Knowledge and Truth: Between Russell and Wittgenstein

Bertrand Russell is important in the annals of philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world, for his role in establishing modern analytic philosophy, a powerful tool in the confrontation with other fuzzier modes of thinking that have populated the philosophical world. Still, Russell, for all his down-to-earth thinking about questions of truth and belief, lacked a certain kind of insight which might have offered a different and likely better picture of what it means to recognize what is true and distinguish it from the false and so guide our efforts in arriving at the best beliefs to be had. A better account, can be found in the work of his one-time acolyte, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yet, for clarity, precision and an ability to apply reasoning to the world of common sense, Russell was likely the better thinker.

On the other hand, Russell’s effort to remake language in purely logical terms by creating an "ideal language" that would squeeze the ambiguities out of natural language and so provide the sciences with a better tool for doing their work, failed to grasp language as a phenomenon of human life in its fullest and richest sense and to give us a basis for explicating the human tendency to believe without warrant—or when the warrants on offer are insufficient.

In his essay, On the Value of Scepticism (1928), Russell offered his own modest notion of skepticism (avoiding the radical skepticism prevalent in other philosophical arenas), a skepticism which seems quite sensible on its face, especially in light of the current state of public rhetoric today). Russell wrote:

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein’s view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment. These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life. The opinions for which people are willing to fight and persecute all belong to one of the three classes which this scepticism condemns. . . . The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

And so it is today in our own politics as opinions fly round the Internet, infesting our social media. It has become increasingly difficult to sort truth from falsehood, honesty from fakery or to find general agreement about pretty much anything but the most basic of questions. It seems we are, as a group, if not always individually, too easily swayed by the power of repetition and the volume level of what others are saying. When reason should be our measure, not the amplification of the voices favoring this or that viewpoint, we too often fall prey to the latter.

And it is because of emotion that we are so easily swayed, as Russell points out, emotional commitment to some beliefs and/or discomfort with others. We are victims of our own psychological predispositions, allowing the power with which a claim is made, and so holds our attention, to influence the degree to which we are prepared to endorse it. Instead of sound reasoning we fall back on our preferences, buttressed by the endorsement of those who are prepared to endorse the things we would ourselves endorse.

Now Russell’s account is fine, as far as it goes. It does seem to accurately capture why we are so easily swayed by irrational claims or claims that merely seem to be lacking sufficient rational justification. Russell, of course, believed reason must be paramount and so rejected claims that appear to depart from what seems reasonable, e.g., those based on religious or other dogmatic beliefs we may happen to have a preference for. But, in giving his account, he misses something important. In telling us why we tend to succumb to unwarranted beliefs he fails to tell us why it seems to us to make sense to do so. Russell’s account addresses what drives us to endorse claims for which there is no rational warrant, but it does not touch on why that is even a possibility in creatures capable of rational judgment like ourselves.

Why, that is, is it so natural to us to succumb to beliefs based on our preferences and passions when reasoning prescribes another path? Are we just deluding ourselves with the notion that what we take to be reasonable is that, regardless of whether it adheres to the rules of logical inference which we have a general understanding of (or we could not reason our way from point A to point B, avoid the fire from the frying pan, pay attention to traffic flows on crossing a street, etc.). The question is not that we often do allow ourselves to accept claims without sufficient warrant, or take poor warrants to be good ones, but why doing this seems possible to us at all. Do we not actually grasp how reasoning works?

Or does it work differently than it seems to?

Russell’s account gives us a seemingly sound psychological picture of why some of us are prone to drawing conclusions without logical warrant, but it doesn’t help us understand this in an epistemological sense. What is it about how belief and reasoning work that enables us to lose sight of facts and sound reasoning at times and fully embrace, instead, what can only be deemed irrational? Granted we are susceptible to such kinds of thinking and our behavior shows this clearly, and Russell rightly notes it. Yet the question Russell’s account does not answer, the one we need answered, is why we are susceptible to such thinking in the first place.

It’s not that we are, or that certain psychological tendencies in our make-up cause us to be at times. The question we should be asking is what is it about the mechanisms of belief, our thinking processes, that open this possibility for us at all? Are we victims of programming glitches produced in us by an errant nature, nature’s programmer gone AWOL?

What wants answering is what there is about our modes of forming beliefs that allows us, indeed makes it so easy for us, to give in to inadequately supported claims. What we want to understand is not that we have the predilection for belief in unwarranted or under-warranted cases but why we are prone to this at all. To do this we must answer the question of what counts as knowledge, belief, truth, etc., and why at times we count things that logic tells us we should not be counting as falling into these categories.

What’s needed is an account of the mechanics of belief formation itself, not what prompts us to go along with some claims and not others without the inferential support we would require for doing so in other circumstances. In other words, the issue here is epistemological (as in what underpins and makes viable our reason-based judgments?) not psychological (as in what are the belief tendencies we observe in the human animal?).

A better way to look at the epistemological question than Russell’s can be found in the later Wittgenstein, Russell’s one time protégé, whose pragmatic account of language as just another form of behavior changes our understanding of the epistemological question considerably.

Applying Wittgenstein’s insight concerning language to the pragmatist account of truth, given by the early American pragmatist philosopher William James (who was vehemently criticized by Russell, by the way, on this very issue), we get quite a different picture of how language, and thus, human thinking (which, itself, takes place linguistically) works.

In James we find a coherentist theory of truth which depends on semantic holism (the idea that every belief we hold is but one point on a network of interrelated ideas, none of which stands alone as beliefs per se but which are so interlocked that they must be grasped as part of a group into which each must be fitted and, thus, tested as a group rather than piecemeal, claim by claim). Here the warrant for any single belief is seen to hinge on that belief’s ability to fit comfortably into the larger framework within which it takes its meaning. But this does not, as with the classical coherence theory of truth (normally opposed to the correspondence theory), which has been rightfully criticized for divorcing its proponents from the idea that we can actually connect with reality, force us to give up connection to a presumptively real world which the correspondence theory appears to offer. Rather, the pragmatist account rests not on justifying our justifications (which is a feature of both correspondence and coherence theories) but on a causal foundation.

The notion of causality in the pragmatist strategy serves the purpose, by replacing the idea of justification at the most basic level. Instead of moving forever from premise to conclusion, with each premise being, itself, a reason for a conclusion it implies, and each conclusion becoming itself a premise in an endless stream of reasons, the pragmatist account of truth takes as its ground causation, not justification. But what is “caused” is not a reason but a system in which inferential reasoning is operative as a mechanism for moving between claims. It is not correspondence between words and what they are about nor is it a matter of overarching fit with other premises but, rather, the effectiveness of the system in which inferences happen.

It's not individual claims, statements or beliefs that are taken to connect to the world but the larger framework within which each individual claim stands. Here effectiveness on a broad systemic level is seen as key to the viability, or lack thereof, of any single belief we choose to hold. Thus, it’s not the individual statements we make which are judged true or false, based on their capacity to reflect the world in themselves, but the impact of our decision to accept or reject such statements on the fuller system of related beliefs we hold, i.e., on whether or not granting or rejecting a claim’s characterization as being true enables us to better get by in the world. It is the effect on us that comes from holding a particular belief which causes our network of beliefs to work, or fail to, as a whole. And it is within, and as a function of, such networks that we see the world around us, the world towards which our actions are geared.

Truth claims must pass a dual test therefore, fitting comfortably within our other inferentially relevant beliefs (or obliging us to make adjustments to those others in order to accommodate the new one) while, at the same time, enabling the larger system into which they are to fit (and of which they therefore become a part) to do their job of faithfully framing our experiences in ways that enable us to succeed in what we do.

On this pragmatist notion of truth, and the beliefs it characterizes, correspondence is not lost as a test of truth, it is simply promoted from its role as a feature of particular claims in connection with what they are claims about to a higher level where truth status hinges on the ability of the mass of related beliefs to hang together in ways that adequately frame our world. Unlike Russell's assumption that we must look to reasons to justify other reasons all the way down (or at least until we go as far as we humanly can in unravelling our belief claims), the pragmatic approach substitutes causal relations for justificatory ones at the ground level, thus making justification (i.e., the claims we come to see as true and so supportive of other claims) a function of the effects the world has on us through our experiences of it as these affect our overall grasp of the world. This account also, and not incidentally, serves to enlarge the scope of our concept of language itself, taking it beyond the sort of account Russell relied on in that passage. Here language is no longer to be understood as simply the practice of logical reasoning clothed in our utterances (and the symbols we use to represent them), as Russell assumes, but, as Wittgenstein came to see, as a complex of behaviors, practices that integrate our utterances with other activities in which we engage.

Language is part of our human "form of life" in Wittgensteinian terms, i.e., humans behave not only through the actions of their bodies in response to the world but also in terms of the impact of their utterances on their fellows, on the responses their utterances prompt in fellow language users. Thus, language is best understood, from this perspective, not as formal reasoning clothed in particular utterances that vary, contingently, from linguistic community to linguistic community (but which, at bottom, all boil down to the same underlying set of logical specifications), but as a set of practices through which the rules we think of as logic come to be. In this sense, of course, language must not be reduced to nothing more than the assertions and their justifications we make about the world (though these cannot be taken out of language without fundamentally undermining its nature, as Robert Brandom reminds us). Reasoning (understood as the use of logical rules of inference) is just one aspect of the fuller panoply of things we do with our utterances, gestures and the symbols we use to represent them. But it is the capacity to assert, to make claims about things, that distinguishes language from its predecessor forms of communication found in other creatures.

Language, on this view, includes, but is hardly limited to, the making of, and giving support for, assertions about things in our world, i.e., our inferential uses of utterances, gestures and symbols for the purpose of depicting a world of things. The "not limited" qualifier here is key though. As Wittgenstein noticed, language is activity no less than hammering a nail or having a snack. But it is a kind of activity that enables us to organize our mental world in structured ways and thus is key to our "form of life" which is characterized by our ability to depict and describe things to others around us and to draw inferences from what we see in terms of what we ought to do.

This structure is made possible by the rules of inference (i.e., what we call “logic”) which we, as a species, have developed to enable us to make our raw subjective experiences (our sensory inputs) into discrete and relatable bundles of information we call "things." Thus, a world that extends outward from each moment and place in which we find ourselves takes shape, extending beyond our immediate surroundings via the possibility of conceptualization, a possibility language enables.

Concepts are, we might say, a gift that language gives us (for we could not have these without the ability to use our utterances to organize our subjective mental world); but they are also a prerequisite for having language at all, rather than just a capacity to make noises that have effects on others (i.e., that perform the signaling function found in other animals' behavior). Language is a form of signaling that takes sending signals to another level by giving its users the capacity to think, and so to reason, about things.

The capacity to form concepts is what differentiates language from mere signaling. Russell's notion of language as being distillable into a purer logical liqueur, with everything else we do in words thought to be discardable, mere ambiguity-generating fluff, if we are to engage in serious thinking, fundamentally misrepresents the phenomenon of language itself.

Language, of course, is more than logic, even if it cannot be language without logic in the mix. Our language is the animal’s capacity to signal its own wants and needs to others of its kind, and to draw in its prey or let others of its kind know when to flee, converted into a means for organizing and sharing thoughts with others. As such, it fundamentally alters the form of life of those creatures on our planet that possess it and, in doing so, it enables its possessors to depict and move within a world whose scope is greater than the given moment and place in which they may happen to be.