![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Margaret MacDonald (1907–56) was a central figure in the history of early analytic philosophy in Britain due to both her editorial work as well as her own writings. While her later work on aesthetics and political philosophy has recently received attention, her early writings in the 1930s present a coherent and, for its time, strikingly original blend of common-sense and scientific philosophy. In these papers, MacDonald tackles the central problems of philosophy of her day: verification, the problem of induction, and the relationship between philosophical and scientific method. MacDonald’s philosophy of science starts from the principle that we should carefully analyse the elements of scientific practice (particularly its temporal features) and the ways that scientists describe that practice. That is, she applies the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to actual scientific language. MacDonald shows how ‘scientific common-sense’ is inconsistent with both of the dominant schools of philosophy of her day. Bringing MacDonald back into the story of analytic philosophy corrects the impression that in early analytic philosophy, there are fundamental dichotomies between the style of Moore and Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and the Vienna Circle on the other.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul Franco, Jeff Kaplan, Richard Lawrence, and Ana María Mora-Márquez for detailed comments on earlier drafts, as well as Michael Kremer for sharing his work on MacDonald and correcting a number of errors in section 5. I would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Notes
1 According to Waithe, A History, MacDonald was, along with C.A. Mace, Gilbert Ryle and Susan Stebbing, a ‘co-founder’ of Analysis. Her name, however, does not appear on early mastheads (which only list the editor Arthur Duncan-Jones, Stebbing, Mace, and Ryle), nor is it mentioned in MacDonald’s own history of the journal (MacDonald, Philosophy and Analysis), nor in the notice of her death (Saw, “Dr. Margaret MacDonald”). I could not determine precisely her involvement in the journal before World War II.
2 The fullest discussion of her life and work is now Kremer, “Margaret MacDonald”, superseding Addis, “Margaret MacDonald”, 601–605.
3 Elsewhere MacDonald frequently commits herself to the empirical verifiability of all meaningful propositions. She wields it against McTaggart's theory of the self (MacDonald, “Russell and McTaggart”). She argues for the senselessness of hylomorphism by arguing “it would be logically impossible to verify” it (MacDonald, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”, 299). Finally, she argues against Engels' claim that all things are really processes (and its contradictory held by ‘substratum theorists’), concluding that the claim is “non-significant” because it is “not resolvable by more empirical observation” (MacDonald, “Things and Processes”, 8).
4 Stebbing, Logical Positivism and Analysis quotes many of the same passages from Americans as MacDonald, and as Stebbing's dissertation concerned the American pragmatists, it is likely that she is MacDonald's source.
5 She cites Schlick, “Form and Content”. Stebbing, Logical Positivism and Analysis explicitly relies on MacDonald’s verbatim report of these lectures.
6 Compare Wittgenstein's own statement of the principle of verificationism in McGuinness, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, 47 ff, 97 ff, 243 ff. The same ideas can still be found in his Cambridge lectures, e.g., Ambrose, Wittgenstein's Lectures, 19.
7 See Misak, Verificationism, for verificationism in the pragmatist tradition.
8 Stebbing, Logical Positivism and Analysis and Stebbing, Russell, and Heath, “Communication and Verification” also focus on examples concerning the past, but use them to argue for the stronger claim that there are meaningful propositions which are unverifiable in the sense that is of interest to the positivists.
9 Stebbing (“Communication and Verification”, 170) makes a related distinction in her discussion of verificationism between “(1) establishing a certain proposition as true, (2) understanding what difference its truth or falsity would make, (3) knowing the evidence upon which my belief in its truth or falsity is based”. While the third item in both lists is the same, the first and second go in different directions.
10 This connects to Roman Ingarden's 1936 objection to verificationism that, in order to know how to verify a claim, one must already know what it means, so that the verificationist has switched what is posterior (verification) with what is prior (meaning) (See Pelletier and Linsky, “Verification”). While MacDonald would not object to this, her argument is rather broader. First, she objects to the identification of the meaning with the means of verification, not with the idea that one is prior to the other. Thus, even if the verificationist scrapped talk of priority and simply held onto the biconditional that X is the meaning of p iff X is the way to verify whether p, then MacDonald’s argument would still stand. Second, Ingarden’s objection only distinguishes two things, which correspond roughly to 1 and 3 in MacDonald’s list, while MacDonald also distinguishes what determines the truth value of a proposition.
11 A version of this view remains in the literature on formal learning theory, on which only infinite inductive rules are ever justified. See, e.g., Kelly, The Logic of Reliable Inquiry.
12 For example, see Wittgenstein, Big Typescript, 22 ff, or Ambrose Wittgenstein's Lectures, 92.
13 It seems likely that MacDonald's interest in hypotheses was in some way derived from Wittgenstein, who devoted a significant amount of energy to understanding them from his discussions with the Vienna Circle through most of the 1930s. See McGuinness, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, 99, 255 ff, Wittgenstein, Philosophische Bemerkungen, 282–285, Big Typescript, 117–122, Ambrose, Wittgenstein's Lectures, 78. However, his position differs from hers in significant ways, which are extremely relevant for MacDonald's discussion of induction. In particular, according to Wittgenstein, a hypothesis is not a proposition (Satz), but rather a law for the construction of propositions (Gesetz zur Bildung von Sätzen). In this respect, he seems to be more or less closely following Ramsey (Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place, 71), and thus subject to the same criticism.
14 Her conclusion, although not the argument for it, is close to Ramsey, “Truth and Probability” and Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, who also take induction to be a fundamental mode of inference.
15 She opposes McTaggart to Russell and “his followers” whom she names as Wisdom, Stebbing, Ayer, all of whom practice “analytic philosophy” on 322–323 and then later calls McTaggart's opponents “the logical positivists”, whom she refers to in the first-person plural “We” (326). Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Carnap, and “other writings of the Vienna School” are freely used to explain and defend ideas that were attributed to Russell earlier in the paper. So it seems at the very least for the purposes of comparison with McTaggart, that MacDonald does not see a fundamental divide between the Cambridge and Vienna strands of what has come to be known as ‘early analytic philosophy’.
16 Her discussion of ancient and early modern philosophers is relatively minimal, but this is not surprising given the topics of interest to her. Aristotle and Descartes receive a fair amount of discussion in “The Philosopher's Use of Analogy”. Hume is briefly discussed in “Induction and Hypothesis”.
17 In this way, her criticism of the Vienna Circle has some affinities with those of Reichenbach, “Logistic Empiricism in Germany”. I have seen no clear indication that either was aware of the other. Moreover, MacDonald's focus on the language used by scientists has no clear parallels with Reichenbach.
18 For Wittgenstein on ‘ordinary language’, see e.g., McGuinness, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, 45; Ambrose, Wittgenstein's Lectures, 102.
19 In “Things and Processes” and “Review”, MacDonald alludes to her agreement with the criticism of Eddington in Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists.
20 MacDonald often treats pragmatists and positivists together, even though they arose in very different circumstances and had distinct developments. From her early work on verificationism, for example, she treats the positivist and pragmatists as having essentially the same view and argues in MacDonald, “Language and Reference” that Carnap's attempt to give a formal description of language is compatible with Peirce's theory of signs. For connections between American pragmatists and early analytic philosophers in Europe, see Misak, “Influence of Pragmatism on the Vienna Circle”.
21 It is interesting to note in this connection that Stebbing herself has been characterized as falling between these two traditions by Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 173 ff.
22 Reeves, “Theory of Descriptions” and Stebbing, Russell, and Heath, “Communication and Verification”.
23 MacIver (“Some Questions”), although he only uses it for a reference to Moore’s lectures and Will (“Problem of Induction”).
24 Bergmann (“Two Types”), Donagan (“Recent Criticisms”), Emmet (“The Use of Analogy”), Smart (“Descartes and the Wax”), and Stebbing (“Some Puzzles”).
25 Taube (“Positivism, Science, and History”).
26 This was originally printed as her contribution to the Aristotelian Society Symposium Hannay, Holloway, and MacDonald, “Criticism of the Arts”.
27 As O’Neill correctly notes, this argument does not completely explain why early modern women philosophers have so entirely disappeared, which she argues is due to the aftermath of the French Revolution (“Disappearing Ink”, 37 ff). I omit discussion of it here only because it is the first mentioned argument that seems to explain MacDonald’s disappearance best.
28 Chapman, Susan Stebbing (especially 38–40, 79–80) clearly documents the challenges faced by MacDonald's supervisor in gaining a permanent position.
29 See Kremer (“Margaret MacDonald”) for a striking comparison between MacDonald's and Ryle's professional academic careers.
30 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Anderson, “Epistemic Injustice”.
31 MacDonald (“Language and Reference”; “Reply”; “Further Reply”), MacIver (“Token, Type and Meaning”; “Rejoinder”; “Last Words”).
32 See Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 69 ff for a similar dynamic with Stebbing and John Wisdom.
33 See, e.g., Chang, “The Philosophical Grammar of Scientific Practice”.
34 On her influence on Ryle, see Kremer, “Margaret MacDonald”.