five top things i’ve been reading (fortieth edition!)
the latest in a regular 'top 5' series
The Existence of Matter, Bertrand Russell
The Book of Mormon
Letter to Keir Starmer, Laurie Magnus
Tweet on the Irish Enlightenment, Patrick Collison
Pittsburgh bridges
This is the fortieth (!) in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end. I’ll try to be brief today because I’m in the middle of writing something about the value of freedom, which I want to publish here tomorrow.
1) Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (1912) has been featured here before. Among more analytical commentary, I’ve written about how it left me, as a child, somewhat obsessed by thinking about whether tables were real. This week, I reread The Existence of Matter, the chapter in which Russell tries hard to alleviate such concerns.
Russell begins sensibly enough by accepting the Cartesian argument for the existence of oneself: “If he had any experiences whatsoever”, he describes Descartes’ approach, then “he must exist”. Russell goes on to clarify, however, that he accepts only that the cogito affords “primitive certainty” of your “particular thoughts and feelings”, and not the persistence of yourself over time.
He then moves on to the relevance of sense-data — a section which would feel familiar if you’ve been following my occasional reports of gradually reading J. L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962). Here, Russell starts with the idea that even if he can’t be sure that it’s him, Russell — a person who persists across time — who is seeing the brown colour of the table, he can nonetheless be “quite certain” that “a brown colour is being seen”. This is a distracting move in the context of trying to prove the existence of particular things, but let’s move on!
Having then dismissed the value of other people’s testimony (i.e., ‘But I’m seeing the same table as you are, and so is he!’) on the clear grounds that the existence of other people also needs proving, and having also made a very strange argument about the “inexplicability” of a non-existent cat expressing feelings of hunger, Russell finally settles on ‘instinctive belief’ as his route into the likelihood of a mind-independent external world.
“Of course it is not by argument,” he tells us, “that we originally come by our belief in an independent external world”. And soon after, he continues, “All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left”. This section, I think, implies that he’s decided that certainty about the momentary ‘I am’ (or even just ‘this particular thought I’m having’) is itself a matter of instinctive belief. In other words, that you can get from ‘I think’ (or just ‘I have this particular thought’) to ‘knowing that I am’ (or just ‘knowing that I have this thought’) without argumentation!1 But that’s another problem for another day.
Russell ends the chapter much more confident than he was at the start (if indeed he was the same person back then). “It is of course possible that all or any of our beliefs may be mistaken”, he says, as part of his ‘systematic organization of knowledge’ argument. Nonetheless, he concludes, we should have faith in our instinctive beliefs, relative to their intercoherence and how strongly we hold them, and work from there. This seems far-fetched, at best — until he reminds us how much further philosophers go than this, on similar kinds of reasoning, all of the time! A fun read, still.
2) I’ve been in Pittsburgh the past few days for a conference on voluntary governance. On Saturday, I went to an interesting talk about dissent and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, given by my excellent Mercatus colleague Nathan Goodman. So when I found a copy of The Book of Mormon (1830) in my hotel room later that day, I decided to read some of it.
It wasn’t as exciting, substance-wise, as I’d expected. The most striking features of the sections I read were linguistic: particularly, its punctuation by pastiche Bible terms, and its moments of first-person narration. “Durst” was my favourite example of the former. The opening soliloquy almost reminded me of Moby-Dick (1851):
“I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.”
3) I don’t follow UK politics like I used to. But this week I read the public letter written by the Prime Minister’s ‘ethics adviser’, Laurie Magnus, in response to criticisms made about Angela Rayner’s stamp duty arrangements. Magnus’s current official title is Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, but he was originally appointed as the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, and the UK press and the wider commentariat almost always refer to him using the ‘ethics adviser’ term.
I won’t go into the details of the letter, which prompted Rayner to resign from her ministerial posts. But the headline takeaway, that while Magnus found Rayner had breached the ministerial code, he nonetheless believed she had “acted with integrity and with a dedicated and exemplary commitment to public service”, emphasises quite how bizarre it is that he’s generally considered to be offering advice on ethics.2
4) Today, I enjoyed reading this long tweet, by the Irish entrepreneur Patrick Collison, about the identity of the Irish Enlightenment. Providing both neutral overview and personal analysis, it reads like a mini SEP entry. I was shocked to learn that Hutcheson, Burke, and even Berkeley (!) “don’t feature very prominently in contemporary Irish culture or Irish education”…
5) I knew in advance that Pittsburgh had a load of great bridges. I didn’t know however that on standard counts (thanks GPT) there are 446 of them! I also wasn’t expecting to be so reminded of Newcastle.
I don’t think I explained my concern here very clearly, so here’s another go! Russell claims that we don’t (originally) come to belief in an independent external world “by argument”. But he previously accepted that belief in oneself (or at least one’s particular thoughts) is reached by argument. So he either thinks that belief in an independent external world is accessible to us in a way that belief in oneself (or one’s thoughts) is not, or he’s changed his mind by this point of the chapter about belief in oneself (or one’s thoughts) being reached by argument. Of course, he could try to get out of this problem by emphasising that it's knowledge of oneself (or one’s thoughts), rather than belief, that he accepted as the conclusion of the cogito (or that you can access this belief or knowledge in both ways) but I don't think that really solves it for him…
Really, of course, a metaphysician is required for this post, with its focus on determining matters of the “highest possible”.
I haven’t read that work by Russell, but from your description, I don’t begrudge him his instinctive beliefs! That’s why we have the methodology of science—to test our instincts against experience and abandon those that fail. It’s been a productive process so far!
It mirrors a similar but tougher situation in moral philosophy, where we are likewise unable to derive initial moral principles by pure logic alone. So we let our moral philosophers, too, choose starting assumptions and test them. But what is the moral analog to scientific experimentation against physical reality? Something like John Rawls’ “reflective equilibrium” perhaps.
Big fan of the book of mormon!