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Review of Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language. Alan Schwerin. Westport: Praeger 2002. Pp. xxv, 144 This book is a compilation of papers from two Bertrand Russell Society annual meetings, and a Russell/Wittgenstein conference.[1] The book’s editor, Alan Schwerin, harbors no illusions about the general quality of such work: “Papers presented at academic conferences are notoriously dull, tedious and sordid affairs.” It is Schwerin’s express hope, however, that “the reader will not say the same about the contributions to this volume.” And as its title implies, the range of topics addressed is indeed diverse and the papers engaging. Ray Perkins’ piece discusses ‘Bertrand Russell and Preventive War’. Perkins concedes that Russell publicly advocated preventive war in early post-World War II years, but hastens to attribute to him a more benign policy than that conventionally ascribed, by emphasizing the conditional nature of Russell’s preventive war policy. Perkins argues that Russell, unlike other advocates of preventive war, believed the Soviets would probably accede to international controls of weaponry, thereby rendering preventive war unnecessary to actually conduct (a point overlooked by Alan Ryan, Perkins claims, in Ryan's book Bertrand Russell: A Political Life). However, a private 1954 letter is mentioned by Perkins in which Russell certainly sounds as though he was advocating a more extremist policy, and there is the acknowledgement that “Russell’s embarrassment concerning his … letter and its harsh recommendation may have caused him to obscure the record regarding its content in his later years.” After the Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan in 1946 (the American proposal at the UN for international control of atomic energy), the fate of world peace was anyone’s guess, especially as long as more effort was being channeled into propaganda than good-natured resolution of the problems. Andrew Bone, in ‘Russell and the Communist-aligned Peace Movement in the Mid-1950s’, explains how the organizers of the 1957 Pugwash conference (founded to support the 1955 Russell-Einstein manifesto to promote nuclear disarmament as a first step towards ending war) knew that, in order to have credibility, they would have to preserve an appearance of being impartial and above the fray. As the author of the 1920 anti-communist work, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Russell was better situated than many and had “no embarrassing record of fellow traveling to disavow.” For example, Russell was careful to rebuff certain overtures of the communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s World Peace Council. Still, this did not prevent the likes of Sidney Hook, one of America’s more aggressive intellectual cold warriors, from thinking that the communists manipulated Russell. Russell’s political acumen is apparent from his sensitivity to the need for ensuring that no peace pact be perceived as being in the pocket of predominantly Western or Soviet interests. In ‘Russell on Happiness’, José Idler-Acosta notes some parallels between Russell and John Stuart Mill, such as their commitment to individuality and their common conviction that unhappiness is located in “selfishness and the lack of a cultivated mind.” This contribution is basically an overview of the relevant portions of Russell’s Conquest of Happiness and Authority and the Individual. Idler-Acosta also appropriately draws attention to the latter work’s prescience in appreciating the merits of environmentalism. The latter half of the book is concerned with the subject of language. In Antony Flew’s essay, ‘Russell, Wittgenstein, and Cogito ergo sum’, Russell is said to have exaggerated the influence of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on Oxford linguistic philosophy. What is more, he claims that Russell’s criticisms of that movement are partially due to Russell having taken Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (a famous diatribe against linguistic philosophy to which Russell contributed a foreword) “as if that polemic actually provides both a faithful representation and a devastating critique of what it purported to represent and to criticize.” (p.60) Far from dealing with trivial matters, Flew argues that the Oxford linguistic philosophy school made relevant contributions to the handling of Kant’s “three great questions of philosophy,” namely, God, Freedom, and Immortality. The Socratic Club at Oxford, originally founded and chaired by C.S. Lewis, is cited as the catalyst for many pieces in the New Essays in Philosophical Theology collection that Flew published in 1955 with Alasdair Macintyre. The basic thesis of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is hailed as “crucially relevant to the question of a future life.” Then an apparently ill-tempered quip from Wittgenstein about the peculiarity of the sentence “Cogito ergo sum” is proposed by Flew for analysis as a possibly “radical and totally devastating objection to the position that Descartes had reached in the second paragraph of Part IV of his Discourse on the Method.” Rom Harré’s ‘Reference Revisited’ is more technical. Ostension had a crucial role in Russell’s philosophy of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. While Harré agrees about ostension’s importance, his concern here is to stress the vital function demonstratives (pronouns like ‘this’ or ‘that’ which point to an intended referent) serve as “indexicals” (words whose meaning is determined by the context of their utterance, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘that’, etc.) in existence demonstrations. As Harré will have it, Russell not only failed to grasp the importance of the statement/sentence distinction, but the very type of issue that was an impetus for Russell’s attempt to “outflank Alexius Meinong’s ontologizing” arises in the realm of statements only. And yet “[i]f…we were to follow Russell in restricting genuine pure acts of reference to those that can be performed by the use of ‘this’, noting the shift in article as we moved from ‘This is…’ to ‘There are…’, we would land ourselves in a positivism of the most extreme sort.” For guidance here, Harré cites the work of Czeslaw Lejewski based on the insights of Stanislaw Lesniewski according to which an overhauling of scientific realism is recommended in which genuine instances of certain types of entities are initially ascertained and then symbols, or variables, to stand for them are concocted. In such a scheme, “the question of the truth-values of any given sentence arises only when a sentence is used to make a statement about the world. And this is how it should be.” In ‘Our Statements Are Likely to Be Wrong: On Russell’s Big Thesis’, Alan Schwerin takes Russell to task for his statement toward the very beginning of his 1912 Problems of Philosophy that “In our search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.” Schwerin argues that the discussion following Russell’s mention of this view makes it “abundantly clear” that Russell is committed to what Schwerin calls (with “deliberate irreverence”) “Russell’s Big Thesis,” namely, that “Any ordinary language statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.” Schwerin thinks that this introductory statement is either unimportant as “mere complaints, not to be taken too seriously,” or misguided as too dismissive of the possibility that at least some of our ordinary assertions can be correct. Schwerin not only thinks it significant that the “Big Thesis” is neither repeated nor referred to in the rest of the book but notes how “Russell is clearly impressed by the prospect that multiple observation reports are possible in any observation instance.” But “[h]is argument does not preclude the possibility that at least one ordinary language observation report can be true. Ironically, the stress in his argument on the multiplicity of the possibilities ought to have alerted him to this distinct possibility.” Schwerin also cites Ken Blackwell’s research on the “intimacy” between the ideas expounded in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, and how the dismissive treatment of skepticism in paragraph 6.51 of the Tractatus quite likely has Russell as its target.[2] The final paper featured is Nicholas Griffin’s ‘Russell, Logicism, and “If-thenism”.’ “If-thenism” is the doctrine that “all mathematical statements are conditional in form”, a view asserted by Russell in the very first sentence of his 1903 Principles of Mathematics, when he says: “Pure mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form ‘p implies q’.” (Russell 1903, p.3) While a step in the direction of logicism, “if-thenism” is to be understood as quite distinct from it. Griffin acknowledges that there are indeed elements of “if-thenism” in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. He contends, however, that such elements are (i) narrower in scope than supposed by the “if-thenist” interpretation proponents, (ii) remain present in Principia Mathematica, and (iii) are evidence of Russell’s failed hopes for the logicist project. Griffin argues that, while Russell’s Principles of Mathematics views all mathematical statements as taking conditional form, this was not derived from “if-thenism.” Griffin criticizes Hilary Putnam’s interpretations of Russell in this matter as being wholly destitute of a textual basis and utterly alien to anything Russell ever intended. Griffin also criticizes Alberto Coffa’s attribution to Russell of “if-thenism,” saying that there are no logistically significant differences in doctrine between The Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica as Coffa supposes. In any case, “It defies belief that his (Russell’s) thinking about the nature of mathematics should have undergone so striking a change without his having commented upon it.”
The contributions to this volume vary in readability, which is to be expected in any
attempt at surveying the thought of an author like Russell who involved himself in
subjects of such vastly varying levels of accessibility. Overall, the diversity of topics
addressed in this book is one of its assets, and it better reflects the range of Russell’s
interests than something more specialized in scope.
[2]Ken Blackwell, 'The Early Wittgenstein and the Middle Russell',
in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, pp. 1-30, Irving Block (ed.). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1981.
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