The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly

Two essays by Russell collected in his 1910 Philosophical Essays, ‘Pragmatism’ (1909) and ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ (1906-07), are remarkably united in a way that seems to ask for commentary.^[1] While ‘Pragmatism’ has received extensive comment from an enormous range of sources, the relatively encapsulated views of ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ have not been given the same amount of attention. Since each piece is brief, light shone on the two of them simultaneously may help to elucidate some of the main points of both.

In ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’, Russell continues his lengthy project of turning the tables on neo-Hegelianism by making it clear that simply setting out what it is that H.H. Joachim and other neo-Hegelians actually hold will destroy their argument. This is so, Russell claims, because some sort of correspondence theory of truth – even if unacknowledged – is required in order to make even minimal sense of the “coherentist” or “monistic” position that the neo-Hegelians espouse. For example, in Part I of ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’, Russell sums up his larger argument against the cohering side with four brief points, the last of which is as follows:

In order to prove that there can be only one coherent whole, the theory is compelled to appeal to “experience”, which must consist in knowing particular truths, and thus requires a notion of truth that the monistic theory cannot admit. (p. 139)

As Russell has argued at an earlier point in the text, the proposition “Bishop Stubbs was hanged for murder” cannot be meaningfully experienced unless we can assign a truth-value to it, but the monistic theory, an earlier sort of super-holism, asks us not to assign a truth value to isolated propositions because such an assignment is “no help towards constructing the whole of truth”. (p. 138) Because, as Russell claims, this position ultimately undermines itself, it cannot be maintained.

This same line of argument is used in ‘Pragmatism’. The crux of both essays, though this is perhaps more obvious in ‘Pragmatism’, revolves around the notions of truth and correspondence – Russell believes in correspondence and pragmatists don’t, or in Rortian terminology, Russell believes in mirrors, and the pragmatists do not. Russell’s argument here is similar to that used in ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ – the pragmatists’ conception of truth not only abuses natural language, but must somehow be less than straightforward. It would appear to rest on a correspondence notion of what would count as true. On Russell’s view, any anti-foundational theory of truth – such as those espoused by both the pragmatists and the neo-Hegelians – fails to capture what modern logic has shown, e.g., about the nature of truth and of assertions of truth.

II.

Part of what Russell aims to do in ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ is to show – by establishing the incoherence of what the monists are calling the “axiom of internal relations” – that no sense whatsoever can be made of the doctrine. This is comparatively easy to do; Bradley, Joachim and the others assume that since all is ultimately one, no meaningful predication can be made of the parts of the totality. Russell is able to show convincingly that without meaningful predication at some lower level (such as that needed to state the axiom), no predication can be made of the whole, so that the doctrine of internal relations is incoherent.

In typical close analysis, he exposes the inconsistencies of the doctrine while allowing the reader to wonder how it is that grown adults ever came to formulate such a theory in the first place. For example, he writes with respect to the “axiom”:

A more searching argument against the axiom of internal relations is derived from a consideration of what is meant by the ‘nature’ of a term. Is this the same as the term itself, or is it different? If it is different, it must be related to the term, and the relation of a term to its nature cannot without an endless regress be reduced to something other than a relation. Thus if the axiom is to be adhered to, we must suppose that a term is not other than its nature. In that case, every true proposition attributing a predicate to a subject is purely analytic, since the subject is its own whole nature, and the predicate is part of that nature. (pp.144-145)

Thus, contra the idealists and their axiom of internal relations, there is predication between a term and its “nature” (or really, between expressions of them). As Russell goes on to explain, this analysis also destroys the notion that coherence can meaningfully be predicated of the collection of propositions as a whole, since the very notion of predication is under attack.

Again, the point of Russell’s analysis is to establish that which is now taken for granted philosophically, and that is that predication and propositional content are relations, and that we can characterize those relations. Because this notion is so familiar to us, we find it difficult to distance ourselves from it sufficiently to come to grips with the novelty of what Russell is saying. Both ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ are attacks on doctrines that imply that there is some meaning to ‘truth’ other than a correspondence relationship. But if truth is not understood as correspondence with things, no proposition can be examined with respect to experience and assigned a truth-value, and all doctrines become unintelligible. The Bradleyan system under examination in ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ is incoherent and nonsensical; the pragmatist tradition, as presented in Russell’s examination of it, is probably slightly less nonsensical but cannot survive much scrutiny.

Russell himself sometimes draws the two doctrines of idealism and pragmatism together, as when he says,

I do not observe that idealists distinguish these two meanings [of the notion of ‘relation’]; indeed, speaking generally, they tend to identify a proposition with its consequences, thus embodying one of the distinctive tenets of pragmatism. (pp. 141)

If there is no correspondence notion of truth – no conception that propositions can be examined with respect to experience and then assigned a truth value – there can be no intelligible doctrine of either consequences or of the nature of things. But in order to come to this conclusion, Russell must engage in a close analysis that has devastating ends for his opponents.

III.

In addition to difficulties with theories of truth that do not live up to their billing, Russell has an understandable difficulty with what might charitably be termed philosophical vagueness, and both ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’ and ‘Pragmatism’ attack their opponents on these grounds.

The charge of vagueness is related to the lack of development of any kind of view of truth, but it is possible to at least minimally make some distinctions between the two. One of the areas that Russell finds the least praiseworthy in the work of Joachim is the appeal to “organicity”; it is this very organicity, as Russell repeatedly maintains, that prevents the doctrine from being comprehensible in such a way that it can be clearly articulated, let alone maintained. (p. 132) As Russell himself says, his opponents frequently characterize his own philosophical work as “crude”; what they must really dislike is that it is so clear that it can actually be understood. (p. 132) On his view, a philosophical doctrine ought to be able to be clearly grasped and articulated. Russell abhors any sort of philosophical view that proceeds as if it is so intellectually sophisticated that it cannot be understood. As he says of the neo-Hegelian stance, “The position which I have been trying to represent is always considered, by those who hold it, a very difficult one to apprehend….” (p. 132)

Although Russell does not find the pragmatists guilty of the same degree of imprecision, he does find it difficult, in many cases, to delineate the precise claim being made. With the Jamesian version of pragmatism, it is not clear, Russell contends, whether it is the actual will to believe, the pragmatist temper, that is constitutive of the doctrine, or whether the doctrine stands independently. As he notes,

[The] essay on the will to believe is important, because it has been widely read and much criticized, both adversely and favorably, and because it affords a good introduction to the pragmatist temper of mind. Some practice in the will to believe is an almost indispensable preliminary to the acceptance of pragmatism; and conversely pragmatism, when once accepted, is found to give the full justification of the will to believe. (p. 83)

In each case, then, part of what causes, for Russell, the lack of appeal of the doctrine in question is that it is very hard, ultimately, to come clear as to just what that doctrine is. For the “monistic theory”, there is apparently no such thing as an individual truth, even though, as Russell notes, the full-scale “organic” doctrine would require such a notion were it able to make any predication of any kind, including of its organic whole. In what the “organicity” consists is left more or less to the reader’s imagination, in the same way that the conclusion of a novel or literary work might not be fully set out. Although the pragmatists in general have been somewhat more specific, it is not clear whether some emotional dynamic drives the establishment of the epistemological portion of the doctrine, or whether it can be maintained independently of the emotional dynamic.

Russell quite rightly excoriates this lack of clarity, and the more scathing parts of his rebuttal, particularly in ‘The Monistic Theory’, are actually quite humorous and fully up to his usual standard. A good deal of levity informs the following part of ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’, even though it is employed to make a philosophical point:

As for the deus ex machina, the ideal experience in which the whole of truth is actualized, I will merely observe that he is in general somewhat discredited, and that idealists themselves are rather ashamed of him, as appears by the fact that they never mention him when they can help it, and that when they do, they introduce him with apologetic words, such as ‘what is true in the end', – as though what is true 'in the end' were anything different from what is true. (p. 138)

Although we may be laughing so hard that we lose track of Russell’s greater point here, the crux of the matter is, of course, that there is no way to unpack the “monistic theory” that leaves it with any credibility.

IV.

In both essays, then, Russell makes use of the modern predicate calculus, ignored, as he sees it, by both sets of philosophers, to make the point that the doctrines in question do not make sense. Part of the pretentiousness of the belief systems, as I have indicated here, resides in their vagueness, and Russell is easily able to criticize the vagueness since it appears early on given close examination. The monistic view has a certain Leibnizian appeal, for example, but unlike some parts of Leibniz’ views which can be at least set out explicitly, the monistic view cannot be adequately stated, since any attempt to state it clearly undermines it. The variety of views subsumed under pragmatism are not quite as easily undermined, but as Russell is at pains to make clear, it is not at all obvious what motivates them, or at what philosophical goal they aim.

Russell is also clear on how it is that a philosophy should hang together, if in fact it does hang together. As he says at the very outset of ‘The Monistic Theory of Truth’, logical monism is related to ontological monism. (p. 131)

If it is indeed the case that it is the metaphysical monism that is the driving force here – and this, apparently, is what the thinkers in question would like us to believe – then that part of the view should be patently clear and susceptible of ready articulation. But it should also be related to logical monism, and it is the attempt to set out the logical monism that undoes the view. Russell is not only on sure ground here; the clarity and brilliance of the essay derive from the fact that logical monism is used to destroy the notion of the metaphysical monism that is, allegedly, the heart of the doctrine.

Insofar as pragmatism is concerned, Russell remarks that

[The pragmatists] point triumphantly to the influence of desire upon belief, and boast that their theory alone is based upon a true psychological account of how belief arises. With this account we have no quarrel; what we deny is its relevance to the question: What is meant by ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’? (pp. 96-97)

In other words, it might well be thought that the one set of questions precedes the other, but as Russell makes clear, the pragmatists do not seem to show that they have understood this.

I have argued here that there is a close tie between the comparatively brief essays in question. But that argument has not been difficult to make. The clarity of Russell’s work, the time period, the development of logic, and a number of other features all bring the writings of this period together. Of greater interest, perhaps, is a feature that might initially be thought to be non-philosophical. There is a great humanism behind these essays, a humanism which informed Russell’s life. It is a humanism that refuses to swallow the murky and superficially palatable for the sake of some purported wondrous goal. Insofar as that clarity and concern for the general intellectual welfare dominated most of Russell’s life, thought, and work, the two essays in question are – and one hesitates to use the word – merely “parts” of the great driving work that consumed Russell throughout his life and motivates our admiration to this day.

Department of Philosophy
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
jduran@education.ucsb.edu

^[1] References throughout this paper are to the 1996 Simon & Schuster edition of Philosophical Essays.