Bertrand Russell: An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

Abstract

Introduction In comparison with his early essays on analytic philosophy and with the writings of his logical atomist period, Bertrand Russell's An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth has received less attention and is often neglected by contemporary readers. There are, I think, two main reasons for this. The first is probably stylistic. In contrast to the sharpness of his earlier works such as “On Denoting” (1905) and Problems of Philosophy (1967 [1912]), the style of the Inquiry – which was originally presented as Russell's William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940 – is less polished and the views expressed less clear-cut than, for instance, those of Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) or “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918). The second reason owes more to the content and the atmosphere of the book. Whereas Russell's first philosophy is based on the logical analysis of language as a guide to the structure of the world and displays a sort of analytic purity, his second philosophy, especially in the Inquiry, is more epistemological and provides a mixture of considerations on knowledge, meaning and ontology that is sometimes disconcerting, in particular when it introduces psychological considerations in matters of logic. For those readers who have been accustomed to think of Russell, along with Frege and Moore, as the founder of analytic philosophy, and who consider that the distinctive mark of this kind of philosophy is a logical analysis of language free of all psychological considerations, it comes as a surprise to see Russell analysing meaning in terms of psychological concepts.