On Susan Stebbing and Clarity (with some nods to Carnap, Quine, and Ernest Nagel), Part I

When, back at NewAPPS, I first blogged about Susan Stebbing (1885 – 1943), a key figure in early analytic philosophy, there was almost no scholarship on her. Since then a fine entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy and a number of important scholarly papers and books have appeared. I take no credit for this joyous state of affairs!

My present interest in her work is to explore to what degree she helps us make sense of the nature of 'clarity' or 'clearness' so valued by analytic philosophers then and today. To do so, in this post I focus on Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), which was written for a wide audience (it was commissioned by pelican). This may bias our treatment of her views on clarity. But we have to start somewhere (and the book gives us some of her most detailed views on the matter).

The official topic of the book is announced in the prologue:

I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise. It is the aim of this book to make a small effort in this direction.--Preface to the 1939 edition, pp. xxix-xxx*

It's worth noting that 'clear' and its cognates are used repeatedly through the book. Clarity here is a property of thought and perception. In what follows, I use 'cognition' as shorthand for both. Clarity seems to be a necessary condition for success at thinking (and action guided by it). In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. Undoubtedly undistorted thought is what's being aimed at in describing something as ‘clear.’ But the suggestion is that known biases and and awareness of ignorance are not an obstacle to successful thought presumably because they can knowingly be controlled for. Crucially, clear cognition is a key ingredient for intelligence on Stebbing's view. (22)

It is an important question in political philosophy to what degree it really is necessary for a democratic people to have undistorted thoughts and even control for known biases. But I leave that aside here. (Well, I return indirectly to it at the end of the post.)

Presumably, Stebbing's interest in unconscious bias is prompted by the significance of political propaganda, demagoguery, and advertising (she groups these together as "rhetorical persuasion") and presumably also reflects the growing stature of Freudianism in the age. It is an interesting sociological-historical fact that interest in such bias was revived in recent decades in the context of concerns over racial discriminatory practices. However, for Stebbing an important example of such unconscious bias are (not the desires of our infant inner child, but rather) the "concealed contradictions" we acquire as members of a group. (p. 22) In fact, racial biases are one of the kinds she discusses.

Be that as it may, Stebbing's notion of clarity is not the only one that one can find in the analytic tradition. For Carnap (recall) clarity is an (aesthetic) property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages. Clarity in the hands of Carnap means to capture a kind of demand for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (it very much hopes to prevent equivocation and polysemous use).  Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.

By contrast, Quine had a tendency, as Greg Frost-Arnold has shown, (i) to associate clarity with more general forms of intelligibility. In later years, Quine might argue that (ii) his program (developed in Word & Object) of the philosopher regimenting scientific language to exhibit its ontological commitments, may also be aiming at a species of clarity (about the 'ontology' of science), alongside systematicity.  He also (iii) came to think of clarity as a more general theoretical virtue of a system. 

What's important for present purposes is that neither Carnap's nor Quine's notions of clarity is aimed at or -- given that science is highly specialized -- apt for a democratic people. (I don’t mean to deny that Carnap was very interested in facilitating improved democratic life.) And while there are undoubtedly some family resemblances and overlaps between their notion of clarity and Stebbing's it's useful to keep them distinct (more on that below).

Interestingly enough, also in 1938, (recall) Ernest Nagel was concerned with the role of clarity in democratic life. For Nagel clarification is the development of canons of intelligibility and validity apt for (esoteric) special sciences, but also the making transparent of the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims to ordinary people in part by showing how and the way terms/concepts hang together and function in a system of knowledge and forms of ordinary practice. In particular, the cultivation of clarity is a contribution to a democratic ethos that prevents mere reliance and dependence on authoritative experts and also ensures that calls to action are proportioned to the evidence on their behalf. (See here for a scholarly version of this claim.)

Again, while I don't want to exaggerate the differences between Nagel and Stebbing —they share in fact a pragmatist sensibility, and agree on the significance of proportioning belief to evidence and the important focus of the way we do things with reasonings --, it's important to see the contrasting notions of clarity at work here. In Nagel, clarity is something we do to specialist language and practices that, amongst other functions, can shape and diagnose features in ordinary life, whereas for Stebbing clarity can be immanent in and part and parcel of ordinary life. Not to put too fine a point on it, Nagel, Carnap, and Quine all share in the idea that there is some salient contrast between formal and specialist, regimented languages, on one hand, and ordinary speech, on the other. (How that contrast is characterized is famously a matter of substantive disagreement among them.) In this divide clarity is not to be found primarily on the side of ordinary talk. Stebbing is the outlier in thinking that clarity is not so restricted, but available, in principle, to us all. This is the first thing I wanted to establish today.

The second is that while Stebbing treats clarity as a property of thought and perception that is, in principle, widely diffused among ordinary people (she thinks we all have "some capacity to follow an argument" (21) and in a footnote hopes its not unduly optimistic (26)), she also treats it as a skill that can be acquired for one can be "trained to think clearly." (p. 4) Such training makes "rational argument and… reasonable consideration" possible. Stebbing's role in articulating a deliberative conception of democracy is worth highlighting.

Now what such training involves and who controls access to it are quite important, but I postpone discussion of her views to another time. What matters here is that the skill itself can, once acquired with "effort" (29), also be something that we control. (She emphasizes that have to wish to think clearly.) And, third, that a feature of the skill is logically sound argument (which should not be conflated with syllogistic reasoning).

In future posts, I want to make more precise and also explore some of the difficulties with Stebbing's conception of clarity. But it is worth noting two final features of it in this digression. Stebbing takes

for granted that to be clear-headed is worth while for its own sake. Without this assumption I should not have wanted to write this book. It is, however, enough if you will admit that muddled thinking ends in bungled doing, so that to think clearly is useful for the sake of achieving even our most practical aims. Unless you admit at least as much as this, there will be no point, so far as you are concerned, in what I have to say. Our points of view would be too different for discussion to be possible. (34)

The first feature is that clarity is not just treated as an instrumental value to democratic deliberative life. Stebbing values it as a private and presumably highly intellectual virtue or end in itself. (There are shades of Spinoza here whose work she knew well.) Fair enough, and not wholly surprising.

But it is a bit peculiar that she thinks her imagined interlocuter or reader must share in the commitment that "to think clearly is useful for the sake of achieving even our most practical aims." Admittedly, it seems odd for anyone to deny this in the most general sense. But it is not wholly unreasonable for such an interlocuter to also claim that clarity of cognition may often (perhaps always) be unnecessary to achieve our most practical aims (because relying on tradition, faith, instinct, testimony, or expertise/authority of others). And perhaps (admittedly there are shades of Hume and Nietzsche here) its our biases (or overconfidence) that help us acquire  our most fundamental, practical aims (which are always constrained by time and other resources scarcities). The real problem here is not the purported role of clarity in achieving our aims, but in Stebbing's insistence that muddled thinking must end in muddled doing. This has not been established. (It's hard to see how it could be established given how much has been achieved in conditions of ignorance and superstition.)

Now, what's odd is that in order to have discussion at all, Stebbing assumes assent on this very point of contention. And the reason it is odd is that in a democratic society we can't assume or stipulate agreement over such questions or ways of life including those that, to put it exaggeratedly, resist the clarion call of Enlightenment. My point here is not that one cannot help others see how useful clarity might be (and Stebbing is wonderful on this score), but rather that it must the potential effect of such discussion not its common ground.

---

*All my quotes/page-numbers are from the 2022 Routledge reprint with an introduction by Peter West and a foreword by Nigel Warburton.