New Light on Bertrand Russell’s “Bundle Theory”

Abstract

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 34 (winter 2014–15): 162–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM oeviews NEW LIGHT ON BERTRAND RUSSELL’S “BUNDLE THEORY” Ray Perkins, Jr. Philosophy / Plymouth State U. Plymouth, nh 03264–1600, usa perkrk@earthlink.net Gülberk Koç Maclean. Bertrand Russell’s BundleTheory of Particulars. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Pp. x, 170. isbn 978-1472512666 . £65.00; us$120.00. his is an important book which should bring needed attention to Russell ’s much neglected later philosophy, which is not only innovative but also, as the author argues, of a coherent whole with much of his metaphysics and epistemology going back to the early years of the last century. One of Gülberk Koç Maclean’s pervasive themes is that Russell’s philosophical evolution is largely motivated by a commitment to his programme of logical atomism built on three principles: analysis, the plurality of reality, and the method of logical construction. All were at work in Russell’s serious philosophy from roughly 1903, and they served him well whether he was breaking new ground in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics or epistemology. The main problem that Maclean examines in detail is the frightfully difficult one of particulars and Russell’s relatively late career solution in terms of his bundle theory—a theory first put forward in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and later, with some modification, in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). In her Introduction, with the help of some terminology and categorial distinctions from Michael Loux’s excellent Metaphysics, Maclean gives the reader a very useful overview of the problem and a brief look at the bundle theory itself and its main metaphysical competitor, substratum theory. In the course of eight chapters she manages to present Russell’s theory and its background, and defend it against many critics, old and contemporary, on several related issues including individuation, modality, non-demonstrative inference, neutral monism and logical atomism. Some of her ideas are innovative departures from traditional accounts of Russell’s later work, e.g. that it’s of a piece with q= Reviews 163 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM both his logical atomism and his neutral monism of the years between the world wars. background The problem of particulars in one form or another was tackled by Russell in several early works. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), for example, ordinary physical (material) objects were epistemically problematic: their existence was knowable only indirectly by inference from our immediately known sensedata which were normally caused by those physical objects. But those causes were mysterious Ding an sich-like substances permanently hidden behind a veil of sense-data, allowing us knowledge of their structure but nothing of their intrinsic nature. It was Russell’s empirical uneasiness with material object particulars that led him to try to eliminate them by constructing them out of experiential data (sensed and unsensed) in 1914; they became—were replaced with—series of classes of sensibilia.1 Similar empirically motivated concerns led him to a version of neutral monism . He dropped the mental/physical distinction between sensations and sense-data and eliminated ordinary mental particulars (minds) as well as material objects, by constructing them out of a “neutral” stuff—sensations in The Analysis of Mind (1921) and events in The Analysis of Matter (1927). Both minds and matter become series of classes of neutral stuff arranged according to different causal laws, viz. those of psychology and physics respectively. Maclean has an interesting and rich chapter (pp. 119–31) in which she defends Russell’s neutral monism against several critics, including W. T. Stace and David Bostock, and argues against the widely held view that Russell gave up neutral monism in his later period. the problem and solution By 1940 Russell’s logical atomist programme led him to eliminate all particulars , not just the so-called ordinary ones like material objects and minds. The problem quite simply was...