Analytic women

[Celerity]

Twin forces marginalised the women of early analytic philosophy. Correct those mistakes, and the next generation benefits

https://aeon.co/essays/the-lost-women-of-early-analytic-philosophy


Thought (1900-01) by Auguste Rodin. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

A couple of years ago, the library of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was subject to a massive reclassification. Hundreds of books were provisionally placed higgledy-piggledy on the shelves, atlases leaning against poetry collections, folios of sheet music wedged between a tome on malaria treatments and a study of birds in the Arctic. In the midst of this jumble, one of us was preparing the valedictory lecture that would mark her official retirement as professor of philosophy. After two hours of thinking and writing, it was time for a break and a leisurely look at the miscellany of intellectual effort on the shelves. A bright blue book drew attention. It was the fourth volume (the rest were nowhere to be seen) of A History of Women Philosophers (1995) edited by Mary Ellen Waithe, which deals with female philosophers in the 20th century. Upon inspection, it contained not only essays on thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, but also a chapter on a completely unknown English philosopher, E E Constance Jones (1848-1922). The authors of this chapter, Waithe and Samantha Cicero, argued that Jones had solved Frege’s Puzzle two years before Gottlob Frege himself had done so.


Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones (1916) by John Lavery. Courtesy Girton College Cambridge/Wikipedia

This was by all accounts a spectacular claim. Frege, the German mathematician and philosopher born in the same year as Jones, had been the major inspiration for Principia Mathematica, the bible of modern logic that Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published between 1910 and 1913. Frege’s grand aim was to find a foundation from which the whole of number theory could be derived. In carrying out this project, however, he encountered a philosophical problem. How to account for the fact that an equation like 2 x 2 = 1 + 3 is informative, whereas 4 = 4 is not? It is not just that the symbols on both sides of the identity sign are different. After all, in 7 = VII the symbols on either side of the identity sign differ, but the statement is not informative in the way that 2 x 2 = 1 + 3 is; it simply represents the number seven in two different symbol systems. In later work, Frege used a non-mathematical example to illustrate his problem. Why is the statement ‘The morning star is the evening star’ informative, whereas ‘The morning star is the morning star’ is not? Since both ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ refer to the planet Venus, both sentences seem to say nothing more than that Venus is Venus.

Frege solved the problem in his paper ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892). He argued that the meaning of a term like ‘morning star’ is not just its reference (Venus), but also contains another component – the sense – which is the way in which the reference is given to us, in this case as a star that appears in the morning. ‘The morning star is the evening star’ is informative because the references of ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’ are the same, while their senses are different. In fact, it took the Babylonians quite some time to discover that this star that appears in the morning is the same heavenly body as the star that appears in the evening. ‘The morning star is the morning star’, on the other hand, is trivially true – for the Babylonians as well as for us. Waithe and Cicero discovered that Constance Jones was struggling with a problem similar to that of Frege, for she wanted to know: why is the statement A is B significant while A is A is trivial? Waithe and Cicero argued that in 1890 – two years before Frege wrote his classic paper – Jones had published a solution that was basically the same as Frege’s.



For any scholar in analytic philosophy, this was breaking news. Both of us have long been teaching the history of analytic philosophy, one of us for more than 30 years. We have taught countless students how, at the University of Cambridge, Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore revolted against traditional logic and traditional philosophy, thereby founding what became known as analytic philosophy. We have described how, in the 20th century, analytic philosophy branched out in two different directions, a formal one that led to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), the Vienna Circle, and W V Quine’s naturalised philosophy; and an informal one consisting of the ordinary language philosophy associated with J L Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and the later work of Wittgenstein. Nowhere did we mention Constance Jones. We simply did not know about her, much less did we suspect that she could have anticipated that crucial building block of analytic philosophy, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference.

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Susanne K Langer photographed by Richard Avedon. Courtesy the Smithsonian National Museum of American History