Morgan grayce willow

MORGAN GRAYCE WILLOW

I.  BIOGRAPHY

The English philosopher L. Susan Stebbing was born December 2, 1885, the youngest of six children of barrister Alfred Charles Stebbing and Elizabeth Elstob in Wimbledon, near London. Since both her parents had died by the time she was sixteen, Stebbing was raised primarily by a guardian. As a child Stebbing suffered from an illness and was not expected to live. Her health continued to be a problem and as a conse-quence her education was discontinuous until 1906 when she went to Girton College, Cambridge.

Even at Girton Stebbing’s health affected her course of study, for though she had hoped to read classics, it was felt that doing so would involve too much physical strain. She was directed instead into history and completed her exams in 1907. During her last term at Girton, however, she chanced to read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Thoroughly taken by it, Stebbing decided to stay on to read moral sciences under the direction of W. E. Johnson and completed the exams in one year though she was still unable to attend many lectures.

In 1912 Stebbing received her M.A. from the University of London. Her thesis entitled Pragmatism and French Voluntarism was subsequently published in the Girton College Studies series. She lectured at King’s College, London, from 1913 to 1915 when she, along with her sister Helen Stebbing, Hilda Gavin, a Girton friend, and Vivian Shepherd, took over the Kingsley Lodge school for girls in Hampstead. There she taught history and involved herself in the direction of the school which was to grow into a large and flourishing institution. Meanwhile, also in 1915, she became a part-time Lecturer at Bedford College, University of London. She advanced to full-time Lecturer there in 1920, Reader in 1927, and Professor in 1933.1

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 125-155. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Margaret Macdonald, who wrote on Stebbing for the Dictionary of National Biography remarked that she “was no philosophical recluse.”2 In addition to her teaching duties at Bedford, Stebbing lectured widely, both in philosophy at other colleges and universities, and on behalf of the League of Nations Union after the First World War. She was an active participant in the Aristotelian Society where she exchanged views with Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and A. N. Whitehead; she contributed numerous papers to the Society’s Proceedings and in 1933 was elected its president. Also active in the Mind Association, Stebbing was elected president in 1935.

Though not an originator in formal logic, Stebbing proved herself an able exponent of the dramatic developments in the subject happening during the first third of this century. In A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930) she made a unique contribution by her clear presentation in a single volume of an exposition of the logical theories of the early twen-tieth century along with a careful account of the metaphysical difficulties dispelled or clarified by these developments. Her book has been cited as the first work on modern logic to comprehensively introduce both formalism and its related philosophical problems. John Wisdom adds to this that the book’s value is greatly enhanced by its extensive and detailed examples.3

In 1931 Stebbing held a visiting professorship at Columbia University in New York. R Magg, who attended her lectures in logic there, recalls that she was met with enthusiasm and that her lectures were characterized by a lively discussion prompted mainly by Stebbing’s active encouragement of diverse views. Reflecting that the time of her visit was one of crisis on the European scene, Magg makes a special point of Stebbing’s insistence that logic is purposive and useful:

Logic had been to us a field in which we were supposed to be objec-tive, rational, neutral, scientific and even aloof from the affairs of the world.... But here we found a different kind of logician... who made it clear that reason and logic, mind and science, had important services to perform in the very problems of the relation of society to man, of man to society.4

These ideas she later expounded in Logic in Practice (1934) and Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) where she emphasized the importance of rationality, clarity, and knowledge in the conduct of human affairs. These works demonstrate, through the use of numerous examples 

of emotional persuasion, the effects of errors in reasoning. With these books she extends her influence beyond purely academic philosophical issues.

Stebbing’s interests stretched outside the metaphysical questions posed by logic and into areas of inquiry introduced by developments in the foundations of science. In Philosophy and the Physicists (1937) she takes Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington to task for the obscurantism and mystification embedded in their popularizations of early twentieth century scientific developments. They both argue, she suggests, that modern physics shows the world to be a very different sort of place than it indeed seems to be, both physically and metaphysically. Jeans and Eddington develop idealist views of physics to which Stebbing applies a careful rational criticism. Underpinning her attack of their arguments is an implicit faith that it is unnecessary to hide behind such intellectual smokescreens and that to engage in such evasions actually prevents the kind of appropriate adjustment to changes in the human situation that the careful use of reason and knowledge would otherwise enable.5

Stebbing elaborates her view that reason can, if properly used, go a long way toward delivering humans from evil and the conditions resulting from it in Ideals and Illusions (1941). Written during the Second World War (indeed, bearing the imprint of the British Book Production War Economy Standard), this work stresses the importance of clear thought,

i.  e. thought free from unnecessary and obfuscating abstractions, about ethical principles in the lives of nations as well as in the lives of individuals. Feeling that both of these are threatened by fascism and by the thinking that has led up to it, Stebbing urges that: “Amidst the ruins it is still possible to preach the ideal of freedom, truth, happiness, and love.”6

Stebbing’s final book, A Modem Elementary Logic (1943), is a logic text revised and condensed from the earlier logic book.

In his “Appreciation” John Wisdom mentions that at Stebbing’s lectures “a stiffish breeze was usually blowing.” Though her students had to withstand the very “sharp rays” of her criticism, he notes that it was not applied without kindness and patience. He suggests the character of L. Susan Stebbing in another way when he comments that:

I always wished that she would write a book, or at least a paper,

free from the pressure of other duties or any promise to have it done

by a certain time. But no - there was always something, if not a 

committee meeting then a taxi for Ireland, and with a suitcase in her hand and a hat a trifle insecure upon her head she would be gone.7

II. PHILOSOPHY

1. Pragmatism and French Voluntarism

Stebbing’s dominant concern reveals itself as early as 1914 with the publication of her master’s thesis Pragmatism and French Voluntarism.8 In this volume she sets herself the task of examining the “fashion,” as she calls it, of two separate movements in philosophy that, through disparate methods and opposed conclusions, both depreciate the value and efficacy of reason. In addressing this problem she takes on the French Voluntarists, most especially Bergsonian Intuitionists, and the Pragmatists. The problem, she maintains, lies finally in the inability of either group to give a satisfactory account of truth, a problem which leads both to resort to non-intellectual methods of solving metaphysical problems. In contrast, Stebbing wishes to maintain that only “by the complete working out of the demands of intellect can we obtain knowl-edge that is at once complete and rational, hence truly knowledge” (PFV, p. vi).

In opening her discussion Stebbing attributes the wave of unpopularity of reason in her age to the prevailing spirit of democracy in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of this upon philosophy was, she claims, to call philosophy out of the “closet” and to bring it to the “plain man.” Stebbing felt it unfortunate that the charge against philosophy, namely that it had become too complicated for the plain man, was not restricted to a critique of the discipline’s technical terminology. Instead, the criticism had become “a plea for the recognition of other attitudes towards the Universe than that of regarding it as a ‘problem- to-be-solved’ ” (PFV, p. 2). Since, it was claimed, intellect alone could not satisfy the philosopher as a person, one’s entire emotional reaction had to be taken into account. Consequently new stress was laid on the active, volitional side of the human. This led to a second tendency: a revolt against the mechanical model of the universe which in turn spawned the admission of contingency into physical science. From these tendencies came French Voluntarism which adhered to a radical contingency and claimed the need for a higher form of perception than 

intellect to give direct contact with reality. Similarly, Pragmatism grew from the desire to bring philosophy into the daily arena and to place knowledge in a position of lesser value than action, thus making intellect a means to the satisfaction of human needs. Though, she argues, the two schools of thought share these origins, they are nonetheless diametrically and fundamentally opposed.

Stebbing traces French Voluntarism from its founder Maine de Biran through Ravaisson and Boutroux. She concentrates in the main, however, on Henri Bergson whose profound originality emerged, she says, from the earlier Voluntarists in much the same way that “the slow slipping of the loosened surface beneath a tilted rock causes it to rush down into the valley below if but a single stone be removed, so the slow accumulation of ideas results in the gradual formation of a new way of looking at the whole and transforms it suddenly and completely” (PFV, p. 36). Unlike James and other pragmatists who begin by considering the nature of truth, Bergson, she explains, does not directly address the question. The theory of life that he proposes involves a view of knowl-edge that to Stebbing seems peculiar. Reacting to the view of reality that contradiction is inherent in change, Bergson insisted to the contrary that what we apprehend is that which does not change, i.e. duration. We fall into contradiction because, though reality is a continuous flux, we apprehend only its spatial representation. We misrepresent the real because intellect has a purely practical function, that is, it has evolved in the interests of action. Consequently, we need something else in addition to intellect, namely the intuition, in order to apprehend the real.

Stebbing holds that Bergson comes to view intellect and intuition as opposed. There are for him two ways of knowing, that of the intellect which forms concepts and that of intuition, a sympathetic insight wherein the distinction between the knower and the known is lessened. Intellect is specially adapted to deal with matter while intuition is adapted to deal with life. “The conclusion that M. Bergson draws is that the philosopher must free himself from the tyranny of practical needs since, under their sway, he can only think matter, the inverse of the living reality...” (PFV, p. 47). Bergson, then, she goes on, embraces anti-intellec- tualism on the grounds that intellect is one-sided because it is tied to the service of practical needs. After linking Bergson with other proponents of French Voluntarism, Stebbing concludes her examination of them with the summary remark that “So far from agreeing with the pragmatist in the identification of the true and the useful, the exponents of the 

New Philosophy go to the other extreme and utterly divorce the useful from the true” (.PFV, p. 73).

The anti-intellectualism of the pragmatists is rather different from that of the Bergsonians. Stebbing reviews the work of Charles Renouvier by way of building a bridge from the pragmatists to Kant. Though not himself properly considered a pragmatist, the part Kant assigns to will in establishing truth opens, in her view, an avenue for the pragmatists in developing their own criterion of truth. Renouvier finds the existence of possible doubt in all judgments in the liberty of will. Since, he argues, error and truth are distinguished one from the other, and since free decision is possible, then doubt is also possible. To will to affirm a judgment becomes, according to Renouvier, the only escape from scepticism (PFV, p. 102). Stebbing responds:

It may be granted that we cannot set out from the circle of doubt without the aid of will, and that consequently will is an element in all affirmation. But this does not involve the conclusion that will makes truth. We will that, and not what, the judgment may be. Hence what is true is independent of our willing, though that it is true may result from our action. (PFV, p. 102)

She concludes that his attempt to raise the status of belief to a level equivalent with that attributed to knowledge ends by degrading knowl-edge to the level of belief.

Tracing Pragmatism further to Kant’s method of postulation, Stebbing asserts that the pragmatists overlooked the limitations Kant imposed on postulation. “Kant’s much quoted phrase - T must therefore abolish knowledge to make room for belief’ - makes a distinction between knowledge and belief that is wholly obliterated in Pragmatism” (PFV, p. 104). He is willing to admit postulation in instances where knowledge fails, but he assigns to postulates only the level of belief.

After examining the relations between Renouvier’s theory of certainty and Kant’s method of postulation, Stebbing turns her attention to the pragmatists. She claims that the pragmatists adopted the method of postulation for two reasons: first, in order to clarify human thought as purposive and thus to recognize the emotional and volitional aspects of humans; and, second, because they wished to carry the experimental method of science into metaphysics. In doing the latter, she asserts, the pragmatist transforms the hypothesis of science into the postulate of metaphysics. “The postulate will be proved by the way it ‘works,’ and its truth will be simply its utility” (PFV, p. 112). 

In summing up her comparison of these two philosophical camps, Stebbing points out that Bergson and the Voluntarists condemn the intel-lect because it is pragmatic while the pragmatists reverse that and repudiate any view of the intellect that denies its pragmatic nature. Her own view of the relation of utility and truth is that what is true is useful because it is true and not the other way around. “The pragmatist first identifies truth with its consequences, then selects one of these, viz. utility, and substitutes one for the other. But the utility depends on the truth and not vice versa” (PFV, p. 140). They have confused a criterion of truth, i.e. utility, with its nature. Meanwhile, she asserts, the Bergsonian Intuitionists have gone the reverse route and claimed that the nature of truth is its own criterion by identifying truth with reality. She insists, on the other hand, that the two issues be treated separately as far as this is possible and, further, that one must address first the question of the nature of truth since it is logically prior to its own criterion (PFV, p. 157).

Stebbing expresses her own faith in reason and her sense of its role when she declares that “philosophy is essentially the affair of intellect.” In calling the Intuitionists to task for resorting to means of extra-rational solution to the problems the intellect has been unable to solve, she reasserts the place of reason:

The antinomies they are supposed to solve are antinomies of reason, hence must be solved by reason. An extra-rational solution cannot be made to meet the case but is merely a confession that the problem is insoluble. Thus the problem of truth remains an intellectual problem and the attempt to solve it “livingly” results in abandoning the quest of truth as such and in substituting for it a conception of life which ignores the interest that gave rise to it. It is then the work of intellect to solve the problems that intellect raises. (PFV, p. 162)

2. A Modem Introduction to Logic

With the publication of A Modern Introduction to Logic9 Stebbing established her reputation as a metaphysician equal to the questions posed by logic and the foundations of science. The book’s value lay not so much in its original developments in formal logic as in its clear exposition of various logical theories and in its lucid discussion of the metaphysical problems the new logical techniques raised.

Stebbing set out with this book to fill what she perceived as a major 

gap in the availability of textbooks in logic that addressed more than the traditional syllogistic logic of Aristotle. At a time when A. N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad, Stebbing’s own teachers to whom she pays due credit in her preface, were making significant and, Stebbing felt, interesting advances in symbolic logic, students preparing for exams at Cambridge were only being exposed to what she calls the “elaborate trivialities” of traditional developments of the syllogism. Stebbing identifies four categories into which books on logic fall: traditional, metaphysical, pragmatic, and mathematical. And though she places her book in the last category, she nonetheless feels that the student must be introduced to the traditional syllogism for reasons beyond the immediate need to pass exams (which, she claims, were still being designed to test “proficiency in technical dodges” rather than logical principles). For the syllogism, she insists, “is a form very often exemplified in our ordinary reasoning; moreover, it is psychologically the simplest form, so that syllogistic arguments provide the easiest means of enabling the student to apprehend form as such and to realize that the validity of reasoning depends upon its form” (MIL, xi-xii).

But that she wishes to go beyond that is very clear for she opens her preface with the remark, “The science of logic does not stand still” (MIL, ix). She wants to introduce the student and the general reader to the tremendous advances in logic that had occurred during the preceding half-century:

It has not been my intention to take the student very far into mathe-matical logic, but only to enable him to realize that the principles of symbolic logic are not peculiar to a special kind of study but are principles exemplified in everyday reflective thinking no less than in mathematical deductions. I have not sought to write an introduction to symbolic logic, my purpose has been to emphasize the connexion between Aristotelian logic and symbolic logic, and thus to write a text-book which will include as little as possible that the student has subsequently to unlearn, or for the teaching of which the modern logician feels it necessary to apologize. (MIL, ix)

Because it will be important in later work by Stebbing, we must take note of the fact that even in this text the intent of which is to bring mathematical logic to the attention of students and readers, Stebbing has twice already mentioned “ordinary reasoning” and “everyday reflec- 

tive thinking.” Convinced, as we have seen, of the value of reason, Stebbing is not inclined to restrict that faculty to Cambridge or Oxford dons, and even in this logic text she opens the book with a chapter entitled “Reflective Thinking in Ordinary Life.” She sketches a lively example of a idler at the beach who is suddenly roused from a leisurely reverie by shouts from people standing on a cliff overhead. He recognizes that their shouts have significance for him and looks about him only to discover that he is soon to be trapped by the incoming tide. One of the people points toward the cliff. The beach idler wonders whether there are footholds; he looks but finds none. But he does observe that there is a ledge in the direction the person on the cliff has been pointing, and he notes further that the discoloration of the rocks indicates the mark of high tide. He realizes that on that ledge he will be safe. Stebbing uses this situation to illustrate the contrast between unreflective and reflective thinking in ordinary experience (MIL, 1-3). With this example she drives home her point that all thinking is directed toward solving problems. Further, thinking is controlled by the conditions of the problem the process addresses, and its natural end is the solution of the problem. Thus Stebbing lays the groundwork for her introduction to symbolic logic and paves the way for the works she will write on the practical application of reason.

A Modem Introduction to Logic was met with acclaim and excitement. In a review for Philosophy L. J. Russell exclaimed “Here for the first time the general reader has an opportunity of studying recent developments of logical theory without being compelled to make his way through a mass of books and of articles scattered through the journals.”10 Nerlich of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967 edition, still considers it the best introduction for a reader to the metaphysical problems of logic. It must be noted that though Stebbing addressed the volume to the student and the general reader, she did not back away from meeting difficult metaphysical problems squarely. Another reviewer, Ross Thalheimer, comments that “The volume has, for an introduction to logic, a rather marked controversial character,”11 and is for this reason of special interest to both the professional logician and the non-professional reader.

The book is divided into three parts, the first of which is about deductive logic. In this section Stebbing deals with the analysis of propositions and concerns herself with the nature of symbols. She elucidates the more adequate analyses that modem developments in logic bring to the problems Aristotelian logic has attempted to address. In the second section Stebbing moves into a consideration of induction and the 

scientific method. She explores what is meant by the terms “science,” “cause,” “hypothesis,” and “theory” as well as how the experimental sciences seek causes. The final section includes supplementary chapters covering the theory of definition, abstraction and generalization, a dis-cussion of the characteristics of logical thinking, and finally a sketch of the historical development of logic.

C. A. Mace, who prepared a detailed review of the book for Mind,12 vouches for the “originality and coherence” of the overall plan of the book by highlighting its points of interest. He characterizes Stebbing’s Logic as both lively and fresh owing largely to its abundant presentation of examples drawn from genuine problems, and to the introduction of varied and abundant illustrations. Nonetheless, the work is not without, in Mace’s view, its points of controversy and significant contribution to the ongoing discussions among the Cambridge logicians. He notes, for example, that many readers will likely disagree with Stebbing on the subject of ambiguity (Mace, p. 355), and he notes her departure from Johnson on the distinction between simple and compound propositions as well as her identification of simple propositions with Bertrand Russell’s atomic propositions (Mace, p. 357). He commends her for treating, for the first time in a general logic text, topics such as general propositions, descriptions, and existence. He credits the section on induction and scientific inquiry for bringing together the recently made contributions to the subject by Johnson, J. N. Keynes, and C. D. Broad.

Mace does, however, challenge a distinction Stebbing makes between two kinds of belief upon which scientists depend. She calls these pos-tulates of scientific method and regulative principles. These last take the form of certain “demands that nature must conform to certain con-ditions” {MIL, p. 403). Mace counters:

A considerable amount of fresh air is let into the discussion of these regulative principles, but even so they remain somewhat mysterious. One is not perfectly satisfied of their bona fides, and of their right to associate with the dignified logical principles with which Miss Stebbing’s work is principally concerned. Must we really recognise demands - however insistent - that Nature must be so and so, whatever the evidence, or lack of evidence, may be? (Mace, p. 363)

He argues, rather, that propositions making the assertion that a given constitution of Nature makes induction possible may indeed assert a logical fact, but they do not place “demands” on nature. 

L. J. Russell claimed that Stebbing’s Modern Introduction to Logic had done for the Cambridge school and the works of Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, Broad, Johnson, and G. E. Moore what H. W. B. Joseph had done for Oxford thought in his Introduction to Logic (Russell, 110). Joseph, in fact, took advantage of the appearance of her book to launch an indirect attack on the Cambridge logicians. In a series of papers in Mind, Joseph's attack and Stebbing’s rejoinders debate such questions as the theory of descriptions, propositions and constituents, functions and variables, and implication, as well as the question “What is really ‘analysed’?”13 A detailed review of this dispute is beyond the scope of this introduction to Stebbing’s work, though readers interested in the development of symbolic logic may find it of interest. Suffice it to say here that the debate reveals the niche the book fills in the stream of developments taking place in logic during the early third of the century.

It is also of interest that, along with Ralph Eaton of Harvard University who wrote General Logic, An Introductory Survey,14 Stebbing - and indeed symbolic logic itself - came under attack from another quarter. The British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller in “The Sacrifice of Barbara”15 bemoaned the demise of Barbara, his pet name for traditional formal logic, who he claims “is falling a victim to fierce attacks, launched simultaneously from Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts” (MPD, p. 48). Schiller questions whether “Symbolic Logic is a real advance in logic, and is not rather a cruel, needless, and pernicious superstition of the Academic Grove” (MPD, p. 49). While accepting that symbolic logic is “a more perfectly formal form” of formal logic, Schiller questions what he sees as the fundamental abstraction of form from matter and the set of assumptions upon which symbolic logic is based (MPD, p. 51). Schiller criticizes proponents of symbolic logic for separating logic from empirical science and psychology, then challenges them to address the status of “truth” and “meaning” in their systems of formal logic. He asks:

Is it really possible to abstract the pure form of reasoning and to base a science on it? Is it really permissible to suppose, with Professor Stebbing... that by substituting symbols ‘precise, i.e. well-defined and therefore unambiguous,’ for words, the haunting wraith of ambi-guity can be laid for ever?... Is it really possible to rule out the psychic side of thought, and to ignore the conceptions of purpose, satisfaction, selection, relevance, and the rest, which refer to it? (MPD, p. 56)

3. Logic in Practice

It is not, however, the case that Stebbing allowed no place for the pur-posive in her concern for logic and thinking. On the contrary, as we have seen, she opened her Logic with a treatment of thinking that clearly indicates the purposive nature of the process. In two other works, both written for the general reader, Stebbing elaborates on this theme to a considerable degree.

In the first of these Logic in Practice16 Stebbing devotes her first chapter to “Purposive Thinking.” She means by this that all thinking is directed toward the solving of problems.

To be confronted with a problem is to be compelled to think. Thinking essentially consists in asking questions and attempting to answer them. To ask a question is to be conscious of a problem; to answer correctly is to have discovered its solution. Purposive thinking is thinking directed to answering a question held steadily in view. (LIP,

p. D

The most highly developed form of such directed thinking is reasoning (LIP, p. 10). While Stebbing asserts that all thinking is purposive, she is not averse, as is Schiller, to its formal representation in symbol. On the contrary, it is her view that sound reasoning is a habit which can be more fully developed by the study of logical principles, and the intent of this slim volume is to relay these principles to the non-academic audience.

Despite the nontechnical emphasis of the book, Stebbing does still manage to emphasize the value of a formal approach to reasoning. In a chapter entitled “The Importance of Form” she illustrates the form of deductive inference through a number of examples. In one of these an investigative committee has been formed to search for the causes of a fire aboard a passenger steamer. The committee has no immediately available premises that entail an answer to their question. In lieu of data they were forced to assert and test a number of hypotheses: 1) that an unnoticed lighted match had come in contact with some combustible part of the ship and had ignited; 2) that a wire had shorted out; or 3) that someone had deliberately set the ship on fire. In hypothesis number 1) the unnoticed match, for example, the argument breaks out into the following form: 

(1) If so, then the match was dropped in a cabin or in a public part of the ship, and the fire began in the place where the match was dropped.

(2) But, the fire broke out in the luggage-room (i.e. not in a cabin nor in a public part of the ship).

(3) Therefore, the cause of the fire was not a lighted match. (LIP,

p. 26)

She goes on to illustrate this symbolically:

If HI, then Cl, but not Cl,

not HI. (LIP, p. 27)

Stebbing elaborates upon the example at some length in order to fill in for the lay reader exactly in what way reasoning can be said to follow a formal pattern. “The conclusiveness of an argument depends entirely upon its form” (LIP, p. 28). And once this basis is established Stebbing goes on to treat, in a similar direct way and with a minimum of tech-nicality, the following topics: deductive forms; ambiguity, indefiniteness, and relevance; the estimation of evidence; and the grounds of belief. Although the book was not intended to be an introduction to logic, it was hailed by L. J. Russell in Philosophy17 as a good introduction in that he expected it would induce an interest in the subject of logic and logical problems on the part of the general reader.

4. Thinking to Some Purpose

In the fall of 1936 Stebbing delivered a lecture entitled “Thinking” at the annual conference of the British Institute of Adult Education. Subsequently published (along with a companion piece by C. Day Lewis on the imagination), this lecture came to form the basis for Thinking to Some Purpose. In the lecture Stebbing begins addressing the question whether it is possible to train others to think clearly by charging that it is misleading to speak of “clear thinking” at all. “There may be a clear exposition, or a clear argument, or a clear speech.... But there is not a clear piece of thinking, or a clear thinking, but only thinking clearly.... It is always an T that thinks.”18 And, further, “My thinking is determined by the sort of person I am, and the sort of person I am becoming is in part determined by how I am thinking” (I&T, p. 15). It 

follows that others cannot be directly taught to think any more than they can be directly made into other sorts of persons than they are. What can be taught indirectly, however, is the content of thinking since all thinking is about something (МГ, p. 16). With her usual directness Stebbing says that though “Only a fool or a logician would suggest that we could train people to think by giving them facility in the use of the delightful language of pure logic,” students can be taught to ask them-selves “What is it exactly that I am saying?” (МГ, p. 17).

The B.B.C. asked Stebbing to follow up this lecture with twelve talks. She was never able to accomplish the radio series, but the synopsis she submitted for the proposed talks became Thinking to Some Purpose.19 And it is in this book that Stebbing goes to some lengths to get students and general readers alike to ask themselves not only what they are saying but also what twisted thinking and crooked arguments they are using and/or falling prey to. While this book recaps some of the points in Logic in Practice, particularly with regard to thinking as a purposive activity, the two books differ primarily in that the latter deals with reasoning in its formal aspects while Thinking to Some Purpose is a practical guide to the numerous obstacles thrown in the paths of those who would wish to think clearly. From the prologue, intriguingly entitled “Are the English Illogical?”, to the epilogue “Democracy and Freedom of Mind,” Stebbing demonstrates through example after example - drawn from the speeches of politicians, from newspapers, and from advertising - the common fallacies, the dangers of propaganda, what she calls potted thinking, problems of statistical evidence, and potential misuses of analogy in argument.

5. A Modern Elementary Logic

Stebbing’s final book on logic, A Modern Elementary Logic,20 which appeared in 1943 was in many ways a pared down version of the earlier A Modern Introduction to Logic. In this textbook written with the express purpose of preparing first-year students for the logic examinations, Stebbing felt free to exclude some of the “technical trivialities” she’d been constrained by the form of the exams to include in the earlier test. In addition, discussions on scientific method are more restricted. The book also differs from the earlier text in that Stebbing, keeping in mind students who, like members of the armed forces, were studying on their own without the assistance of a tutor, devised an appendix intended to answer students’ most commonly asked questions about logic. 

6. Philosophy and the Physicist

In 1937 Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists21 was published. With this book Stebbing applies the commitment to rational clarity she has developed and illustrated in her works on practical logic to her long-standing interest in recent developments in the sciences. Specifically, she examines with careful attention the arguments presented to the common reader (to use the phrase she borrows from Samuel Johnson) by eminent scientists who elucidate what they believe to be the implications of developments in mathematical physics. The primary targets of her analysis are Sir James Jeans for his The Mysterious Universe (1930) and The New Background of Science (1933) and Sir Arthur Eddington for The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Science and the Unseen World (1929), and New Pathways in Science (1933).

Stebbing begins by paying tribute to the interest of the common reader in scientific research but charges in Part I, entitled “The Alarming Astronomers,” that some scientists writing for the common reader “seek to arouse [the reader’s] emotions, thereby inducing a frame of mind inimical to intellectual discernment. Popularizations of such a kind constitute a grave danger to thinking clearly” (P&P, p. 5). Turning specifically to Jeans and Eddington she makes the charge more direct: “Both these writers approach their task through an emotional fog; they present their views with an amount of personification and metaphor that reduces them to the level of revivalist preachers” (P&P, p. 6).

Stebbing disposes of Sir James Jeans rapidly. Citing first his descrip-tion of the human response to the universe in The Mysterious Universe as “terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances” and the “material insignificance of our home in space - a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world,”22 she accuses Jeans of stretching beyond the directly informative to the manipulative:

In accordance with the temper of an age in which men admire size and material power, Jeans insists upon the magnitude of astronomical distances, upon the smallness of the earth, and upon the shortness of the span of human history. In his purely expository writings Jeans has made brilliant use of comparative estimates of size and of distance in order to elucidate astronomical facts. Now, however, the comparison is dwelt upon simply in order to make the reader feel his own feebleness and insignificance in the material universe. (P&P,

pp. 10-11) 

Jeans has not suggested any criterion for meaning relative to distances, and, she claims, it is absurd for him to assert that distances are either “meaningless” or “meaningful.” He misuses metaphor in a similar way when he adds to the above description that “into such a universe we have stumbled” and goes on to speak of the universe as being “indifferent” or even “hostile.” Stebbing counters that these terms can only bear significance when they are predicated of living beings (P&P, pp. 12-13).

In The New Background of Science Jeans again falls prey to anthro-pomorphism despite his own protests about the necessity of avoiding it. Suggesting that scientific developments have led to the abandonment of the mechanical view of the universe, Jeans remarks:

We are beginning to see that man had freed himself from the anthro-pomorphic error of imagining that the workings of nature could be compared to those of his own whims and caprices, only to fall headlong into the second anthropomorphic error of imagining that they could be compared to the workings of his own muscles and sinews. Nature no more models her behaviour on the muscles and sinews of our bodies than on the desires and caprices of our minds. {P&P,

p. 22)

He himself, nonetheless, continues to insist, as Stebbing points out, that nature models herself Furthermore, as his argument develops he shifts with neither explicit clarification nor argument from a conception of “goddess Nature” to that of a universe consciously designed by a God who has the qualities of a Great Mathematician. After extricating the form of his argument from his ambiguous language, Stebbing concludes that Jeans has made two serious blunders. First, he’s forgotten that any given collection of objects can be brought within the scope of mathematical formulae and analysis, and second he’s failed to distinguish pure from applied mathematics:

His first blunder has prevented him from seeing that what is surprising is not that the world “obeys mathematical laws” but that terrestrial mathematicians should be competent to discover them. His second blunder leads him to impute to God the desire to make models of his mathematical creations, in fact to make “graven images”. {P&P, p. 26)

When Jeans goes on from there to take a position that the findings of the new physics support philosophic arguments for idealism and that materialism and matter need redefinition in light of new knowledge, Stebbing demurs: “both idealism and materialism, as understood by Jeans, are out of date.” Further, “these cloudy speculations of Sir James Jeans cannot properly be regarded as affording the common reader any clear information as to the ‘philosophical implications’ of the new physics” (P&P, p. 42).

In Part II, “The Physicist and the World,” Stebbing turns to the work of Sir Arthur Eddington. First she addresses Eddington’s famous passage describing his entry into a room in The Nature of the Physical World. He stands at the threshold knowing that in order to enter he must press with a force of fourteen pounds per each square inch of his body. He must step onto a plank travelling at twenty miles per second around the sun.

I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.23

Lively as this description is, Stebbing charges that the mixing up of language appropriate for “the furniture of earth and our daily dealings with it with language used for the purpose of philosophical and scien-tific discussion” can only lead to confusion (Pc£P, p. 47). Adding the disclaimer that some may see her criticism of a picturesque passage as overly heavy-handed, Stebbing elaborates that the picturesqueness is not itself at issue. Rather, his conclusion is at issue, i.e. that while it is not problematic for an ordinary person to enter a room, it is problematic for a physicist to do so.

Furthermore, Stebbing examines just what Eddington claims when he denies that the plank has solidity. Here she relies on the common, ordinary usage of the word “solidity,” for, she claims, we can only understand Eddington’s denial of the solidity of the plank if, in fact, we do understand what it means to say that the plank is solid. Either a misuse or a figurative use of the term relies on some correct and literal use of the term. “The point is that the common usage of language enables us to attribute a meaning to the phrase ‘a solid plank’; but there is no 

common usage of language that provides a meaning for the word ‘solid’ that would make sense to say that the plank on which I stand is not solid” (P&P, p. 52).

She goes on to point out another of Eddington’s illustrative passages that suffers from the same confusion of language. In this one he elabo-rates the “two tables” analogy. One is the familiar table that has extension, color, substance - the table at which Eddington has sat and written for years. The other is his scientific table which is really mostly empty space because it consists of electric particles and charges. About this table, he says, there is nothing substantial. Stebbing criticizes this view that there are two tables, one belonging to the external world of physics and the other to the familiar world. With this duplicate worlds theory, Stebbing charges, he has fallen into the same error that Berkeley accused the Newtonians of committing. In this case, as in others she claims, Eddington’s failure to familiarize himself with philosophy before venturing into its territory has done him in. Finally she suggests “that it is as absurd to say that there is a scientific table as to say that there is a familiar electron or a familiar quantum, or a familiar potential” (P&P, p. 58).

Eddington gets himself in further trouble with Stebbing by asserting that the aim of science is to construct a world that is symbolic of the world of common experience. She criticizes him for failing to make clear in what way the symbolic construction of physics relates to the familiar world. He wants to suggest that the familiar world is a delusion and, hence, constructs an idealist metaphysics. Three lines of thought lead him to this: 1) his notion of physics as “world-building”; 2) his belief that physics concerns itself with “pointer readings” suggests the existence of some background of an inscrutable nature; and 3) a belief that the world of physics is symbolic of both the familiar world and this inscrutable background (P&P, p. 83).

Further, she chides, his metaphorical use of the word “building” leads him into some mystification. According to him the mind builds both the scientific and the familiar worlds. In building the scientific world, the scientist uses simple elements for which there is no counterpart in the everyday world. These elements, such as energy, momentum, stress, are selected or decided upon by the mind. Eddington asserts that “Ultimately it is the mind that decides what is lumber - which part of our building will shadow the things of common experience, and which has no such counterpart” (P&P, p. 84). Stebbing, however, watching the construction of his argument closely, notes: 

But when Eddington says “the mind decides”, the common reader is likely to attach quite a different significance to the statement. Eddington himself does so. The mind decides is gradually trans-formed into the mind contributes, and then into, the mind creates. This transformation is all important for his metaphysics, and is utterly unwarranted. (P&P, p. 85)

Fundamental to Eddington’s philosophy of science and metaphysics in his view that science consists of pointer-readings. When he elects to elaborate this view he presents his common reader with the example of an examination question in which a student is asked to compute the time of descent of an elephant sliding down a grassy hillside. The student knows, in this example, that he can ignore the elephant per se; he need only work with the two-ton mass accorded to the elephant. That is, “Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine” {P&P, pp. 92-3). The student is then given the slope of the hill, the co-efficient for friction, and other data from which to calculate his answer. About this Eddington remarks:

And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equiva-lents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? {P&P, p. 93)

Stebbing charges that in characterizing the situation in this way he overlooks the way physical measurements are obtained and used for prediction {P&P, p. 96). Here, as elsewhere, Eddington’s failure to give an adequate account of the relationship of the symbolic world of physics to the familiar world of everyday experience has led him, and along with him the common reader, into mystification and absurdity.

Another of Eddington’s analogies that Stebbing feels draws him inexorably into difficulty is that of the newspaper office. He sketches it in this way:

The inside of your head must be rather like a newspaper office. It is connected with the outside world by nerves which play the part of telegraph wires. Messages from the outside world arrive in code along these wires; the whole substratum of fact is contained in these code messages. Within the office they are made up into a presentable story, 

partly by legitimate use of accumulated experience, but also with an admixture of journalistic imagination; and it is this free translation of the original messages that our consciousness becomes aware of. СP&P, p. Ю2)

This picture suggests that a perceiving part of the mind constructs the familiar world out of coded messages that come from the external world. But the story is a translation - and rather a loose one at that - and not a direct reading of the code. Indeed, since the wires only transmit the code, the story is made up so loosely from the received data that Stebbing questions whether it can be called a translation at all. On this model, “The familiar world is an illusion; it is an illusion that the per-ceiving part of the mind (i.e. the editor) makes for itself under the delusion that it is translating messages sent from the external world” (P&P, p. 103).

Again Stebbing grants that her position may be objected to on the basis of criticizing an illustration. However, as she points out, Eddington does not use the newspaper office analogy as an illustration merely. It is, in fact, fundamental to his argument. “Whenever he attempts to show how it is that we have knowledge of the external world and that this knowledge is ‘a remote inference’, he uses the parable of the decoded messages. But in stating the parable he includes the conclusions that he seeks to establish by means of the parable” (P&P, pp. 104-5). In other words, Eddington’s mistake, according to Stebbing, is that he does not stick to using the illustration to illustrate. He transforms the illustration into an argument, then draws inferences from it. As she continues throughout the volume to explicate his arguments, Stebbing catches him making this mistake again and again.

Next Stebbing turns her attention to the problems of causality and human freedom which some physicists of the era had taken it upon themselves to explore. In Part III of her critique she attempts to show that the use of scientific speculations and the phenomena of quantum physics “to find countenance for a theory of the interaction of human beings upon one another is an unwarranted as it is surprising” (P&P, p. 142). After a review of the problem as it appeared to Thomas Hill Huxley and J. S. Mill, she asks “what precisely is meant by the statement that physicists did formerly believe in determinism but that now they do not” (P&P, p. 156).

It was Laplace who developed the deterministic scheme that was only implicit in Newton’s cosmology, and this scheme achieved its 

culmination in his conception of the supreme Calculator. Roughly, put, an intelligence that could know all the forces acting in nature at any one given time could also know the forces acting at any other time. Stebbing interprets the Laplacean Calculator to mean “that the state of the world at any given time determines its state at any other time, whether earlier or later than the given time” (P&P, p. 161). The Calculator could, in other words, predict the state of the world at some future time.

The conditions which render an event subject to prediction are the same as conditions that allow the application of a physical law to an event. If we know initial conditions and relevant physical laws, we are able, in a deterministic system, to predict the outcome of an event such as what path a shell will take when fired from a gun (P&P, p. 165). The form of reasoning is: “If the initial state of a system and the laws of its behaviour are known, then its states at any other moment can be predicted, and the prediction can be verified by measurement” (P&P, p. 170). The development of quantum theory in the early twentieth century, however, demonstrated that in the case of sub-atomic phenomena it is not possible to precisely determine the initial condition (P&P, p. 171).

Stebbing then reviews Bohr’s model of the atom and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The latter involves the admission that the basis of quantum laws is statistical and thus disrupts the strict application of causal laws. She asserts that this development removes any reason for regarding the material universe as a machine.

The rejection of this machine-language is an important gain. It makes for clearer thinking with regard to the philosophical implications of physics. There is, however, a danger that we may reject the language whilst we continue to be influenced in our thinking by the machine- image. We need also to avoid the not uncommon mistake of supposing that the uncertainty relations show that there is anything indeterminate in Nature, or that science has now had to become inaccurate. (P&P, p. 183)

Indeterminacy in nature consequent upon uncertainty relations is just what Jeans does claim in making statements such as, “Heisenberg now makes it appear that nature abhors accuracy and precision above all things.” Stebbing counters that there is, after all, nothing lawless in quantum phenomena, for the initial conditions of a given case are still deter- 

mined as precisely as the limits of the Principle of Uncertainty allows. From them, the probability of subsequent states is still determined by exact laws (P&P, p. 183). Nonetheless, she concludes the section by claiming that the discovery of uncertainty relations does involve a change in attitude with regard to determinism. That change is, however, not what Jeans or Eddington suppose it to be.

Eddington has accepted that the Laplacean model and the deter-ministic scheme of law supported by classical physics created problems in the notion of human freedom of action. He further reasons that modern physics has, by virtue of shattering the deterministic model, to some extent erased the problem. Stebbing comments, “the problem that confronts Eddington is to get as much uncertainty, or ‘indeterminacy’, as he can out of the miserably small amount represented by Planck’s constant” (P&P, p. 213). The first step in his argument is that human action would be completely unfree if the Laplacean model were attained. He then assigns living beings to the macrophysical system. From this he wishes to maintain that some degree of uncertainty in the realm of microphysics is sufficient to allow for human freedom. This is not at all, Stebbing urges, an adequate argument. Indeed, we must admit, she goes on, that there is a vast difference between the behaviors of inorganic bodies and human beings. “This cleavage may not do ‘violence to physics’ but it seems to me to leave the problem of free will just where it was before physicists became indeterminists” (P&P, p. 216).

Next Stebbing moves into a discussion of the human intuition of freedom, conditions of moral responsibility, and beliefs about the nature of the physical world within which actions have consequences. In addressing these issues she mentions and remarks upon attempts by John Wisdom, L. J. Russell, and C. D. Broad to wrestle with the question of responsibility.24

Part of the difficulty in addressing the question of responsibility is one of terms. Stebbing clarifies that “responsibility” used in the ethical sense is not a synonym for causation. “To accept responsibility is to deny compulsion; it is not to deny causation, for not all causation is a form of being compelled” (P&P, p. 227). Hence when we made the state-ment “I did such-and-such” we are asserting that “I am responsible for such-and-such,” not that “I was compelled to do such-and-such.”

Heisenberg’s discovery of the Uncertainty Principle, while inapplic-able on the macrophysical scale of the human, nonetheless does have some bearing on the problem of free will, says Stebbing, for the problem 

has been created in part by a confusion in our thinking and in our language. Discussions of free will are pervaded by the image of the Potter and the pot or by the image of the machine and its many cogs. The jumble of the theological doctrine of predestination and the scientific doctrine of determinism permeates both our thinking on the question and the language in which we express it to such an extent that we have come to believe “that we understand how what happens here and now is predetermined by what happened there and then” This makes sense to us “because we have assimilated predetermination to compulsion, natural laws to commands, causal connexions to constraining ties” {P&P, p. 239). In other words, we have illegitimately intruded extraneous notions into or understanding of causation and scientific determinism. In summing up this part of her discussion Stebbing elaborates:

I venture to believe that no one has ever imaginatively realized what it would be like for everything that happens to be bound together by compulsions. But under the influence of the success of the scientists we have given an intellectual assent to a scheme of deterministic law - a scheme which we understand only in so far as we concentrate attention upon this or that domain of Nature and import into the scientific terminology notions of compulsion that are extraneous to it. In this way ‘the dominance of universal causation’ is felt to be a nightmare. Heisenberg’s principle has some part to play in revealing to us what it is we thought we were accepting. {P&P, p. 240)

Another part of the problem arises, she continues, when we put the human “I” in what we conceive of as the material world. Stebbing argues that while “I” am in the material world, there is no strict analogy between the way “I” am set in the world and the way a billiard ball is set against another billiard ball in the world. Here again we have allowed the language and thinking of the physicists to dominate our thinking. The “I” is an embodied mind. She gives the example of an “I” who struggles to give up smoking. That struggle, then, is also an element in the world. While it is necessary for the physical scientist to abstract characteristics in the world and study them in isolation, “we create a pseudo-problem when we try to fit human beings in a world thus conceived as though it were the world in which human persons act” {P&P, p. 245). The danger for the physicist turned philosopher, as for those of us considering their impact on our thinking, is of confusing the “world of physics” with the “physical world.” “The former is to be found only in physics.... The 

latter, the physical world or Nature, is that which physics is about..

(.P&P, p. 281)

Stebbing’s final word on the problem of freedom is that it is ultimately one of the self:

Human freedom consists in this: that we do not yet know what we shall be, not because the knowledge is too difficult to acquire, not because there are no certainties but only very great improbabilities, but because we are not yet finished. We are begun; what we have already become and are now becoming plays a part in what we shall become. (P&P, p. 249)

Philosophy and the Physicists was met by most reviewers, including C. D. Broad,25 with enthusiasm and was praised for its thorough job of cleaning up the muddled thinking of Jeans and Eddington in their popularizations of physics. Though G. A. Paul concurs in the main with this view, he does, however, respond to the book with some very close criticism. Though it does not fall within the scope of this essay to thor-oughly review his remarks, I would like to direct the reader to them and mention one, in particular, of his points. With regard to Stebbing’s remarks about human freedom and the becoming self, Paul charges that here she has fallen prey to the same defect for which she criticizes Jeans and Eddington, namely that she has painted a metaphorical picture which she then takes as explanation.26

The continuing legacy of this work, however, is suggested by G. C. Nerlich in his entry on Stebbing in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He characterizes it as a solid work of rational criticism while pointing out that underlying this criticism is an “implicit faith that we need not seek protection behind intellectual smoke screens and, indeed, that this sort of evasion prevents any really dignified adjustment to the human situation based on knowledge and reason. Susan Stebbing deeply believed that such an adjustment is possible.”27

7. Ideals and Illusions

In 1941 Ideals and Illusions28 first appeared. Written during the rising tide of World War II, this book has a different tone from her earlier work. An exercise in rational criticism of the sort Stebbing has consistently expounded and demonstrated, Ideals and Illusions differs from her earlier work in two respects. Somewhat loosely structured, the book seems more 

a collection of essays whose arguments relate to and overlap each other, building finally to a kind of crescendo, rather than the sort of linear, single-threaded argument she develops in Philosophy and the Physicists. In addition, this book is more polemical than her other works. This last is due perhaps to the cultural climate in which she was working. Citing the growing awareness in England of a sense of national failure, Stebbing sets out to examine wherein that failure lies. Her contention is that much of the failure stems from muddled thinking about ideals.

In her preface she contrasts this perceived sense of failure against the very different climate out of which it grew:

At the opening of the twentieth century it may well have seemed likely that a new century of hope had begun. In fact, in no other century have so many human beings... suffered pain, anguish of heart, bitterness of spirit, despair, and unnecessary death. (М/, p. vii)

No one in the culture, she claims, is free of some degree of respon-sibility for these conditions, for it is a community failure and the community is made up of the individuals who compose it. While a number of causes can be cited, Stebbing’s plan in the book is to focus on “our unwillingness to make definite to ourselves what it is we believe to be worth the seeking” - a failure, in other words, “to make explicit our ideal” (М/, p. viii).

First, in the chapter entitled “Ideals and Utopias,” Stebbing vindi-cates the significance of ideals. She defends the position that having ideals does not necessarily imply having impracticable ideals, i.e. to have ideals is not equivalent to being a visionary or utopian (7<&7, pp. 5-6). She argues against E. H. Carr, who in The Twenty Years' Crisis, 79791939 claims that, in the case of politicians, ideals are unattainable and, hence, that it is realist politicians who get things done. His primary example of the ineffectual idealist politician is Woodrow Wilson with his vision of a League of Nations. Stebbing claims that Carr then falls into the confusion of supposing that it is only realists, i.e. those who have no ideals in view, who get things done. Finally, she contends, the realist- idealist classification only clouds our thinking about politics. For it is not the case that Woodrow Wilson had ideals and Hitler did not. It is rather the case that both operated from ideals irrespective of their effectiveness of accomplishment. For “To say T have an ideal’ means T conceive (have an idea of) a state of affairs which I judge to be good - i.e., worthy of attainment.’ This leaves open the question whether the ideal is real- 

izable. It also permits the condemnation of an ideal as evil; I may wrongly judge what is good” (М/, p. 21).

Next Stebbing ascertains that once the confusions and biases connected with the word “spiritual” are cleared away it can be argued that spiritual good and evil “are to be found in the daily intercourse of us men one with another in this world independently of any relation of man to God; further, that the significance of spiritual value does not depend upon God or upon the continuance of human beings after the death of the body” (/<£/, pp. 33-34). She opposes this to the Catholic views expressed by Rosalind Murray and Cardinal Newman that spiritual excellences are those which fit an individual for heaven or that evil lies not in harm that results from human actions but in the state of mind of the sinner. It is not adequate, for example, to maintain, as Murray does, that the wrong in the slum conditions under which some people must live resides in the avarice on the part of the rich. Stebbing counters this view by saying:

There are, then, two kinds of evil, which it is important for us to distinguish. First, there are evils resulting, for instance, from living in slums, from earthquakes, from famine, and from wars. Secondly, there are those evils exemplified in the actions of men responsible for bringing about any evil of the first kind. (/<&/, p. 38)

The third and fourth chapters are devoted, respectively, to clarifying the need for, and the role of, ideals in examining the foundations of our moral code, and to examining the efficaciousness of one such ideal, namely the pursuit of happiness. In the latter case she reviews the utilitarian doctrines of Bentham and J. S. Mill. They concern her insofar as they have put forward an ideal for action which arose from their interest in practical situations and their desire to reform social institutions. Though they failed, in her view, to exercise a careful analysis of moral consciousness, lacked dialectical subtlety, and expressed their position in vague and ambiguous language,