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Language Sciences 32 (2010) 143–148

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Reassessing Russell

Roy Harris

2 Paddox Close, Oxford OX2 7LR, UK

Keith Green, Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory, Continuum, 2007, ix + 174pp.� 2008 Roy Harris. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Bertrand Russell does not cut much of a figure in students’ histories of Western linguistics, which operateon the principle that linguistic theory is strictly for linguists. But even Robins (1997) grits his teeth and men-tions the work of two philosophers (J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle) in his account of 20th-century developments.Russell, however, is sternly ignored. Similarly, a popular students’ Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

(Crystal, 1997) manages to refer in its entries to a number of philosophers, including Austin, Searle, C. S. Pei-rce, H. P. Grice, Rudolph Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Donald Davidson and even Jacques Derrida; but again Rus-sell is left out in the cold. When eventually Russell was belatedly recognized by (some) linguists as having arightful place in the development of modern linguistic thought, he ran the risk of being immediately dismissedas having failed to develop a satisfactory ‘theory of reference’ (Seuren, 1998, p. 387). (It is as if Amundsen wereretrospectively criticized for having failed in 1911 to reach the ‘true’ South magnetic pole. The notion thatpolar exploration at that time was itself an achievement has somehow dropped out of sight.)

These are among the reasons why Keith Green’s book should be read both by linguists and by philoso-phers, for although it focuses on a single figure it throws a great deal of light on the whole course of relationsbetween linguistics and philosophy throughout the twentieth century. I would even venture to say that no onewho has not read it, and pondered what it says, is in any position to understand an important part of the intel-lectual history of modern times. Each of the two disciplines in question has its own canonical version of thathistory, but Green’s probing analysis shows that neither is to be trusted. It illustrates the sad fact that, in spiteof lip-service paid to interdisciplinarity, modern academics and their students tend to live inside hermeticallysealed worlds, fed by their own journals and publishers, and only rarely dare to set a foot outside.

Green seems to have read everything Russell ever wrote, or at least everything that survives, and since Russell’soutput was prolific (some 60 million words, or 2000 words a day on average), and Russell changed his tune, bothover time and depending on the readership he was writing for, making sense of all that is in itself a scholarlyachievement on Green’s part. It is an achievement of an order seldom encountered nowadays in Britishuniversities.

In order to put Green’s reassessment of Russell in some kind of perspective, some comments are in order onearlier accounts. A commonly held view of what was happening in philosophy in the early 1900s is that:

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the meaning and the analysis of thought come into the centre of the picture [. . .]. This new orientation isreflected in the work of two British philosophers of the twentieth century, G.E. Moore and BertrandRussell. [. . .] With Moore and Russell language has entered explicitly on to the scene, but whereas with

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Moore the emphasis is on reaffirming the language of common sense, with Russell it is on reforming it.This difference becomes greatly magnified when we consider the approach to the subject which each hasinspired in later philosophers. Associated with Russell there is what might be called a tradition of alter-

native language philosophy, consisting in attempts to validate some set of concepts as providing anacceptable means of looking at some part of the world, regardless of whether those concepts happento coincide with those embodied in the language of common sense. (Graham, 1977, pp. 5–6. Italics inthe original.)

If this is on the right lines, it would obviously explain the low esteem in which linguists appear to hold thework of Russell, who is here cast in the role of a thinker who held no brief for examining the observable lin-guistic usage of the hoi polloi, since the language of the hoi polloi is a muddle anyway. That attitude was by nomeans confined to Russell. I well remember from many years ago the comment of a distinguished Oxford phi-losopher who responded to the criticism that ‘philosophy of language’ had no basis in empirical fieldwork byremarking that he saw no ground for supposing that anything of philosophical interest could be gleaned from,as he put it derisively, ‘studying the dialects of Norwegian fishermen’.

Another possible reason Russell has remained in the linguistic shadows is that the much publicized ‘linguis-tic turn’ in philosophy was eventually disowned even by those who had originally promoted it. Twenty-fiveyears after publishing his landmark volume The Linguistic Turn, Richard Rorty came round to the view thatit had always been a mistake to suppose that ‘philosophy could be advanced by studying a topic called ‘‘lan-guage”’ (Rorty, 1992, p. 374). Rorty announced his acceptance henceforth of Donald Davidson’s contentionthat ‘there is no such thing as a language, not at least if a language is anything like what many philosophersand linguists have supposed’.

As one who had reached Davidson’s conclusion before Davidson did, although for somewhat different rea-sons (Harris, 1981), I can hardly disagree with it, although I reject both Davidson’s argument in support of itand his Gricean appeal to ‘intentions’ (Davidson, 1986). (In fact, Davidson’s position, when examined indetail, is by no means as far removed from that taken by theorists who believe in ‘the language myth’ asDavidson supposes.) But although it seems clear to me that Russell had always believed in ‘the languagemyth’, and never abandoned it, I share Green’s view that there is much to be learnt from Russell’s mistakesabout language, however misguided they must now appear. The reason has much in common with the reasonwhy there is so much to be learnt from Plato’s mistakes. In fact, Russell’s mistakes (about language) have aclose affinity to Plato’s. In both cases we are dealing with the mistakes of a powerful mind in search of a clearway of dealing with certain basic problems about the role of language in human affairs. The difference is thatRussell had the advantage of being able to survey a whole history of ways in which Plato’s solutions had beencriticized by subsequent generations of thinkers.

The first serious attempt to analyse Russell’s view of language comprehensively and in detail was MaxBlack’s paper ‘Russell’s philosophy of language’, published in 1944 in the collection of papers edited byP.A. Schilpp, under the title The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Russell replied to Black’s criticisms in thesame volume (Russell, 1944, pp. 691–695). As Black points out, when Russell first announced (in 1914) hisbelief that ‘the influence of language on philosophy has [. . .] been profound and almost unrecognized’ thiswas regarded as a remarkable pronouncement, whereas a quarter of a century later the influence of languageon philosophy had become – due in large part to the influence of Russell himself – almost universallyrecognized.

Black attacked Russell’s philosophy of language on four related but quite distinct grounds. First, Blackobjected to the consequences of applying Russell’s theory of types to ordinary language. Second, he deniedthat what Russell called ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ was a satisfactory basis for explaining the connexionsbetween the words we use and the ‘objects’ they stand for. Third, he rejected Russell’s notion of an ‘ideal lan-guage’. Finally, he dismissed Russell’s behaviourist semantics as untenable. Precious little of Russell’s accountof language was left standing.

Black was particularly severe on Russell’s ‘ideal language’ as the hypothetical goal of a philosophy of lan-guage. If it were to conform to Russell’s criteria, Black argued, such a system of symbolism would be soremote from the languages with which we are familiar (e.g. English, French, etc.) as to be completely unrec-ognizable and unusable for communicational purposes.

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Russell’s reply to Black’s onslaught was remarkably mild and even conciliatory. He admitted that his ownpresentation of the theory of types was unsatisfactory, but hoped that some day someone else would eventu-ally develop a better version. As regards his ‘ideal language’, he thought that Black had misunderstood thekind of verbal equipment it was supposed to contain. He had never, he claimed, seriously urged that sucha language should or might be constructed ‘except in certain fields and for certain problems’, e.g. for math-ematical logic and theoretical physics (Russell, 1944, pp. 693–694). To the charge of behaviourism (a chargealso levelled at various times against the later Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle), Russell entered no plea at all.The reader is left with the curious impression that Russell was no longer greatly interested in defending hisown philosophy of language (even though its more-or-less definitive version had been published as late as1940) and that his intellectual focus of interest had by that time shifted elsewhere.

Gordon Baker, in his article on Russell in Linguistic Thought in England 1914–1945 (Baker, 1988) goes evenfurther and doubts whether Russell, at least in his early development as a philosopher, had any philosophy oflanguage at all. Baker suggests that in Russell’s case we are confronted with a paradox – the paradox ‘thatsomeone who had no philosophy of language should have played a pivotal role in determining the courseof linguistic thought’ (Baker, 1988, p. 27). Baker points out that Russell stands accused of failing to distinguishuse from mention, and of ‘failure to distinguish what a sentence means from what it is used to state’. ‘It seemsbizarre that he produced valuable reflections about language only when he addressed his mind to other topics’(Baker, 1988, p. 29).

Eventually he advanced the thesis that the theory of symbolism has considerable importance for phi-losophy. But what did he understand by ‘language’, ‘a language’, ‘a symbol’, ‘symbolism’, ‘a proposi-tion’, ‘the constituents of a proposition’, ‘a proper name’, ‘a verb’, etc.? These questions are awkward.In some cases he gave no explanation, so that his answers must be inferred from how he used theseconcepts. In other cases he gave numerous explanations which seem to conflict with each other. Forexample, in some places he declared it to be a confusion to think that propositions consist of words,insisting instead that their constituents are the entities indicated or signified by words; at the same timehe called these entities ‘proper names’, ‘adjectives’, and ‘verbs’; and in other places he stressed that aproposition is a symbol, indeed a complex symbol made up of parts that are also symbols. In yet othercases he gave several non-equivalent explanations of one of these expressions, dismissing the ambiguityas harmless. All of this creates difficulty for expounding his view of the nature of language and sym-bols. It is hard to know which of his formulations he took to be the same, which different (Baker, 1988,pp. 30–31).

Baker’s own conclusion in the end does Russell no favours. ‘Russell’s theories seem important because theyare so flexible and empty’ (Baker, 1988, p. 57). ‘Russell’s influence might be considered a measure of the pov-erty of modern linguistic thought’ (Baker, 1988, p. 59).

A more guarded but certainly no more flattering view is presented in the article on Russell specially writtenfor The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Asher, 1994) by R.M. Sainsbury. Here Russell’s two main‘contributions to philosophy of language’ are identified as his theory of names and his theory of definitedescriptions. His view of an ideal language is not even mentioned, nor his behaviourist semantics. (Sainsburydoes, however, defend Russell somewhat half-heartedly against Saul Kripke’s misinterpretation of Russell’saccount of proper names.)

This is the dismal background against which to set Green’s discussion of Russell’s approach to language.For a start, I find it refreshing to read someone who does not sound apologetic or embarrassed about discuss-ing the subject at all, and who sees no shame in acknowledging Russell’s lifelong view that it is a philosopher’sduty to make the language in which we express our thoughts as clear as possible, and thus make our thinkingclearer too. (Would that linguistic theorists accepted the same responsibility too.)

Green seems to me to explain things that other accounts leave obscure. To begin with, why did Russell,who, by his own remarkable admission, had regarded language as ‘transparent’ until about 1918, andevinced no previous interest whatsoever in linguistic theory, suddenly in the early years of the twentiethcentury focus his attention on the theory of the definite article? (For that, in effect, is what the celebrated‘theory of descriptions’ amounts to.) Green suggests two reasons. One – which seems to me the less

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convincing – is that there was a historical analogy between the development of the definite article in Eng-lish and Russell’s entire logicist programme. The other is that Russell came to see – long before anyone else– that without a theory of the definite article it was impossible to explain certain fundamental mathematicalconcepts, e.g. ‘the even prime’ and ‘the greatest cardinal number’. (If you are sceptical, try doing it your-self. There is no insuperable difficulty about words like even, prime, greatest, cardinal, and number. Butwhat are you going to say about the meaning of the? Without the definite article, these concepts cannotachieve mathematical lift-off. Your dilemma is then that, without a theory of the definite article, youare obliged to expel concepts like ‘the even prime’ and ‘the greatest cardinal number’ from the foundationsof mathematics. Or – even more horrendous – admit that you do not know what you are talking about. Inmathematics, unlike linguistics, this has always been unacceptable until fairly recently. But nowadays weare assured, for example, that mathematicians do not worry about whether numbers ‘really’ exist ornot: Gowers, 2002, p. 17. Most linguists would say ‘Welcome to the club!’ Who cares whether words‘really’ exist or not?).

But Russell did worry. In one sense, the whole of Russell’s engagement with language over the subsequentdecades – including his long flirtation with behaviourist linguistic theory (that he seems to have been temptedto swallow hook, line and sinker during the interwar years) – took off from this initial attempt to deal with thedefinite article. So too did his rejection of Frege in the famous paper ‘On denoting’ (1905). No academic lin-guist of that period was thinking on this kind of wavelength at all; in fact, general linguistics was only justemerging from the cosy cocoon of Comparative Philology. Saussure had not even begun his landmark lecturesat Geneva.

The key to Green’s reading of Russell seems to me to be the question of the relationship between languageand logic. It is true that there are remarks about logic scattered throughout Saussure’s lectures, but whichfailed to survive in the edited version eventually published after his death. However, the first detailed theoret-ical statement on the subject that we have from the Geneva school is contained in Albert Sechehaye’s Pro-

gramme et methodes de la linguistique theorique (1908), which is dedicated to Saussure. It is worth quotingthis statement in full.

On entend generalement, et avec raison, par ce terme de logique, une science entierement theorique quicherche a fixer sous leur forme la plus pure et la plus abstraite, les relations fondamentales de la pensee.C’est une science exacte, s�ur des mathematiques. Nous pourrions dire – continuant l’analogie qui nousest familiere – que la logique grammaticale est a la logique philosophique, ce que les formes et les mouv-ements que nous voyons autour de nous, sont aux formes et aux mouvements de la geometrie et de lamecanique. La grammaire est une logique pratique et appliquee. Elle ne contient pas uniquement la log-ique, comme d’aucuns l’ont cru, mais elle la contient et elle ne peut pas pecher contre ses lois (Sechehaye,1908, p. 104).

The term logic is generally understood, and rightly, as the name of an entirely theoretical science seek-ing to fix in their purest and most abstract form the fundamental relations of thought. It is an exact sci-ence, a sister of mathematics. We could say – following a familiar analogy – that grammatical logic is tophilosophical logic what the forms and movements we see around us are to the forms and movements ofgeometry and mechanics. Grammar is a practical, applied logic. Grammar contains not only logic, assome have believed, but it does contain logic and cannot infringe the laws of logic.

Whether this corresponds to Saussure’s mature view of the relationship cannot be debated here. (It seemsclear to me that it does not.) The relevant point in the present context is that the position stated here by Sech-ehaye in 1908 had already been called in question by Russell before Sechehaye’s book was published. Of thisSechehaye seems to be entirely ignorant. The same ignorance can be inferred from Sechehaye’s later bookEssai sur la structure logique de la phrase (1926). In particular, Sechehaye seems to be entirely unaware thatany logical doubt could be thrown on the traditional grammatical distinction between subject and predicate.Russell, as Green points out, had questioned this as early as 1900 in his book on the philosophy of Leibniz(Russell, 1900). If Russell’s work did nothing else, it at least raised at a very basic level the question of therelationship between grammatical structures and logical structures. In his comments on Leibniz Russell ‘isalready carving out a distinct philosophical voice, and is already embroiled in linguistic issues’ (Green,2007, p. 25).

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Green argues (convincingly) that Meinong was a more important figure in all this than Russell laterallowed, and that his rejection of Meinong left him with few options other than, ultimately, to accept the rel-evance of language to logic. As Green puts it, rejecting Meinong made ‘the linguistic elements responsible forthe symbolization of the object asserted’. So proclaiming, as Russell had done, that language was ‘irrelevant tologic’ henceforth rang hollow.

By 1937, Russell is admitting that logic is ‘much more linguistic than I believed it to be’, i.e. than he believedit to be when he wrote The Principles of Mathematics (1903). That might well be the academic understatementof the century. It would be difficult to improve on Green’s brilliant summary of Russell’s dilemma. ‘The over-arching paradox of this kind of analysis is that Russell’s statement to the effect that the grammatical differencehas no bearing on the term itself is itself predicated on grammatical grounds; that is, a grammatical differenceis noted in order to explain non-essential difference’ (Green, 2007, p. 34). But it takes a little time, as withmany of Green’s observations, for the full thrust of this to sink in.

Highly recommendable is Green’s Chapter 4, which shows how, years later, Chomsky – by then the ‘lead-ing’ linguistic theorist – found himself in exactly the same logico-linguistic fix (from which he has yet to extri-cate himself). But did Russell ever manage it? You will have to read the book and find out. Tellingly, Greenquotes a passage from Chomsky condemning what Chomsky calls Russell’s ‘pessimism’ on the clash betweenscience and human ‘passions and instincts’. Green comments euphemistically: ‘Although Chomsky here rejectsRussell’s supposed pessimism, his writing has all the hallmarks of the Russellian vision’ (Green, 2007, p. 219).A less diffident commentator than Green might have had a field day analysing Chomsky’s garbled concept of‘logical form’, which would have had Russell throwing up his aristocratic hands in despair.

Green highlights unnoticed parallels between Russell and Chomsky, although in so doing he seems to me totake a somewhat romanticized view of their political attitudes. But he does not miss the epistemological blindspot which both theorists have when it comes to divorcing language from communication. Neither Russell norChomsky ever took on board what Saussure saw from the beginning and Wittgenstein eventually came roundto seeing – that the social praxis of communication is what makes any language what it is. You cannot (pace

Chomsky et al.) simply ‘abstract from’ the social dimension and reduce languages to sets of correlationsbetween sentences and ideas in the mind of an idealized speaker. (It makes no more sense than treating thelocal public transport system as a timetable in the mind of an ideal Lord Mayor.)

The connexions between Russell’s ideas and Wittgenstein’s form a well-trodden field, over which Greentreads lightly. ‘When we encounter Russell and Wittgenstein grappling with concepts such as ‘word’, ‘sentence’and in particular ‘proposition’, we find that contemporary philology has almost nothing to offer them’ (Green,2007, p. 104). This may be so, but in the case of ‘proposition’ it is only fair to add that this was never a phi-lologist’s concept in the first place. The culprit was Aristotle, and I find it odd that there is only one passingreference to Aristotle throughout Green’s book. For it was Aristotle’s initial formalization of deductive infer-ence in the fourth century BC, and his invention of the concept ‘variable’, that provides the whole foundationfor Russell’s ‘mathematical logic’. Without Aristotle, Russell would never have been in business.

Green is good on the postwar mismatch between linguistics and ordinary language philosophy (which Rus-sell detested). He also puts his finger adroitly on the way that ‘the sentence has been accorded an abstract andholy status by linguists’ just as ‘the proposition’ has by philosophers.

Finally, the book does not neglect Russell’s own output of fiction and the light this throws on the greatman’s view of language. Green’s interesting remarks on Russell and Derrida in the final chapter could havebeen amplified. But, fiction apart, it is astonishing how many commentators discuss Russell without – appar-ently – recognizing that they are dealing with one of the greatest masters of expository English prose that theworld has ever seen. (Russell was awarded the Nobel prize for literature – a distinction, dare one say, unlikelyto be bestowed on Chomsky or any other contemporary linguistic theorist.) It is a phenomenon that invitescomparison in the visual arts with the work of Stubbs (my comparison, not Green’s). Stubbs was arguably thegreatest English painter of his age, but devoted his genius to depicting the anatomy of horses.

It is a pity that Green’s book is marred by unforgivably slipshod errors of detail. These include incorrectdates, misspelt names, missing references and even, in one case, attributing a publication to the wrong editors.The standard of proof-reading is appalling. These slips could all easily be corrected in a second edition, butthey should never have been allowed to appear in the first. They do not detract from the fact that this is a re-reading of Russell that is long overdue.

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227–255 (Page references are to the third ed., 1951).Crystal, D., 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, fourth ed. Longman, London.Davidson, D., 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In: Grandy, R.E., Warner, R. (Eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. Oxford

University Press, Oxford, pp. 157–174.Gowers, T., 2002. Mathematics. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Graham, K., 1977. J.L. Austin. A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Harvester, Hassocks.Harris, R., 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth, London.Robins, R.H., 1997. A Short History of Linguistics, fourth ed. Longman, London.Rorty, R.M. (Ed.), 1992. The Linguistic Turn, rev. edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Russell, B.A.W., 1900. A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Russell, B.A.W., 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Routledge, London.Russell, B.A.W., 1905. On denoting. Mind 14, 412–418 (Reprinted Marsh, R.C. (Ed.), Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, London,

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