‘Winifred Nicolson tells an anecdote of her great-grand-mother, who was also Betrand Russell’s grandmother remarking after a visit from her grandson, ‘I don’t know why it is that all my grandchildren are so stupid.’ I don’t know why she thought the great logician stupid at that time; but the stupidity of logical positivism lies, if anywhere, in its premises… If it is true that the crassness of English philosophy has lain always in the quality of its premisses Lady Stanley may in this respect have been right about her grandson’s ‘stupidity’.’
– Kathleen Raine, Autobiographies
STUPIDITY IS STRONG, SOME may think, particularly as applied to Russell, though maybe not too strong if one reflects on some of his educational and political adventures; but what Kathleen Raine is talking about is not the intellectual brilliance and acuity of the logician, of however high an order. She is talking about choice of premises. And here it may be that intellectual dexterity, even of the quality of a Russell, is not enough.
‘ “If meinongianism isn’t dead, nothing is,” Gilbert Ryle is reputed to have said in the heyday of Oxford Philosophy. I think Ryle was exactly right.’ Thus Graham Priest, in Towards Non-Being: the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality[4], thinks Ryle is exactly right in exactly the opposite sense to that intended by Ryle. Nothing is ever dead in philosophy (and in 2007-8, when Priest is but one of a phalanx of defenders of non-being, least of all the meinongianism Ryle took as his touchstone of philosophical moribundity). Some of us might wish for a healthy dose of Ryleanism (as we would put it) in philosophy of mind as well as in the philosophy of possibility and contradiction (where inconsistent beings are now sometimes countenanced, as well as nonbeings), but, as readers of contemporary philosophical journals will appreciate, that is not how it is. And Priest is surely right to point to the transience and power (both) of philosophical fashion when it comes to premisses. In a sense, more power to Priest’s elbow in shaking us out of a certain ontological complacency.
That said, how are we to chose premisses? And further, how are we to judge conclusions, when philosophers like Priest and Williamson are simply not prepared to accept reductio ad absurdum arguments when applied to their conclusions about such topics as noneism and vagueness, and can, in a sense, argue for their conclusions against the most robust-seeming objections? Do we simply toss coins here? Are all defensible premisses epistemologically equal, so to speak, simply awaiting their time or their defenders? This would not actually be such a surprise, given that at one time or another, just about every imaginable philosophical position has found its time and its able defenders. Or might there be something a bit more at stake, humanly speaking? Do the philosophies of the great philosophers reflect their own values and commitments in ways which lie deeper than the arguments they deploy in their writings?
