Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (12 page)

Russell wrote a characteristically generous letter to Newman acknowledging the point: ‘You make it entirely obvious that my statements to the effect that nothing is known about the physical world except its structure are either false or trivial, and I am somewhat ashamed not to have noticed it myself.’

Familiarly by now, the common thread linking Russell’s earlier and later views was his desire to reconcile science and perception, with the particular aim of basing the former on the relative certainty of the latter and thus furnishing it with grounds. He saw the chief problem in any such enterprise as securing the move from perception to the objects of physical theory. On his view, this move must either be inferential, in which it takes us from the incorrigible data of sense to something else, or it is analytic, that is, consists in a process of constructing physical entities out of percepts. On the later view just reported, the inference has a special advantage over more usual inferential theories, in that the inference is not from one kind of thing to another, but from one part of something to its other parts.

In his earlier views Russell had accorded primary reality to sense-data and built everything else out of them. On the later view, reality belongs to events as the ultimate entities, and an important change of emphasis is introduced: percepts remain immediate and as certain as anything can be, but they are not construed as having accurately to represent the physical world, which, in the picture offered by science as the most powerful way to understand it, is anyway very different from how it appears.

Inference and science

Crucially, however, there remains a familiar and major problem about whether inferences from perception to the world are secure. A large part of Russell’s aim in
Human Knowledge
(
HK
) was to state grounds for taking them to be so. Throughout his thinking about the relation of perception and science he was convinced that something has to be known a priori for scientific knowledge to be possible. Earlier, as noted, he thought that purely logical principles provide such knowledge. But he now saw that logic alone is insufficient; we must know something more substantial. His solution was to say that inference from perception to events is justified in the light of certain a priori ‘postulates’ which nevertheless state contingent facts about the world. So stated, Russell’s view immediately reminds one of Kant’s thesis that possession of ‘synthetic a priori knowledge’ is a condition of the possibility of knowledge in general, a view which Russell robustly dismisses in the Preface to
HK
. The difference is explained by the tentative and probabilistic account that Russell, in this last major attempt to state a theory of knowledge, felt was all that could be hoped for.

Two features of Russell’s approach in
HK
explain this result. One is that he now thought that knowledge should be understood in ‘naturalistic’ terms, that is, as a feature of our biological circumstances, taken together with the way the world is constituted. The other is that he had come to make a virtue of the fact that the basic data of knowledge are never certain, but at best merely credible to some degree. This second point enters into the detailed working out of the views in
HK
. The first makes its appearance whenever Russell needs to justify the justifications that
HK
attempts to provide for scientific knowledge.

When data have a certain credibility independently of their relations to other data, Russell describes them as having a degree of ‘intrinsic’ credibility. Propositions having some intrinsic credibility lend support to propositions inferred from them. The chief question then becomes: How do propositions with some measure of intrinsic credibility transfer that credibility to the hypotheses of science? Another way of framing the question is to ask how reports of observation and experiment can function as evidence. This is where Russell’s postulates come in.

There are five postulates. The first, ‘the postulate of quasi-permanence’, is intended to replace the ordinary idea of a persisting thing: ‘given any event A, it happens very frequently that, at any neighbouring time, there is at some neighbouring place an event very similar to A’. Thus the objects of common sense are analysed into sequences of similar events. The ancestor of this idea is Hume’s analysis of the ‘identity’ of things in terms of our propensity to take a sequence of resembling perceptions to be evidence for a single thing, as when you have perceptions of a rose bush every time you go into the garden, and therefore take it that there is a single persisting rose bush there even when no perceivers are present.

The second, ‘the postulate of separable causal lines’, states that ‘it is frequently possible to form a series of events such that, from one or two members of the series, something can be inferred as to all the other members’. For example, we can keep track of a billiard ball throughout a game of billiards; common sense thinks of the ball as a single thing changing its position, which according to this postulate is to be explained by treating the ball and its movements as a series of events from some of which you can infer information about the others.

The third is ‘the postulate of spatio-temporal continuity’, designed to deny ‘action at a distance’ by requiring that if there is a causal connection between two events that are not contiguous, there must be a chain of intermediate links between them. Many of our inferences to unobserved occurrences depend upon this postulate.

The fourth is ‘the structural postulate’, which states that ‘when a number of structurally similar complexes are ranged about a centre in regions not widely separated, it is usually the case that all belong to causal lines having their origin in an event of the same structure at the centre’. This is intended to make sense of the idea that there exists a world of physical objects common to all perceivers. If 6 million people all listen to the Prime Minister’s broadcast on the radio, and upon comparing notes find that they heard remarkably similar things, they are entitled to the view that the reason is the common-sense one that they all heard the same person speaking over the airwaves.

The fifth and last is ‘the postulate of analogy’, which states that ‘given two classes of events A and B, and given that, whenever both A and B can be observed, there is reason to believe that A causes B, then if, in a given case, A is observed, but there is no way of observing whether B occurs or not, it is probable that B occurs; and similarly if B is observed, but the presence or absence of A cannot be observed’. This postulate speaks for itself (
HK
506–12).

The point of the postulates is, Russell says, to justify the first steps towards science. They state what we have to know, in addition to observed facts, if scientific inferences are to be valid. It is not advanced science which is thus justified, but its more elementary parts, themselves based on common-sense experience.

But what is the sense of ‘know’ here? On Russell’s view, the knowing involved in ‘knowledge of the postulates’ is a kind of ‘animal knowing’, which arises as habitual beliefs from the experience of interaction with the world. It is far from being certain knowledge. ‘Owing to the world being such as it is,’ Russell says:

certain occurrences are sometimes, in fact, evidence for certain others; and owing to animals being adapted to their environment, occurrences which are, in fact, evidence of others tend to arouse expectation of those others. By reflecting on this process and refining it, we arrive at the canons of inductive inference. These canons are valid if the world has certain characteristics which we all believe it to have.

(
HK
514–15)

These characteristics are the common-sense facts that the postulates in effect embody, and it is in this sense that we ‘know’ them. They are implied in the inferences we make, and our inferences are by and large successful; so the postulates can be regarded as in a sense selfconfirming.

Although Russell thinks of the postulates as something we know a priori, it is clear that their status is odd. They are in fact empirical in one sense, since they either record or are suggested by experience. What gives them their a priori status is that they are
treated as known
independently of empirical confirmation (except indirectly in practice), rather than as generalizations in need of such justification. In effect Russell has selected some general contingent beliefs which are especially useful to have as premisses in thinking about the world, and elevated them to the dignity of postulates. Their indirect justification, in turn, is that on the whole they, or the results of their application, work. Allied to the extremely modest ambition Russell has for epistemology in
HK
– it is no longer the quest for as certain a basis for knowledge as one can get, but only a statement of rules of thumb whose adoption makes scientific thinking acceptable – this might be enough. But it has no pretensions to be a response to scepticism, or a rigorous account of non-demonstrative reasoning.

These last remarks suggest why Russell’s arguments in
HK
received little response, much to his disappointment. He recognized well enough that canons of evidence and scientific reasoning are worth investigating only if we can be confident that, if we get them right, they will deliver substantial contingent knowledge about the world. But the most that Russell’s argument establishes is that, so far, the general principles on which our empirical thinking relies have been largely successful. But this looks like exactly the kind of unbuttressed inductive inference Russell was anxious to caution against, citing the example of the chicken who, on being fed day after day, grew increasingly pleased with the world – until the day of her encounter with the butcher. There are limits to pragmatic justification; imagine someone who encourages the growth of his tomatoes by prayer alone, and gets some tomatoes every year, and someone else who waters and fertilizes his tomatoes, and gets many more each year; still, the first gardener might regard the fact that he gets some tomatoes as pragmatic justification for praying over them. The success of our principles to date does not, thus, amount to much of a ground for saying that they deliver the scientific goods.

In particular, we have no guarantee against the possibility that use of the postulates leads us to falsehood, either occasionally or in some systematic way concealed by the kind of situation exemplified by the praying gardener. Now this possibility is in effect allowed by Russell in asking very little of epistemology. The complaint must therefore be that the argument in
HK
is in fact an admission of failure, when taken in the light of the epistemological tradition. Descartes and his successors in modern philosophy raised questions about the nature of knowledge and how we get it precisely so that they could distinguish between some enterprises – alchemy, astrology, and magic, say – and others – chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, say – which differ not merely in the number of really useful applications they offer, but in telling us something true about the world; and where, moreover, the latter fact explains the former, and opens the way to more of both by the same route. Furthermore, our ancient prejudices and animal beliefs might be controverted in the process, as indeed happens: for the world depicted by science is remarkably different from the world of common sense. But Russell in
HK
says that the utility of applications and those same animal habits of belief are the only final justifiers we can hope for in epistemology. This is very much less than the project of epistemology traditionally aims to achieve, and it is much less than Russell himself hoped to attain when he first took up the epistemological task many decades before.

Chapter 4 Politics and society

Introduction

Russell contributed voluminously to debates about morals, politics, religion, education, and questions of war and peace. He did not think of these contributions as being in the strict sense philosophical. As the preceding chapter shows, he regarded philosophy as a technical discipline concerned with abstract questions about logic, knowledge, and metaphysics. These other debates, in his opinion, are by contrast matters of emotion and opinion, relating as they do to practicalities of life. He acknowledged that there can be analysis of moral and political discourse in a formal sense, that is, as a systematic study dealing with their logic rather than their substance; but it was practical questions and concrete problems that interested him, especially after the outbreak of the First World War.

Nevertheless, in certain of his writings Russell ventured an account of the basis of ethics. He did not try to state an original theory, resting content with consciously derivative views which (after his interest in practical questions had become serious) were ‘consequentialist’ in character, having it that the moral worth of what people and governments do must be judged by outcomes. At the same time – and not altogether consistently – he sometimes wrote as if he believed in the intrinsic moral worth of certain things, such as the character traits of courage, magnanimity, and honesty. And he also, in some of his earlier writings, put forward a view further inconsistent with these, that moral judgements are disguised statements of subjective attitude. The main problem for Russell was how to reconcile two conflicting things: on the one hand, allegiance to profoundly and passionately held moral convictions, and, on the other hand, the apparent groundlessness of moral judgement. His difficulty in achieving this reconciliation was increased by his scepticism about whether there can be such a thing as ethical knowledge at all.

The best way to characterize Russell’s contribution in the ethical sphere is, perhaps, to say that he was much more a moralist than a moral philosopher. Like Aristotle before him he regarded ethics and politics as continuous; there is no difference of kind between the ethical judgement that war is evil and the political demand for peace. Accordingly there is a seamlessness in Russell’s thinking about morality, politics, and society which explains why, in the most thorough of his books on these questions,
Human Society in Ethics and Politics
(
HSEP
), they are considered together.