems of representation” in general, for Russell, is essentially the result of an inevitable mediation of the data by language (regardless of what the data and the language may in fact be, for example, in the context of the hypothetico-deductive systems of the empirical sciences). By “vagueness”, what Russell intended to say (mainly after 1918) was really what Quine much more later will define as the “indetermination of translation”. Russell’s partial semantic holism led him in “On Propositions” (1919) to neutral monism and to the theory that meaning, in general, has its basis in usage.
In the “Preface” of this book Russell explicitly acknowledges the importance of Wittgenstein’s influence when, after a reference to Whitehead, he says: “In pure logic, which, however, will be very briefly discussed in these lectures, I have had the benefit of vitally important discoveries, not yet published, by my friend, Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein.” In: B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World. London: George Allen Unwin 1949, p. 9 (italics mine).
Russell presents his “logically perfect language” in the lectures on “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” from this very wide perspective, that is to say, as something which should embrace all the human experience of each subject of knowledge. It should embrace because we must understand it, theoretically, as constructed by each subject from the acquaintance basis, using, in some way not explained by Russell, logical constructions and descriptions. The enormous complexity of such language means, for him, that it is impossible for philosophy to construct (or re-construct) it. We could perhaps construct a logically perfect language if this language were constituted only by syntax (but this is not the case): “In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied. The language which is set forth in Principia Mathematica is intended to be a language of that sort. It is a language which has only syntax and no vocabulary whatsoever.… It aims at being that sort of language that, ifyou add vocabulary,would be a logically perfect language. Actual languages are not logically perfect in this sense, and they cannot possibly be, if they are to serve the purposes of daily life. A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would not only be intolerably prolix, but, as regards its vocabulary, would be very large private to one speaker. That is to say, all the names that it would use would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker…. Altogether, you would find that it would be a very inconvenient language indeed. That is one reason why logic is so very backward as a science, because the needs of logic are so extraordinarily different from the needs of daily life.… I shall, however, assume that we have constructed a logically perfect language, and we are going on State occasions to use it.” In: B. Russell. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914–1919,p. 176.
See B. Russell, Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1910, p. 45ff.
Russell’s theory of types can be extended to what Carnap in the Aufbau calls the “heteropsychological levels”, and can include, therefore, social and cultural objects. Russell himself, sometimes, was tempted to interpret his theory in this sense, but, in fact, he never did that. This development of Russell’s theory of types, by Carnap, can be compared to the development of that theory, by Tarski, in terms of a “hierarchy of languages”. In both cases, Russell had the intuition of these possible interpretations of his theory.
In this regard, significantly, part of the texts of Our Knowledge of the External World to be quoted here have already been quoted by Carnap himself in his Autobiography. I would only add, briefly, a passage (partly omitted by him) of Russell’s last remarks in that book: “… It is in this way that the study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy: it gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics provides the method in physics. And as physics, which, from Plato to the Renaissance, was unprogressive, dim, and superstitious as philosophy, became a science through Galileo’s fresh observation of facts and subsequent mathematical manipulation, so philosophy, in our days, is becoming scientific through the simultaneous acquisition of new facts and logical methods.” In: B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World,pp. 243–244.
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Ribeiro, H.J. (2001). From Russell’s Logical Atomism to Carnap’s Aufbau: Reinterpreting the Classic and Modern Theories on the Subject. In: Rédei, M., Stöltzner, M. (eds) John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [2000], vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2012-0_21
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