Russell on Experience and Egocentricity

Abstract

I

Introduction. Neutral monism is the view that both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are composed of, or grounded in, more basic elements of reality that are intrinsically neither mental nor material. In one context or grouping, such elements can count as ‘material’, but in another context or grouping, these same elements can count as ‘mental’. Its chief proponents include Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, William James and Bertrand Russell. Yet before his conversion to the view in 1918, Russell was a mind–matter dualist and a pointed critic of neutral monism. During this period, he shares Brentano’s (1874) view that a core feature of mental episodes is that they involve mental acts directed as towards one or more simple or complex objects. But whereas Brentano holds that such acts achieve their directedness in virtue of their representational contents, Russell takes them to involve the power of minds to be directly ‘acquainted’ with independent (and typically non-mental) objects presented in experience.

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the question of how and why Russell’s views about the mind changed in 1918. Accordingly, scholars have given increased attention to Russell’s discussions and critiques of neutral monism in his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript (hereafter TK) and 1918–19 ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ (hereafter PLA) (see Bostock 2012; Landini 2011; Pincock 2018; Tully 2003).¹ Yet some recent interpretative attempts (such as Textor 2021) have been hampered by the misconception that the early Russell views experience as in some sense ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’, such that its introspectable qualitative character is fully exhausted by the actual character of the objects experienced (Campbell 2009). At most, introspection reveals the mere existence of experience as a metaphysically primitive, generic mental relation.

In ‘Illumination Fading’, Michael Martin (2024) reads Russell in this problematic way. Specifically, he takes the early Russell to follow G. E. Moore (1903) in holding that experience is entirely ‘colourless’, adding ‘nothing distinctive to mental facts other than giving them the warrant to be classified as mental’ (Martin 2024, p. 166) and being ‘revealed to reflection only as existing as such’ (2024, p. 174).² On such a view, Martin contends, there is only one way of experiencing objects, and it is possible to ‘group together qualitatively similar experiences just by their objects’ (2024, p. 155). This misreading has a number of unfortunate consequences. For starters, it leads Martin to misunderstand the early Russell’s key objections to neutral monism regarding indexical expressions (and their cognitive correlates) such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘that’, and so on. It also primes him to misinterpret the later Russell as holding that there is no special problem of egocentricity for neutral monism. Ultimately, it convinces Martin that Russell, both early and late, failed to ‘come to grips with the question of subjectivity in the first place’ (2024, p. 171).

In point of fact, Russell’s early dualist objections to neutral monism are largely based on his rejection of the diaphaneity of experience. And his eventual acceptance of such diaphaneity is among the chief catalysts for his 1918 conversion to the view. Yet for all the subsequent changes his analysis of mind undergoes, Russell continues to see egocentricity as something for which neutral monism must adequately account. And when he at long last returns to the problem of indexical expressions in his 1940 Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (hereafter IMT) and 1948’s Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (hereafter HK), he offers new resources for doing so.

I will proceed here as follows: §ii surveys Russell’s early dualism and the central role that acquaintance plays within it. §iii makes the case that Russell rejects the diaphaneity of experience as a dualist. §iv examines the central role that this rejection plays in his TK and PLA objections to neutral monism, especially his key argument regarding ‘emphatic particulars’. §v turns to Russell’s IMT and HK account of ‘egocentric particulars’ and presents Martin’s questionable appraisal of it. Finally, §vi considers a suggestive alternative reading by Christoper Pincock (2018) before arguing that Russell’s new notions of ‘positional qualities’ and ‘noticing’ play central roles within his neutral monist analyses of experience and egocentricity.

II

Russellian Dualism. The broad outlines of Russell’s early dualism are well known. Most centrally, he holds that ‘The faculty of being acquainted with things other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind. Acquaintance with objects essentially consists in a relation between the mind and something other than the mind’ (Russell 1912, pp. 66–7). In fact, he maintains, ‘all cognitive relations—attention, sensation, memory, imagination, believing, disbelieving, etc.—presuppose acquaintance’ (Russell 1984, p. 5).³ Russell initially takes it to be ‘obvious’ or ‘plain’ that all such phenomena are essentially mental, and his primary concern is to argue against idealists that the objects of our experience, in contrast, generally are not.

The centrepiece of Russell’s dualism is his view that acquaintance constitutes a relation of direct awareness between subjects and simple or complex objects, rather than one mediated by ideas, mental representations, or cognitive contents, processes or structures (Hylton 2003). As such, acquaintance is a matter of objects simply being presented to subjects in experience rather than subjects taking them to be some way:

I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to the object, i.e. when I am directly aware of the object itself. When I speak of a cognitive relation here, I do not mean the sort of relation which constitutes judgment, but the sort which constitutes presentation. (Russell [1911] 1992, p. 148)

In his 1913 ‘The Nature of Sense-Data’, Russell further clarifies the significance of this distinction:

These I regard as radically distinguished by the fact that presentation (or acquaintance) is a two-term relation of a subject, or (better) an act, to a single (simple or complex) object, while judgment is a multiple relation of a subject or act to the several objects concerned in the judgment. (Russell [1913] 1992, p. 184)⁴

Accordingly, judgements admit of truth or falsehood (depending on whether or not the relevant objects are related as they are judged to be), whereas the dual-relational character of presentation entails that ‘the question of truth or error cannot arise’ (Russell [1913] 1992, p. 184). Either the subject is directly aware of the object in virtue of it being presented in experience, or they are not. When it is so presented, Russell continues: ‘The object of a presentation is what it is, and there is an end to the matter. To say that it “appears different from what it is” can only mean that we make false judgments about it’ ([1913] 1992, p. 186).

In his 1912 The Problems of Philosophy (hereafter POP), Russell emphasizes that acquaintance ‘constitutes the mind’s power of knowing things’ at the most basic level (1912, p. 67). By presenting, without characterizing, simple or complex objects, acquaintance positions subjects to attend to them selectively, name them directly, analyse them in terms of their parts and the relations among them, form conceptions of their qualities and relations, and make judgements about them that will be true or false depending solely on whether they are as they are judged to be. In doing so, acquaintance provides subjects with evidence about the nature and constituents of reality, enables them to pick up piecemeal knowledge about it, and supplies them with the descriptive resources needed to think and talk indirectly about the world beyond their personal experience.

Initially, the dualist Russell holds that we enjoy acquaintance with ordinary material objects, our own mental episodes (but not those of others), and abstract object of various sorts.⁵ But by 1912, various ‘purely empirical’ considerations convince him that the particular qualities and relations directly presented in sensation (such as experienced colours, shapes, orientations, tones, textures and so on) cannot be those of ordinary material objects (Russell [1913] 1992, p. 186). For one thing, the sensory qualities and relations we ordinarily attribute to material objects can differ based on perspective, circumstance and the conditions of our sensory organs when those objects and their interrelations do not (1912, pp. 11–18). For another, we can experience these same sensory features while dreaming, hallucinating, or having our sense organs (or brains) directly stimulated when no corresponding material objects are present (1912, pp. 34–7, 55–6). In fact, given the time it takes stimuli to travel from their sources to our sense organs, even ordinary sensory experiences concern material objects and events only as they were in the past (1912, pp. 52–3). Thus, Russell concludes, the immediate objects of sensory experience are concrete particulars that are external to the mind, causally dependent on our physiology, but not inherent in our physical environment.

Though sense-data are external to the mind, Russell repeatedly emphasizes that they are nevertheless ‘subjective’ in a way that material objects are not. This is because the sense-data we experience are causally dependent, not just on the material object, but also on the perspective from which we are viewing it, the specific environmental conditions and its effects on our ‘sense-organs, nerves and brain’ (Russell [1914] 1986, p. 7). Thus, mundane physical and physiological facts ensure that no two subjects can experience exactly the same sense-data (at least at the same time). But all of this, Russell insists, only shows that sense-data exhibit ‘physiological subjectivity’ ([1914] 1986, p. 7).⁶ Indeed, he continues:

If—per impossibile—there were a complete human body with no mind inside it, all those sensibilia would exist, in relation to that body, which would be sense-data if there were a mind in the body. What the mind adds to sensibilia, in fact, is merely awareness: everything else is physical or physiological. (Russell [1914] 1986, p. 8)

III

Russell on Introspection and Self-Knowledge. It is easy to read into Russell’s assertion that the mind’s contribution to sensory experience is ‘merely awareness’ the view that experience exhibits Moorean diaphaneity. Some, in fact, have ascribed to him the even stronger view that we cannot have any direct introspective awareness of dual mental relations (Textor 2021, p. 240).⁷ In reality, Russell holds that not only can we discern the presence of such mental relations through careful introspective attention, we can also distinguish the different contributions they make to the intrinsic qualitative character of experiences of objects.

There is no question that prior to 1913, Russell thinks we can, by an act of introspective effort, distinguish our experiencing of an object from the object experienced. He is quite explicit on the matter:

In introspection, we seem to be immediately aware of varying complexes, consisting of objects in various cognitive and conative relations to ourselves. When I see the sun, it often happens that I am aware of my seeing the sun, in addition to being aware of the sun; and when I desire food, it often happens that I am aware of my desire for food. (Russell [1911] 1992, p. 149)

After reiterating this again in POP, he adds: ‘Similarly we may be aware of our feeling pleasure or pain, and generally of the events which happen in our minds’ (1912, pp. 76–7).

There is, however, a pressing question of whether we can be directly aware of ourselves in addition to our experiencing, since ‘it is hard to discover any state of mind in which I am aware of myself alone, as opposed to a complex of which I am a constituent’ (Russell [1911] 1992, p. 149). Indeed, he says, ‘when we try to look into ourselves we always seem to come upon a particular thought or feeling, and not upon the “I” which has the thought or feeling’ (1912, p. 78). Even so, he thinks such self-acquaintance is probable. His empirical grounds are these: ‘When I am acquainted with “my seeing the sun”, it seems plain that I am acquainted with two different things in relation to each other … [and] it is plain that the person acquainted is myself’ (1912, p. 79). His theoretical grounds concern the meaning of ‘I’ in thoughts of the form ‘I am acquainted with such-and-such object’. At this time, he holds that the ‘I’ must either function logically as a proper name for an object of acquaintance or as an indirect description of something entirely in terms of such objects. But any such self-description, he argues, will involve reasoning along these lines:

We are acquainted with acquaintance, and we know it is a relation. Also we are acquainted with a complex in which we perceive acquaintance is the relating relation. Hence we know that this complex must have a constituent which is that which is acquainted … Thus ‘I’ means ‘the subject-term in awarenesses of which I am aware’. (Russell [1911] 1992, p. 149)

But since a description of this form results in an endless regress, he concludes that we must either be acquainted with the referent of ‘I’ or ‘find some other analysis of self-consciousness’ ([1911] 1992, p. 149; 1912, pp. 79–80). But at this time, he has none on offer.

By the time of TK, however, ‘the elusiveness of the subject in introspection’ convinces Russell that we lack introspective self-acquaintance and know ourselves merely via introspective self-description in virtue of our ability to designate our experiences with ‘this’ and then partially analyse them (1984, p. 36). Indeed, he elaborates:

[The] datum when we are aware of experiencing an object O is the fact ‘something is acquainted with O’. The subject appears here, not in its individual capacity, but as an ‘apparent variable’; thus such a fact may be a datum in spite of incapacity for acquaintance with the subject. (Russell 1984, p. 37)

As such, subjects are introspectively ‘known merely as the referents for the relation of acquaintance, and for those other psychical relations—judging, desiring, etc.—which imply acquaintance’ (1984, p. 37). Thus, he concludes:

[Psychical] data—at any rate those that are cognitive—consist not of particulars, but of certain facts (i.e. of what certain propositions assert), and of certain relations, namely acquaintance and certain others which presuppose acquaintance. (Russell 1984, p. 37)⁸

Russell goes on to argue in TK that dual mental relations do, in fact, make distinctive introspectable contributions to the intrinsic qualitative characters of our experiences—which, incidentally, Martin himself has previously noted (2015, p. 25). Indeed, in order to decide whether two-term mental relations are ‘distinguished by the nature of the relation or only by the nature of the object’, Russell proposes the following test:

[If] an object O can be given [in two kinds of experience], and if the two experiences can be seen to be different by mere inspection, without taking account of their relations to other experiences, then we must conclude that [they involve different relations to the object]. (Russell 1984, pp. 53–4, emphasis added)

He then spends five chapters applying this test to the dual relations of sensation, imagination, immediate memory, conception and attention.⁹ Here are his key conclusions.

Sensation and introspection differ in terms of the objects they directly present to us—simple and complex sense-data in the former case and mental complexes in the latter (Russell 1984, p. 37). But in both cases, we experience objects as being ‘present’ at the time of the experiencing, a quality that makes them ‘recognizably different from any other experienced relation of subject and object’ (p. 64). In the case of immediate memory, these very same objects can also be directly experienced as being ‘past’, again a quality making it ‘recognizably different’ from other mental relations (pp. 65–6, 71–3, 100).¹⁰ In the case of imagination, there are often, but not always, differences between images and the objects of the other dual relations. Even so, Russell insists, ‘there is also a difference, usually recognizable introspectively’, between the relation of imagining and the others, and he thinks it probable that we experience its objects as having no essential time relation to the mental episode (pp. 62–3, 100). Cases of conception are also introspectively distinguishable from all of the aforementioned, but Russell notes that this might merely be due to its objects being universals rather than particulars (p. 100). Finally, and this is of central importance for discussions to come, he thinks we can also introspectively distinguish experiences involving the dual relation of attention which can present to us any of these same particulars or universals (p. 100).

Moreover, Russell not only rejects diaphaneity in TK and his earlier works, he clearly rejects it afterwards as well. In ‘The Ultimate Constituents of Matter’, for instance, he considers whether ‘the quality designated by the word “mental” does, as a matter of immediate observation, belong to the objects of sense’ (Russell [1915] 1986, p. 79). Russell confidently declares that ‘it is not difficult to see that colours and noises are not mental in the sense of having that intrinsic peculiarity which belongs to beliefs and wishes and volitions, but not to the physical world’ ([1915] 1986, p. 79). He then challenges Berkeley’s argument that heat, like other sensory objects, is mental since it passes imperceptibly into pain as we approach nearer and nearer to a fire. Russell deems such reasoning fallacious:

The sensation itself, like every sensation, consists in experiencing a sensible object, and the experiencing has that quality of painfulness which only mental occurrences can have, but which may belong to thoughts and desires, as well as to sensations. (Russell [1915] 1986, p. 79, emphasis added)

Against Berkeley, he replies:

As the heat which we experience from the fire grows greater, the experience passes gradually from being pleasant to being painful, but neither the pleasure nor the pain is a quality of the object experienced as opposed to the experience. (Russell [1915] 1986, pp. 79–80)

And he certainly holds that the ‘colour or flavour’ that painfulness adds to sensory experiences is something to which we can introspectively attend!

IV

The Case Against Neutral Monism. Roughly a year after the completion of POP, Russell reviewed William James’s posthumous Essays in Radical Empiricism (James 1912) for the journal Mind. Though this was not his first encounter with neutral monism, it marked his first encounter with, and appraisal of, James’s version of the view (Pincock 2018; Wishon 2021). In TK, Russell describes the view as follows:

Neutral monism—as opposed to idealistic monism and materialistic monism—is the theory that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical do not differ in respect to any intrinsic property possessed by the one set and not by the other, but differ only in respect of arrangement and context. (Russell 1984, p. 15)

Particular sensory qualities and relations, for instance, are ‘physical’ when they are part of a causal series of other such elements following physical causal laws. And these same sensory qualities and relations are ‘mental’ when they are part of a causal series of such elements following psychological causal laws. In this way, ‘there is only one kind of stuff out of which the world is made, and this stuff is called mental in one arrangement, physical in the other’ (Russell 1984, p. 15). As a result, ‘there is no distinctive relation such as “acquaintance”, involved in all mental facts, but merely a different grouping of the objects as those dealt with by non-psychological sciences’ (1984, p. 5).

In his 1912 review, Russell praises James’s radical empiricism for being ‘profoundly original and profoundly interesting’ ([1912a] 1992, p. 303). Despite this, he raises several objections to it, with James’s analysis of ‘experience’ being the primary target.¹¹ The major point of disagreement, of course, concerns Russell’s view that experience is intrinsically relational:

To be ‘given’, to be ‘experienced’, is not the same thing as to ‘be’. To be ‘given’, or ‘experienced’ seems to imply a subject, to in fact be constituted by a relation to a cognizing act. (Russell [1912a] 1992, p. 302)

And Russell’s key argument for this is far from theoretical:

On grounds of the purest empiricism, from mere inspection of experience, I for my part should hold it obvious that perception is in its intrinsic nature a fact of relation, involving an act as well as an object. For this reason, I cannot accept James’s view, in spite of its very attractive simplification of the world. (Russell [1912a] 1992, p. 303, emphasis added)¹²

Russell’s more extensive critique of neutral monism in TK and PLA also focuses largely on the analysis of experience. The central disagreement is again the same: ‘If it were not for the fact that neutral monism has been believed, I should have said it was obvious that we can experience our own experiencing, and this is different from experiencing the object of our experiencing’ (Russell 1984, p. 33). But as such introspective obviousness is under dispute, Russell bolsters his position with several arguments. His ‘first and chief’ objection is that the neutral monist analysis of experience cannot capture the ‘immediacy’ and ‘presence’ an object has for us when, and only when, we experience it—a presence which, he insists, depends on nothing outside of the experience itself (pp. 23, 31–2). Russell also objects that neutral monism cannot give a tenable account of ‘the bond which unites’ the various things we experience at a given moment and ‘the difference which marks them out from the rest of the things in the world’ (pp. 28–32, 35).¹³ Yet Russell’s most ‘fatal’ and ‘conclusive’ refutation of neutral monism is his argument regarding indexical expressions such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘that’, and so on, which designate different things on different occasions depending on the circumstances in which they are used (pp. 32, 41).

Before turning to Russell’s objection, it is necessary to consider his own account of such indexical expressions, starting with ‘I’. As noted above, Russell supposes in ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’ (1911) and POP that ‘I’ designates the particular person with whom the speaker enjoys direct self-acquaintance (as any self-description would end up being circular). This allows him to descriptively analyse other indexicals, such as ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’, and so on, in terms of objects’ relations to a designated ‘I’. In this way, indexical expressions designate egocentric particulars. But once Russell comes to deny our self-acquaintance in TK, such expressions require new analyses. On his new account, ‘this’ takes over as the fundamental indexical expression, where ‘this’ is ‘the name of the object attended to at the moment by the person using the term’ (Russell 1984, p. 39).¹⁴ As before, he can then descriptively analyse other indexical expressions in terms of objects’ relations to those selectively emphasized as ‘this’. For instance, he says, ‘The subject attending to “this” is called “I”, and the time of the things which have to “I” the relation of presence is called [“now”]’ (1984, p. 40). In this way, indexical expressions now designate emphatic particulars.

It must be stressed that Russell’s analyses of indexical expressions in TK rests crucially on his analysis of experience—though attention now steals the spotlight from self-acquaintance. The basic picture is this: at any given time, we experience a rich, perspectivally structured array of different simple or complex objects presented to us via sensation, introspection, imagination, immediate memory or conception. We thereby experience them as being immediate and present to us, though in varying manners depending on the relevant relations involved. Then, due to either our own effort or some other cause, the distinctive relation of attention selects one (‘or at least a very small number’) of those presented objects, and we thereby experience them as being singled out and emphasized (Russell 1984, pp. 8–9, 40). This enables us to designate them with ‘this’, or another proper name, and then cognize them in the various ways (Amijee 2013; Wishon 2018). In this fashion, ‘All knowledge of particulars radiates out from this object’ (Russell 1984, p. 40). Even so, the remaining presented objects continue being experienced ‘in some less exclusive manner’, including faint and peripheral sensations, faint wishes, dim thoughts, and so on (1984, pp. 8–9). Thus Russell takes our experience to have ‘an internal structure that involves a center and increasingly peripheral bands of objects’ where the centre is the object of attention (Pincock 2018, p. 319). But crucially, this internal structure is entirely due to the contributions mental relations make to the qualitative character of our experiences, not due to any difference in the experienced character of objects.

In turning to Russell’s objection regarding emphatic particulars, it should become clear that it immediately concerns neither the semantics of indexical expressions nor the treatment of ‘mind’, ‘matter’, ‘time’, and so on in term of groupings of neutral elements. Rather, it concerns the analysis of experience underlying our use of indexical expressions:

What I demand is an account of that principle of selection which, to a given person at a given moment, makes one object, one subject and one time intimate and near and immediate, as no other object or subject or time can be to that subject at that time, though the same intimacy and nearness and immediacy will belong to these others in relation to other subjects and other times. In a world where there were no specifically mental facts, is it not plain that there would be a complete impartiality, an evenly diffused light, not the central illumination fading away into outer darkness, which is characteristic of objects in relation to a mind? (Russell 1984, pp. 40–1)¹⁵

In short, what the dualist Russell thinks neutral monism cannot account for is the experienced immediacy and presence of objects provided by acquaintance and the experienced selective emphasis of some provided by attention. It is no wonder, then, that some commentators inclined to read diaphaneity into Russell’s dualism have found the objection ‘obscure’ (Sainsbury 1979; Bostock 2012).

V

Illumination Lost? Five years after his TK critique of neutral monism, various considerations persuade Russell to adopt the view himself.¹⁶ None is more pivotal than his reversal regarding the diaphaneity of experience:

[I] formerly believed that my own inspection showed me the distinction between a noise and my hearing of a noise, and I am now convinced that it shows me no such thing, and never did. (Russell [1918] 1986, p. 255)

Having thus dispensed with the empirical grounds for his former view (after already questioning its theoretical grounds in PLA), Russell finally concludes that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are simply different causal systems of the particular sensory qualities and relations which, when sensed, he had previously called ‘sense-data’:

I should reduce the stuff of the world to particulars such as occur in seeing, hearing, etc. … The distinction between the mental and the physical, in this view, lies entirely in the fact that one particular may occur in two quite different sorts of causal correlations. (Russell [1918] 1986, pp. 254–5)

Namely, the causal relations of physics and the causal relations of psychology.

Thereafter, Russell sets out to naturalize, rather than eliminate, ‘mind’ and ‘mental phenomena’ in terms of systems of what Dewey (1916) calls ‘pure natural events’ (Russell [1918] 1986, pp. 253–4). As a dualist, Russell reports, ‘I was anxious to rescue the physical world from the clutches of idealism [but thought it undeniable that experiencing is] exclusively mental’ ([1918] 1986, p. 255). Now being a neutral monist, he continues:

I still wish to rescue the physical world from the idealist. But if I could rescue the so-called ‘mental’ world from him too! Then the reason for making a gulf between the mental and the physical would disappear. (Russell [1918] 1986, p. 255)

The challenge for Russell is to show that ‘minds’ and ‘mental phenomena’ can be adequately analysed in terms of the same brief qualitied natural events as ‘matter’. Russell identifies three especially pressing obstacles for doing so: ‘(1) judgment, (2) desire, and (3) ‘emphatic particulars’, i.e. such terms as I, now, here, this’ ([1918] 1986, p. 254).

Over the next two decades, Russell writes extensively on neutral monism, offering naturalistic analyses of judgement, desire and various other mental phenomena. But surprisingly, he does not explicitly revisit the issue of egocentricity until his 1940 IMT and 1948 HK. When he does so, there is no hint of it having posed an especially daunting challenge for neutral monism. What is more, Russell’s analysis of indexical expressions is, in broad strokes, strikingly similar to his earlier one:

All egocentric words can be defined in terms of ‘this’. Thus: ‘I’ means ‘The biography to which this belongs’; ‘here’ means ‘The place of this’; ‘now’ means ‘The time of this’; and so on. (Russell 1940, p. 108)

In HK, he offers a similar analysis:

We may define ‘I’ as ‘the person attending to this’, ‘now’ as ‘the time of attending to this’, and ‘here’ as ‘the place of attending to this’. (Russell 1948, p. 100)

In fact, Russell even frames his discussions of egocentricity using the same metaphor of illumination he formerly wielded against neutral monism:

Physics views space-time impartially, as God might be supposed to view it; there is not, as in perception, a region which is specially warm and intimate and bright, surrounded in all directions by gradually growing darkness. (Russell 1940, p. 108)

And here it is again in HK:

It is to be observed that ‘here’ and ‘now’ depend upon perception; in a purely material universe there would be no ‘here’ and ‘now’. Perception is not impartial, but proceeds from a centre; our perceptual world is (so to speak) a perspective view of the common world. What is near in time and space generally gives rise to a more vivid and distinct memory or percept than what is far. The public world of physics has no such centre of illumination. (Russell 1948, p. 107)

As Martin notes, one would expect to find some key difference in Russell’s new analyses of indexical expressions and egocentricity that explains how neutral monism can address his former challenge (Martin 2024, pp. 156).

So what does Martin make of it all? For starters, he does not interpret the illumination metaphor as describing qualitative differences within the internal structure of experience that are not due to the presented objects. This is entirely unsurprising given that he ascribes diaphaneity to Russell’s dualist analysis of experience. Instead, he takes the metaphor to gesture at the more general fact that each subject is a locus of subjectivity in a world wherein it is otherwise absent. As he puts it, ‘we are the central illumination and we sense there are limits to our conscious awareness, with a world extending beyond that’ (Martin 2024, p. 164). Consequently, much of his critique of the early Russell centres on whether a generic ‘colourless’ dual mental relation can, all by itself, explain the generic, ‘distinctively first-personal or subjective facts of consciousness’ (Martin 2024, pp. 165). This misses the mark.

Martin’s interpretation of the original objection also primes him to draw the wrong conclusions about a key addition to Russell’s discussions of indexical expressions in IMT. Specifically, he homes in on passages in which Russell characterizes the use of such expressions without any appeal to the subjectivity of ‘minds’:

A machine could be constructed which would use the word ‘this’ correctly: it could say ‘this is red’, ‘this is blue’, ‘this is a policeman’, on suitable occasions. In the case of such a machine, the words ‘this is’ are an otiose addition to the subsequent word or words; the machine might just as well be constructed to say ‘abracadabra red’, ‘abracadabra blue’, and so on. If our machine, later on, said ‘that was red’, it would be getting nearer to the capacities of human speech. (Russell 1940, p. 111)

Martin then reads Russell as offering a purely third-personal account of our use of indexical expressions as well:

A verbal reaction to a stimulus may be immediate or delayed. When it is immediate, the afferent current runs into the brain and continues along an efferent nerve until it affects the appropriate muscles and produces a sentence beginning ‘this is’. When it is delayed, the afferent impulse goes into some kind of reservoir, and only produces an efferent impulse [to use a sentence beginning with ‘that was’] in response to some new stimulus. (Russell 1940, p. 112)

Based largely on these two passages, Martin takes Russell to conclude that indexical expressions pose no problem for neutral monism (or any other view) for the simple reason that there ‘aren’t distinctively subjective facts’ at all (Martin 2024, p. 165).¹⁷ Having arrived at this radical view, Russell then becomes free to redeploy—without comment—both his earlier account of indexical expressions and (quite inexplicably) the same illumination metaphor he previously used to capture a feature of ‘minds’ he longer thinks even exists! Putting it all together, Martin then boldly declares that Russell never properly came to grips with subjectivity and, moreover, was unduly ‘cavalier’ about solipsism (Martin 2024, p. 171).

It is not possible to give an adequate accounting of Russell’s neutral monist analysis of subjectivity here. But it is not difficult to see that Martin’s reading has gone awry. Consider, for instance, these telling remarks from HK:

There are—and I am prepared to maintain this dogmatically—many kinds of events that I can observe when they happen to me, but not when they happen to anyone else. I can observe my own pains and pleasures, my perceptions, my desires, my dreams. Analogy leads me to believe that other people have similar experiences, but this is an inference, not an observation. The dentist does not feel my toothache, though he may have admirable inductive grounds for believing that I do. (Russell 1948, p. 58)¹⁸

Also, compare the passages of the ‘indexical-using’ machine Martin cites with these:

Everybody who is not a philosopher addicted to Behaviourism is persuaded that things happen in us that do not happen in any machine. If you have a toothache, you know that you are feeling pain. You could make a machine which would groan and even say, ‘This is unendurable’, but you would still not believe that the machine was undergoing what you undergo when you have toothache. (Russell 1959, p. 103)¹⁹

In reality, Russell takes subjectivity (and solipsism) very seriously both before and after adopting neutral monism, which a closer examination of his later account of indexicals makes evident.

VI

Illumination Regained? There are at least two key elements of Russell’s analysis of indexical expressions in IMT that receive insufficient attention in Martin’s reading: the positional structure of perception and the role played by ‘noticing’. As with Russell’s earlier analysis in TK, these neglected elements do not primarily concern the semantics of indexical expressions, but rather the analysis of experience—and its subjective internal structure—underlying their use. Moreover, neither of them is present in Russell’s previous writings on neutral monism, making them strong candidates for being both resources he overlooked as a dualist and potential substitutes for acquaintance in the new account (Martin 2024, p. 165). In the case of noticing, Russell even says as much: ‘In [IMT], I replaced “acquaintance” by “noticing”, which I accepted as undefined’ (1959, p. 104).

The first of these new additions coincides with a major shift in in Russell’s views about the nature of the neutral stuff out of which ‘minds’ and ‘matter’ are composed. Prior to IMT, he holds that the fundamental neutral stuff consists of particular events exhibiting particular qualities and relations—where it is an open question whether such features are instances of universals or tropes grouped in terms of similarities to a sample (Russell 1921, p. 196). Among his reasons for doing so are considerations such as these:

[It] did not, at that time, seem to be doubtful that, if there are two patches of red in two different places, there are two particular reds … [since they] differ only in position [which] presupposes diversity and cannot constitute it. (Russell 1959, p. 121)²⁰

But by the time of IMT, Russell deems such arguments invalid:

As regards the sensible world, it is clear on reflection that … position is defined by qualities. What is at the centre of the field of vision has a quality that we may call ‘centrality’. Everything else that I am seeing has various degrees of two qualities: up-and-down and right-and-left. (Russell 1959, p. 121)

As such, ‘A red patch on my right can be a complex of the two qualities of redness and rightness; and a red patch on my left can be a complex of the two qualities redness and leftness’ (Russell 1959, pp. 121–2). On Russell’s new view, events become bundles of compresent qualities and relations themselves rather than particulars exhibiting instances of them (Koç Maclean 2014).²¹ The primary attraction of this development is a reduction of his ontological commitments. But the new notion of ‘positional qualities’ also enables Russell to explain the internal perspectival structure of our experiences—wherein some sensory qualities and relations are central while others are to varying degrees peripheral—without needing to posit a system of perspectival relations between those sensory qualities and a special entity which in some way supplies a privileged ‘point of origin’ for such relations.

Russell is well aware, however, that this does not fully address his original objection regarding emphatic particulars. Recently, Pincock has speculated that Russell initially intends to meet this challenge via his analysis of ‘consciousness’ in The Analysis of Mind (Pinnock 2018, p. 327). On this analysis, we are conscious of certain experienced sensory qualities and relations when they cause: (1) images that resemble them, (2) true beliefs of the form ‘this is occurring’ or ‘this occurred’, and (3) feelings of assent towards those beliefs (Klein 2023). Pincock suggests that such consciousness is perhaps meant to play the same selective role as attentional acts do in Russell’s dualist period (Pincock 2018, p. 327).²² But while Russell plausibly intends it to partly explain the emphasis we experience selected sensory items as having, such consciousness cannot explain the selective experiences themselves. This is because it is itself partly constituted by mental episodes involving ‘this’. Here is where his new notion of noticing comes into play.

In IMT, Russell contends that ‘the word “know” is highly ambiguous’ and that there are multiple senses in which we can ‘know’ (that is, be aware of) our percepts and their constituent qualities and relations (Russell 1940, p. 49). Most primitively, ‘there is a sense of “knowing” in which, when you have an experience, there is no difference between the experience and knowing that you have it’ (p. 49). In such cases, our percepts and their sensory qualities have an experiential presence and immediacy within our ‘mind’ simply by standing in the right psychological causal relations to other such events in our ‘biographies’ so as to be ‘experiences’ at all (pp. 50–1). In addition, we can also selectively ‘notice’ some of these qualities and relations, though such noticing is ‘a matter of degree, and very hard to define’ (p. 50). Roughly speaking, it consists ‘mainly in isolating from the sensible environment’ and often involves ‘partly a sharpening of the appropriate sense organs, partly an emotional reaction’ (p. 51). For instance, we can notice a present experience ‘if it rouses in you any emotion, however faint—if it pleases or displeases you, or interests or bores you, or surprises you or is just what you were expecting’ (p. 50). It can also consist of ‘attending’ to elements of our experience, intentionally or otherwise: ‘A sudden loud noise is almost sure to command attention, but so does a very faint sound that has emotional significance’ (p. 51). In fact, there is ‘an important sense in which you can know anything that is in your present sensible field … [and] often you can be sure that it was already there before your attention was called to it’ (p. 50). In each of these cases, selected qualities are experientially emphasized to varying extents depending on the degree to which we notice or attend to them.

On a final note, Russell is quite clear in IMT that our use of ‘this’ to designate something partly depends on its being an ‘object of attention’ (1940, pp. 109–11). Indeed, the main point of Russell’s discussions of both the ‘indexical-using’ machine and our afferent and efferent nervous responses is to show what, in addition to noticing or attending to an object, ‘is required in order to secure the temporary uniqueness of “this”’ (p. 111). Specifically, it requires certain causal relations between the experienced object of our attention and our use of ‘this’ or ‘that’ in order to designate it. And with such analyses in hand, he can then provide descriptive analyses of other indexical expressions such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, and so on (p. 108). Moreover, he can also now explain, without circularity, how we can have explicit consciousness of something we notice or attend to as per his earlier 1921 analysis.

VII

Conclusion. What should now be clear is that the notions of positional qualities and noticing provide Russell with new resources for offering a neutral monist analysis of the subjective internal structure of experience that nicely fits his oft-used illumination metaphor. At the same time, they make it possible for him to redeploy a suitably modified version of his original analysis of indexical expressions. In this way, Russell’s new analyses of experience and indexical expressions jointly constitute his considered response to his earlier dualist challenge regarding emphatic particulars. While it certainly would have been nice for him to declare it as such, it strikes me as far more plausible that he passed over in silence a former objection he takes himself to have adequately addressed rather than an alleged radical abandonment of ‘distinctively subjective facts’ altogether.²³ There remain, of course, big questions about the adequacy of Russell’s neutral monist analyses of experience, subjectivity, egocentricity, indexicality, and so on. Here, I have simply made the case that (1) early Russell clearly rejected diaphaneity, (2) this rejection figured centrally in his early objections to neutral monism, and (3) several decades later (if not sooner) Russell takes himself to have a way of addressing those objections.²⁴

References

Footnotes