## 1. Life



Stebbing lived through some remarkably turbulent decades, in terms
both of social and political upheavals and of philosophical
developments, and these are reflected in the direction and development
of her work. Her personal life and career, in contrast, were
relatively uneventful. She was born in 1885 in North London, the
youngest of six surviving children of a fish merchant. She went up to
Girton College Cambridge in 1904, a time at which University study for
women was very much the exception and long before Cambridge awarded
degrees or even full University membership to women. Apparently her
first interest was to study science, but this was deemed by her family
to be too demanding for her on the grounds of her delicate health, so
she matriculated in History. Whether or not it was a legitimate bar to
scientific study, it is true that Stebbing suffered from ill health
throughout her life. In particular, she was afflicted with
Meniere's disease, a disorder of the inner ear which
caused her fits of vertigo, severe headaches, and forced prolonged
periods of bed rest.



While at Cambridge Stebbing developed an interest in philosophy,
apparently after happening on a copy of F. H. Bradley's
*Appearance and Reality* (1893). After completing her studies
in History she took the first part of the Moral Sciences Tripos at
Cambridge and then moved to King's College London to take an MA
in Moral Science, graduating in 1912. After various short-term and
part-time posts teaching in schools and universities, she was
appointed to a lectureship at Bedford College for women, in the
University of London, in 1920. In 1933 she made the national
newspapers when she became the first woman in the UK to be appointed
to a full professorship in philosophy, again at Bedford College.
(Bedford College became coeducational in the 1960s but was merged with
Royal Holloway College in 1985, though the philosophers there moved to
King's College London, which now has an established chair of
philosophy named after her.) During the late 1930s and early 1940s she
knew, or worked or corresponded with, many of the major figures in
mid-twentieth century philosophy. At the same time she devoted a great
deal of time, influence, and personal income, to securing the safety
of refugees from Germany and Nazi occupied countries: both exiled
scholars and orphaned or fugitive children. However, her health
continued to deteriorate. She suffered and apparently recovered from
one bout of cancer, but the cancer returned, and she died in 1943 at
the age of 57.



Stebbing's given names were "Lizzie Susan". She
disliked the "Lizzie" and was universally known throughout
her life as "Susan". In her writing and professional work,
she generally preferred to use just initials, and at least to begin
with, she published as "L. S. Stebbing". One friend
suggested that Stebbing preferred philosophical debates not to become
side-tracked by details of gender or status that might be indicated by
first names or titles. (For a full account of her life, see Chapman
2013.)


## 2. Logic



Stebbing's first significant work, which established her
reputation, was *A Modern Introduction to Logic*. First
published in 1930, it was revised in 1933, and might justly be
regarded as the first textbook of analytic philosophy: it went through
several editions and was still being reprinted in the early 1960s. Its
main aim was to introduce readers to the developments in logic that
had taken place over the previous five decades, though she leads into
this through discussion of traditional Aristotelian logic. Its title
was "A Modern Introduction to Logic", not "An
Introduction to Modern Logic". Divided into three parts, the
first deals with topics that are now familiar in analytic philosophy,
such as names and descriptions, logical form, the theory of
descriptions, inference and implication, as well as offering an
account of syllogistic theory. The second deals with scientific
methodology, covering induction and causality, in particular. The
third discusses definition, abstraction, and the nature and historical
development of logic.



Stebbing's conception of logic is made clear in the first and
last two chapters of the book. Logical thinking is
"directed" thinking, aimed at answering a question or
solving a problem. As such it involves *reasoning*: identifying
and articulating the premises by means of which, by valid
argumentation, to arrive at relevant conclusions. Reasoning proceeds
in accord with certain rules and exhibits certain forms of inference,
and one of the tasks of logical theory is to articulate these rules
and make explicit these forms of inference--as Aristotle first
did in developing his theory of the syllogism. One reason that
Stebbing included discussion of syllogistic theory was that the rules
and forms are relatively simple, so that the dependence of the
validity of an inference on its logical form, for example, could be
more easily ascertained and elucidated. But she was also concerned to
introduce modern logic. She explains the basic symbolism of Whitehead
and Russell's *Principia Mathematica* in chapter 8, for
example, and the theory of relations in chapter 10. She does not give
any systematic presentation of the predicate calculus, however. In
keeping with her conception of directed thinking, her concern is
primarily with explaining the various concepts and doctrines, such as
the concept of a proposition and Russell's theory of
descriptions, which help us in understanding logical thinking and
logical theory.



Logic, according to Stebbing, is not an art, understood as "a
set of rules the learning of which may fit some one to do
something", but a science--the science of possible forms
(1933b: 473-4). Insofar as the logical forms that the science of
logic discovers are *norms* of thinking, logic can be described
as a normative science. But its normativity is not its distinguishing
feature, she argues, but is merely a by-product of the fact that norms
are what are discovered in logic. She offers an account of the
development of logic as the science of form in the final chapter of
the book, tracing it from its roots in Aristotle's *Prior
Analytics* to Whitehead and Russell's *Principia
Mathematica*, in which it is finally shown, she claims, that
"Demonstration as such is purely formal" (1933b: 488).



In 1934 Stebbing published *Logic in Practice*, a very short
book directed at a more general audience. She continues to regard
logic as the science of forms, the chief task of which is to make
explicit the norms of reasoning. But she does indeed become more
interested in the art of thinking. In the preface she writes:



> 
> 
> The study of logic does not in itself suffice to enable us to reason
> correctly, still less to think clearly where our passionate beliefs
> are concerned. Thinking is an activity of the whole personality.
> Given, however, a desire to be reasonable, then a knowledge of the
> conditions to which all sound thinking must conform will enable us to
> avoid certain mistakes into which we are prone to fall. There is such
> a thing as a habit of sound reasoning. This habit may be acquired by
> consciously attending to the logical principles of sound reasoning, in
> order to apply them to test the soundness of particular arguments.
> (1934a: vii-viii)
> 
> 
> 



*Logic in Practice* is intended to help people reason
correctly, with stress laid on "the importance of considering
language, which is an instrument of our thinking and is imperfect, as
are all human creations" (1934a: viii). This marks a transition
in Stebbing's work: from the mid 1930s onwards she becomes more
concerned with what would now be described as critical thinking.


## 3. Cambridge Analysis



By her own account, Stebbing was "converted" to analytic
philosophy when she encountered G. E. Moore for the first time at a
meeting in London:



> 
> 
> In 1917 I read a paper to the Aristotelian Society [entitled
> "Relation and Coherence"], perhaps one of the most muddled
> papers that have ever been presented to that assembly. ... At the
> outset of the discussion ... a man whom I had never seen and took
> to be quite young, began to ask me questions with a vehement
> insistence that considerably alarmed me. "What ON EARTH do you
> mean by that?" he exclaimed again and again, thumping the table
> as he said "on earth" in a manner that clearly shewed he
> believed there was no earthly meaning in what I had said. Soon,
> however, my alarm faded; the vehement philosopher had made me forget
> not to be a philosopher--nothing mattered except trying to find
> out what I did mean. In spite of my stumbling replies he managed to
> elicit the reasons why I had been led to the views I was trying to
> defend; he shewed me the baselessness of many of my reasons, he
> unravelled the muddles and enabled me to see more clearly the grain of
> sense that had been at the back of my inept criticisms. That was my
> first meeting with Moore, whose name I discovered only towards the end
> of the discussion. I am inclined to think that this meeting of the
> Aristotelian Society was somewhat peculiar in the annals of the
> Society, for the reader of a paper was, before the end of the
> discussion, convinced that her main contentions were entirely wrong.
> One does not expect a philosophical society's meeting to end in
> a conversion, yet such was the result in my case, owing mainly to the
> vehement and vigorous clarity of Moore and his patience in pursuing
> the question to its end ... (1942: 530)
> 
> 
> 



Stebbing kept in touch with Moore for the rest of her life,
corresponding and meeting regularly in Cambridge. Chapter IX of *A
Modern Introduction to Logic*, for example, was revised for the
second edition in the light of criticisms she received from Moore, as
she notes in its preface (1933b: vii).



One fundamental idea that Stebbing took over from Moore was the
distinction between understanding a proposition and knowing its
analysis. Moore had appealed to this distinction in arguing in
"A Defence of Common Sense" (1925), for example, that one
can know, with certainty, that various "common sense"
propositions, such as that one exists, has a body, is a human being,
and so on, are true even if one cannot give the analysis of them. All
that is necessary to know that these propositions are true is to
understand them (understand their meaning, as Moore put it). Indeed,
Moore argued, one could not even raise the question of its correct
analysis (or judge the correctness of any analysis that was offered)
if one did not understand the proposition in the first place. This
distinction is also fundamental to Wittgenstein's
*Tractatus*, though whether it was Wittgenstein who influenced
Moore or Moore (in earlier thinking) who influenced Wittgenstein
cannot be discussed here. Whatever their mutual influence, however,
the distinction became central to the conception of analysis that was
characteristic of what came to be known as the Cambridge School of
Analysis, whose members included John Wisdom and Austin Duncan-Jones
as well as Moore and Stebbing. It also included, or at least was
influenced by the ideas of, Bertrand Russell, Frank P. Ramsey and C.
D. Broad. (For further details, see Baldwin 2013.)



In 1932 Stebbing read another paper to the Aristotelian Society
entitled "The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics", in which
she sought to spell out and justify the presuppositions of the
conception of analysis of the Cambridge School. She identifies three
main assumptions, which she formulates as follows (1932: 85):



(1)
If *p* [standing for any proposition] is to be analysed,
then *p* must be understood. It follows that there is at least
one expression which unambiguously expresses *p*.
(2)
If *p* is to be analysed, then it is not always the case
that *p* is known to be false, and it is sometimes the case
that *p* is known to be true. 
(3)
Directional analysis is possible. 


The first, which she characterizes as logical, she defends by
appealing to Moore's distinction between understanding a
proposition and knowing its analysis, making explicit the
presupposition that if one can understand a proposition, then there
must be some unambiguous formulation of it. The second, which she
describes as metaphysical (though it is also epistemological),
expresses the further--Moorean--assumption that any process
of analysis must take it as granted that the proposition we are
seeking to analyse can be known to be true. Stebbing here merely
states that the assumption is plausible and that she has no reasons to
reject it (1932: 92).



The third assumption gives her the most difficulty, however. She
divides it into a number of more specific presuppositions, but what is
crucial is the assumption that analysis must be "directed"
towards, i.e., end in, what she calls "basic
facts"--absolutely simple or atomic facts. Just such an
assumption was made in Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* as well
as in Russell's form of logical atomism, for example. But once
Stebbing has made explicit all these presuppositions, she comes to the
conclusion that not only are they unjustified but they are not even
very plausible (1932: 86-7).



To illustrate the conception of metaphysical analysis that Stebbing is
seeking to articulate, let us consider one of Stebbing's
examples:



(1)
 Every economist is fallible.


Let us suppose that we need to give some unambiguous formulation of
this. Here is one possibility:



(2)
For all *x*,if *x* is an economist, then *x* is fallible.


We can see this as providing a logical analysis of (1). It could be
readily formalized in the predicate calculus as

 

\[ (\forall x) (Ex \rightarrow Fx) \]


But what is its metaphysical analysis? One suggestion might be that
the analysis of (1) ends in a conjunction of propositions expressing
the specific facts about the fallibility of each economist:



(3)
Karl Marx is fallible and John Maynard Keynes is fallible and
Muhammad Yunus is fallible and ... 


It seems clear that we can understand (1) without knowing the
suggested analysis expressed in (3), so to this extent the Moorean
distinction seems justified. To understand (3), taken as elliptical
for the full conjunction, I would need to know the names of all the
economists, and this is something that very few--if any--of
us know. But if this is right, then can we really say that (3)
analyses the "meaning" of (1), which is how Moore seemed
to want to put it? Does (1) have the same "meaning" as
(3)? Even if we take (1) as an abbreviation of the (full) conjunction
expressed in (3), would we not at the very least have to add at the
end "and that is all the economists there are"? And how
should this last clause be analysed? What kind of fact does that
express? In any case, can "facts" such as that Keynes is
fallible, etc., be regarded as "basic"? Can they not be
analysed further? (3) was only offered as one suggestion, natural as
it might have seemed. Are there not other possible analyses, taking a
rather different form? Might the truth (if such it is) of (1) not be
grounded, instead, in facts about the nature of being an
economist--that economists have to idealize situations and hence
are bound to get some things wrong, for example?



There is room for argument, then, as to what the
"metaphysical" analysis of a proposition such as (1) is;
and in the early 1930s members of the Cambridge School did indeed
debate the issue of the analysis of a whole range of types of
proposition in great detail. Stebbing was at the centre of this
debate. A distinction came to be drawn between logical and
metaphysical analysis in just the way we have outlined: logical
analysis was intended to give an "unambiguous" formulation
and metaphysical analysis was intended to uncover the "basic
facts" on which the meaning or truth of the proposition to be
analysed was grounded. Logical analysis was alternatively described as
"same-level" analysis and metaphysical analysis as
"new-level" or "reductive" or
"directional" analysis.



Once this distinction is drawn, it becomes possible to reject
metaphysical analysis without rejecting analysis altogether. We can
allow logical analysis to provide us with
"unambiguous"--or at least clearer--formulations
of the proposition we want to analyse. This may be sufficient to
elucidate its logical form or to remove certain confusions to which it
may give rise. This is what Max Black (1933), for example, advocated
in a reply to Stebbing that he also read to the Aristotelian Society a
few months later (see Beaney 2003). We can also allow
"partial" metaphysical analyses. We might
"reduce" propositions about the decisions of committees,
for example, to propositions about the activities of its constituent
members, which may be enough to explain the decisions that were made
without having to further analyse what it is to be a member of a
committee or indeed what it is to be a person (rational or otherwise).
The correctness or usefulness of an analysis is relative to our
purposes in seeking it. This purpose-relative approach to analysis was
the one that Stebbing herself came to adopt. (For more on the debates
about analysis in the 1930s, see Baldwin 2013; Beaney 2003, 2016.)


## 4. Logical Positivism



Stebbing played a major role in introducing logical positivism into
Britain. She first met Moritz Schlick in Oxford in 1930 when they
spoke in a panel together at the Seventh International Congress of
Philosophy, and Schlick came to England again in 1932 to lecture at
King's College London. In 1934 she invited Rudolf Carnap to give
a series of three lectures (later published as *Philosophy and
Logical Syntax*) in London, where Carnap met Russell and A. J.
Ayer for the first time. She was on the organization committee for the
International Congress for the Unity of Science, which was held in
Paris in 1935 and in Cambridge in 1938.



What Stebbing found attractive in logical positivism was its respect
for science and the value it placed on logic. What she rejected was
its repudiation of metaphysics. (She endorsed the
"logical" and "empiricism" but not the
"positivism", in other words, of the movement for which
both "logical empiricism" and "logical
positivism" are used as names, more or less interchangeably.) We
can see her 1932 paper, "The Method of Analysis in
Metaphysics", as seeking to defend the conception of
metaphysical analysis of the Cambridge School in response to the
logical positivists' critique of metaphysics. But it is in a
paper she read to the British Academy in March 1933, "Logical
Positivism and Analysis", that she attempts to engage directly
with logical positivism and say what she finds objectionable about it.
She takes "logical positivism" to include the views of
Wittgenstein, as filtered through the reports and writings of various
members of the Vienna Circle such as Schlick, Carnap, and Friedrich
Waismann. Focusing especially on Carnap, she criticizes his conception
of "logically constructed systems" (as found in his
*Aufbau* of 1928, for example) for being too abstract. However
useful such a system may be in showing what can be constructed with
the fewest possible assumptions and primitive terms, she argues, the
world itself is not such a system. She also attacks Carnap's
"methodological solipsism" on what she calls "the
best of grounds ... namely, that I *know* it to be
false" (1933a: 77).



Stebbing's assertion of what she *knows* is hardly likely
to be seen by anyone other than a committed Moorean as a knockdown
argument against any form of solipsism. She goes on to accuse
Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists who were influenced by him,
of confusing "direct experience" and
"content", but no evidence is offered for saddling
Wittgenstein with the views she claims he had. However, in the last
quarter of the paper, she makes clear that what is really at issue, in
her view, is a conflict between two different conceptions of analysis,
which she calls "directional analysis" and
"postulational analysis". Directional analysis is the form
of analysis that she had attempted to defend in her 1932 paper.
Postulational analysis is what is used "in the construction of a
deductive system" (1933a: 80). Axioms are stipulated and
everything else in the system is derived by the rules of
inference.



What Stebbing means by a constructed system here is a system that is
postulated as a *replacement* for a conceptual system used in
our everyday life--in the way that set theory might be seen as
postulating a replacement for our ordinary system of arithmetic. On
this view, our everyday concepts and propositions are vague and need
to be replaced--or "explicated", to use
Carnap's later term--by precisely defined concepts, clearly
stated axioms and logically derived propositions. Stebbing's
fundamental objection to this conception of postulational or
explicatory analysis is that it misunderstands the role of analysis,
which is "to understand something more clearly" (1933a:
81). Simply replacing our ordinary vague concepts by precise ones does
not genuinely show what it was we understood. Consider, for example,
the "replacement" of our ordinary concepts of colour by
concepts scientifically defined in terms of the wavelengths of light,
etc. Arguably, this can never do justice to what it is we experience
when we see colours and describe them in the ordinary ways we do: it
does not capture the phenomenology of our experience. In the same way,
we might question whether defining numbers as sets genuinely shows
what we "really mean" by number terms.



According to Stebbing, the logical positivists--and she
specifically mentions Schlick in this regard--put "the
pursuit of meaning" before the determination of the truth-value
of propositions (1933a: 83). But this gets things precisely the wrong
way around, on Stebbing's Moorean view: we *begin* with
propositions that we understand (in some sense) and can *know*
to be true, and in seeking an analysis of these propositions, we aim
to clarify that understanding by identifying the facts that make them
true or false. This is precisely the conception of analysis that she
had attempted to articulate and defend in her 1932 paper. On the
explicatory conception (as Stebbing seems to construe it), on the
other hand, we *postulate* something with a meaning that is
intended to be clear once and for all, with the aim of thereby guiding
or constraining our subsequent determinations of the truth-value of
the relevant propositions.



At the very end of her lecture, in explaining how she disagrees with
the "linguistic" approach of Wittgenstein and the logical
positivists, Stebbing summarises her view as follows:



> 
> 
> What we ordinarily say, we say unclearly. We speak unclearly because
> we think unclearly. It is the task of philosophy to render our
> thoughts clear. ... We cannot clarify our thoughts by thinking
> about thinking, nor by thinking about logic. We have to think
> *about* what we *were* thinking about. The philosopher
> considers a *given expression*, and analyses it in order to
> find *another expression* which says *more* clearly what
> the original expression said *less* clearly. This investigation
> is not linguistic. We must first *know* what facts are the case
> before we can fruitfully employ analysis for the purpose of clarifying
> our thoughts about the world. Accordingly, Logical Positivism fails, I
> think, in so far as it attempts to start from *a priori*
> assumptions with regard to the nature of language and the principles
> of symbolism, and, by means of these, to draw limits with regard to
> what we *can* think. Their mistake is that they seek to make
> *everything* clear at once. But it is not in this way that
> philosophy can develop. We must proceed step by step, beginning with
> propositions which we *know* to be true, not ruling out
> initially what does not fit in. (1933a: 86)
> 
> 
> 



What emerges from the two papers that Stebbing wrote on analysis in
1932 and 1933? As she admitted herself, some of her arguments might
well seem unconvincing or inconclusive. On the one hand, she confesses
that she can find no justification for the presuppositions of
directional analysis, her favoured form of analysis, at least as far
as the commitment to "basic facts" is concerned. On the
other hand, her objection to postulational analysis seems to amount,
at times, to no more than the charge that it is not directional
analysis. (For a fuller account of her critique of logical positivism,
see Beaney 2016.) In attempting to clarify both directional analysis
and postulational analysis, and to defend the former and criticise the
latter, however, she helped sharpen the issues in dispute between the
Cambridge School and logical positivism. Furthermore, by encouraging
dialogue between the two, in both her writings and her organizational
activities, she also helped foster that critical engagement between
the "ordinary language" and "ideal language"
wings of analytic philosophy, as they later came to be called, which
has continued to this day. In short, what she promoted, above all, was
critical reflection on the nature of analysis and hence of the
essential characteristics of the two main schools of thought that were
to come together under the heading of "analytic
philosophy".


## 5. Politics and Critical Thinking



During the mid 1930s, Stebbing engaged increasingly with a general or
even popular, as opposed to an exclusively philosophical or academic,
audience. This development in her work was driven by her belief that
the structures and principles of formal logic need not be seen as a
closed, isolated system, but rather could profitably be applied to the
problems and issues of modern life. This was coupled with a commitment
to the practical analysis of the texts in which these problems were
presented and discussed, in order to identify any illogical, flawed or
misleading thinking. In *Logic in Practice* (1934) she had
already aimed at a more general readership, including more overt
political commentary than in *A Modern Introduction to Logic*,
offering examples drawn from political speeches and newspaper reports
to demonstrate examples of muddled argument and biased description. In
*Philosophy and the Physicists* (1937), her focus was on the
language used by scientists to explain their ideas--particularly
by scientists who proposed to present these ideas in a way that was
palatable, and indeed entertaining, to a popular audience. Stebbing
worried that imprecise, impressionistic or sensational uses of
language obscured the nature of recent scientific advances and, worse
still, encouraged unjustified inferences and beliefs to be drawn from
them.



One of Stebbing's main targets was Sir Arthur Eddington, a then
prominent public figure whose photographs of the eclipse in 1919 had
helped to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity. Eddington
liked to grip his readers' attention and their imagination by
requiring them to consider everyday experiences in the light of
scientific discoveries. In this passage from his popular book *The
Nature of the Physical World* (1935), he is concerned with the
atomic theory of matter:



> 
> 
> I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a
> complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an
> atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square
> inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank traveling at
> twenty miles a second round the sun--a fraction of a second too
> early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this
> whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a
> wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through
> every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance.
> To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip
> through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives
> a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly;
> and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about
> steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be
> boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not
> a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. (1935:
> 328)
> 
> 
> 



Stebbing disliked this way of explaining physics, because of the
casual misuse it made of everyday language, and also because of the
much larger implications Eddington encouraged his reader to draw from
it. In *Philosophy and the Physicists* she drew attention to
these issues. She argued, for instance, that it simply made no sense
to say "the plank has no solidity of substance". The word
"solid" just means having properties such as those of a
plank. Whatever developments in physics may indicate, a plank with no
solidity is simply a nonsense, or a contradiction. Science must find
other language in which to express these findings, since using
everyday language to do so will only mislead and confuse. In fact,
although Eddington ignored or even concealed this fact, scientists had
found it necessary to develop new and highly formal systems for
expressing their findings, since they were describing a very different
type of reality from that of everyday experience. Eddington's
persistent use of everyday language to describe scientific knowledge
was designed to have an emotional rather than an informative impact on
his readership. Here is Stebbing's own version of the business
of walking into a room:



> 
> 
> I enter my study and see the blue curtains fluttering in the breeze,
> for the windows are open. I notice a bowl of roses on the table; it
> was not there when I went out. Clumsily I stumble against the table,
> bruising my leg against its hard edge; it is a heavy table and
> scarcely moves under the impact of my weight. I take a rose from the
> bowl, press it to my face, feel the softness of the petals, and smell
> its characteristic scent. I rejoice in the beauty of the graded
> shading of the crimson petals. In short--I am in a familiar room,
> seeing, touching, smelling, familiar things, thinking familiar
> thoughts, experiencing familiar emotions. (1937: 45)
> 
> 
> 



Stebbing's point is that ordinary language very adequately and
indeed very accurately describes everyday experience. That description
does not coincide with the scientific understanding of matter, and nor
should it; for that a different type of language is necessary. The
danger was that once Eddington had got his readership thinking about
the scientific conception of matter in relation to everyday language,
he was able to manipulate their understanding of the possible
consequences of recent scientific developments for our understanding
of other areas of human experience, including the spiritual and even
the religious. Eddington argued that the behaviour of material objects
was now shown to be random and unpredictable, rather than controlled
by determinate laws of physics. Our understanding of the world around
us as relatively stable and ordered was imposed on reality by our own
perceptions. This, in turn, opened up the possibility of the scientific
viability of other types of truth or reality, including the mental,
the spiritual and, for Eddington, the divine.



If *Philosophy and the Physicists* was written to guard its
readership against imprecise or misleading use of language by
scientists, Stebbing's next major publication had an even more
earnest and urgent purpose. *Thinking to Some Purpose* was
published in 1939. It was a direct result of the increasing pressure
on Stebbing to become a more prominent commentator on current affairs
and to contribute to public intellectual debate; the BBC commissioned
a series of talks from Stebbing which she was unable to deliver
because of ill health but which she published instead in the newly
established Penguin series of "original non-fiction books on
contemporary issues". Although Stebbing was reluctant to play a
prominent public role, she was committed to the necessity of academics
contributing to the discussion of crucial social and political issues.
*Thinking to Some Purpose* was written before the beginning of
the Second World War, but it was produced at a time when Stebbing,
like many others, was well aware of the gravity of the national and
international situation, and of what was at stake. She was convinced
that it was imperative that the electorate, now universally franchised
and generally literate, should be equipped to deal with the type of
rhetoric that was being directed at them:



> 
> 
> the citizens must be able to think relevantly, that is, to think to
> some purpose. Thus to think is difficult. Accordingly, it is not
> surprising, however saddening it may be, that many of our statesmen do
> not trust the citizens to think, but rely instead upon the arts of
> persuasion. (1939: 14)
> 
> 
> 



The book is full of analyses of actual uses of language by those
trying to persuade others to take a particular course of action:
advertisers, journalists, clergymen and, particularly, politicians.
Stebbing urged readers to hone their critical skills in order to
identify uses of language that introduce assumptions rather than make
direct statements, or that hide parts of an argument that in logic
would need to be made explicit. A repeated target is Sir Stanley
Baldwin, several times Conservative Prime Minister. For instance,
Stebbing quoted the following extract from a speech he gave while
campaigning on behalf of the National Government in the 1931 General
Election. Baldwin's task was to explain how it would be possible
for Liberals and Conservative to work together in Government.



> 
> 
> There must undoubtedly be some difficulty over the question of
> tariffs. Liberals would approach the problem with a Free Trade bias
> but with an open mind to examine and decide whether there were
> measures of dealing with the problem apart from tariffs. Conservatives
> would start with an open mind but with a favour for tariffs. They
> would start with an open mind to examine alternative methods, and the
> Cabinet as a whole would sit down with perfect honesty and sincerity
> to come to a decision on that matter. (quoted by Stebbing 1939:
> 66)
> 
> 
> 



Stebbing focussed on some of Baldwin's specific lexical
choices:



> 
> 
> You will notice that Baldwin speaks of a Liberal *bias* for
> Free Trade and of a Conservative *favour* for tariffs. The word
> "bias" carries with it an emotional significance of having
> *prejudged* the matter in a way that could hardly be regarded
> as consistent with having an "open mind". The word
> "favour" does not, I think, have this significance. (1939:
> 66-7)
> 
> 
> 



In numerous other examples in *Thinking to Some Purpose*,
Stebbing drew attention to the ways in which speakers and writers can
potentially have a strong influence on the beliefs and actions of
their audiences, not just through what they literally say but through
how their choice of words introduces ideological assumptions or
disguises necessary steps in an argument.


## 6. Last Work and Legacy



Soon after the outbreak of war, Stebbing moved to Cambridge as part of
the general evacuation of Bedford College. During her last years, her
work became increasingly socially and politically engaged, although
she herself continued to shun public recognition or any suggestion of
personal political activism. In *Ideals and Illusions* (1941)
she urged the importance in all main spheres of life of identifying
and pursuing specific ideals, and distinguishing these from
potentially comforting but misleading illusions. She targeted a number
of what she saw as such dangerous illusions, including both political
and religious illusions, such as in cases where religion was used to
condone or excuse social inequality or injustice. Stebbing struggled
against ill health to finish *A Modern Elementary Logic*
(1943), a textbook on logic that was aimed particularly at students
who were starting out in their philosophical studies, perhaps without
the benefit of philosophical instruction, as would be the case with
those serving in the military. Her final philosophical contribution
was *Men and Moral Principles*, delivered as a London School of
Economics Hobhouse Memorial Lecture a few months before she died and
published posthumously as a pamphlet in 1944. Stebbing defended the
validity of moral discussion and the reality of moral principles,
based on humanistic rather than religious credentials. She argued that
moral judgments needed to be considered in their full context and on
an individual basis. Her approach allowed for complete sets of ideals
to be evaluated and compared in relation to complex real-life
situations, but prompted some later criticism that it left her without
an intellectual basis for her own condemnation of a number of
political systems, including Fascism.



Stebbing's obituaries focused largely on her logical and
analytical work. This work is indeed still worth celebrating in its
own right and on its own terms, particularly in her bringing together
traditional and modern logic and in her accounts of the key ideas and
doctrines of the Cambridge School of Analysis. Her role as an early
British interpreter and critic of logical positivism and the dialogue
she promoted between the two main branches of analytic philosophy are
also extremely significant.



Subsequent developments in how language has been studied and discussed
in both philosophy and linguistics, however, suggest other ways of
evaluating Stebbing's legacy and her significance. She combined
her commitment to formal logic with a belief in the importance of
practical analysis of everyday texts and as a result in the necessity
of public engagement by philosophers, in a manner which was at the
time rare in academia. She saw no discrepancy between the rigours of
logical argument and the requirements of practical problem solving,
and stressed the need for clarity and transparency in language use. In
this, she championed the importance to philosophers of paying
attention to ordinary language and the varieties of its everyday use
somewhat in advance of the rise of "ordinary language
philosophy" in Oxford after the Second World War.



In some ways, Stebbing went even further than the most committed
philosophers of ordinary language such as Ryle, Austin and Strawson.
She did not just argue that philosophers should pay attention to
ordinary language; she illustrated her philosophical writings with a
wealth of real life examples taken from everyday communicative
interactions, including newspaper editorials, political speeches and
advertising copy. Mary Warnock comments that Stebbing's
"determination to find in language both the source and sometimes
the solution of traditional philosophical puzzles" was central
to later developments in ordinary language philosophy, and highlights
Stebbing's early "understanding of the philosophical
significance of this approach, which can properly be described as
revolutionary" (1996: 93). Stebbing's work was recognized
at the time in this respect. Urmson (1953), in particular, praised her
assault on Eddington for its insistence on attending to how people
ordinarily use language; "solid" is used to describe
properties such as those displayed by a plank of wood, so to describe
a plank as having no solidity is simply nonsensical.



Further developments in the study of language, more recent in origin
and associated with the discipline of linguistics rather than that of
philosophy, have some striking resonances with Stebbing's later
writings, and suggest a modern re-evaluation of her contribution.
Stebbing became increasingly interested not just in the significance
and potentialities of everyday language but also in the social and
ideological implications of how it is used in society, particularly by
those in authority. A number of branches of recent and present
linguistics share this commitment to studying language in context.
Pragmatics, which can trace a direct descent from ordinary language
philosophy through figures such as Austin and Grice, considers meaning
in relation to the intentions, functions and contexts associated with
the use of linguistic forms. Sociolinguistics is concerned with social
influences on the use of language and with the effects of language use
on society.



Perhaps the strongest affinities between Stebbing's work and
current linguistics are in the area of Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA). CDA emerged as an identifiable branch of linguistics during the
final decades of the twentieth century. Its focus is on the close
analysis of actual language use to reveal how specific choices made by
speakers and writers can introduce ideological assumptions into texts,
often assumptions that are concealed beneath the surface message of
the text. Some of the methodological commitments and objectives of CDA
are remarkably similar to the things that Stebbing was saying about
language half a century or more earlier. For instance, CDA most
commonly engages with examples of language use sourced from
contemporary newspaper articles, advertisements and political
speeches. It also has a specific agenda in terms of its intended
effect, reminiscent of Stebbing's mission to educated her
readership as informed and responsible consumers and voters:



> 
> 
> CDA aims to make its users aware of, and able to describe and
> deconstruct, vectors and effects in texts and semiotic materials
> generally which might otherwise remain to wield power uncritiqued. In
> these respects CDA may be a kind of wake-up call, or
> consciousness-raising, about the coercive or anti-democratizing
> effects of the discourses we live by (Toolan 2002: xxii).
> 
> 
> 


## 7. Conclusion



Stebbing played a major role in the development of analytic philosophy
in the 1930s, writing what was in effect the first textbook of
analytic philosophy, *A Modern Introduction to Logic* (1930).
Although she was a leading member of the Cambridge School of Analysis,
with Moore the strongest influence upon her, she also sought to engage
with logical positivism and thereby helped to bring the two together
into the wider movement that we now know as analytic philosophy. In
her later writings she sought to show the relevance of her logical and
analytic work to everyday thinking and to social and political debate.
*Philosophy and the Physicists* (1937) and *Thinking to Some
Purpose* (1939), her two most important books addressed to a more
general audience, can also be regarded as among the first books of
critical thinking, anticipating developments in sociolinguistics,
pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. Both her governing idea of
"purposive thinking" and the emphasis she placed on
clarity of thought and expression were manifested in all her writing,
which was also characterized--as indeed, were her teaching and
organizational activities--by an exceptional degree of
intellectual honesty and moral integrity.