Pragmatism at Cambridge, England before 1900

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to the new story about the history of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy presented in Cheryl Misak's Cambridge Pragmatism. One of the new story's key claims is that pragmatism was a home-grown American philosophy that entered the intellectual scene of 1920s England as an imported good. Taking up the long-neglected case of the English logician John Venn, the paper shows that pragmatism, as defined by Misak, existed in Cambridge, England several decades before the turn of the century. It concludes with the view that a more complex and richer perspective on the twin histories of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic, is needed.

KEYWORDS:

• John Venn
• history of pragmatism
• history of early analytic philosophy
• C.S. Peirce
• William James

Introduction: Cambridge pragmatism

It has long been known that there exists a relationship between British analytic philosophy and American pragmatism.¹ Recently, however, Cheryl Misak gave this story a new twist. Her 2016 book Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein takes issue with the standard narrative, which says, in brief, that “Russell, Moore, and, to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein savaged pragmatism, leaving it never to fully recover” (Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism, 1). On this crude narrative, analytic philosophy out-competed pragmatism, and pragmatism had at best a negative influence on the early development of analytic philosophy. More than merely questioning the standard story, Misak paints a wholly different picture.² She convincingly shows not only that pragmatists and analytic philosophers knew and respected each others' works but also that there actually exists a direct line of influence from Peirce (and, to a far lesser extent, from William James) to the post-Tractatus positions of Russell, Wittgenstein and, especially, Ramsey.

One of the central difficulties of Misak's enterprise is that of pinning down the distinctive theses of ‘pragmatism’. Unavoidably, her new story is grounded upon a somewhat selective reading, centered around Peirce's conceptions of belief, action and truth. Firstly, there is Peirce's dispositional account of belief according to which beliefs must be understood not so much in terms of their representational content as in that of the actions they produce. This gives rise, secondly, to a pragmatic account of truth in which a true belief is one that has the practical consequence of being maximally reliable and of withstanding indefinite scrutiny. Peirce held, thirdly, that beliefs are truth-apt: as ways of settling doubts and establishing habits for action, all beliefs, whether scientific or religious, are true if they work and false if they do not.

With Peirce's pragmatism on the table – where the doctrine of belief as a disposition to act is taken as the kernel – Misak turns to the links between the two Cambridges. The bulk of her book consists in following the ways in which pragmatist ideas from Cambridge, America were both discussed, modified and rejected by philosophers in Cambridge, England, all the while percolating slowly, and deeply, into their philosophical outlooks. Both good history and a piece of original philosophy, with implications for present-day work on the history of early analytic philosophy, Cambridge Pragmatism is insightful and fascinating. However, there are lingering questions and doubts, two of which are taken up in this paper. One concerns an underlying agreement between the standard and new narrative: that pragmatism originated wholesale in America and reached England as an imported good. The other, closely related doubt concerns a matter of focus and interpretation: in her account of the English Cambridge, Misak tends to overlook the philosophical context in England, the background against which the reception of pragmatism and the formation of analytic philosophy at Cambridge took place. What I want to show is that pragmatism, understood in the arguably somewhat loose way proposed by Misak, already existed (in a rough form) at Cambridge well before the turn of the century. Recently, Jeremy Dunham has put forward the case of James Ward (1843–1925), showing that his work might best be understood as pragmatist (Dunham, “Was James Ward a Cambridge pragmatist?”). My case is that of Ward's contemporary and colleague, the Cambridge logician John Venn in whose work from the 1860s–1880s, created independently of, and in part prior to Peirce and James, might arguably be found all three distinctive theses of pragmatism.

Following Peirce's and James' accounts of the history of pragmatism, Misak herself has brought Berkeley, Hume and Kant into the fold, arguing that pragmatist ideas were present in the work of these pre-pragmatist thinkers.³ Indeed, James himself described pragmatism as “a new name for some old ways of thinking”.⁴ It is therefore not surprising prima facie that pragmatism may be found before it was formally established in America; in so far as it is worthwhile to identify cases of ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-pragmatism’, such as Venn's, this paper builds on Misak's account. At the same time, the paper is critical of writing the history of pragmatism exclusively, or at least predominantly, through the dominant lens of Peirce's and James' own search for intellectual forebears. By doing so, one runs the risk not only of mining the past for anticipations of their work but also of re-projecting their views onto the historical record, thereby potentially neglecting alternative formulations or varieties of pragmatism. What the case of Venn shows is that in adding to the history of pragmatism, this history may also be said to change, not least because Peirce and James become part of it, rather than the axis around which it revolves. More specifically, this paper shows that Venn's pragmatism provides us with (1) a view of pragmatism at Cambridge, England as a home-grown way of doing philosophy deemed able to solve a number of problems highly specific to the English intellectual context, and (2) a richer and more complex history of Cambridge pragmatism at large.

1. John Venn's pragmatist philosophy

After finishing Sixth Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1857, John Venn (1834–1923) was appointed Lecturer in Moral Science to his College in 1862, becoming, with Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, one of the main lecturers on the subjects of the Moral Sciences Tripos. Between the 1860s and early-1890s, Venn taught various courses in logic, wrote three standard textbooks, on probability logic (The Logic of Chance), deductive logic (Symbolic Logic) and inductive logic (Principles of Empirical Logic), and published some dozen papers in Mind. One of the most eminent logicians among his contemporaries, Venn introduced two generations of highly talented Moral Sciences students – Frederic William Maitland, W.E. Johnson (once Wittgenstein's tutor) and J.N. Keynes, among others – to J.S. Mill's inductive methods and George Boole's innovations in algebraic logic.

Venn's oeuvre covered the two developments in British logic spurred, in the 1820s, by Richard Whately's Elements of Logic: on the one hand, the so-called algebraization of deductive logic in the work of Boole and Augustus de Morgan and, on the other hand, the inductive logic of scientific reasoning created by Mill, William Whewell and John Herschel. Throughout his entire career, Venn remained more or less committed to Mill's empiricist or material view of logic. This view essentially said that logic, including deductive logic (‘ratiocination’), which Mill granted almost in toto to Aristotle, was grounded on (‘inductive’) inference from observations. From around the mid-1870s on, Venn also came to entertain an interest in Boole's ‘calculus’, that is, his reduction of deductive logical reasoning to class equations and their extension to propositional logic. The overarching problem-situation in Venn's books and articles was twofold. First, to revisit Mill's empiricist view of logic such that it allowed for non-trivial deductive reasoning and, second, to reformulate Boole's calculus such that it agreed with the updated empiricist view. Put differently, Venn's challenge was to reconcile a commitment to empiricism and ordinary language, on the one hand, and formal logic and symbolic language on the other.

This paper will only be concerned with one aspect of the first problem; regarding the second problem, suffice it to say that Venn's answer revolved around his theory of existential commitment, which ensured that deductive reasoning was not seen to generate new knowledge about the world. Venn's struggle with the first problem started in 1867 – when he published his first paper in Mind – and eventually culminated in his Principles of 1889. At the beginning, Venn presented himself as an enthusiastic follower of Mill's empiricist outlook. Around the mid-1870s, he had become an increasingly dissatisfied Millian and by the end of the 1880s he identified with a position that combined elements of pragmatism, conventionalism and evolutionary thinking. There were several factors involved in this development, some of which concerned what Mill did and others which concerned what he did not do. One example of the former category is Venn's growing disagreement with Mill's analysis of inference, more in particular of the syllogism as involving a petitio principii. Unlike Mill, Venn at one point no longer believed either that syllogisms always only stated as a conclusion what was already known as a premise, nor that it was always needed for premises to be grounded on induction. Instead, in some cases of deductive reasoning it was legitimate to take the premises for granted, and possible to reach a conclusion that was distinctively new. One example of the latter category is Venn's view of belief and truth, first put forward in the context of his analysis of probability statements, to which we now turn. It will become clear in what follows, firstly, that Venn's pragmatism first arose in a discussion found in Logic of Chance of 1866; secondly, that it was further developed in his “Hulsean Lectures” of 1869 (which were soon forgotten but which were mentioned in James’ Principles of Psychology); and, thirdly, that it was combined with conventionalism in both his Principles and an unpublished paper of 1889. These points are remarkable for at least the following reason: they show that Venn developed what may be called a proto-pragmatism that pre-dates the pragmatism of Peirce and James, both in its core as well as in some of its implications, especially concerning the rationality of religious belief and the view of truth in terms of actions.

1.1. Probability: full and partial belief

Venn's Logic of Chance, which Peirce praised as “a book which should be read by every thinking man” (Peirce, “Venn's Logic of Chance”, 317), is remembered as the first systematic, if rudimentary, account of the idea that probability is relative frequency.⁵ This viewpoint was already adopted in a famous passage in Mill's System of Logic (1843) – it was natural for Mill to do so given his empiricist view of logic. Venn dedicated some 400 pages to its detailed elaboration and defense against the ‘subjectivist’ or ‘conceptualist’ views of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Augustus De Morgan. Perhaps the most radical feature of the frequency view is that all senses and uses of probability – e.g. single-event probability, belief revision, inverse probability – that do not define probability in terms of long-run series of events are rejected. Almost all of Venn's critics, such as, most prominently, Francis Y. Edgeworth, Francis Herbert Bradley and John Maynard Keynes rejected his theory largely because of these implications. Venn's most enthusiastic follower was Peirce, who praised and acknowledged his work both in his 1867 review of Logic of Chance and, for instance, in his 1878 paper “The Doctrine of Chances”.⁶ Peirce endorsed Venn's frequentism, his main criticism being that Venn sometimes did not take this outlook far enough.

According to Venn, probability is a kind of logic: it is grounded on events, but essentially concerned with finding out what inferences can be made about probability statements or what he called proportional propositions (‘Given that nine men out of ten live to forty, what could be inferred about the prospect of the life of any particular man?’). There are many oddities about Venn's Logic of Chance. One of them is that it is forced to define probability as a counterfactual (‘The probability of throwing a six with a die is the limiting relative frequency that it would have had if it were thrown an infinite number of times’). Another is that Venn wants nothing to do with the subjective view of probability – which views it as a measurement of belief – but is preoccupied almost solely with the task of determining what beliefs a subject can and may have about one or the other probability statement. These two oddities are closely related. The issue of belief enters exactly at that point where there are only real-world, short-run frequencies. On the one hand, Venn does not want to admit that there always exist measurable degrees of belief between the extremes of an infinitely long and short series of events, for instance of throws of a coin. Or, more precisely, he rejects the idea that such degrees are the probability of an event: there is a difference between what we actually believe and what we are rationally justified to believe given the evidence. On the other hand, Venn, at times an ordinary language philosopher par excellence, cannot but admit that in daily life we constantly seem to form a “graduated scale of intensity of belief” (Venn, Logic of Chance (henceforth LoC), 75–76). Indeed, judging from popular opinion, as illustrated in common language (‘I feel almost sure’, etc.), there does seem to exist something like partial belief.

Venn went to great lengths to find out what partial belief is and whether and when it is correct. His starting point was to contrast it with ordinary full belief. Here, the truth of belief of a statement can simply be checked by appealing to the facts. This is impossible, however, in the case of partial belief in any single contingent event. Venn gives the example of a coin:

I am about to toss one up, and I therefore half-believe […] that it will give head. Now it seems to be overlooked that if we appeal to the event […] our belief must inevitably be wrong [for] the thing must either happen or not happen; […] there is no third alternative. But whichever way it occurs, our half-belief […] must be wrong. If head does come, I am wrong in not having expected it enough […]. If it does not happen, I am equally wrong in having expected it too much […].

(Venn, LoC, 78).

Given his own theory, Venn might have stopped at this point, emphasizing that beliefs about single-case probabilities can simply never be justified. But since he attaches much weight to popular opinion and common language, this will not do. First of all, Venn allowed for the use of personal judgement to assign probabilities to beliefs about single cases and, more generally, about all cases where the statistical probabilities are unknown. Peirce dismissed this ‘remnant of conceptualism’ in Venn's work, writing that, given the frequency theory, the only logically correct statement in such cases would be: “We know not what to believe” (Peirce, “Venn's Logic of Chance”, 319).⁷ Like Venn, however, Peirce accepted that since daily life constantly forces us to make choices about unrepeatable cases, beliefs about single contingent events must be justified somehow. Peirce's solution was the following. Since no individual can help himself to the notion of an infinitely long run, which stands at the core of the frequency theory, his only option is to adopt the position of the ideal thinker who reasons from the social perspective of an ‘indefinite community’; when doing so, he knows that his probability assessments in single cases are justified because he sees that, “if everyone made them, then, in the long run, they would be correct”.⁸ Venn on the other hand, proposed to approach the justification of belief in terms of the readiness to act upon its truth, that is, in terms of the kind of individual conduct that results from it. “There can be no alteration in the belief without a possible alteration in the conduct, nor anything in the conduct which is not connected with something in the belief” (Venn, LoC, 82). Whatever else may be implied in having a belief – psychologically speaking – it seems clear – philosophically speaking – that in all cases we are ready to stake our conduct upon it. Similarly, what we believe might best be inferred from what we do, since how we act is nothing else than the “translation into practice” (Venn, LoC, 83) of our belief. According to Venn, it is not in betting only, but in all circumstances that “numerical associations” (Venn, LoC, 85) thus become inseparably connected with events. It is in consequence of this fact that we act unhesitatingly even when dealing with single, non-repeatable events. “A die is going to be thrown up once, and once only”, writes Venn: “I bet 5 to 1 against ace, not […] because I feel one-sixth part of certainty in the occurrence of ace; but because I know that such conduct would be justified in the long run of such cases” (Venn, LoC, 85). Put differently: we apply to an individual event the same rule that we should apply when we would know the long-run relative frequency with which an event occurs. Hence, our conduct is the same in these two cases.

Taken together, Venn takes seriously the fact that everyone is obliged to act and, therefore, to exercise one's belief about contingent events every day, the whole day. His search is for the test and justification of the amounts of such beliefs, which is found in action or conduct. Rather than a fraction of certainty, partial belief expresses “a numerical apportionment of our conduct” (Venn, LoC, 84). For Venn, that is what life is all about: to value chances at their right proportion, weighing gains and losses, and to believe and act accordingly.

1.2. Scientific and religious belief

Venn was heir to a clerical, Evangelical dynasty and this twin heritage was key to what was expected of him when he went up to Cambridge in 1853. He took orders in 1859–1860, spent some time as a curate and wrote for the Christian Observer. During the late-1860s, Venn worked alongside F.D. Maurice, Sidgwick, Marshall and others to professionalize and secularize Cambridge education, but he also continued to take clerical duties around Cambridge and was also prepared to take to the University pulpit, delivering the “Hulsean Lectures” in 1869.

The four lectures, published with an introduction and appendix in 1870, were based in part on arguments that Venn had already rehearsed in the Logic of Chance. There, Venn had separated out human belief as the subjective side of probability distinct from the observation of series of events. At the same time, he had recognized that in daily life man always acts on belief rather than on statistical frequencies, which at any rate are not even always available.

Venn choose as his subject “Some of the Characteristics of Belief: Scientific and Religious”. His main aim for his lectures was to provide a logic of the belief element of religious faith, which he argued did not differ essentially from any other act of belief. Belief, whether scientific or religious, is that “state of mind in which we are prepared to act on the truth of any proposition in question” (Venn, Hulsean Lectures (henceforth HL), viii). According to Venn, all belief is, and should be, founded on evidence. The main difference between scientific and religious belief consists solely in the kind of evidence on which they are grounded. Whereas science can always appeal to a relatively limited amount of clear-cut experimental facts, religion is based on a wide variety of complex doctrines that encompass the entirety of human existence. Moreover, all religious belief involves apprehension of the evidence which is influenced by emotions, either subjectively (in the form of feelings and passions) or objectively (by entering as premises into the conclusions we draw about the world). Consequently, the contrast between scientific unanimity and religious difference is fully logical. Venn strongly believed that this explanation could diminish the significance of religious difference at a time when the High and Low Church party conflict was leading university men to secularism and positivism.

Having explored the logic of differences in religious belief, Venn's next step was to search for a criterion of truth. How is it possible to decide which beliefs are right and which wrong if people entertain different judgements on religious evidence? Venn did not offer a conclusive answer, nor did he take a dogmatic approach, saying what should be believed. Instead, he argued that the truth of one's religious belief was to be defined in terms of its practical usefulness and benefit. That is to say, firstly, that beliefs should be tested out by living by the doctrine in question; secondly, that beliefs should be constantly subjected to the ‘shaking down’ process of daily life; and, thirdly, that what will emerge is a harmonious whole of beliefs whose adoption is rational because they have proven beneficial for life. Taken together, with time, certain beliefs lose their hold, without being strictly disproved, and other beliefs become more firm “as we continue to find them harmonising with our other convictions and adapting themselves to the varying necessities of our daily life” (Venn, HL, 35). Venn's position was less radical than James' in his famous 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe” and, in certain sense, more akin to Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Unlike James in 1896, Venn for instance accepted that there was evidence for religion, emphasizing time and again that God's testimony was to be accepted without hesitation. In 1902, James returned to the question of evidence, examining mystical experience and religious emotion. Venn would have appreciated James' description of religion as a partly emotional and partly intellectual ‘attitude’ (James, Varieties, 53), but his own focus in 1869 was too much on traditional Christian faith to accept anything mystical as religious evidence. At the same time, notwithstanding these differences or the tension inherent in James' own views on religious evidence, the implications of their general positions did strongly resemble one another. First of all, the emphasis was on religious belief as a personal matter. Venn wrote, for instance, that his theory was, strictly taken, only concerned with the internal unity of an individual's opinions. Secondly, religious beliefs were said to be true if their practical implications are advantageous or beneficial to the life of an individual. Venn frankly admitted that the truth of religion cannot be proven and that secularism cannot be strictly disproved. All that could be done, in fact, was to show that it was disadvantageous to shape one's conduct in total disregard of religious belief. Venn answered the central question what is meant by someone's believing this or that in a way quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein's pragmatic analysis of certainty:

Of course it is not meant that he says he believes it. […] The best […] test is found by studying his actions. When a man is acting deliberately, and knows what he is doing, the question, Does he believe this proposition? is best answered by others, if they substitute for it the question, Is he acting upon the assumption of its truth? If he is, I should say he does believe; if not, no; quite irrespective of anything he may say or suppose upon the subject.

(Venn, HL, 89)

For Venn, as for later pragmatists, whether Peirce or Ramsey, all belief is indissolubly bound to action. His central idea was, indeed, that truth has “no meaning or explanation except in reference to our conduct” (Venn, HL, 116). Venn hit upon this idea in 1866 and used it in 1869–1870 to put forward an admittedly rough-edged, proto-pragmatic account of religious belief.

1.3. Venn's Pascalian wager

Interestingly, as James would do in 1896, Venn included an examination of (criticism of) Pascal's wager in his discussion of the truth of religious belief.⁹ There is a marked difference between Venn's largely negative account of Pascal in his lectures in Great St Mary's Church and his much more positive treatment of the wager in the appendix attached to the printed edition.

Having provided a logical explanation of religious differences and a theory of religious truth, Venn took up the following challenge: what to do if in doubt about which doctrines to live by? One option was to think difficulties over for oneself, to the point where it would be better to disregard them, and the other was to accept doctrines on ecclesiastical authority. According to Venn, this last option is supported by those, like Pascal, whose philosophical scepticism leads to religious dogmatism. Venn's reconstruction of the Pascalian argument goes as follows: even though human reason is at a nonplus as to why and what we should believe, prudence can suggest that it is safest for us to believe. Since the church provides means for helping us to believe, as prudent people we should hasten to accept its doctrines. “It says”, writes Venn, “This is what comes of thinking; you will find yourself involved in a maze whence escape is quite hopeless; then do not think, but assent” (Venn, HL, 63). Again, much like James, Venn rejects the so-called doxastic voluntarism implicit in Pascal's wager: the idea that one has voluntary control over one's beliefs and that feigning religious belief to gain eternal reward is a possible and even beneficial strategy. Venn emphasized that belief is neither fully an act of the will nor absolutely independent of the will. Instead, religious belief always revolves around the “prodigious practical importance of the life you lead upon the convictions you entertain” (Venn, HL, 88).

Venn's vocal rejection of Pascal's wager stands in stark contrast to its much more positive treatment in the Appendix to the “Hulsean Lectures”. There is one obvious sense in which this should come as no surprise. The key ingredients of Pascal's wager – in brief, an opposition to evidentialism, the view that we must have good evidence for all our beliefs, and the proposal to view religious belief as a pragmatic decision in a betting situation – clearly resonated with Venn's views outlined in Logic of Chance and the “Hulsean Lectures”. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, Pascal is sometimes referred to as the first pragmatist.) First of all, like Pascal, Venn believed that making a choice about living religiously or not was impossible to avoid and that the choice to do so may best be understood as “balancing a present loss, certain and small, against a future gain, probable and vast” (Venn, HL, 115). Secondly, unlike many of Pascal's critics, including James, Venn did not perceive an antithesis between self-interest and truth in religious matters: he was not at all convinced that Pascal's wager implied inauthentic religious belief. James, for one, would later write that, “after such a mechanical calculation”, religious belief would “lack the inner soul of faith's reality” (James, The Will to Believe, 6). “The fact is”, Venn argued some thirty years earlier, “that all successful action, and therefore that dictated by self-interest, rests upon truth; in other words, if we wish to succeed we must have as many true beliefs and as few false ones as possible” (Venn, HL, 115). Given his theory of truth, in the case of the contingent events that pervade everyday life, this means that it is rational for us to act as if the event in question will happen. For example:

When […] we are confronted by rival alternatives each of which rests upon a probability only, it is sheer madness to adopt the one which seems the most probable simply because it is so, and in defiance of the loss and gain which we thereby incur. […] I do not mean that we must believe events to be more probably true than they really are; far from it; but we must constantly act upon the hypothesis that an event may really happen when we well know that such a contingency is very unlikely.

(Venn, HL, 116).

Thirdly, Venn denied that there was a difference between making decisions from a position of ignorance on religious or worldly matters. Instead, seeing all belief as a decision problem or betting situation, in both cases – whether for the prudent gambler or the honest believer – practical rationality should be our guide:

There is a great danger, I think, in admitting any sharp distinction between the principles upon which we act in regard to our temporal or spiritual interest. […] If a man is to be applauded for undergoing the annual sacrifice of paying a premium to guard against the bare chance of having his house burnt over his head, why is he not to submit to the various sacrifices required by religion, if these sacrifices will in any way remove the chance of a far worse catastrophe?

(Venn, HL, 117).

According to Venn, anyone acting upon the chance of salvation was merely “‘insuring his life’ in a somewhat higher sense” (Venn, HL, 120).

All pragmatic arguments for religious belief, intended to motivate a this-worldly action on the basis of the benefits associated with that action, Venn's wager stands somewhere between Pascal and James. Like Pascal's wager, it has the structure of a gamble made in the midst of uncertainty about the future and it is centered around the chance of salvation, or, more generally, around the Christian option for belief. Like James' argument, its aim was to provide an argument for the rationality of living religiously rather than to argue for the need for doctrinaire theological assent. Taken together, Venn agreed with the original position of Pascal's wager, which he found “natural and appropriate” (Venn, HL, 119), but rejected the outcome motivated by it. What troubled Venn was the idea that the wager should lead to dogmatic faith. Although he never went so far as to imply, as James did, that there was no evidence for the truth of Christianity, Venn did maintain that religious belief could be rational when based solely on emotions. At the core of Venn's wager stood the “hearty” and “efficient” action of the “honest-minded man” (see Venn, HL, 121), one who, when insuring his house or insuring his chance of going to heaven, knows not only that he must make a decision but also that he is acting on a mere contingency.

1.4. Knowing and acting, science and common thought

Throughout his oeuvre, Venn was heavily concerned with two other, eventually typically pragmatist themes: the relationship between science and common thought, and between knowing and acting.¹⁰ Venn considered this connection in different ways and from different perspectives, ranging from the bearing of scientific predictions upon human conduct and the apparent break with ordinary speech forced by algebraic logic to the connection between seeing the world scientifically and practically. This last topic found its origin in Venn's criticism from the 1870s of Mill's empiricist view of logic, which said that logic, like any other science, deals with things rather than with human thinking about things. Because our knowledge of things in the world is limited, Venn argued, following Herbert Spencer, the objectivity which Mill claimed for logic can only be an ideal towards which logicians should aim (see Spencer, “Mill versus Hamilton” and Venn, “The Difficulties of Material Logic”). In the meantime, the lack of objectivity should be made up for by conventions and assumptions which together enable the logician to postulate a world of objectively existing things. By 1889, Venn's general view of logic was that, as a meta-science, its basis is essentially and necessarily dualistic: it assumes that there is an independent world to be known and a mind to know it and brings these distinct realms into relation by means of both objective conditions (e.g. causation, uniformity) and subjective conditions (e.g. powers of observation, memory). What results is not only “the logician's world”, that is, “the world as the logician regards it”, but also the figure of the logician as the neutral spectator who is viewing the world from nowhere, observing, recording, judging, and inferring (see Venn, Principles of Inductive Logic, chapters 1–5).

Venn's mature position was uncomfortable for several reasons. One major problem was that the logician (and, ipso facto, the scientist) was always also an agent in the world and that logic (and, ipso facto, science) always also stood in relation to that world. The crux of this problem, taken up in the Principles of Empirical Logic, was the feedback loop between scientific knowledge and its societal application, for instance in political economy or sociology: as soon as knowledge is made publicly available and, subsequently, acted upon, the facts under study might change, rendering conclusions or predictions false. Hence, though necessary, the disinterestedness of the scientific observer is impossible, firstly, since he is himself like those whose conduct is studied and, secondly, because his own behaviour will also be influenced by what is known about it. Consequently, however important, the distinction between the theoretical and the practical standpoint is unsustainable in the context of human conduct. Venn's views may be positioned between Peirce's and James' general outlooks on the relation between theory and practice in the following way. On the one hand, Venn, like Peirce, held that there should be a contrast between knowing and acting, between scientific reasoning and practical life. At the same time, unlike Peirce, and more in line with Mill, Venn also believed that a complete logic of all the sciences would also concern practical business and common life. On the other hand, Venn accepted, pace Peirce, that there was no such contrast and, pace Mill, that the scientific promises of the human (or ‘moral’) sciences were to be toned down because of it. Much like James, then, Venn emphasized time and again that scientific knowledge always had to be tempered “with a wholesome infusion of practice”, giving pride of place to “the fresh air of practical life” (Venn, LoC, 369–370, see Smith, “British Thought”).

Another problem that troubled Venn in the late-1880s was that the need to construct the scientist's world did not sit well with his commitment to viewing science and common thought on a continuum. Venn discussed this problem-situation only once, in an unpublished lecture delivered in October 1889, entitled “Science & Common Thought”. His strategy was twofold. First, he wanted to prove that the then widely-held view on the relation (or lack thereof) between science and everyday life – i.e. that science does not or should not concern ordinary people or that it is wholly distinct from ordinary life – were wrong. After that, he put forward the alternative view that science is what is common to everyone who takes up an epistemic relation to the world, whether scientific or not.

Venn's starting point was a rejection of the foundationalist view of scientific knowledge in favour of a fallibilistic and coherentist outlook, whose inspiration John Dewey, among others, would later credit to Peirce (see Shook, Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge, chapter 4). “There is a common metaphor”, Venn wrote in a passage well-worth quoting in full, “which seems to me misleading”:

People talk of the “circle of knowledge”, & say that as this circle increases, so will the circumference […] This seems to suggest that within that circle the knowledge is tolerably complete. I think a more appropriate metaphor would be that of a cobweb. You know how the spider begins. He sketches a few threads between remote points, & then proceeds to connect these by cross threads, & so to work the whole up into a consistent web. But however many of these connecting links he may make, it is still a web & not a surface; the gaps can never be really filled up so as to leave no blank spaces between.

(Venn, “Science and Common Thought”, 3)

Venn not only found the notion of complete and absolutely certain knowledge absurd per se but also believed that it stood in the way of a clear view of what science is and how it is related to common thought. According to Venn, science grows out of, extends and improves ordinary thinking, from which it differs only qualitatively in terms of accuracy, generality and rigor. Hence, there is no categorical difference between the workman or artisan and the scientist, be it Newton or Darwin. All knowledge requires the relation of a subject to an object. Another precondition is that certain postulates are in place that turn the subject into a knowing subject and the world of objects into a knowable world. For Venn, these postulates are not found in the human mind, nor are they grounded on, or fully justified on the basis of, observation. Instead, they take the shape of conventions which define what the subject must be in order to know and what the world must be in order to be knowable. Taken together, Venn's solution to the second problem was the following. He first argued that to assume an epistemic position – whether scientific or non-scientific – means to abstract away from our living and acting in the world. He then pointed out that the difference between scientific and ordinary thinking has to do with their respective level of abstractness (how far removed from common life and direct observation are they?) and with the variety of, and their ability to investigate, the postulates that they need to assume. Thus, scientific and common thought exist on a continuum, albeit one that first needs to be constructed, so to speak. Once in place, it is possible to assign them their respective place.

One implication of Venn's rather idiosyncratic mix of conventionalism and idealism is the distinction between knowledge and action. In brief, whereas knowing is an epistemic and collective practice that is to be guided by rules for investigating what there is, our conduct is pragmatic, individual and concerned with beliefs about what should be. Consequently, in daily life, we mostly act on beliefs that have proven useful to believe rather than on beliefs for which there is evidence or on established norms. It may thus come as no surprise that Venn dismissed ethical systems such as Mill's utilitarianism and Kant's categorical imperative especially because they provided only ‘purely intellectual’ (Venn, Principles, 570) reasons for action. What Venn emphasized instead was the emotional, social and sympathetic instincts of individuals, from whose point of view actions should be judged.

2. The history of pragmatism and analytic philosophy at Cambridge, England revisited

Misak's story about Cambridge pragmatism is centred around the definition of pragmatists as philosophers committed to the idea that any domain of inquiry – science, logic, mathematics, ethics – is human inquiry and that any account of truth and knowledge must start with that fact. More specifically, Misak adds, at the core of pragmatism stand a dispositional account of belief and a view of the truth of beliefs in terms of their establishing beneficial habits for action. The story's main plot is that pragmatism was developed in the 1870s–80s in Cambridge, America and was imported in the 1920s into Cambridge, England. My point so far has been that, given Misak's definition, anticipations of pragmatism may be found in Cambridge, England in the period between the 1860s and 1880s, and more specifically in the work of Venn. Venn did not self-consciously identify as a pragmatist, of course, but his accounts of belief, truth and action arguably justify labelling his philosophical outlook as at least proto-pragmatist. If not pragmatist per se, the heavy pragmatic element in his work is unmistakable.

What is the significance of this point? Given the notoriety of the search for predecessors, it is not so much that Venn already roughly said what James and Peirce would say better and in much more detail. Rather, its significance lies, first of all, in the fact that it problematizes the idea of pragmatism as a uniquely American invention.¹¹ As a way of thinking and as a style of philosophizing, it existed in Britain before the work of Peirce and James was imported across the ocean. Venn developed it from the 1860s on, independently from Peirce and James. A fuller account of British and American pragmatism before 1900 will also have to explore another, closely related point concerning the transatlantic community of discourse: Venn's influence on Peirce – a rich topic only briefly touched upon in this paper – with whom he shared many key interests (logic, probability, scientific method, etc.) and Sidgwick's direct influence on James and Dewey.¹² We know, for instance, that some ten years before publishing his first papers on pragmatism, Peirce read Venn's work, for in 1867 he wrote his highly favourable review of Logic of Chance (see Peirce, “Venn's Logic of Chance”). James, for his part, included a reference to Venn's “Hulsean Lectures” in Principles of Psychology of 1890 and used Principles of Inductive Logic in his 1903–1904 course on metaphysics at Harvard (see James, The Principles of Psychology, 949n, 1401; James, Manuscript Lectures, 343).

The significance of Venn's pragmatic leanings also lies in its implication for the history of pragmatism, the history of British analytic philosophy and the view it offers of their connection. There is surprisingly little literature on Venn's mid-nineteenth-century generation of Cambridge philosophers, many of whom came to philosophy from mathematics, were involved in the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos and participated in the Grote Club, the informal precursor to the famous Moral Sciences Club.¹³ When mentioned together, Venn, Sidgwick, Marshall and others are commonly referred to as the old-fashioned empiricists to which the idealism of J.M.E. McTaggart, the young Bertrand Russell's main teacher, was a welcome antidote. What was common to their contributions to fields such as ethics, political economy and logic, however, was a rejection of Mill's strong empiricism and a search for an alternative that could take its place. Sidgwick, for one, acknowledged at one point that he was forced to “part company” (Sidgwick quoted in Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, 142) with Mill because Kant had convinced him that intuitions turn the scale. Importantly, due to both deeply ingrained sympathies and rational arguments, none of them ever thought of themselves as idealists. Hence, to claim that Cambridge philosophy in the period between the 1870s and early-1890s was idealist in much the same sense as Oxford Idealism or the Cambridge Idealism of McTaggart and W.R. Sorley, is misleading.¹⁴ At the same time, the fact that Venn, Sidgwick, Marshall and others, such as James Ward, distanced themselves from, and do not belong to, the philosophical movement known as British Idealism does not change that some of their alternatives to Mill were less empiricist than idealist, conventionalist and pragmatist. It is easy to find examples to this effect, many of which relate to Grote, to whom William Mander in British Idealism refers to as a pioneering forerunner of British Idealism (Mander, British Idealism, section 2.7.2). Sidgwick's criticism of Mill's utilitarianism was influenced by Grote, though the extent to which this is the case is unclear (cf. Gibbins, “John Grote” and Rothblatt, “Sitting Down”). Marshall, for his part, was keenly interested in and possibly even committed to a version of Hegelian idealism in his work on political economy (see Cook, Alfred Marshall's Economic Science, chapter 6; Groenewegen, “Marshall and Hegel”). His acquaintance with Hegel sprung from philosophical influences gained through the Grote Club. Next to the pragmatic element, Venn's Logic of Chance and Principles of Inductive Logic emphasized the “creative part of the process of induction” (Venn, LoC, 195) played by the human mind, a part forgotten by Mill and standing at the centre of Grote's Exploratio Philosophica. These and other examples are of course only starting points for a comprehensive account of Cambridge philosophy in the 1870s–1890s. What such a history is likely to make clear is that the received story of modern British philosophy at Cambridge as a passage from old-fashioned empiricism to Russell's and G.E. Moore's analytical philosophy via their revolt against (neo-Hegelian) idealism is too simple.¹⁵ Let me briefly point out three complicating factors. First of all, Grote's largely posthumously published work, including his “conversational, informal, italicized style” and “preference for the ‘language of ordinary men’”, has been referred to as “the first example of that Cambridge spirit […] which was to reach its culmination in the work of G.E. Moore” (Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 52–53n). Secondly, Sidgwick and Venn, to limit the point to these two men, are the intermediate figures: students and friends of Grote, readers of his work, fellow conversationalists, and the teachers of W.E. Johnson, J. Neville Keynes and G.E. Moore. Thirdly, though far less well known today than Mill, Sidgwick and Venn went beyond Mill in ways which influenced these and other early analytic philosophers. Put more strongly, their books and lectures formed the local background of the famous Cambridge School of Philosophy (Broad, “The Local Historical Background”). Venn, for one, established the self-consciously Cantabrigian traditions of probability theory and inductive logic – continued by John Maynard Keynes, W.E. Johnson and C.D. Broad – as well as symbolic logic – climaxed and eclipsed in Alfred N. Whitehead's and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica.

What the case of Venn shows is that his generation of philosophers also developed views which would have appealed to the Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein of the late-1920s. Put very generally, there was the idea that philosophical investigation had to start with the fact that all inquiry is, in the end, human inquiry. According to Misak, it is this insight that stands at the heart of pragmatism. As such, this may be said to be too vague to capture what is specific about pragmatism as compared to empiricism or positivism, for instance. Be that as it may, it is the same insight that essentially stands at the heart of Venn's philosophy and his take on topics ranging from truth and belief to inductive logic. Ramsey and Wittgenstein would definitely not have liked Venn's proto-pragmatic view of truth, which has a distinctively Jamesian ring to it (see Misak, Frank Ramsey, 144–145). Neither of them would have accepted anything even remotely resembling the notion that truth is what is beneficial to one's life. Other aspects of Venn's view of truth, however, would have been received more favourably, such as his search for a logical distinction between domains of science and religion and his rather demystifying account of what makes a belief true. What Ramsey and Wittgenstein would probably have found particularly compelling in Venn was the Peircean element in his work, which is most clearly recognizable in his view of belief. The following three features stand out, in this regard. Firstly, there is Venn's proposal to identify the content of a belief by the actions that manifest it. Secondly, there is the argument that belief is in part a habit that pays off in action. And, lastly, there is the notion that, once put in place with reference to the facts, a belief is to be honestly evaluated by seeing whether it ‘works’ – that is, whether it is a ‘good’ habit. All these key features of Venn's philosophy appeared, in different, stronger and more sophisticated terms, in Peirce and, many years later, in Ramsey, for instance in his “Truth and Probability”.

2.1 Concluding remarks: Remembering and forgetting in the history of Cambridge philosophy

One obvious question suggests itself at this point. If pragmatism, in rough form, could have been found in England, why did Cambridge philosophers only flirt with it when it was imported from America? The obvious answer is: timing. The late-1920s situation in Cambridge philosophy to which pragmatism was relevant was the result of three major events, the idealistic movement against British empiricism, the counter-movement from which arose the early analytic tradition and, after the interruption caused by the First World War, the subsequent phase of mopping up the problems that Principles of Mathematics, Principia Mathematica as well as the Tractatus left behind. For Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and several others at Cambridge who were thinking hard about such logical and mathematical topics as the theory of types and the axiom of reducibility, Venn's generation of philosophers would likely have appeared hopelessly outdated.¹⁶ Another factor involved here was that Russell, for one, had been taught by McTaggart to consider British empiricism, of which Venn and Sidgwick were presented as the last representatives, as ‘crude’ (Russell, Collected Papers, 10). Notwithstanding the striking theoretical similarities between Venn and Peirce, what seems to matter most, historically speaking, is that it was Peirce's work that was attuned to the current problems when it freshly arrived on the Cambridge scene in the late-1920s.

At the same time, however, there is an important sense in which Cambridge philosophers in the 1900s–1920s continued the Cambridge tradition of logic and empiricism. On the one hand, there were W.E. Johnson, John Maynard Keynes, C.D. Broad, R.B. Braithwaite and, somewhat later, Henrik von Wright, who actively read, discussed and engaged with Venn's work on foundations of logic, induction and probability theory. Keynes, especially, not only considered himself as standing in the tradition of “the High Intelligentsia of England” (Braithwaite, “Keynes”, 283) (which included Mill, Sidgwick and Marshall), but allegedly also made both Broad and Braithwaite as well as Wittgenstein and Ramsey “feel that philosophers were not isolated eccentrics but part of the living tradition of thought” (Braithwaite, “Keynes”, 284). On the other hand, in their celebrated revolt against idealism, Russell and Moore effectively returned Cambridge philosophy to its empiricist and logical course. It is even possible to see in their parting of ways – Moore going into the direction of common sense and ordinary language and Russell going toward science and formal logic – an echo of an unresolved tension central to Venn's work. Neither Russell nor Moore ever referred to Venn. Johnson, Keynes and Broad did, and they were fully aware that their work on probability and induction continued a typically Cambridge discussion. Their references, however, were very selective. Whereas Keynes discussed Venn's position in the Logic of Chance in detail in his Treatise on Probability, Johnson and Broad seem to have worked almost entirely from memory, whether from books read or lectures attended, referring to Venn by mention rather than by citation. Unavoidably, memorizing also entails scholarly forgetting, a process that is receiving more attention as of late. Why is something forgotten? And, more importantly, how is it forgotten? One case-study would be the 1920s–30s debate in Mind about the foundations of induction and probabilistic inference, which goes over ground, sometimes almost verbatim, well-trodden in the 1870s–80s debate between Venn, W.S. Jevons and others, partly in the very same journal.¹⁷ The present paper has attempted to show that pragmatism in Cambridge, England also counts as a case-study for processes of forgetting in the history of modern philosophy and, more specifically, of early analytic philosophy. What makes this case particularly fascinating is its suggestion of a connection between forgetting and irrelevance: was Venn's proto-pragmatism forgotten because it was deemed irrelevant or is it today believed to be irrelevant because it was forgotten, or both?

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Chris Stray and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to James Cox at Gonville and Caius College Archives, Cambridge.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) (#275-20-066) and a Grattan-Guinness Archival Research Travel Grant.

Notes

1 The story has been told in work on early analytic philosophy (Skorupski, English Language Philosophy) – also in its relation to phenomenology (Baghramian and Marchetti, Pragmatism and the European Traditions) – Russell (Vuillemin, Leçons sur la premiere philosophie), Moore (Baldwin, G.E. Moore), Peirce (Hookway, Peirce), Ramsey (Mellor, Prospects for Pragmatism) and Wittgenstein (Boncompagni, Wittgenstein and Pragmatism).

2 This new picture has been further enriched with reflections on the reception of pragmatism among the members of the First Vienna Circle. See Pihlström, Stadler and Weidtmann, Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism.

3 See Misak, The American Pragmatists, 28, 113; Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism, 48, 141. Peirce wrote that Kant was “nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist” in Peirce, “Issues of Pragmaticism”.

4 The phrase appears as the sub-title of James' 1907 book Pragmatism.

5 For an account of Venn's frequency theory of probability see, for instance, Verburgt, “John Venn's hypothetical infinite frequentism”.

6 See Peirce, “Venn's Logic of Chance” and Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances”. Peirce formulated a frequency account of probability in his 1866 “Lowell Lecture”, before reading Venn's Logic of Chance. See Peirce, “Lowell Lectures of 1866. Lecture III”. However, as he himself wrote in his 1878 paper: “The conception of probability here set forth is substantially that first developed by Mr. Venn, in his Logic of Chance” (Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances”, 147).

7 For a discussion of the relation between Venn's and Peirce's views on single case probabilities see Levi, “Induction according to Peirce”.

8 Peirce, Illustrations of the Logic of Science, 117; Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry, 109. See also Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances”, 283–284, and, for instance, Levi, “Inference and Logic according to Peirce”.

9 For an account of (criticism of) Pascal's wager see Jordan, Pascal's Wager. For James's criticism of Pascal's wager and his alternative wager see Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith, chapter 2.

10 For instance, James argued in The Will to Believe that scientific investigations and matters of practical life require different standards of justification. Building on and criticizing James' account, Peirce sketches his views on the relation between science and everyday life in his 1898 lecture “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life”. See Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, lecture 1.

11 Misak, in her The American Pragmatists, may be said to retread the old cultural nationalist view of pragmatism, for instance trying to claim Cadwallader Colden as a precursor rather than more obvious cases like Venn.

12 For the connection between Sidgwick and James and Dewey see Kloppenberg, “Rethinking tradition”. It may here be remarked that Venn figured frequently in Dewey's early works. See, for instance, J. Dewey, The Early Works, 75–79.

13 There are valuable exceptions which provide a contextualization of their main protagonist, such as Cook, Alfred Marshall's Economic Science and Deane, J. Neville Keynes.

14 See the 1974–1975 debate between C.J. Dewey (“Cambridge Idealism”) and Stefan Collini (“Idealism”) on Cambridge Idealism in The Historical Journal.

15 A sophisticated version of part of this story, focused on Russell, is found in Griffin, Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship.

16 On the history of early analytic philosophy see, for instance, the contributions to Beaney, History of Analytic Philosophy.

17 The comparison has yet to be made. Laudan, “A Note”, provides an interesting starting point.