Stebbing Vindicated: on technical expertise as a criterion in being the useful subject of attention

Mohan wrote a useful follow up to my post on the unjustly forgotten Susan Stebbing. Before I get to the core of my response to Mohan's post I want to prevent a potential confusion. Mohan suggests  "it is a pity that historians of analytic philosophy don’t give her more airtime." Well, as some commentators on my post noted, historians of analytic philosophy DO write about Stebbing (and this is how I explained how I came to know of her work). My claim is, rather, that even if we leave aside Stebbing's fascinating treatment of Spinoza, reading Stebbing can be instructive to us (by which I mean professional philosophers today): (i) by reminding us that not all early analytic philosophy was fundamentally anti-Metaphysical; following up the work of Moore and Wisdom (etc), Stebbing is developing and theorizing the tools of analysis in order to offer a distinctly analytic account of metaphysics; (ii) I call it distinctly analytic because it anticipates in rudimentary and non-trivial ways the orientation of the program of David Lewis.  (Of course, I don't want to overstate the claim--modality is not driving Stebbing's approach.) This matters even if there is no line of influence. (iii) Stebbing's understanding of the continuity between Bradley and Russell is a useful corrective to a lot of narratives within the disipline. 

By contrast, Mohan claims that Stebbing's "lack of technical expertise in the key tropes of analytic philosophy (Russell's theory of descriptions, no less) meant that it was not very useful for later generations to read her work." At the end of this post I say something about the criterion that Mohan applies here. Now Mohan offers a bunch of examples of Stebbing's lack of "technical expertise." Dan Kervick has usefully challenged Mohan's examples. Now while I have a healthy admiration for Mohan's technical chops (around NewAPPS I am among the techno-ignoramuses), I want to develop Kervick's points a bit. I do so in reverse order (because all my comments turn, in part, on what Stebbing means by "refer.") Mohan writes:

Secondly, she says: “I can refer to an individual that I cannot name, e.g. the present President of the United States.” Again, this is in the service of showing how the method of analysis arrives at simpler entities. But it should have been obvious that Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (described by her hero, G. E. Moore, as a paradigm of analysis) contradicts exactly what she says—that is, it is the precise point of Russell’s theory that the expression “the present President of the United States” does not refer to Barack Obama. (Such a slip is surprising, coming from a logician, but perhaps her logic was of a more traditional variety.)

What matters here is what Stebbing means by "refer." We don't need to intuit it because Stebbing offers us the following distinction:

The distinction between referring to and indicating a fact must now be defined. A fact is referred to by a proposition p if this fact must be the case in order that p should be true. A fact is indicated by a proposition p if p shows, or points to, the fact which must be the case if p is true. A fact which is indicated must be co-present with the indicating. (79)

Given the way Stebbing defines "to refer" it is true on Stebbing's account that "the present President of the United States" does refer to Obama.  It is only when we insist that "to be technical" means "to follow Russell’s theory of definite descriptions," does Stebbing come out as lacking expertise . This is not to deny that we can't create tensions for Stebbing's definition of refer (in fictional contexts, especially), but that is beside the point. Mohan's first example of Stebbing's incompetence also misses its target. Mohan writes:

In speaking of analysis into simples, she says that when one says all economists are fallible, one “indirectly refers” to John Maynard Keynes (who was, of course, an economist). I think that perhaps she says this is in the service of the suggestion that propositions about individuals are  metaphysically (but not epistemically) more basic than quantified statements. This is true, but enough was already known in 1932 about quantified statements for her not to have taken universally quantified statements to be, in any way, conjunctions of singular statements—and this, as far as I can tell, is how she stumbles.

Fair enough. This look devestating. Now lets turn to the text. Here is Stebbing's full claim in context:

We analyse a proposition to discover what exactly it asserts, i.e., to discover not its immediate reference (which we already  know when we understand the proposition) but everything that it refers to, however indirectly. To know what exactly we are asserting is to know what must be the case if we are asserting truly. For example, I cannot truly assert every economist is fallible unless it is the case that, say, Maynard Keynes, who is an economist, is also fallible, and so on. The and so on shows that Maynard Keynes is merely taken as a representative, and that others are also referred to. It is not in the least necessary that I should be acquainted with Maynard Keynes, or with Sir Walter Layton, and so on, in order to judge truly that every economist is fallible. But it is necessary that in so judging I should refer to each of them. (78-79)

I see no evidence that Stebbing thinks (a) "universally quantified statements to be, in any way, conjunctions of singular statements"; if Stebbing thought that she would not claim "it is not in the least necessary that I should be acquainted with Maynard Keynes" (etc). Rather, Keynes is "merely taken as a representative"  of the statement. Mohan's second mishap is (b) attributing to Stebbing "the suggestion that propositions about individuals are  metaphysically (but not epistemically) more basic than quantified statements." I see no basis for this attribution. Rather she says what she says, I think, to explain how she understands the purpose of metaphysical analysis (and how reference works). In particular, given that for her metaphysical analysis is directed toward uncovering the structure of facts from propositions (the content of our judgments) we think we know it matters hugely that we get clear on what is entailed by these propositions--that is, what Stebbing means by what does propisitions indirectly refer to.

Mohan's third criticism is an expression of bafflement:

Finally, one of her fundamental principles seems completely unmotivated: “If p is to be analysed, then p must be understood. It follows that there is at least one expression which unambiguously expresses p.” I don’t understand this at all, but she thinks it’s obvious. Well it was eighty years ago, and maybe it was then.

Now Mohan is right to call this one of Stebbing's fundamental principles. In the paper it is the first of her assumptions and it is described as a "logical presupposition." (85) Now Stebbing explicitly claims she will not try to justify the assumption (86). (Fair enough--assumptions are not justified but shown useful by what follows). Now I am not sure why Mohan does not understand Stebbing's fundamental principle. (She does spend some time explaining it.) Perhaps he thinks that analysis is a way from going from partial ignorance to clarity--say in the manner of a Carnapian explication. Fair enough. I am very fond of explication--wish we had more of it. But Stebbing's understanding of analysis is not this. We go from known propositions (that P [these are mostly about Moorean facts]) to the structure  of the (ultimate basic)  facts that we, in fact, refer to (in Stebbing's sense) by this proposition. Of course, Stebbing's enterprise is fraught with difficulties (fill in your favorite criticism of such metaphysical projects), but I find it baffling that Mohan finds it baffling.

In conclusion, what if Mohan is right, and my defense of Stebbing fails to convince? I certainly did not mean to suggest that Stebbing is beyond criticism. My claim about the significance of Stebbing does not turn on technical expertise. Rather, I claim that she saw with lucidity what metaphysics by way of analysis could be (and, in part, eventually became). In doing so she went against the prevailing atmosphere to be found among her analytic fellow-travelers. This alone ought to be enough to merit our attention. As Mohan admits, Stebbing "had extraordinary insight."Ironically, this echoes Stebbing's move against Spinoza--the visionary matters, but is not part of philosophy proper. There is more to be said about this move. But here I rest with a modest observation; it is tempting to write the history of analytical philosophy as a series of technical breakthroughs (Boole, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Turing, Godel, C.I. Lewis, Tarski, Kripke, Barcan etc). This is certainly a history worth writing. But sometimes it's the folk that could never make a technical breakthrough that discern not just the cracks in the technical apparatus, but even see most clearly its limitations.  And just sometimes -- e.g., Stebbing -- they can see how technique ought to be applied.