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Bertrand Russell & Common Sense for
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Bertrand Russell & Common Sense for Savages
Stephen Leach considers what Bertrand Russell thought about common sense & reality – and how the one does not necessarily show you the other.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believed that reality is knowable, but ordinary language is apt to deceive us as to its nature. For example, an assertion about ‘the present king of France’ is understandable, but ‘the present king of France’ does not denote an entity in the real world, and so anything said about ‘him’ that implies his existence will be false. Misleading assertions such as these are likely to entangle the unwary philosopher; but, Russell believed, an ideal language, discovered through careful logical analysis and rigorously applied, would prevent us from being deceived.
At the turn of the twentieth century he set out to formulate this ideal language, at the same time attempting to demonstrate that mathematics is reducible to logic and that both mathematics and logic refer to real entities. Although Russell’s ultimate ambition was never achieved – reality, logic, and mathematics remain separated – he made enormous contributions to the study of logic along the way, and also came some way towards his ideal language, by helping to develop predicate logic. Moreover, on the way, Russell helped inspire a new way of doing philosophy. He is one of the Founding Fathers of the analytic tradition, one of the main characteristics of which, to this day, is an awareness of the deceptiveness of language. There is a determination in the analytic tradition to be clear and unambiguous – a determination that some might argue is sometimes (or often) carried a bit too far. An essay written with determinedly unambiguous language does not always make for the easiest of reading. However, in Russell’s case, in both his technical writings on logic and in his more popular works, the clarity of his language is matched by the elegance of his expression.
Given his view of the misleading nature of ordinary language, one might expect Russell to have been extremely wary of common sense, which after all is invariably expressed in ordinary language. However that is not quite Russell’s view. In fact, as A.J. Ayer points out, a consistent characteristic of Russell’s career is that he looked for reasons for accepted beliefs: “In the course of his long career, Russell… has held quite a large variety of philosophical opinions… But the fact is that, while he has fairly often changed his views on points of detail, his approach to philosophy has been remarkably consistent. His aim has always been to find reasons for accepted beliefs, whether in the field of mathematics, natural or social science, or common sense” (Metaphysics and Common Sense, 1969, p.179). That is not to say that in metaphysics Russell regarded accepted beliefs as a criterion of truth. Far from it: he fully realised that accepted beliefs and conventional wisdom might simply reflect a contingent environment:
“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.”
(Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912, p.91)
Common sense may supply a starting point, but is not a criterion of truth.
However, in his journalism on social and political questions – which he sharply distinguished from his more technical philosophy – Russell was less critical: “I am prepared to admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense, in practice if not in theory” (Sceptical Essays, 1928, p.12). His journalism contains plenty of approving and unquestioning references to common sense – including Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959), in which Russell presents himself as the champion of common sense. In this respect, in his journalism Russell followed in the footsteps of Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776) accelerated the advent of American independence. What Paine with false modesty told his readers was common sense was not actually common sense until they read his pamphlet and were convinced it was. The same applies to Russell. He claimed to speak on behalf of common sense, but, in doing so, he was doing no more than attempting to prejudice his readers in his favour. It’s a rhetorical move which has been pervasive in political debate ever since the Enlightenment.
Russell portrait © Clinton Inman 2019. Facebook him at clinton.inman
However, this tolerance of common sense as at least providing the starting point of an investigation does not seem to chime with one of the most famous of Russell quotations: “Common sense is the metaphysics of savages.” Intrigued by this disparity, I have searched for the original source of this quotation. It seems to first occur not in Russell’s writings, but in a paraphrase of Russell’s views by the American theologian Douglas Clyde MacIntosh, in 1915.
MacIntosh was commenting on the views expressed in Russell’s book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). Two years earlier, in The Problems of Philosophy, Russell had argued that we infer the existence of the physical world from our sense experiences. That is to say, the existence of the physical world is accepted because it provides the best inferred explanation of our experiences. But in 1914, in Our Knowledge of the External World, Russell argues that objects are not inferred from but are actually constituted of actual and possible sense data. That is to say, he argued that physical objects are, in fact, no more than collections of actual and possible immediate sensory impressions. Russell’s earlier view was