Abstract
Siobhan Chapman has written a fine intellectual biography of Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), who was President of the Aristotelian Society and of the Mind Association, one of the founders of the journal Analysis, and the first woman in Britain to hold a chair in philosophy (at Bedford College, London). During her lifetime, Stebbing’s work on logic – and especially her book A Modern Contribution to Logic (1930) – was generally regarded as her main contribution. But Chapman suggests that, in the context of developments in ordinary language philosophy and in linguistics after her death, other works which were less highly regarded – including Philosophy and the Physicists (1937) and Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) – take on more significance for a contemporary assessment of her work. In particular, Stebbing’s insistence that philosophical analysis should have practical as well as academic applications, articulated with increasing urgency as social and political conditions worsened in the late 1930s; her focus on language use in everyday life, including politics and the media, and on the analysis of real examples (such as the speeches and writings of the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin); and her concern to make the public more critical receivers of the texts they are exposed to, invite, in Chapman’s view, comparison with critical discourse analysis.
Chapman’s book tells the story of how the development of Stebbing’s ideas led to her pioneering work on language use in relation to the story of her life, because ‘her historical circumstances and personal attitudes shaped her philosophical work’, tracing the emergence of her interest and career in philosophy in relation to the currents and figures which she was influenced by and responded to (including especially G.E. Moore, but also Alfred Whitehead, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein), and providing lucid accounts not only of her books, but also her papers, lectures and many book reviews. The focus of her later work on language use was adumbrated in her earlier work on logic and clear thinking, where she ‘was looking to political speeches and newspaper reports for examples of muddled thinking, misleading arguments or downright biased descriptions’.
In Philosophy and the Physicists (1937), Stebbing criticized attempts to communicate scientific developments to the general public, especially those of Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, on the grounds that their explanations of these developments in fact distorted them, and were in some cases extended to metaphysical claims that were not justified by the science – particularly the claim that advances in physics licensed a creed of philosophical idealism. Choosing to describe the physical universe in particular popular terms can lead to unwarranted assumptions, such as that of a creating God, as when Jeans suggests that the laws governing the universe may have been ‘selected’ (only humans or, given certain metaphysical assumptions, God can ‘select’) in order to ‘produce’ magnetism or even radioactivity. Similarly, she criticizes Eddington for the terms in which he describes the unpredictability of the movement of electrons (the electron is ‘free to choose’ where it will jump) and for seeking to extend this to the problem of free will: ‘if an electron is “free to choose” where it will go, surely a man may choose whether he will spend his summer holidays at Margate or at Wiesbaden’ is Stebbing’s characterization of Eddington’s position.
It is the work which Stebbing published from the very end of the 1930s until her death in 1943 that is of most interest to critical discourse analysts, especially her book Thinking to Some Purpose (1939). In the Preface she writes: ‘I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance’. Chapman describes the context in which the book was written and published as a ‘climate of awareness of the manipulative power of words and distrust of the official pronouncements of governments and their mouthpieces’, which arose especially in response to media coverage of the Spanish civil war (which according to George Orwell ‘probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914–1918’). The title of the book indicates its focus on thinking about what should be done, often as a matter of urgency, in response to ‘the avoidable suffering that is being endured today throughout the world’ (Stebbing, 1939: 18).
Stebbing discusses ‘question-begging words’ whose meaning ‘conveys the assumption that some point at issue has been already settled’, referring to a letter to the New Statesman in 1936 by Julian Huxley which documented how words used in The Times to refer to the Spanish Government became increasingly ‘derogatory’ (e.g. ‘Communist’), while those used to refer to the Government’s opponents became increasingly ‘favourable’, and to an extract from a speech by Stanley Baldwin (Conservative leader and Prime Minister) in 1931: 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 the matter.
According to Stebbing, Baldwin’s depiction of a reasoned process of debate and decision-making in which the two political parties are represented as ‘open-minded’ in an ostensibly even-handed way is internally contradicted in that he speaks of the Liberals as having a ‘bias’ for Free Trade (a word which, Stebbing observes (page 52), ‘carries an emotional significance of having prejudged the matter’ in a way that is not consistent with having an ‘open mind’), while the Conservatives have a ‘favour’ (a word which does not carry such a significance) for tariffs.
Chapman observes that Stebbing is concerned ‘not just with individual linguistic choices but also with the way arguments are constructed’ and that the two are closely connected in that ‘the choice of emotionally loaded words can obscure […] problems in reasoning […] Stebbing is as committed as ever to the utility of an understanding of logical validity’ (p. 134). If the Liberals did indeed have a ‘bias’ for Free Trade, how could the process of deliberation in Cabinet be as open-minded and reasoned as Baldwin depicts it? And if Baldwin (and other Conservatives) saw Free Trade as a ‘bias’ of the Liberals, rather than just an option to be evaluated against other available options (or ‘methods’), the same question would arise.
It would be misleading, Chapman argues, to simply view Stebbing as a critical discourse analyst avant la lettre: her critical analysis of language grew out of a different set of concerns and had a different focus from those one generally finds in CDA. It grew out of her work on logic, and she was ‘concerned with the analysis of language primarily as a window to the processes of thinking that it expressed, and as a key to assessing whether these processes were logical or otherwise, rather than as a means directly of identifying the creation and manipulation of social realities’. While Chapman is right to emphasize the differences between CDA and Stebbing’s work, the latter seems to me to be of value in assessing the treatment and analysis of argumentation hitherto in CDA and seeking to go beyond its limitations. Argumentation has been extensively referred to in certain approaches to CDA, but sound methods for critically analysing argumentation and deliberation, based on recent work in argumentation theory and analysis as well as traditional sources, have not hitherto been developed. Especially in Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing gives some sense of what is missing.
In the Epilogue to the book, Stebbing discusses ‘obstacles that impede us in our attempts to think to some purpose’, difficulties (as she puts it in the Preface) arising from ‘unconscious bias’ (and ‘propaganda’ and ‘an unscrupulous speaker’) which are documented throughout the book, and difficulties due to ‘unrecognized ignorance’. Referring to the General Strike of 1926, Stebbing recounts her own difficulties in assessing the reports she reads in newspapers due to a want of reliable information. It is worth quoting part of her conclusion at some length: If such information as I have is not to be trusted, then I lack the freedom of decision. For this reason, those who control the Press have power to control our minds with regard to our thinking about ‘all public transactions’. A controlled Press is an obstacle to democracy, an obstacle that is the more dangerous in proportion as we are unaware of our lack of freedom. […] Ignorance of the relevant facts is incompatible with freedom to reason with regard to them. I am not free to reach a reasoned conclusion with regard to the questions at issue in the General Strike of 1926 unless I know what had happened and what was happening. […] I cannot reasonably pursue a line of conduct unless I know what are the alternative actions open to me, what will most probably be the effects of those actions, which of these effects I desire to see realized. To decide presupposes deliberation. We do not deliberate in the void. […] Some people have supposed that to be reasonable is incompatible with being enthusiastic. Personally I do not think so. […] We can be enthusiastically for a cause about which we have reasoned dispassionately [… but] our enthusiasms stand in need of being from time to time revised. […] A mind in blinkers is a mind that is unfree. For this reason it is well that we should sometimes suffer the nuisance of having our uncritically held beliefs questioned, that we should be driven to find reasonable grounds in support of that which we passionately hold to be true. Should we be able to find such grounds, then our belief will be reasonable and yet not less passionately held.
Stebbing’s focus in this extract is on practical argumentation and deliberation oriented to decisions about what is to be done, as opposed to theoretical or epistemic argumentation about what is the case, though her analysis in this book and elsewhere extends to both types of argumentation and she does not explicitly distinguish between them. Although there is substantial attention in the book to logical fallacies, we can discern here a concern with argumentation and deliberation which goes beyond logic to include dialectic (such as associating reasonableness with the capacity to withstand critical questioning, and deliberating over the effects of actions) as well as rhetoric, though again she does not explicitly differentiate between the three. She discusses representations of relevant states of affairs both in terms of their adequacy with respect to facts and their potential ‘bias’, but her concern with representations is geared towards their importance for the quality of the deliberation which is a necessary condition for decision and action.
There is a strong case (made in Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) for giving primacy to practical argumentation in the analysis of political discourse, which is consistent with Stebbing’s emphasis on the importance of argumentation in critical analysis of political discourse (though she generally formulated this as the importance of logic), and, in her later work, on thinking, arguing and deliberating ‘to some purpose’, with a widening of the concern with argumentation to include dialectic and rhetoric. Political discourse is a form of argumentative discourse, practical argumentation and deliberation over what is to be done (linked to decision-making and action) is what primarily goes on in political discourse, and critical analysis of political discourse therefore needs to be centred on the analysis of practical argumentation and deliberation. This position contrasts sharply with what has tended to happen in CDA approaches to political discourse, where the emphasis has been on representations (of states of affairs, events, the identities of political actors, etc.). Representations must certainly be analysed, but as elements in (practical) argumentation to some purpose. Moreover, although CDA tends to be primarily associated with ‘negative’ critique (in this case, of bad, manipulative and unreasonable argumentation and deliberation), CDA also shares (or ought to share) Stebbing’s commitment to ‘positive’ critique, to improving the quality of thinking, argumentation and deliberation by showing how ‘faults’ in them arise. Viewing Stebbing’s contribution in these terms adds to the convincing case which Chapman makes for recognizing the relevance of her work to CDA.