failures of communication 4
Russell is humorously pessimistic in 1914: “explicit controversy is almost always fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another”. [1]
Otto Neurath thinks the thing to do is to avoid or ban many words on the model of the Vatican’s Index librorum prohibitorum. He proposes "an Index verborum prohibitorum” … it “might not be a bad educational measure for forcing oneself to clarity". [2]
Among the words that Neurath thinks potentially “dangerous” or “dubious”, and recommends avoiding, are appearance, cause/effect, concept, essence, existence, explanation, fact, judgement, material/immaterial, meaning, perception, philosophy, real, reality, sense-datum, true/false, understanding, value, verification. [3]
Russell was more moderate, a few years later: “there are a number of words which I think should disappear from the psychological vocabulary: among these I should include knowledge, memory, perception, and sensation”. [4]
I thought he might have been reading T. S. Eliot (‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) when he wrote in his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript that “the meanings of common words are vague, fluctuating and ambiguous, like the shadow thrown by a flickering streetlamp on a windy night; yet in the nucleus of this uncertain patch of meaning, we may find some precise concept for which philosophy requires a name”; 5] but he only met Eliot in 1914, and I believe that these poems were not finished until 1915.
[1] Russell, B. (1914) Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Open Court), pp. 18–19
[2] Neurath, O. (1921/1973) "Anti-Spengler”, in Empiricism and Sociology, edited by M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen, translated by M. Neurath and P. Foulkes (Boston: Reidel), p. 208.
[3] Reisch, G. (1997) ‘Economist, Epistemologist . . . and Censor? On Otto Neurath's Index Verborum Prohibitorum’, Perspectives on Science 5/3.
[4] Russell, B. Collected Papers vol. 10 (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 295.
[5] Russell, B. (1913/1984) Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript, ed. E. Eames and K. Blackwell (London: Routledge), p. 6.
One day—when flights resume to Shangri-La— there will be a great conference to fix the meanings of all important words.