![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
Susan Stebbing is often portrayed as indebted to G. E. Moore for her ideas concerning the relationship between common sense and philosophy and about analysis. By focusing mostly on her article “The method of analysis in metaphysics”, this article argues that, in fact, Stebbing anticipated some of Moore’s ideas in “Proof of an external world”, and even ideas in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. It further argues that Stebbing cast an original light on the method of analysis, while at the same time being much more aware of its limitations than Moore in “A defence of common sense”. In fact, her reservations anticipated some of Wittgenstein’s criticisms, in Philosophical Investigations, of his earlier logical atomism. It is concluded that Stebbing’s paper is a treasure trove of seminal ideas both in metaphysics and in epistemology, the full significance of which is better appreciated by reading it in connection with the work of these founding fathers of analytic philosophy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous referees and Sandra Lapointe, Alexander Klein, and the audience at a seminar I held at McMaster University in November 2020 for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this paper. I owe special thanks to Louis Doulas for the very stimulating conversations on Stebbing, Moore and common sense, as well as for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes
1 Chapman, Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense, 33–34. Stebbing was the first woman Professor of Philosophy in Britain (since 1933), at a time when Cambridge was still refusing to allow women even to graduate. For the same reason, together with the fact that Wittgenstein applied for the position, Stebbing was not considered for the Chair left vacant after Moore’s retirement at Trinity College, Cambridge (Chapman, Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense, 126–127). She was President of the Aristotelian Society for 1933–34 and President of the Mind Association for 1934–35, and a co-founder of the journal Analysis in 1933.
2 Ayer, Part of My Life, 157–158 describes her as “very much a disciple of Moore”. Beaney, “Susan Stebbing and the Early Reception”, 240 comments: “Stebbing was far too independent a thinker to be described as a ‘disciple’ of Moore, although she was undoubtedly influenced by him”.
3 See Coliva, Moore and Wittgenstein, chapter 1; “Scepticism and Knowledge”; “Moore and Mooreanism”, “What Do Philosophers Do?”.
4 For the point of this mathematical analogy, see Coliva, “Are There Mathematical Hinges?”.
5 The former structure would be instantiated by a proof aimed at proving ‘I have hands’ starting with my current sensory experience. The latter structure would be exemplified by a proof, like Moore’s, that, starting with commonsensical beliefs, aimed at deriving a justification for ‘There is an external world’, which needs, in fact, to be presupposed in order to have a justification for its premises.
6 For a discussion, see Coliva, Moore and Wittgenstein, chapter 4.
7 Stebbing was also familiar with the pragmatist rejection of Cartesian global scepticism and might have drawn inspiration from that for her criticism of it. Thanks to Alexander Klein for drawing my attention to this point.
8 For a discussion of Wittgenstein’s anti-sceptical strategies, see Coliva, Moore and Wittgenstein, chapter 3.
9 For general sociological reasons as to why women philosophers are often disregarded, see Hagengruber, “Cutting Through the Veil of Ignorance” and Hutton, “Women, Philosophy and the History of Philosophy”.
10 The term ‘reductive’ is misleading because Stebbing does not want to reduce physical objects – e.g. tables and chairs – to constructions out of more elementary elements, such as sense data or even the basic constituents of matter identified by physics.
11 This was Stebbing’s, “Logical Positivism and analysis” preferred terminology.
12 If it is merely formal. Principia Mathematica is not, according to Stebbing (MAM, 90–91). Compare Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna analysis”, 339–340 for an elucidation of postulational analysis (which, following Bentham and Wisdom, he dubs “paraphrastic”).
13 Stebbing lists Wittgenstein in the main text, but then adds a cautionary footnote. For Wittgenstein’s atomism in TLP is driven by the goal of determining the conditions of possibility of meaning. Stebbing is critical of transcendental aims and of assigning language a pre-eminent role in metaphysics. For her, words mean what they mean, and metaphysics should determine what facts, if any, make our true beliefs true. Ultimately, Wittgenstein was considered by Stebbing to be at crossroads between Vienna and Cambridge analysis. On the differences between Vienna and Cambridge analysis, see Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna analysis”.
14 A common illustration of directional analysis is the analysis of committees into the individuals that compose them (Stebbing, “Directional Analysis and Basic Facts”, 34–35), where we go from a complex group entity to a set of less complex entities like individuals. As Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis”, 348 rightly notices, however, no general criterion is given about how to demarcate different levels. Yet, this is no more than an illustration, since facts about individuals are not ultimate. Directional analysis is not just ‘new level’ analysis. Rather, as Stebbing points out in MAM, it is that kind of new level analysis that bottoms out in basic facts – that is, in facts that cannot be further analysed.
15 Martin, “Moore’s Dilemma”.
16 Stebbing (“Logical Positivism and Analysis”, 78) writes: “Perceiving, I should contend, is neither direct nor inferential. To suppose that these alternatives are exhaustive is a prime mistake of Logical Positivism. Perceiving is certainly indirect; but it is a non-inferential, indirect knowing”. By perceiving a pen indirectly, since the direct object of perception is a sense datum, we nevertheless know, and know non-inferentially, that there is a pen in front of us. Arguably, for this idea to have some prospects of success, the sense datum should be considered identical to the part of the object perceived.
17 While both Moore and Stebbing were not interested in linguistic analysis (even though Moore’s terminology often obscured this point), it is quite difficult to attribute to Moore the view that, like Stebbing, he was interested in analysing facts. For he never claimed that analysis should be the analysis of true propositions, and he did not clarify what the constituents of propositions were in his view. For a contrary interpretation, see Milkov, “Susan Stebbing’s Criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”. The attribution to Moore (and Wittgenstein) was, in fact, made by Wisdom and it is Wisdom, Logical Constructions, I: 195 himself that can be first credited with the idea that analysis should reveal the structure of facts. While in MAM Stebbing follows Wisdom in attributing this view to Moore, she later rejects that attribution (MI: 528). Obviously, the attribution to Moore is moot. We will return to this issue in §3. Black, “Philosophical Analysis” criticizes Stebbing’s idea that the analysis should reveal the structure of facts. He thinks that the analysis can only reveal the underlying logical structure of propositions. Concerning Black’s criticism of Stebbing, see Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis”, §3).
18 I am indebted to Sandra Lapointe for this incisive formulation.
19 Chapman, Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense, 72 too notices this ambiguity between talk of analysing facts and analysing propositions in MAM.
20 Stebbing also distinguishes between referring to Keynes, in this case, and being acquainted with him, and holds that reference does not presuppose acquaintance.
21 For a critical appraisal of this first step, see Beaney, “Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis”, 340–341).
22 This anticipates the objection made by Strawson against Carnap’s explicationism, and nowadays customarily raised against conceptual engineering projects, that they entail a change in topic.
23 In “Some Puzzles About Analysis”, 72, SPA, see also MI, 527 Stebbing states:
I tried to show [in MAM] that this metaphysical use of the method of analysis rested upon certain assumptions which, so far as I knew, had not been explicitly stated. … I tried further to show that, once the assumptions were explicitly stated, they did not seem very plausible. It appears that I entirely failed to make this contention clear, for several writers have subsequently taken me to have been defending the use of the method of analysis in metaphysics.
24 I, therefore, concur with Chapman, Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense, 70–71, 93, see also Beaney and Chapman, “Susan Stebbing”, §3 who points out how Stebbing is not endorsing metaphysical analysis, but is adopting “it as a hypothetical possibility, in order to establish what would follow from it” and to clarify “the assumptions on which it rests and the principles by which it must proceed”.
25 Based on this, Milkov, “Susan Stebbing’s Criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”, 358 claims that Stebbing (and Moore) were thereby denying the analytic/synthetic distinction well before Quine’s rejection of it. This is not the place for an assessment of that contention. Notice, however, that Stebbing was ultimately critical of directional analysis. Thus, it is doubtful that she thought of it as the correct methodology to adopt in philosophy.
26 For a discussion of Wittgenstein’s rejection of his earlier atomism, see Coliva, “Wittgenstein's critique of logical atomism in the Philosophical Investigations”.
27 Milkov, “Susan Stebbing’s Criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”, 355, in contrast, claims that Stebbing and Moore conceived of the problem of the external world as an epistemological problem. This is explicitly denied by Moore, “A Reply to My Critics” and runs contrary to the ‘metaphysics first’ approach that Stebbing explores at length in MAM.
28 In his reply to Stebbing, Moore, “A Reply to My Critics”, 677 wrote: “I do not at all like her proposal … to call the kind of knowledge I have now that I am sitting at a chair ‘probable knowledge.’ I hold that it is certain that I am now sitting at a chair, and to say that I have ‘probable knowledge’ that I am, seems to me to suggest that it is not certain”. Moore might have been right in objecting to the label ‘probable knowledge’, which suggests that knowledge of truisms is not certain; yet Stebbing was right in claiming that such knowledge cannot be deduced from knowledge of propositions regarding sense data.
29 The main precedent of which was Wisdom, Logical Constructions, rather than Moore. see also fn. 17. Yet, Wisdom credits Stebbing, and MAM appeared while the publication of Wisdom, Logical Constructions was in progress.
30 Coliva, Moore and Wittgenstein, 4–5.