Janssen-Lauret

Susan Stebbing (1885-1943), the UK’s first female professor of

philosophy, was a key figure in the development of analytic
philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world’s first accessible book
on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major
contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics,
philosophical logic, critical thinking and applied philosophy. Women in the
Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians
of analytic philosophy. I provide a thorough yet accessible History of Philosophy
overview of Stebbing’s positive, original contributions, including
her solution to the paradox of analysis, her account of the
relation of sense data to physical objects, and her anti- idealist
interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing’s

Susan Stebbing

Susan Stebbing
innovative work in these and other areas helped move analytic
philosophy from its early phase to its middle period.

About the Series Series Editor

In this Cambridge Elements series, Jacqueline Broad
distinguished authors provide concise Monash University
and structured introductions to a
comprehensive range of prominent and Frederique Janssen-Lauret
lesser-known figures in the history of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

women’s philosophical endeavour, from
ancient times to the present day.

Cover image: Jennifer Kosig / DigitalVision Vectors /

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy
edited by
Jacqueline Broad
Monash University

SUSAN STEBBING

Frederique Janssen-Lauret
University of Manchester
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 Susan Stebbing

Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy

DOI: 10.1017/9781009026925
First published online: November 2022

Frederique Janssen-Lauret
University of Manchester

Author for correspondence: Frederique Janssen-Lauret,

frederique.janssen-lauret@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract: Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK’s first female

professor of philosophy, was a key figure in the development of
analytic philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world’s first accessible book
on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major
contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics,
philosophical logic, critical thinking, and applied philosophy.
Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians of
analytic philosophy. This Element provides a thorough yet accessible
overview of Stebbing’s positive, original contributions, including her
solution to the paradox of analysis, her account of the relation of
sense-data to physical objects, and her anti-idealist interpretation of
the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing’s innovative work in these and
other areas helped move analytic philosophy from its early phase to
its middle period.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Keywords: Stebbing, women in philosophy, history of analytic

philosophy, logic, philosophy of science

© Frederique Janssen-Lauret 2022

ISBNs: 9781009013031 (PB), 9781009026925 (OC)
ISSNs: 2634-4645 (online), 2634-4637 (print)
 Contents

1 Introduction: Susan Stebbing and Her Place

in the History of Analytic Philosophy 1

2 Logic 13

3 Philosophy of Science 32

4 Metaphysics 45

5 Critical Thinking and Politics 53

6 Conclusion 60

References 63
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Susan Stebbing 1

1 Introduction: Susan Stebbing and Her Place

in the History of Analytic Philosophy
Susan Stebbing was the UK’s first female professor of philosophy as well
as an anti-idealist philosopher of physics, an early advocate of mathem-
atical logic, a pioneer of critical thinking, a trilingual anti-fascist activist,
a secular humanist, and an educator of generations of female univer-
sity students, the general public, and schoolchildren, including Jewish
refugees. She deserves to be much better known than she is now. When
Stebbing was born, in 1885, the fledgling cause of women’s education
was still highly controversial and under constant attack from the Victor-
ian establishment. To attend a women’s college, as Stebbing did when
she went to Girton in 1903, was already a feminist act. To rise through
the ranks as an academic even more so. By the time Stebbing reached
her late forties, this was precisely what she had done. Her promotion to
a professorial chair at Bedford College, a women’s college in London, in
1933 inspired articles in several of the national newspapers. Advocates
of women’s education had prevailed, normalised the presence of women
among university students, researchers, and holders of academic posts.
And yet, although Stebbing was highly successful, she was and remained
in many ways marginalised as a woman in academia.
All of Stebbing’s publications from the 1920s onwards belong squarely
to the tradition of analytic philosophy. Her contributions to the field
were significant, and most were in the ‘core’ areas of analytic philoso-
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

phy: logic, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. Stebbing wrote the

world’s first accessible book on the new symbolic logic and its philoso-
phy (Stebbing, 1930), and a book on philosophy of physics containing a
careful, measured rebuttal of idealistic interpretations pushed by promin-
ent physicists (Stebbing, 1937). She published at least one paper per year
in one of the major philosophy journals for most of her career, an unusual
output for a philosopher in the early twentieth century. Stebbing was a
pioneer in the field of critical thinking, publishing accessible books on
good reasoning with a political slant in an effort to persuade the general
public to spot the flaws in fascism. She co-founded the journal Analysis
and introduced logical positivism to the British philosophical scene a
few years before Ayer did (Stebbing, 1933b). During her lifetime, Steb-
bing held a relatively prominent position among British philosophers.
 2 Women in the History of Philosophy

Her books were favourably reviewed and her papers well-received. She
was chosen for prestigious roles in academia in the UK and abroad. She
held a visiting professorship at Columbia, delivered the British Acad-
emy’s annual lecture, and served as President of the Aristotelian Society.
Nevertheless, she faced obstacles which her male counterparts did not
have to contend with. She was turned down for a professorial chair at
Cambridge because she was a woman at a time when Cambridge did not
allow women to be members of the University. As a lecturer at a women’s
college, she had a high teaching load which was spread across most areas
of philosophy. Women’s colleges being underfunded and understaffed,
her teaching load did not lessen after her promotion to Professor. Hav-
ing been raised as a girl with a disability in the Victorian era, Stebbing
had not received the rigorous training in classics and the exact sciences
which her male counterparts took for granted. She had to embark on
a self-education project in physics and its philosophy in her twenties
and thirties. Had she had access to the educational resources in science,
mathematics, and classics open to her colleagues G. E. Moore, Bertrand
Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, her contributions to
logic and philosophy of science might have been greater still.
Despite her impressive achievements, Stebbing has also received lit-
tle attention to date from historians of analytic philosophy. History of
analytic philosophy, as we will discover shortly (Section 1.1), has often
focussed exclusively on those men it unironically calls the ‘founding
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fathers’ of analytic philosophy, Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and

its ‘grandfather’, Gottlob Frege, sometimes to the point of outright iden-
tifying early analytic philosophy with the works of these ‘forefathers’
and analytic philosophy generally with these men and their followers.
Such a narrow focus leaves no room for female founders, even ones as
pivotal as Stebbing, nor for early analytic philosophers who were not
followers of the ‘Great Men’, but critics or independent thinkers, no mat-
ter how analytic their work was thematically. Although some scholarly
work on Stebbing has appeared in recent years, such work has often either
been primarily biographical or tended to concentrate on her relationship
to the canonical ‘founding fathers’ (Beaney, 2003, 2016; Milkov, 2003).
An informative intellectual biography by Siobhan Chapman (2013) sup-
plies a rich array of facts about Stebbing’s life and her correspondence
 Susan Stebbing 3

beyond what this short publication can cover but concentrates on Steb-
bing’s life and on connections between her thought and contemporary
thinking about ordinary language. By contrast, I will concentrate on giv-
ing a thorough yet accessible overview of Stebbing’s positive, original
contributions, including her views on the philosophy of logic (Section 2),
her anti-idealist interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics (Section 3),
her solution to the paradox of analysis (Section 4), and her pioneering
work on critical thinking (Section 5). Although accessible, my overview
of Stebbing’s work is not in the style of a textbook or encyclopaedia
piece. I defend original readings of Stebbing, take stances on interpretive
issues, and provide support for the view that analytic philosophy should
be regarded, not as the tradition of the followers and followers’ followers
of three or four Great Men but as a broad and varied movement with a
variety of female and male ancestors, loosely unified by a focus on tak-
ing the methods and deliverances of the sciences as an inspiration for
philosophy.

1.1 Early Analytic Philosophy, Stebbing’s Role, and

Historiography: Against the Great Men Narrative
Exactly when analytic philosophy began is a matter of dispute. Some
historians argue it came into being as late as Wittgenstein’s arrival in
Cambridge to study with Russell in 1911 (Quinton, 2005: 28). Others,
who consider Frege a founder, might say it began as early as his Begriff-
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sschrift (Frege, 1879). More commonly, historians consider Frege an

ancestor rather than a founder of analytic philosophy (e.g. Burge, 2005:
7–8). Historians of this school of thought generally take the first work
of analytic philosophy to be ‘The Nature of Judgement’ (Moore, 1899),
the paper which inaugurated the mini-movement of two research fel-
lows, Moore and Russell, dubbed by them ‘The New Philosophy’. The
New Philosophy was a fervently anti-idealist project. It went in search
of a realist alternative to the idealism common in late nineteenth-century
British universities, most pressingly to supplant the system of their key
opponent, the British Hegelian F. H. Bradley (1883, 1897). The New
Philosophers at first maintained that a view of judgement as a binary
relation between a mind and something independent of and distinct from
that mind meant that the logical form of true statements about judgement
 4 Women in the History of Philosophy

entailed the falsity of idealism (MacBride, 2018: 30–9). Moore and

Russell’s early attempts (Moore, 1899; Russell, 1903), which boldly sug-
gested that all words refer, led to a bloated ontology and difficulties
explaining the difference between truth and falsity. Attempts to rectify
these shortcomings led to the theory of descriptions and logical atomism.
Moore, Russell, and, a few years later, Wittgenstein (1922), replaced the
faulty view that all words refer with the more viable proposal that it is
instead every true sentence which stands for something – namely, for a
fact. Falsity is then readily explained as failure to correspond to a fact.
But our ordinary-language sentences do not straightforwardly map onto
one fact each. They admit of further, detailed analysis. Logical atomism
presumed that our claims about everyday middle-sized objects – humans,
dogs, cats, plants, houses, cities, mountains, tables, and so on – were,
strictly speaking, claims about a complex plurality of micro-facts: their
components in some arrangement. A statement about a wooden table
is really about protons and electrons arranged into atoms, which are in
turn arranged into molecules, arranged into cells, arranged into cellulose
fibres, arranged into planks, and arranged into the familiar tabular shape.
We analyse statements about organisms into their physical (and perhaps
mental) atoms in a biological arrangement.
Stebbing’s most famous works were to focus on what exactly was
involved in the process of analysis used in logical atomism and more
generally in analytic philosophy. In several of her books and papers, she
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

defended anti-idealism. It is readily apparent that her work concentrated

on themes central to early analytic philosophy. Despite that fact, she has
only rarely been considered a central figure in the analytic movement
or a founder of analytic philosophy. Part of the explanation for her rel-
ative obscurity lies with gendered factors. Implicit and explicit sexist
attitudes on the part of her contemporaries and of historians of analytic
philosophy often led to a woman’s works being cited less often and taken
less seriously (Janssen-Lauret, in press-a). Institutional sexism meant
that faculty at women’s colleges had less visibility in the profession and
less often succeeded at placing their former students in jobs where those
students might promote the work of their former supervisors.
Stebbing has also been neglected because she has been given
insufficient credit for originality. Ayer is typical in describing her as ‘very
 Susan Stebbing 5

much a disciple of Moore’ (Ayer, 1977: 71). Several recent commentators

also describe Stebbing several times over as a ‘Moorean’ (Milkov, 2003:
355, 358; Beaney, 2016: 242, 245–6, 248–50, 253–4; Beaney & Chap-
man, 2021: §§3–4). Although Stebbing certainly viewed Moore as a men-
tor figure, and regularly credited him with specific views she endorsed
or with inspiring her to develop her own views on a given topic, she
similarly gave credit to Russell and to Whitehead, on whose philoso-
phy she wrote more papers than on Moore’s (Stebbing, 1924, 1924–25,
1926). What’s more, Stebbing’s expertise stretched to technical areas of
philosophy of which Moore never made any serious study. Moore’s anti-
idealism had originally grown out of rejecting the Kantianism he had
found appealing as a young man and out of embracing the Platonism
with which he had become familiar in his reading of the classics and
his Moral Sciences degree. By contrast, Stebbing’s anti-idealism found
expression especially in her philosophical work on the new physics with
its theory of relativity and subatomic particles. Unlike many of her con-
temporaries, Stebbing argued that the new physics did not obviously
tell in favour of idealist or panpsychist interpretations. Stebbing also
differed from Moore (but resembled Russell and Whitehead) in taking
an interest in the philosophy of set theory. She discussed how modern
mathematics affects ordinary-language discourse about numbers and the
no-class theory (Stebbing, 1930: 141). Where Stebbing staked out a line
in which she acknowledged the influence of Moore, as in her work on
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metaphysical analysis, she often made advances on his views, such as

her sharp distinction between grammatical and directional analysis and
her solution to the paradox of analysis (see Section 4). Stebbing fur-
ther differed from Moore in the amount of attention she paid to usage
in ordinary language. Chapman has presented an interpretation of Steb-
bing as making moves which foreshadowed modern discourse analysis
and argumentation theory (Chapman, 2013: 172–86).
Stebbing, then, was also a clear representative of the branch of analytic
philosophy which seeks to design a philosophy to fit the latest develop-
ments in mathematics and science. In this respect, she resembled Russell,
Whitehead, or even W. V. Quine more than she resembled Moore. Steb-
bing is best seen as an original philosopher, a transitional figure who
played a pivotal role in moving analytic philosophy on from its early
 6 Women in the History of Philosophy

phase, where (at least in the UK) it was dominated by logical atomism,
towards a middle period typified by more focus on ordinary language and
a more holist approach. To view her primarily as a Moorean is problem-
atic because it denies her credit for originality, but also because it appears
to fall prey to what I have called the Great Men narrative of analytic
philosophy (Janssen-Lauret, in press-b). According to this historiograph-
ical narrative, analytic philosophy is the work of three or four particular
men, their followers, and their followers’ followers. Soames writes, ‘ana-
lytic philosophy . . . is a certain historical tradition in which the early
work of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein set
the agenda for later philosophers’ (Soames, 2003: xiii) and Beaney
describes analytic philosophy as ‘the tradition that originated in the work
of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), G. E.
Moore (1873–1958), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and devel-
oped and ramified into the complex movement (or set of interconnected
subtraditions) that we know today’ (Beaney, 2013: 9).
Soames and Beaney’s characterisations of analytic philosophy are
formulated the way they are for a reason: to sidestep known issues
with attempted definitions of ‘analytic philosophy’ which define it too
narrowly, whether geographically as ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy, the-
matically as philosophy focussed on the analysis of language, or as
‘critical’ rather than speculative philosophy (Katzav & Vaesen, 2017).
All of those candidate definitions leave out major figures in the history of
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

analytic philosophy: German, Austrian, and Polish analytic philosophers,

including Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Maria Kokoszynska, and
Janina Hosiassion (Janssen-Lauret, 2022c); analytic metaphysicians like
Russell, Stebbing, Moore, and Elizabeth Anscombe; and naturalistic
system-builders such as Whitehead, Quine, Dorothy Emmet, and Mary
Midgley.
But a definition of analytic philosophy as three or four men and
their followers is overly narrow, too, not least because it misrepre-
sents all women working on logic and philosophy of science in the
early analytic period as either marginal figures who followed the Great
Men or not analytic philosophers at all. The women whom I have
dubbed ‘grandmothers of analytic philosophy’, including E. E. C. Jones
and Christine Ladd-Franklin (Janssen-Lauret, in press-a, in in press-c),
 Susan Stebbing 7

Victoria Welby (Connell & Janssen-Lauret, 2022), and Grace de Laguna

(Janssen-Lauret, in press-b) fall into the latter category. The ‘grand-
mothers’, similar in age to Frege or Whitehead rather than Russell or
Wittgenstein, also resembled Frege in being originators of ideas – such
as the sense-reference distinction (Jones, 1890) and inferentialism in
logic and language which became influential only many years after the
very early analytic period in which they lived. In recent work, Beaney
has added Stebbing to his list as a fifth founder of analytic philoso-
phy. While Beaney’s solution is welcome in that it makes room for a
female founder, it does not extend to grandparents of analytic philoso-
phy other than Frege – notably, no grandmothers and no other candidate
grandfathers like Whitehead or Stout (MacBride, 2018: 115–52) – nor
for other analytic philosophers and logicians of similar stature to Steb-
bing, such as Carnap, Ramsey, and Tarski, who might lay equal claim to
co-foundership.
My alternative proposal is to view analytic philosophy not as the works
of some handful of individuals and their followers but rather as a broad
and varied movement with a variety of strands, each with a range of cen-
tral and more peripheral figures, each with doctrines in some respects
allied, in some respects in tension with some of the others. There is no
neat and tidy set of plausible necessary and sufficient conditions for who
counts as an analytic philosopher or brief definition of ‘analytic philoso-
phy’. My model for the genesis of analytic philosophy is not that of the
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

United States of America, a government of founding fathers gradually

taking over land belonging to Indigenous peoples, or that of an exclusive
gentlemen’s club with a manifesto which sets the agenda for its follow-
ers. My models are, rather, those of wider intellectual, political, or artistic
movements, a looser coalition of ideas, not all of which point in the same
direction or are wholly mutually compatible. Among the strands making
up the early analytic philosophy movement are empiricism, advances in
formal and mathematical logic since the nineteenth-century revolution
in rigour – not just Frege’s but the algebraic calculi, too – the ana-
lysis of language, and new developments in physics and psychology. On
that alternative conception of analytic philosophy, it has multiple grand-
fathers and grandmothers besides Frege and multiple founding fathers
and mothers, too. One way to restore female early analytic philosophers
 8 Women in the History of Philosophy

to their rightful place is to give up the hero narrative of the Great Men
and embrace the ‘movement’ narrative of early analytic philosophy.
What I take to be most distinctive about early analytic philosophy is
its quest to find a philosophy compatible with new developments in the
sciences, especially the natural sciences and pure mathematics. Most nar-
ratives of the emergence of analytic philosophy to date have focussed
more on early Russell and Moore’s opposition to idealism (e.g. Hyl-
ton, 1990; Candlish, 2007). But Frege, Russell, Whitehead, and other
early analytic philosophers were also driven by reflection on the math-
ematical revolution in rigour and general relativity. These results upset
traditional philosophical certainties about the infinite, parts and wholes –
for example, the intuition that no whole is the same size as any of
its proper parts – and the nature of space and time. Analytic philo-
sophers held that philosophy should accept these results as true, set out
to clarify and interpret them, and fit philosophical enquiry around them
(MacBride & Janssen-Lauret, 2015). For some lesser-known early or
proto-analytic philosophers, such as Welby, Stout, Ladd-Franklin, and
de Laguna, reflection on new findings in the emerging science of psych-
ology was also a major driving force. A further concern for many early
analytic philosophers was opposition to idealism, although later gener-
ations of analytic philosophers contained some idealists. Critical analysis
of linguistic meaning, reference, and truth became crucial items in the
analytic philosopher’s toolbox as she set out to investigate the logical
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

form of scientific truths and their collective ontological commitments.

Stebbing, as we shall see, was an exemplar of analytic philosophy in
her careful analysis of the logical forms of both physics and ordin-
ary language. She was also typical of early analytic philosophy in her
anti-idealism, although she, initially inspired by idealist philosophy as
a student, was a reasonably sympathetic reader of idealism and anxious
to represent idealist solutions fairly in her philosophy of physics. Lastly,
Stebbing, sensitive to ordinary language and always clear that analytic
philosophers must analyse sentences, can be seen as a transitional figure
in the shift from logical atomism – which speaks of analysing proposi-
tions and tends to treat language as a ‘transparent’ (Russell, 1926: 118)
medium to which we need not pay attention – towards the middle phase
of analytic philosophy with its increasing focus on ordinary language.
 Susan Stebbing 9

1.2 Susan Stebbing: Life, Works, and Historical Context

Born in London in 1885 and orphaned in her teens, Susan Stebbing’s pre-
university education consisted largely of intermittent homeschooling.
Stebbing was not merely a Victorian girl-child – already at a disadvan-
tage with respect to educational opportunities – but also significantly
disabled by Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder which causes attacks
of dizziness and nausea and was not, at the time, treatable. Stebbing’s dis-
ability, and probably her lack of rigorous training in the exact sciences
and the classics, limited her choice of subjects at Girton College, where
the logician E. E. Constance Jones, one of the grandmothers of analytic
philosophy, had recently been appointed Mistress. Stebbing began by
reading History. According to different sources (Wisdom, 1944: 283;
Chapman, 2013: 11) she might have preferred either Classics or Natural
Sciences. Perhaps her disability was incompatible with work in a labora-
tory. But there may also have been gendered pressures nudging her away
from natural sciences and classics, which were, in the 1900s, among the
most strongly male-coded fields in the academy.
The Victorian and Edwardian doctrine of gendered ‘separate spheres’
relegated women to the home, leaving the public sphere to men (this will
be explored more in Section 2). Belief in separate spheres led many Vic-
torians to oppose higher education for women altogether but disposed
others to allow for higher education which did not require worldly know-
ledge potentially affecting women’s moral respectability. As a result,
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late Victorian and Edwardian culture did not classify all of mathemat-
ics as strongly masculine. Applied mathematics, used in the physical
sciences and engineering, fields associated with economic gain and the
public sphere, was highly male-coded. But those who didn’t wholly dis-
approve of women’s education often considered pure mathematics, such
as mathematical logic, algebra, and set theory, which did not draw on
worldly knowledge, suitable for a woman to study. For example, Grace
Chisholm’s mathematics lecturers advised her to leave the very applied
department in Cambridge to pursue her PhD in pure geometry in Ger-
many (Jones, 2000). Christine Ladd-Franklin was encouraged to give up
trying to persuade reluctant male physics professors to admit her to their
research laboratories and instead pursue pure mathematics, which she
could study at home (Janssen-Lauret, in press-a). Limited instruction in
 10 Women in the History of Philosophy

the classics was another frequent obstacle for the early generations of
female academics. Educated parents immersed their sons in Greek and
Latin from early childhood but only rarely did the same for their daugh-
ters. Constance Jones recounted in her autobiography that the women of
her family learnt only enough Latin to teach their sons until the boys went
to school (Jones, 1922: 11). Even in the early 1940s, Mary Warnock and
her fellow female classics students found ‘what a struggle it was for girls
to keep their heads above water in Mods, an examination based on the
assumption that boys had been learning Latin and Greek almost as soon
as their education had started’ (Warnock, 2000: 39).
Towards the end of her history degree, Stebbing happened at random
upon Bradley’s Appearance and Reality while browsing in the library.
She was immediately gripped. Stebbing decided to stay at Girton for
another year to read for the Moral Sciences Tripos, as Cambridge called
its exams in philosophy. She studied philosophy with the logician W.
E. Johnson, who introduced her to Aristotelian logic. But Cambridge
did not allow women who passed their Tripos exams to graduate with
their degrees and would not begin to do so until 1948, after Stebbing’s
death. Stebbing accordingly moved to the University of London, which
did award degrees to women.
In London, she completed a master’s thesis on truth, pragmatism, and
the French voluntarism of Bergson, later published in the Girton series
by Cambridge University Press (Stebbing, 1914). After her move to Lon-
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don in the early 1910s, Stebbing continued to teach for Girton on a casual
basis, as well as for Newnham, another Cambridge women’s college. She
also held visiting lectureships in London, at King’s College for Women,
and Homerton, a teacher training college. Stebbing regularly spoke at
the Aristotelian Society and published papers in its Proceedings. Several
of these earliest publications of hers were sympathetic to idealism. In
one meeting of the Society, Stebbing criticised Russell’s views on rela-
tions and, though also disinclined to follow Bradley all the way down the
road to monism, defended the idealist doctrine of concrete unity (Steb-
bing, 1916–17). Some twenty-five years later, Stebbing recounted that,
having presented her paper, she was confronted about the ‘muddles’ (a
favourite word of hers) inherent in her claims by a man she later dis-
covered to be G. E. Moore. Stebbing described feeling ‘alarmed’ at first
 Susan Stebbing 11

at Moore’s ‘thumping the table’ as he asked, repeatedly, ‘What on earth

do you mean by that?’, but being soon drawn into the substance of the
discussion to such an extent that she forgot to feel alarmed or apprehen-
sive: ‘[N]othing mattered except trying to find out what I did mean’, she
wrote (Stebbing, 1942: 530).
Although Stebbing commentators often make much of her labelling
her first encounter with Moore as a ‘conversion’ (Chapman, 2013: 34;
Beaney, 2016: 242; Beaney & Chapman, 2021: §3), it should be borne
in mind that its context is a paper which is both explicitly intended as a
homage to Moore and written by Stebbing in a retrospective mood, as her
own health was failing. A closer look at the historical evidence reveals
that Stebbing’s ‘conversion’ appears to have been both more gradual than
the quotation suggests and a conversion to analytic philosophy generally
rather than a conversion to ‘Moorean’ philosophy. First, Stebbing wrote
and presented a second paper critical of Moore soon afterwards, accusing
him of a ‘misuse of terms’ and of making ‘a serious mistake, viz. . . . the
identification of reality with existence’ (Stebbing, 1917–18: 583). Chap-
man notes that Stebbing and Moore engaged in a frank exchange of
views in correspondence afterwards (Chapman, 2013: 34–5). Stebbing
then published few original philosophical papers for a few years. Her
philosophical thought was possibly in flux, but it is also known that she
was busy with other professional activities. She was searching for an aca-
demic job, while at the same time setting up a girls’ school, Kingsley
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Lodge, with her sister Helen and her friends Hilda Gavin and Vivian
Shepherd, as well as engaging in anti-war activism in the form of lec-
tures on behalf of the League of Nations Union, advocating disarmament
(Chapman, 2013: 37–8). In 1920, Stebbing finally secured one of the few
and far between academic posts open to women, a lectureship at Bedford
College, a women’s college in London. From 1924 to 1929, Stebbing
published a flurry of serious, original journal papers clearly belonging to
the tradition of analytic philosophy. But these were not works of Moorean
common-sense philosophy. Stebbing spent most of the 1920s publish-
ing extensively on philosophy of physics, a topic which had been of
interest to her since at least her master’s thesis, which includes detailed
discussions of the question of whether physical laws are necessary (Steb-
bing, 1914: 3, 28–35, 70–1). Her main interlocutors were the analytic
 12 Women in the History of Philosophy

philosopher and logician A. N. Whitehead, the idealist physicist Arthur

Eddington, and to a lesser extent other analytic figures such as Bertrand
Russell, C. D. Broad, and C. E. M. Joad and other idealist physicists
such as James Jeans. Moore, immersed in the classics to an extraordin-
ary degree from his schooldays, and whose early philosophy had been
inspired by Plato, with Kant and Bradley as foils, never made any seri-
ous venture into the philosophy of physics. We will examine Stebbing’s
philosophy of physics in Section 3. Stebbing clearly regarded Moore as
a mentor figure and mentioned him regularly in her work on incomplete
symbols and analysis, which dates mostly from the early 1930s. Steb-
bing was generous with acknowledgements where she took her views to
originate with others, a trait typical of early analytic female philosophers
(Connell & Janssen-Lauret, 2022). Although this trait is, in general,
admirable, Stebbing at times gave herself insufficient credit for origin-
ality. In Section 4, I will argue that her theory of analysis in fact makes
a significant advance on Moore’s, despite Stebbing’s modesty about her
own achievements relative to his.
Stebbing enjoyed great success in her career at Bedford College. She
was promoted to the position of being the UK’s first female professor of
philosophy in 1933. She published primarily on philosophy of science,
formal and philosophical logic, metaphysics, and language, including the
first accessible book on the new symbolic logic, A Modern Introduction
to Logic. Stebbing continued to suffer severe attacks of Ménière’s disease
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but used these periods of illness to read books in English, French, and
German, often publishing her thoughts as a book review. As a result of
her extensive reading and trilingualism, Stebbing was one of the first out-
side of continental Europe to see the significance of logical positivism.
She published a detailed study of the movement (Stebbing, 1933b) three
years before Ayer published his Language, Truth, and Logic. Stebbing’s
publications on logical positivism did much to introduce it to the British
philosophical scene. In the late 1930s, Stebbing, increasingly alarmed by
the rise of fascism and generally conscious that the general public would
benefit from the ability to detect and resist fallacious argumentation and
manipulative uses of language by those in authority, began to write on
the application of critical thinking to ethics and politics. She also worked
with Jewish refugees, work which she continued until her death in 1943.
 Susan Stebbing 13

2 Logic
Susan Stebbing seems always to have loved logic and to have felt at
home within it. As a Girton undergraduate, she had studied Aristotel-
ian logic with W. E. Johnson, who would later write, with significant
help and support from Newnham philosophy student Naomi Bentwich
(Johnson, 1924: v), a three-volume magnum opus entitled Logic. The
mistress of Girton, E. E. Constance Jones, was herself a logician, then
author of three books (Jones, 1980, 1982, 1905). We know that Steb-
bing and Jones discussed logic together, too, because Jones thanked
Stebbing for helping her with the proofs of the second edition of her
Primer of Logic (Jones, 1913: i). Among Stebbing’s early publications,
before she became an analytic philosopher, is a defence of (Aristotelian)
logic against the charge that it is mostly useless in everyday reasoning
(Stebbing, 1915).
Twenty-first-century Western readers may feel a sense of surprise at
seeing several logicians among the first and second generations of UK
and US women to enter higher education and specialise in philosophy.
The contemporary stereotype is that women in philosophy, who remain
a small minority within the field, prefer moral or political philosophy
to logic. In our late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western
cultural context, logic is associated with masculinity. But this associ-
ation of male thinkers with logic and female thinkers with normative
philosophy, I will show, is a relatively recent invention, not common
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in the days of early analytic philosophy. All women who held aca-
demic jobs in philosophy in the United States or the UK, and many on
the European continent, prior to the 1940s of whom I’m aware were
experts either on logic broadly conceived or on history of philosophy.
Some also published on normative philosophy; some did not. Besides
Jones and Stebbing, in the 1890s–1910s Christine Ladd-Franklin, Sophie
Bryant, Mary Everest Boole, Constance Naden, Margaret Floy Wash-
burn, Mary Whiton Calkins, Beatrice Edgell, Augusta Klein, Grace de
Laguna, and Helen Dendy also published regularly in mainstream phil-
osophy journals on formal logic, philosophical logic, and the application
of logic to other fields such as psychology. Notable female historians
of philosophy include Elizabeth Haldane, the Descartes scholar and
translator, and M. J. Levett, the celebrated translator of the Theaetetus.
 14 Women in the History of Philosophy

But I have found no women employed in anglophone academic phil-

osophy posts before the late 1940s who published only on normative
philosophy.
Other early analytic philosophers, male and female, also regularly
described their female colleagues as especially good at or interested
in logic, without indicating that they found anything odd about this.
A paper on Ladd-Franklin’s logical system, for example, rhapsodised,
‘No scheme in logic that has ever been proposed is more beautiful than
that . . . of Dr. Ladd-Franklin’ (Shen 1927: 54; see also Janssen-Lauret, in
press-a). Stout wrote in his obituary of Jones, ‘Logic . . . was her spe-
cial subject, and it is only here that she would herself have made any
claim to originality’ (Stout, 1922: 383). It was not merely pro-feminist
men interested in logic who described women as such. Even a patronis-
ing and facetious reply to Stebbing’s 1915 paper by a detractor of logic,
which speaks of acting ‘out of deference to Miss Stebbing’s sex’ and not
wanting ‘to hurt Miss Stebbing’s feelings’ (Mercier, 1915: 19), neverthe-
less refers to her repeatedly as ‘a logician’ (Mercier, 1915: 18, 20) and
deplores the way her ‘exceptional mental power’ has been ‘corroded and
attenuated by the study of logic’. Though quite openly sexist, Mercier
nevertheless appears to see no tension between Stebbing’s identity as a
woman and her identity as a logician.
All academic fields were of course male-dominated in the late Victor-
ian and Edwardian period in which Stebbing grew up and first attended
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Girton, during which women’s education remained a controversial cause.

Women had to make heroic efforts to be accepted even as second-class
colleagues by male academics. Men routinely disparaged women’s intel-
lectual abilities. But the strongest bulwarks of masculinity within the
academy were not logic, philosophy, or pure mathematics. In these fields,
we see several notable female scholars, like Constance Jones, Chris-
tine Ladd-Franklin, and Grace Chisholm Young, embarking on academic
careers from the 1880s onwards. Classics as an academic field and polit-
ics as a field and an activity were much more strongly male-coded in
late Victorian and Edwardian Western European and North American
society. The doctrine of gendered ‘separate spheres’, which was preva-
lent in those societies, claimed that women’s sphere was the home, as
a safe haven from man’s inherent aggression and competitiveness and
 Susan Stebbing 15

associated with moral virtues of peacefulness, piety, and purity (Laslett &
Brenner, 1989: 387). Men ruled the public sphere, which included higher
education as well as politics and the marketplace, a sphere decidedly
less shot through with moral virtue and imbued with the kind of worldly
knowledge from which women were shielded. Although I shall concen-
trate on Stebbing’s largely white and upper/middle-class British context,
I note that cultural variations existed. In particular, some ethnic minority
groups within Western societies, such as African American communi-
ties, largely adhered to Victorian ideals of domesticity but highly prized
women’s education (Carlson, 1992: 61–2), and working-class commu-
nities of all ethnic groups valued women’s paid work outside the home,
which they did not view as being at odds with domesticity (Laslett &
Brenner, 1989: 389).
Politics, academic and practical, was described as an essentially mas-
culine enterprise, especially by opponents of women’s suffrage. Anti-
suffragists seized upon the doctrine of separate spheres to argue that
involvement in politics would erode women’s pure, instinctive virtue.
They justified their opposition to women’s suffrage on the grounds that
women were not suited to politics because emotion, not reason, informed
women’s morality. Anti-feminists argued that while feminine, instinct-
ive morality was well-suited to child-rearing and the domestic sphere,
it had no role to play in the cold, calculating world of politics, where
women would invariably ‘consider personalities above principles’ when
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they cast their votes or became involved in governing (Hopkins, 1913: 8).
According to the doctrine of separate spheres, women’s moral superiority
did not issue from rational reflection or knowledge of ethical theory. It
flowed from motherly love, self-sacrifice, and domesticity. Western Vic-
torian and Edwardian cultural mores mostly did not encourage women to
study or teach moral theory in colleges or universities. And they viewed
women as outright incompetent in the realm of politics, a competitive
field drawing upon quite unfeminine worldly knowledge. Logic, by con-
trast, whether Aristotelian or mathematical, could be studied from home
or entirely within the safe walls of a women’s college. As a result, it
was considered, by those who approved of women’s higher education
but upheld separate spheres, as a safe subject for a woman to study.
 16 Women in the History of Philosophy

Female logicians in fact made key contributions to logic in the late

nineteenth century. Formal logic, which had long been considered a
fully finished science, completed by Aristotle and no longer subject to
development (Kant, 1787, Bviii), was beginning to be revised in light
of novel developments in nineteenth-century science and mathematics.
Empiricist logicians like Mill (1843) and Venn recognised an induct-
ive branch of logic alongside the deductive. Constance Naden’s book
on the subject, Induction and Deduction (Naden, 1890), was described
by a sexist reviewer as displaying ‘a power of acute reasoning such as
few other women have ever possessed’ (Ω, 1891: 292). Mathematic-
ally inclined logicians began to apply algebraic methods to syllogistic
logic. One of the major figures in this tradition was Christine Ladd-
Franklin, who reconceptualised Aristotelian logic as a calculus based
on the relation of exclusion, effectively a NAND-operator (Ladd, 1883;
Ladd-Franklin, 1889, 1911, 1912; see also Uckelman, 2021; Janssen-
Lauret, in press-a). Ladd-Franklin in addition had an excellent eye
for natural-language illustrations of logical principles used in everyday
reasoning: ‘When I said to my little girl, “I will take you down town
this afternoon if you are good,” she said “And only?” – meaning: That
is no doubt a sufficient condition, but is it also indispensable?”’ (Ladd-
Franklin, 1912: 646). Ladd-Franklin was highly regarded by her contem-
poraries. Whitehead, in his Universal Algebra, cited Ladd-Franklin, not
Frege, for the latest work on quantification and existence assumptions
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(Whitehead, 1898: 116). Venn highly praised the 1883 published ver-
sion of her PhD (Venn, 1883: 595–601). Constance Jones made a major
advance in philosophical logic when she queried the third of the trad-
itional Aristotelian Laws of Thought, the Law of Identity. Jones denied
that subject-predicate statements in general express identities, as most
are not of the logical form ‘A is A’. According to Jones, their logical
form is, rather, one which states ‘an identity of denomination in diver-
sity of attribution’ (Jones, 1890: 46), that is, they attribute to the same
referent two different properties, using phrases with different ‘signifi-
cations’ (Jones, 1892: 20). Jones, then, proposed with what she called
her ‘New Law of Thought’ or ‘analysis of categoricals’, a version of
what we now know as the sense-reference distinction and was described
as such by her contemporaries: ‘a theory expressed first by Miss
 Susan Stebbing 17

Constance Jones as long ago as 1890, and, a little later, by Prof. Frege’
(Klein, 1911: 521).

2.1 Stebbing’s Views on Logic

Stebbing was the author of the first accessible book on the new, sym-
bolic logic. Her Modern Introduction to Logic (Stebbing, 1930, 1933a)
is often described as a ‘text-book’, but although Stebbing’s intended
audience was students, to speak of a logic ‘text-book’ is apt to con-
jure up, for the twenty-first-century reader, an image of a short book,
focussed on exercises for students, which details the views of others
without originality. Stebbing’s book, by contrast, was a 500-page behe-
moth, taking in Western formal and philosophical logic from Aristotle
to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus, in which Stebbing frequently defended original philosophical
viewpoints of the sort we would now expect to find in a monograph.
A short publication like this one permits only a whistle-stop tour of
Stebbing’s philosophy of logic (see also Janssen-Lauret, 2017, 2022a;
Douglas & Nassim, 2021). As we shall see, Stebbing expressed original
views on logicality – the question what makes a theory logic – where she
emphasised the importance of formality conceived as universal applic-
ability; on the nature of logical consequence, where she advocated for
material consequence; and on the continuity between logic and scientific
methodology, which she viewed in hypothetico-deductive terms. Steb-
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bing’s best-known contribution to logic pertains to her views on analysis,

logical constructions, and incomplete symbol theory, which I will cover
first.
Stebbing’s innovations in the theory of philosophical analysis also
inform her metaphysics and, I argue in what follows, her philosophy
of science. Her work on logic and its role in facilitating philosoph-
ical analysis stressed that what philosophers analyse is language, not
propositions or judgments, that the logical form of a sentence is context-
dependent, and that logical construction needs careful definition. This
work prepared the way for her celebrated distinction between grammat-
ical or same-level analysis – analysis of language in terms of a further
stretch of language, which may be analytic or a priori – and metaphys-
ical or directional analysis, which specifies what simple elements in what
 18 Women in the History of Philosophy

configuration there are in the world in case the sentence is true (see
Section 4).
To appreciate the novelty of Stebbing’s contributions, we need a brief
sketch of the historical backdrop, beginning with how Stebbing’s prede-
cessors, especially Moore and Russell but also Constance Jones, reacted
to those authors whom Stebbing labelled the ‘traditional logicians’. Steb-
bing’s ‘traditional logicians’ included the idealists Bosanquet and Brad-
ley, whose logic was Aristotelian but, by Stebbing’s lights, had lost sight
of the most positive features of Aristotle’s thought, the formalism which
Aristotle shared with mathematical logic (Stebbing, 1930: x–xii) by mis-
takenly setting ‘form’ in opposition to ‘Reality’ and proposing instead a
‘metaphysical logic’ governed by the principle of ‘identity-in-diversity’.
Russell and Moore’s first venture into anti-idealism, the New Phil-
osophy, had rebelled against idealism, with Bradley as their main foil.
According to Bradley’s (and Bosanquet’s) identity-in-diversity view,
what we think of as ordinary identity claims or subject-predicate state-
ments never represent reality correctly. Bradley and Bosanquet claimed
that true identity between subject and predicate could not be asserted
due to the ‘difference in meaning’ (Bradley, 1883: 28), that we ‘cannot
speak of the coincident part as the same, except by an ideal synthesis
which identifies it first with one of the two outlines and then with the
other’ (Bosanquet, 1888: 358). Bradley maintained that our thoughts and
language must always radically misrepresent reality, because reality is
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fundamentally one, completely without structure. By contrast, thought

and language are composed of parts and concatenated with a definite
structure in order to represent. Rejection of the Bradley–Bosanquet line
does not require rejection of Aristotelian syllogistic logic. Constance
Jones, who adhered in the main to Aristotelian formal logic despite
replacing one of its covering laws with her New Law of Thought, had
already raised the worry that Bradley’s view ‘seems to me to depend
on a confusion between identity and similarity’ (Jones, 1890: 50 n.1).
The young Moore (1899, 1900–01) and Russell (1903: §46) did not
initially take Jones’s sensible way out; Jones expressed polite puzzle-
ment that Moore, in 1900, fell into the same mistake as Bosanquet of
running together qualitative and quantitative identity, when they are
easily distinguished in ordinary language (Jones, 1900–01; see also
 Susan Stebbing 19

Janssen-Lauret, in press-c). Rather, Moore and Russell at first responded

by offering, instead of the idealist modus ponens – if reality does not
resemble our thoughts and language, then we cannot represent it cor-
rectly, and reality indeed fails to resemble our thoughts and language –
a modus tollens: our thoughts and language certainly can represent real-
ity correctly. Therefore reality does resemble our thoughts. Each of our
words is a symbol complete in itself, whose task is to refer to some com-
ponent of reality. Reality does divide into parts, and our minds can reach
out and grasp, and name, components of reality directly. This ‘all-words-
refer’ model ran aground. It made it impossible to make non-existence
claims and to distinguish true statements from false ones.
The mathematical, symbolic logic which Russell increasingly turned
to, having first read Frege in 1902, provided a basis to solve the New
Philosophers’ problems. In short, they moved to a model on which it is
not the case that every word stands for something but every true propos-
ition (or judgement) does stand for something, namely for a fact. Falsity,
then, is the property a proposition or judgement has when it fails to stand
for a fact. Russell used symbolic logic and its theory of quantification to
account for falsity and negative existentials. Symbolic logic had grown
out of new developments in nineteenth-century mathematics, the revo-
lution in rigour which made mathematicians turn their attention to their
deductive proof methods. Previously, logicians and mathematicians had
been content to build their systems up from principles which appeared
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to them to be intuitively true. But intuition proved no fit guide for math-
ematicians exploring novel systems, like Cantor’s theory of transfinite
numbers, and the new theory of classes, which introduced higher and
lower levels of infinity. Mathematicians’ only guide was adherence to
clearly laid-out proof methods. Instead of relying on syllogistic forms,
where each premise or conclusion has just one quantifier, rigorous new
treatments of arithmetic and geometry also needed statements with mul-
tiple quantifiers, such as ‘for each number, there is another number which
is its successor’ or ‘in between any two points on a line, there is another
point’. They needed a polyadic (that is, multiple-quantifier) logic, like
Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879). Frege thought of his quantifiers as higher-
order properties: to say that so-and-sos exist is to say that the so-and-so
property has instances. Russell put such quantifiers to work in accounting
 20 Women in the History of Philosophy

for negative existentials. A negative existential proposition does not sin-

gle out, say, a unicorn and say of it that it does not exist; the proposition
says that there are no instances of the unicorn property.
Where the early Russell–Moore view had assumed that all words are
complete symbols, whose only function is to refer, their new, improved
model introduced incomplete symbols, whose function is different. Their
contribution to meaning is revealed through analysis. Russell focussed in
particular on definite descriptions, which look, grammatically, like they
stand for some component of reality but whose grammatical form mis-
leads us. Although ‘the present Queen of France is an equestrian’ looks
very similar to the true statement ‘the present Queen of England is an
equestrian’, it is neither true that the present Queen of France is an eques-
trian nor that she never rides, because there is no present Queen of France.
Russell’s solution was to say that ‘the present Queen of France’ is not
referential. It is a disguised quantifier phrase, which disappears upon ana-
lysis: ‘The proposition “a is the so-and-so” means that a has the property
so-and-so, and nothing else has’ (Russell, 1910–11: 113). Proper names,
complete symbols, stand for constituents of propositions known to us
directly. Definite descriptions, by contrast, have no meaning in isolation,
so their function is not referential. They do not introduce a referent as
the constituent of a proposition; they say of a property that it has exactly
one instance. Descriptions, definite or indefinite, are useful in explaining
that non-existence claims do not ascribe the property of non-existence to
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a constituent of a proposition but amount to the assertion that it is not the

case that exactly one thing has the so-and-so property. They also help us
account for falsity. A false proposition is likewise an incomplete symbol,
which arranges words in a way in which nothing is arranged in the world.
It is not just ‘the present Queen of France’, but also ‘the present
Queen of England’, which is an incomplete symbol according to Rus-
sell. Assuming that the reader is not personally acquainted with the
Queen, they know her only by description: they know that there is pres-
ently one unique instance of the Queen-of-England property. Even those
acquainted with the Queen are acquainted only with a visible surface
of her – her face, for example, not the back of her head – at a spe-
cific time. Although they know that she otherwise exists as a complex
arrangement of mental and physical states, they know this descriptively,
 Susan Stebbing 21

not directly. The Queen is, to them, a logical construct, or, as Russell
sometimes said, a logical fiction, someone whose existence and nature
we know of through descriptive knowledge of her properties. Russell’s
mature view at this time preserved the assumption, so central to his and
Moore’s first venture into anti-idealism, that our minds can reach out and
grasp, and name, constituents of reality directly.
Complete symbols or proper names, encoding in language a sign of
immediate acquaintance with something in the world, remained. Russell
stressed that we need them, as they are where analysis terminates: ‘Every
proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of con-
stituents with which we are acquainted’ (Russell, 1910–11: 117). On
Russell’s view, analysis terminates in ‘sense-data’. Although sense-data
are now generally thought of as mental states, such an account of them is
not necessary. Moore considered an interpretation on which sense-data
are identical with the surfaces of objects (Moore, 1925: 59). Russell at
times admitted acquaintance with universals and the self, not merely with
mental states.
Stebbing enthusiastically embraced incomplete symbol theory for its
potential to account for negative existentials. Stebbing considered it
‘plain common sense’ that ‘negative existential propositions are true
if there is no individual in the actual world to which the descriptive
phrase applies’ (Stebbing, 1930: 56). She also mentioned negative exis-
tentials as playing an important role in science. She contrasted the planet
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Neptune, posited to explain irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, and sub-

sequently observed, thus confirming the hypothesis, with the positing of
the planet Vulcan to explain irregularities in the orbit of Mercury. Vulcan
was never observed, because there is no such planet. The irregularities in
Mercury’s orbit are explained instead by Einsteinian general relativity
(Stebbing, 1930: 346, 398). While Stebbing also embraced the project of
logical construction, she sought to improve on Russell’s version of it.
One feature of Stebbing’s thought which sets it apart from that of Rus-
sell and Moore is her insistence that what philosophers analyse is not
propositions, judgements, or things themselves but language, and specif-
ically sentences or other expressions used on some occasion, in some
context. The early Russell had explicitly held the view that ‘symbols
were always, so to speak, transparent’, that is, that language is a medium
 22 Women in the History of Philosophy

we need not pay attention to, whose only job is to stand for something
outside itself. In Principia, an occurrence of a term is called ‘referen-
tially transparent’ iff nothing is said of it but by means of it something
is said of something else (Whitehead & Russell, 1964 [1910]: appendix
C). Stebbing was among the first to stress the importance of context in
interpreting occurrences of expressions, as Quine was also to do in his
development of referential transparency (Quine, 1953: 124). But neither
of them was the first to do so. Russell admitted that he had first seen a
rebuttal of the transparency of language in ‘Lady Welby’s work on the
subject, but failed to take it seriously’ (Russell, 1926: 118).
Stebbing argued that Russell’s claim that ‘the proposition “a is the so-
and-so” means that a has the property so-and-so, and nothing else has’ is
not independent of context because some sentences of the form ‘a is the
so-and-so’ do not contain definite descriptions. For example, ‘the whale
is a mammal’ is usually used to express a taxonomical claim about whales
and has the form of a universal generalisation, equivalent to ‘all whales
are mammals’. A sentence such as ‘the dog is fond of peanut butter’ is
ambiguous. It can be used to make a generalisation about all dogs, in
which case it is a universal generalisation, or to make a statement about a
particular dog, identified by context (I might say it about my dog Daphne;
Stebbing might have said it about her dog Smoodger), in which case it
contains an incomplete symbol. Stebbing thus recommended a refined
account of incomplete symbols, which she credited to Moore in corres-
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pondence, “‘S, in this usage, is an incomplete symbol” = “S, in this usage,

does occur in expressions which express propositions, and in the case of
every such expression, S never stands for any constituent of the propos-
ition expressed” ’ (Stebbing, 1930: 155). Stebbing credited her criticisms
of Russell on incomplete symbols to the influence of Moore, in discus-
sions and correspondence with him rather than his published work. But
there are some potential signs that Stebbing was overly modest here, and
her view is more original than it appears. It is notable, for example, that
Moore consistently spoke of the objects of analysis as propositions (e.g.
Moore, 1925; see also Section 4 in this Element). By contrast, even in
1930 Stebbing’s criticisms already clearly turn on thinking of analysis as
analysis of language: ‘in logical analysis there are not two things but two
expressions which mean the same’ (Stebbing, 1930: 441).
 Susan Stebbing 23

Stebbing criticised Russell for speaking loosely about logical

constructions. She took exception to his calling them ‘fictions’ and not
distinguishing between incomplete symbols – which are expressions of
language – and logical constructions, as, for example, when he wrote,
‘classes are, in fact, like descriptions, logical fictions, or (as we say)
“incomplete symbols” ’ (Russell, 1919: 181–2), a line Stebbing described
as ‘extremely confused’ (Stebbing, 1930: 157). She also expressed hesi-
tation about Russell’s claim that a definition in mathematics is the
‘expression of a volition’ – ‘a declaration that a certain newly-introduced
symbol or combination of symbols is to mean the same as a certain
other combination of symbols of which the meaning is already known’
(Whitehead & Russell, 1964 [1910]: Introduction). Stebbing here took
Russell to be running together defining on the one hand, which is a rela-
tion between expressions, with analysis of concepts on the other hand.
Unlike definition, conceptual analysis takes the form of stating which
properties are conjoined in a given concept. Stebbing maintained, first
of all, that definitions were relations between expressions but not merely
syntactic items. Rather, ‘the definiendum and the definiens express the
same referend’ (Stebbing, 1930: 441), that is, they stand for the same
thing. Similarly, Stebbing maintained that a mathematical definition can
elucidate a concept but is not a definition of the concept. It ‘marks an
advance in knowledge’ rather than telling us only what we already knew
(Stebbing, 1930: 441).
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Stebbing maintained from early in her career that, if logical construc-

tion theory was true and useful, it had to be defined in terms of incomplete
symbol theory. As Russell had provided only examples and no definition,
Stebbing proposed one: she defined ‘Any X is a logical construction’ as
‘X is symbolised by “S” and “an S” is an incomplete symbol’ (Steb-
bing, 1930: 157). In 1930, Stebbing said little about her own original
views concerning logical construction theory, which may indicate that
at that time she was hesitant to endorse it fully. Although she felt able
to declare that classes were logical constructions (Stebbing, 1930: 455),
she seemed less certain about macro-physical objects. She raised a worry
that, if macro-physical objects such as lions are logical constructions,
then lions turn out not to be particulars (Stebbing, 1930: 159 n.2); only
sense-data are to be counted as particulars on such a view.
 24 Women in the History of Philosophy

By the second edition of her book (Stebbing, 1933a), Stebbing had

come around to a firmer, and original, view on logical construction
theory. She added to the discussions above an appendix providing a
clear statement of the view that ‘there are good reasons for supposing
that . . . persons are logical constructions’ (Stebbing, 1933a: 502; see also
Stebbing, 1933a: 146 n.1). Stebbing remained resolutely opposed to call-
ing logical constructions ‘fictions’ and hesitant about the nomenclature
of ‘logical construction’, ‘for it suggests that something is constructed,
which is not the case . . . to say that the table is a logical fiction (or con-
struction) is not to say that the table is a fictitious, or imaginary, object;
it is rather to deny that, in any ordinary sense, it is an object at all’ (Steb-
bing, 1933a: 502). Stebbing’s position on logical construction differed
from Russell’s. Unlike Russell, Stebbing did not hold that analysis ter-
minates in sense-data, nor that we can name sense-data. In the sections
that follow on Stebbing’s philosophy of science and metaphysics, we will
see Stebbing’s reasons for dispensing with sense-data and substituting
observations, or perceptual objects.
In short, Stebbing saw no need to require that analysis terminates
in something which ‘Russell . . . could regard as an indubitable datum’
(Stebbing, 1933a: 503). According to Stebbing, analysis need not termi-
nate in indubitable data, or objects of acquaintance (see also Section 4).
In another paper in the same year, Stebbing also cast doubt on Russell’s
contention that our language allows for pure reference without any dis-
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cursive content: ‘Ordinary language is essentially descriptive. It is for

this reason that no non-general fact can be expressed. If we attempted
to use a sentence not containing any descriptive symbol, we should be
reduced to a set of pointings. In such a case, we could say nothing;
we could only point. . . . Pure demonstration is a limit of approximation’
(Stebbing, 1933d: 342; see also Janssen-Lauret, 2017: 14–15).1
Stebbing also expressed original views on what the distinctive char-
acteristics of logic are, tracing out a line stretching from Aristotle to
twentieth-century symbolic logic which stresses formality. Although

1 See Janssen-Lauret (in press-c) for a case that Stebbing’s argument here resembles
that of Constance Jones and may have been influenced by Jones; see also Janssen-
Lauret (2017) for a case that she may also have been influenced by Bradley.
 Susan Stebbing 25

Beaney and Chapman (2021: §2) state that Stebbing’s book covers
‘traditional, Aristotelian logic’, Stebbing herself sharply distinguished
between Aristotle’s logic and that of those she called ‘Traditional Logi-
cians’, certainly including the idealists Bosanquet and Bradley. Among
Stebbing’s original views on logic is the doctrine that Aristotle’s logic
shares with the symbolic logic of Frege, Peano, Russell, and Whitehead,
but not with the thought of traditional logicians, a focus on formality.
Early modern logicians and their successors argued over whether logic
was an art, the ‘art of thinking’ – as in the title of the 1662 Port Royal
Logic, La logique ou l’art de penser (Stebbing, 1930: 163) – or a science,
and whether logic was psychologistic, that is, descriptive of reasoning, or
normative, prescribing to us how we ought to think and argue. Stebbing’s
college principal Jones caused much controversy with her bold, anti-
psychologistic stance that logic was the science of the relations between
propositions (Jones, 1890).
Mathematical logic, which Stebbing called ‘symbolic logic’, cast new
light on the question of the distinctive characteristics and subject mat-
ter of logic, the question now generally called ‘logicality’. Previously,
logicians and mathematicians had been content to build their systems up
from principles which appeared to them to be intuitively true, or self-
evident. But late nineteenth-century mathematicians had begun to find
that coherent proof systems remained when some allegedly self-evident
principles were given up. Non-Euclidean geometries, for example, no
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longer assumed that parallel lines never meet. Dedekind’s definition of

an infinite set assumes that such a set has a proper part which has the
same (infinite) size as it, contradicting the intuitive principle that wholes
are larger than their proper parts. And these kinds of unintuitive systems
were soon given useful application in the new Einsteinian physics. Steb-
bing saw the importance of both the tendency of the new mathematical
logic to rely increasingly on proof-theoretic methods and its applications
to non-mathematical reality. She brought the two together in her philoso-
phy of logic. Stebbing rejected Wittgenstein’s view that logical truths do
not say anything (Wittgenstein, 1922: 4.0312) because they are tautolo-
gous. She wrote, ‘I think that the assertion of a tautology is a significant
assertion . . . Further, I think that it is not absurd to say that a tautology is
true’ (Stebbing, 1933c: 196).
 26 Women in the History of Philosophy

Stebbing held that the success of modern symbolic logic, which places
no reliance on intuitive self-evidence, gives us good reason to dispense
with self-evidence as a condition of logicality. It also places limits on the
role played by modal notions in logic: ‘We cannot answer that an axiom is
a proposition that is necessarily true, for we do not know what necessarily
true means’ (Stebbing, 1930: 175). According to Stebbing, what is neces-
sarily true is at best a relative notion given in terms of what is implied by
what (Stebbing, 1930: 176). She also argued that we cannot rely on the
notion of ‘logical priority’. To speak of one truth being ‘logically prior’
to another is obscure and adds an inappropriate dose of metaphysics to
our logic (Stebbing, 1930: 175). Stebbing concluded that ‘no deductive
system can be regarded as demonstrating necessarily true propositions by
means of necessary primitive propositions or axioms’ (Stebbing, 1930:
176–7) because truth cannot be established by proof in the sense of dem-
onstration; to find out what is true we must turn to the empirical. What
we can do is, in a given system, to take certain notions as undefined, and
some statements as not for present purposes standing in need of proof,
without their being taken to be absolutely indefinable or indemonstrable.
These are called ‘primitives’ after Peano (Stebbing, 1930: 175). But
what is the property that makes a system logic? Stebbing’s answer was
‘formality’, not in the sense of involving only proof without invoking
truth but in the sense of universal applicability.

If we reject the view that there are different logics, then I think we can
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speak of logical principles which are exemplified in every deductive

system and in every valid reasoning from premisses to conclusion.
It is the distinguishing characteristic of a logical principle that it
applies not only to systems but to arguments, not only to geometries
but to matters of fact. In other words, logical principles, are com-
pletely general because they are completely formal, and conversely.
(Stebbing, 1933c: 196)

On Stebbing’s view, then, logic is a science: the science which con-

cerns what follows from what. The question of the nature of logical
consequence, or what it means to say that something logically follows
from something else, is also one on which Stebbing expressed original
views. Stebbing discussed different kinds of logical following-from, first
describing Russell’s ‘material implication’, according to which p implies
 Susan Stebbing 27

q just in case either p is false or q is true (Stebbing, 1930: 223). She quer-
ied Russell’s view that material implication is a plausible candidate for
logical consequence. She cast doubt on that view by arguing that in ordin-
ary language we say that, if q follows from p, then q can be deduced from
p. Material implication, Stebbing countered, can hold between statements
which cannot be deduced from one another. She expressed a preference
for an alternative account of logical consequence, based on a relation
which C. I. Lewis called ‘strict implication’ and Moore called ‘entail-
ment’ (Stebbing, 1930: 222; see also Douglas & Nassim, 2021). The
relation of entailment holds, for example, between statements like ‘this
is red’ and ‘this is coloured’, that is, it covers what is now often called
‘material consequence’. Entailment is not definable in psychological
terms (Stebbing, 1930: 223). Although we would now categorise this
kind of entailment as modal, Stebbing, in 1930, resisted this characterisa-
tion, arguing that ‘impossible’ is less clear than ‘entails’ (Stebbing, 1930:
222 n.1). Both implication and entailment are in turn distinct from infer-
ence, which Stebbing described as ‘a mental process’ (Stebbing, 1930:
210), and, although of interest to logic, different from validity. Inference
is psychological, but not validity (Stebbing, 1930: 211).
These views of Stebbing’s in turn affected her answers to the questions
of extensionalism in logic and the relationship of logic to philosophy
of science. The new mathematical logic’s need to overcome intuition
as a guide to logical truth, and replace it as far as possible with rules
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of proof, led to the rise of extensionalism. The extensionalist contends

that we should talk about things as they are, not about how they may
or must be. ‘Mays’ and ‘musts’, modal expressions, extensionalists
took to rely on intuitions or psychological principles of self-evidence,
methods made obsolete by the new mathematical logic. As we have
seen, Principia’s aim was to speak of objects with referentially trans-
parency, so that any two co-referential expressions were everywhere
intersubstitutable (Whitehead & Russell, 1964 [1910]: appendix C).
The radical extensionalist logicians of the 1930s and 1940s, especially
Tarski and Quine, thought logic should only account for differences
in extension, not intension: as Tarski put it, ‘two concepts with differ-
ent intensions but identical extensions are logically indistinguishable’
 28 Women in the History of Philosophy

(Tarski, 1956 [1935]: 387). Quine, too, enthusiastically defended exten-

sionalism (Quine, 2018 [1944]: 158; see also Janssen-Lauret, 2018,
2022b), and it was assumed that modal logics like C. I. Lewis’s couldn’t
be extended to the quantified case until Ruth Barcan managed it in
1946–7 (Barcan, 1946, 1947).
We have seen that Stebbing was circumspect about allowing modality
into logic. Yet she was not as strongly opposed to intensional discourse
as Quine or Tarski. Stebbing certainly had reservations about ascribing
necessity, especially essence or metaphysical necessity, to the world:
‘Modern theories of organic evolution have combined with modern the-
ories of mathematics to destroy the basis of the Aristotelian conception
of essence’ (Stebbing, 1930: 433). But she accepted analytic truth and
admitted in a later paper that, although analyticity does not exhaust entail-
ment, analytic containment ‘involves a must which is a must of necessity’
(Stebbing, 1933c: 193). Stebbing also expressed moderate extensional-
ism in her attitude towards intensions. She objected to the view that ‘the
intension of a word is commonly said to be all that we intend to mean by
it’ that ‘this definition suggests an unfortunate intrusion of psychology
into logic’ (Stebbing, 1930: 28). But Stebbing, like Frege, believed that
some intensional language could be systematised and decoupled from the
psychological via quantification over abstract objects. Frege thought ref-
erence was made to senses where intersubstitutivity salva veritate failed
(Frege, 1892). Stebbing did not believe in Fregean senses but neverthe-
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less thought a set might have an intension as well as an extension, if the

intension was taken to be its defining property (Stebbing, 1930: 141).
Stebbing’s view of logic was in the main anti-psychologistic. She
regarded logic as a science of what follows from what rather than one
which describes how we in fact think. The anti-psychologistic view was
typical of the grandparents and founders of analytic philosophy. Frege
famously criticised psychologism in logic and mathematics. Jones, too,
defended a view of logic as the normative science of how we ought to
reason, given what the consequence relations between propositions are,
rather than the descriptive science of reasoning, a branch of psychology
(Jones, 1890: 2). Stebbing agreed with the view that logic is normative
rather than a descriptive science of reasoning. But, according to her, the
normativity of logic is simply a by-product of its abstract nature and
 Susan Stebbing 29

its formality. Logic has no distinctive set of facts of its own; it traces
the general forms of reality (Stebbing, 1930: 474). Nevertheless, Steb-
bing never lost sight of logic’s connection to thinking and reasoning.
She consistently described thinking as an activity. Logical reasoning she
described as goal-directed, purposive thinking, separate not from action-
linked thinking but from free association of thoughts or idle reverie.
When giving examples of reasoning, she liked to give practical examples:
a man uses his knowledge of natural laws to trace a safe path off a cliff
in high tide (Stebbing, 1930: 1–2); a woman thinks through why it is
unwise to wear a given dress to the beach, as the chemically unstable dye
fades in sea air (Stebbing, 1930: 8); a man locked out of his flat devises
hypotheses which he can test in order to determine whether the flat has
been burgled (Stebbing, 1930: 234). Stebbing viewed logical reasoning
as an activity of people, people who interact in communities and whose
views are informed by the ‘intellectual climate’ (Stebbing, 1930: 294) in
which they live.
Lastly, a central aspect of Stebbing’s outlook was her view of logic
as continuous with philosophy of science and scientific methodology.
Stebbing did not favour a split of logic into an inductive and a deductive
branch, since she believed that science must deploy both inductive and
deductive reasoning (Stebbing, 1930: 245, 344). What is true in a nat-
ural science, unlike in a purely deductive science such as mathematics,
‘depends upon what there actually is in the world’ (Stebbing, 1930: 231)
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and relies on experience (Stebbing, 1930: 232). But scientific method

stands in continuity with logic because the task of the natural sciences
is to construct a system of the world. Stebbing carefully reflected on the
nature of a system. In a certain sense, any collection of elements stand-
ing in relations is a system (Stebbing, 1930: 174). Deductive systems
specifically are composed of propositions – defined by her as some-
thing a thinker or speaker can affirm or deny (Stebbing, 1930: 15) –
standing in logical relations. But Stebbing also spoke of systems as
composed of facts, with the requirement that the facts all be mutually
consistent with each other; she speaks of facts as contradictory ‘when
the propositions which would correspond to those facts are contradictory’
(Stebbing, 1930: 199). Following the revolution in rigour and the great
success and applicability of unintuitive proof systems like transfinite
 30 Women in the History of Philosophy

arithmetic and non-Euclidean geometry, we can no longer assume that

systems rest on self-evident axioms or are false when they have counter-
intuitive consequences. Nor can we assume that the world itself is a
system. It is certainly not logically necessary that it is. Yet science, Steb-
bing wrote, is concerned with finding ‘the system (if there is one) which
is the system of the world’ (Stebbing, 1930: 199).
Since logic, according to Stebbing, is formal in a sense where it is
concerned with truth, the label of ‘logic’ can be usefully applied to the
kind of method which seeks increasingly abstract generalisations which
take observations as a point of departure: we begin with awareness of a
complex situation in which some fact is singled out as peculiar, to be
accounted for, we form a hypothesis connecting it to other facts, and
develop the hypothesis deductively, in order to test the consequences so
deduces against observable facts (Stebbing, 1930: 234–5). We might now
call Stebbing’s procedure here a version of the hypothetico-deductive
method. Stebbing did not view the hypothetico-deductive method and
the inductive method as opposed. In her view, both are involved in sci-
entific reasoning. She viewed inductive reasoning as resulting not from
mere enumeration of cases (this crow is black, that crow is black, . . .,
therefore all crows are black) but from a combination of enumeration and
analogy. Inductive reasoning consists not just of enumeration but also of
finding respects of resemblance, shared properties of scientific relevance,
between the instances: we can call a bird a ‘crow’ only if it resembles
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‘in certain respects other others called by the same name . . . properties
belonging to all the instances of crows constitute the total positive ana-
logy’ (Stebbing, 1930: 250). Stebbing considered argument by metaphor
in the scientific context especially pernicious because she regarded a
metaphor as an especially weak analogy, connoting only one shared
property (Stebbing, 1930: 253). What sort of a system is a scientific
theory? Stebbing was sympathetic to the then fashionable view that
science does not explain (that is, it does not answer why-questions)
but instead describes; it answers how-questions. Yet she pointed out
that science does not merely describe in the sense of listing proposi-
tions which recount all the scientific facts, such as exact descriptions of
which motions occurred or which particles were present in which loca-
tion at which time. Such descriptions are neither feasible nor useful.
 Susan Stebbing 31

Scientific theorising requires abstraction and formulations of law-like

generalisations: ‘constructive description’, in Stebbing’s terminology
(Stebbing, 1930: 392).
The facts which comprise the world include those which resist sys-
tematisation without first being subjected to some abstraction in thought.
When we perceive, we perceive absolutely specific shades and sounds,
for which we have no words. To use words is already to abstract to
some degree. To use general terms is to classify (Stebbing, 1930: 444).
The most abstract propositions are formal ones. Their significance is
independent of any specific experience (Stebbing, 1930: 446). How,
asked Stebbing, can we link the neat, orderly, exact system of science
to the ‘untidy, fragmentary world of common sense’ to which our abso-
lutely specific, unstructured perceptions belong? We use not merely the
abstractions which naming, classifying, hypothesising, and law-like gen-
eralising afford us but also the method of extensive abstraction due to
Whitehead. Stebbing’s example is Whitehead’s account of points. First,
we take the relation of spatial inclusion, as when a box fits inside another
box. We define inclusion as a transitive, asymmetric, serial relation and
say that a point is what that series of inclusion converges on. We need
not know anything about the intrinsic nature of points. All we need is
their formal properties (Stebbing, 1930: 451). Points, then, are logical
constructions, but they are not fictions. They are constructed not in the
sense of being made up but in the sense of discovery (Stebbing, 1930:
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454). They help us theorise.

Stebbing’s contributions to logic are deserving of wider recognition
among historians of analytic philosophy. Her Modern Introduction to
Logic was the first accessible book on symbolic logic and also contained
innovative material on a range of topics in the philosophy of logic. Steb-
bing carefully considered what formality, the hallmark of logic, means in
view of new developments in proof theory which imply that logic can no
longer lay claim to being self-evident or necessarily true. Stebbing gave
an original and sophisticated answer, namely one in terms of the univer-
sal applicability of logic. She also made progress on the topics of analysis
and incomplete symbol theory. She distinguished analytic analyses, such
as mathematical definitions, from philosophical analyses, briefly sketch-
ing an account of philosophical analysis that is not analytic, and thereby
 32 Women in the History of Philosophy

laid the groundwork for her later metaphysics, and made room for a more
holist approach within analytic philosophy.

3 Philosophy of Science
Much of Susan Stebbing’s published work focussed on the philosophy of
science and especially on the philosophy of physics. But it is only very
recently that she has been given credit for holding original views on phil-
osophy of science (West, 2022; Janssen-Lauret, 2022a). To date, little has
been written about the half-dozen philosophy of science papers Stebbing
published between 1924 and 1929, where she set out her view, which
she termed ‘realism’, on the importance of observations to philosophy of
science (Stebbing, 1924, 1924–5, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929). As we saw
in Section 2.1, Stebbing’s Modern Introduction to Logic had much to
say on the relationship between logic and scientific methodology. Yet,
to date, it has not seen much engagement from historians of analytic
philosophy. Her book Philosophy and the Physicists (Stebbing, 1937)
investigated and meticulously rebutted the idealistic interpretation of
Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics then popular with some
physicists. Stebbing’s contemporaries described the book as having a
wholly negative project (Broad, 1938; Paul, 1938). But current schol-
arship has begun to argue that Stebbing put her original ideas to good use
in Philosophy and the Physicists, such as directional analysis (Janssen-
Lauret, 2022a; see also Section 4 in this Element) as well as novel views
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on entropy (West, 2022). Stebbing continued to write on philosophy of

physics until the final years of her life (Stebbing, 1942–3).
If it appears surprising that little attention has been paid to Stebbing’s
philosophy of science and physics, this may be connected to the percep-
tion that Stebbing was primary a follower of Moore. Moore, captivated
from a young age by the question of idealism, represented in its various
branches by Kant and Bradley, never studied much physics and had little
to say on its philosophy. In her philosophy of physics, Stebbing men-
tioned Moore only rarely. In her early papers, she entered into a dialogue
mainly with the philosopher of physics and logician A. N. Whitehead.
She also engaged in symposia with other philosophers of physics such as
C. D. Broad, Dorothy Wrinch, and R. B. Braithwaite. In Philosophy and
the Physicists, Stebbing never mentioned Moore. She focussed primarily
 Susan Stebbing 33

on her critique of the idealist physicist Arthur Eddington, also engaging

along the way with other analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Rus-
sell, C. D. Broad, and C. E. M. Joad, and other idealist physicists like
James Jeans. The views on perception and observation which Stebbing
developed in the 1920s do not much resemble Moore’s, and her extended
and sophisticated arguments for anti-idealism about physics are, I argue,
best interpreted as distinct from Moorean common-sense philosophy.
A closer look at Stebbing’s philosophy of physics furthers the case that
she deserves to be known as an important analytic philosopher in her own
right.
Stebbing’s achievements appear even more impressive given that she
was almost entirely self-educated in physics. As we saw in Section 1, she
had been only intermittently homeschooled as a Victorian girl with a dis-
ability. Although interested in studying natural science (Chapman, 2013:
11), Stebbing was unable to make this wish a reality as an undergraduate
student because she was left disabled by Ménière’s disease. Its attendant
attacks of vertigo, dizziness, and nausea made it in practice impossible for
Stebbing to work in a laboratory. Still, she never lost her interest in phys-
ics. So it should not come as a surprise that Stebbing’s first venture into
analytic philosophy concerned the interpretation of the new Einsteinian
physics.
Here, Stebbing made an early move to spur on the development
of analytic philosophy from a heavily foundationalist project to one
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adaptable to the holism that was distinctive of mid-analytic philosophy.

3.1 Stebbing’s Early Papers: Whiteheadian Philosophy

of Science, Observations, and Realism
While historians often present the origins of analytic philosophy as lying
entirely with the early efforts of Russell and Moore, and thus as sparked
primarily by anti-idealism, in my view an important driving force for
the development of analytic philosophy was the pressure to find a phil-
osophy to make sense of the new science and mathematics and their
counter-intuitive consequences. Stebbing’s philosophy of physics was
both anti-idealist and concerned to account for novel developments in
mathematics and science. In Section 2.1, we saw her carefully consid-
ering the repercussions for logic of the new science and mathematics,
 34 Women in the History of Philosophy

which imply that we can no longer assume that it is necessarily true that
parallel lines never meet, or that wholes are always greater in size than
their proper parts, simply because they seem intuitively self-evident. It
was not merely that assuming the falsity of such apparently intuitive prin-
ciples led to perfectly coherent proof systems. Such proof systems, of
non-Euclidean geometry and set theories which allowed for denumerable
and non-denumerable infinities, were also fruitfully applied to model
the space–time of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So, what had
appeared to be self-evident necessary truths about parallel lines never
meeting and wholes always being greater than their proper parts now
seemed to be actual falsehoods, not true of the physical world in their
complete generality. Stebbing saw the need for a properly worked-out
philosophy to fit around the deliverances of the new natural sciences.
In her work on logic, as we have seen, she argued that we may explain
‘how the exact and tidy world of the physicist is connected with the
fragmentary and untidy world of common sense [if we] demonstrate
the applicability of abstract deductive systems to the world given in
sense-experience’ (Stebbing, 1930: 452) and that we should turn to
Whiteheadian extensive abstraction to carry out this project.
As we saw in Section 1, the prevailing narrative of Stebbing’s devel-
opment has it that she was ‘converted’ to Moorean analytic philosophy
as a result of a philosophical exchange with Moore in 1917–18 (e.g.
Beaney & Chapman, 2021: §3). Although Stebbing herself was to an
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extent responsible for this ‘conversion’ account (Stebbing, 1942: 530), it

must be borne in mind that the paper in which she made this claim was
explicitly a homage to Moore, written in Stebbing’s final years while
she was very unwell, and with a generally self-abnegatory tone through-
out, and that Stebbing was apt to be overly modest at the best of times
(Janssen-Lauret, 2022a; Connell & Janssen-Lauret, in press: §1). It is true
that Stebbing certainly did turn away from idealism and towards analytic
philosophy. Still, her publications during the 1920s were not Moorean in
focus. They engaged in dialogue primarily with Whitehead’s philosophy
of physics and at times expressed explicit disagreement with Moore.
Whiteheadian philosophy of physics is vast, complex, and written in a
language of its own full of neologisms. Space does not permit me to give
a full account of his thought here, although I will highlight a few key parts
 Susan Stebbing 35

(see MacBride, 2018: 115–28, for a fuller treatment). Whitehead thought

that for a realist philosophy to encompass Einsteinian physics required
some radical shifts in our thinking. Among these shifts was a symbolic
logic to replace the Aristotelian subject-predicate model, in order to rep-
resent the relational and polyadic (multiple-quantifier) logical forms of
relational statements, such as those used in his account of spatial points:
in between any two points, there is another point, and neither the points
nor their names can be listed. We must give up the binary opposition
of subject-predicate form in logic and the grammar of our language.
More than this, Whitehead thought, to grasp the new physics fully we
must also dispense with the distinction between particular and univer-
sal, which results ‘from our inveterate habit of forcing all philosophies
into the framework of Aristotelian categories; and finally, from an undue
reliance upon the ultimate philosophical importance of Indo-European
languages’ (Stebbing, 1924–5: 313). It was not just the two-category
treatment of particular and universal which Whitehead deplored but the
‘Bifurcation of Nature’ more generally. Nature does not divide into the
neat binaries we were taught by previous generations of philosophers.
We must also do away with the distinctions between mind and body and
primary and secondary quality. Rather, Nature must be thought of as an
endless succession of events, from which both common-sense objects –
plants, animals, persons, rocks, planets – and their qualities and relations
are abstractions. There is no ultimate sense to be made of a distinction
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between the primary qualities an object really has, such as its size, shape,
and motion, and the secondary qualities which are mental additions, such
as colour, sound, and smell. All these qualities are to be found in Nature.
All are to an extent abstractions from the panoply of events which it
comprises, as is the mind itself (Stebbing, 1924: 292).
Stebbing agreed that the Bifurcation of Nature must be abandoned, but
took a more moderate view than Whitehead. From early on, she expressed
a preference for an ontology of particulars and universals – though
one which included relational universals, not merely properties – which
together combine into facts, instead of Whitehead’s event ontology. Yet
she admitted that the nature of the particular-universal distinction was far
from obvious and must be carefully revisited in view of the difficulties
with its application to physics. She explicitly took issue with Moore’s
 36 Women in the History of Philosophy

common-sense derivation of the particular-universal distinction from the

distinction between what is predicable and what is not: ‘Prof. Moore
says “is predicable of something else” is a perfectly clear notion . . . I am
rather doubtful’ (Stebbing, 1924–5: 316). By contrast, Stebbing came
to embrace the Whiteheadian view that secondary qualities are really
there in Nature. They are not an addition made by our minds. She fur-
ther cautioned against the extrusion of mind from nature, including, as we
shall see, in Philosophy and the Physicists. Her arguments for these posi-
tions, though, often differed from Whitehead’s. She put forward original
views about the basis of ordinary-language observational truths needed
by physics and philosophy alike.
Stebbing held that there is a certain kind of collection of facts such
that they ‘can all be known, and that such facts are the basis upon which
all scientific and philosophical speculation must rest’ (Stebbing, 1929:
147). But these were quite different in kind from the propositions
Moore offered up to the reader as certain, such as ‘Hens lay eggs’
(Stebbing, 1933b: 8). Stebbing’s basis for scientific and philosophical
speculation was what she called ‘perceptual science’ (Stebbing, 1929:
148), comprising statements such as:

1. I am now seeing a red patch.

2. I am now perceiving a piece of blotting paper.
3. That is a piece of blotting paper.
4. That piece of blotting paper is on the table.
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5. That piece of blotting paper was on the table before I saw it.
6. Other people besides myself have seen that piece of blotting paper.
(Stebbing, 1929: 147)

The view that (1)–(6) above are true and known to be true Stebbing called
‘realism’. Her ‘realism’ was clearly distinct from Moore’s ‘Common-
Sense View’, often described as one according to which ‘our ordinary
common-sense view of the world is largely correct’ (Baldwin, 2004:
§6), even though there are some similarities. Stebbing’s range of truths
was narrower, and more perception-focussed, than Moore’s. Stebbing
also emphasised that she saw both philosophy and physics as start-
ing from the same range of truths about perceptual observations, the
relationship of the observer to her perceptions, and her relationship to
 Susan Stebbing 37

other observing subjects. By contrast, Moore never mentioned physics

when enumerating certainties or truisms. Stebbing contended that ‘the
denial of realism is inconsistent with the validity of physical theor-
ies . . . theoretical physics has developed by the continual modification
of common-sense views through a stage of what might be called percep-
tual science, and that unless perceptual science is true theoretical physics
cannot be true’ (Stebbing, 1929: 148). Stebbing’s ‘perceptual science’, or
‘realism’, is commonsensical in a certain way but much more naturalistic
than Moore’s ‘Common-Sense View’.
Crucially, Stebbing did not take her ‘realism’ to entail the falsity of
most forms of idealism. Her realism does plausibly entail the falsity of
Bradley’s realism specifically. After all, Bradley held the idiosyncratic
view that Reality, being fundamentally one and without structure, could
never in principle be truly described by ordinary human language. But
Stebbing held that most ontologically idealist theories are not like Brad-
ley’s. They do not say that (1)–(6) are false but rather that there is a
philosophical analysis according to which the objects discussed in (1)–(6)
have a mental or spiritual, rather than material, nature. Stebbing wrote,
‘does physics give us any reason to suppose that propositions such as the
six propositions I asserted above are false? I cannot see that it does . . . It
has relevance to naive realism, which is a theory about the analysis of
such propositions’ (Stebbing, 1929: 147). Naïve realism provides a phys-
icalist analysis of (1)–(6). Moore also placed weight on the distinction
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between knowing a truth and knowing its analysis, and Stebbing cited
his 1925 ‘Defence of Common Sense’ here for that insight. Neverthe-
less, Stebbing’s view had already moved beyond Moore’s at this point.
According to Stebbing, modern physical theory was in tension with naïve
realism, but not with her realism, and by itself neither compelled nor ruled
out an idealist interpretation of physics.

3.2 Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists

Stebbing’s 1937 book Philosophy and the Physicists presented an
extended argument against idealist interpretations of modern phys-
ics, largely those of the physicist Arthur Eddington and to a lesser
extent James Jeans, also a physicist. As Stebbing made no positive
case in favour of an alternative interpretation of modern physics, her
 38 Women in the History of Philosophy

contemporaries took her project to be wholly negative, merely cleaning

up the mess made by physicists going beyond their competence and wan-
dering into the realm of philosophy. Broad’s (otherwise complimentary)
review made a rather sexist comparison between Stebbing and ‘a good
housewife who has at least completed her spring-cleaning’ (Broad, 1938:
226). But the fact that Stebbing’s case was largely critical, and she pre-
sented no alternative interpretation of physics, does not imply that her
arguments were merely of the nature of picking apart (and sweeping up)
Eddington’s and Jeans’s arguments.
Recent commentators have argued that Stebbing drew upon her ori-
ginal philosophical thought in the course of Philosophy and the Physi-
cists, even though she did not always make clear when she did this.
West (2022) argues that Stebbing defended an original view on the
philosophy of entropy (Stebbing, 1937: chap. 11). I will show here
that Stebbing also argued for her Whitehead-inspired view that sec-
ondary qualities are in Nature (Stebbing, 1937: 52–5), appealed to her
1930 proposal that science provides a ‘constructive description’ (Steb-
bing, 1937: 85), and used her views on philosophical analysis and logical
constructions to further her argumentative case. Idealists about physics,
on Stebbing’s view, believe that successive steps of analysis ultimately
reveal physical objects to be logical constructions out of something men-
tal, ‘the stuff of our consciousness’ (Eddington, 1920: 200). Stebbing was
not dogmatically opposed to idealist interpretations of physics. She even
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called some of Eddington’s statements of idealism ‘delightful’ (Steb-

bing, 1937: 208). But whether an idealist interpretation of physics is
viable must depend on the merits of the philosophical analysis it provides
and the arguments offered in favour of it. Stebbing judged Eddington’s
arguments to be insufficient to establish idealism.2 What follows is not a
full account of all of Eddington’s arguments or Stebbing’s rebuttals; due
to constraints of space, I have to restrict my discussion to a few highlights.
It is important to make clear at the outset that Stebbing did not take
the statement that physical objects are logical constructions out of elem-
ents which are ultimately mental or spiritual in nature to be in any way
internally contradictory. Stebbing’s position was that modern theories of

2 Eddington’s view is now often called ‘panpsychism’, but Stebbing did not use that term.
 Susan Stebbing 39

physics entailed neither idealism nor materialism. To suppose otherwise

was, Stebbing thought, to commit the fallacy of supposing that a macro-
object – that is, a logical construction, really a plurality of micro-objects
in some arrangement – inherits the properties of the micro-objects which
make it up, or vice versa. We saw in Section 2.1 that in her work on
logical constructions, Stebbing compared this fallacy to ‘the confusion
in supposing that if men are numerous and Socrates is a man, it would
follow that Socrates is numerous’ (Stebbing, 1933a: 505).
Materialists as well as idealists may fall into the above fallacy.
Nineteenth-century materialist physicists did so, Stebbing noted, when,
having discovered the atom, they assumed that atoms were ‘solid,
absolutely hard, indivisible billiard-ball-like . . . in a perfectly straight-
forward sense of the words “solid” and “hard” ’ (Stebbing, 1937: 47).
When Rutherford split the atom, physicists came to know that atoms
were not, in fact, solid, but consisted of subatomic particles suspended
in mostly empty space. But Eddington, too, committed a version of the
fallacy which conflates the properties of the macro-objects with those of
their constituent micro-objects. He did so, for example, when inferring
from the fact that the atoms of which a plank in his study floor is made
are mostly empty space that ‘the plank has no solidity’ (Eddington, 1928:
342). To say ‘the plank is not solid’ in ordinary English is to imply that
the plank is very brittle or visibly has holes in it. Stebbing maintained that
it remains, despite our knowledge of subatomic particles, perfectly true
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to say ‘this plank is solid’ of an ordinarily robust plank free of worrisome

holes. That the plank is, at the subatomic level, made up of mostly empty
space is perhaps counter-intuitive but does not negate its solidity. ‘No
concepts drawn from the level of common-sense thinking are appropriate
to sub-atomic, i.e. microphysical, phenomena’ (Stebbing, 1937: 44). The
macro-object, a plank, which we generally describe in ordinary language,
is solid; the micro-objects, atoms, which comprise its analysis, are not
themselves solid; these two statements are not mutually contradictory.
Similarly, the macro-objects are called ‘material objects’ in ordinary
language, but there is no contradiction in supposing that their micro-
components might, as Eddington supposed, be made of ‘the stuff of con-
sciousness’. It may appear that a follower of Moore’s ‘Common-Sense
View’ ought to find such a view contradictory. We will see in Section 4
 40 Women in the History of Philosophy

that Moore at times seemed to incline towards the position that such a
view is paradoxical. Stebbing, by contrast, did not. She was very clear
that Eddington’s purported analysis, ‘the plank is material but its ultimate
micro-constituents are the stuff of consciousness’, is no more internally
contradictory than ‘the plank is solid but its component atoms are mostly
empty space’. Stebbing’s objection to Eddington’s idealist conclusion
was not that it was internally contradictory or at odds with common sense.
She simply found that it did not follow from his premises.
By Stebbing’s lights, Eddington’s project went wrong early on not just
by committing the fallacy of conflating macro-objects’ properties with
those of their constituents but by raising the question ‘how is percep-
tion possible?’, a question which Stebbing (for Whiteheadian reasons)
already considered ‘devoid of sense’ (Stebbing, 1937: 52), and by look-
ing to physics for an answer to it. Stebbing, of course, held that physics
itself must rest on facts about perception and observation, and relation-
ships between observers, and although she did not cite her 1929 account
of ‘perceptual science’ in Philosophy and the Physicists I will show that
she made use of it. What’s more, Stebbing objected to the Bifurcation
of Nature inherent in Eddington’s view that physics constructs a ‘sym-
bolic world’. Eddington’s ‘symbolic world’ duplicates the familiar world
in which, for example, Susan Stebbing stepped into her study and took
pleasure in seeing and smelling ‘a crimson and scented rose’ from a
bowl on her desk. On Eddington’s account, the world of physics con-
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tains ‘duplicates’ of the desk, the bowl, the rose, etcetera. It contains
no duplicate of crimson but merely ‘its scientific equivalent electro-
magnetic wavelength . . . the wave is the reality . . . the colour is mere
mind-spinning’ (Eddington, 1928: 88). Stebbing felt that Eddington was
correct to deny that the wave itself is coloured, for we must not ‘in one
and the same sentence . . . mix up language used appropriately for the
furniture of earth and our daily dealings with it with language used for
the purpose of philosophical and scientific discussion’ (Stebbing, 1937:
42).3 Nevertheless, the wave not being coloured cannot be used as a
premise to support the conclusion that the rose is not really coloured

3 See Chapman (2013) for an interpretation of Philosophy and the Physicists which
emphasises the difference between ordinary language and the language of physics.
 Susan Stebbing 41

(Stebbing, 1937: 51). The rose, a macro-object, is instead to be analysed

in terms which include the electromagnetic wavelength.
The distinction between primary qualities – such as length, breadth,
mass, shape, and motion – which physical objects really have, and sec-
ondary qualities assumed to be mental additions – such as colour, sound,
and smell – was one Whitehead and Stebbing deplored. The distinction
had nevertheless been common among philosophers since the seven-
teenth century. Stebbing cited examples from Newton, affirming the
distinction, and from Berkeley, criticising Locke and the Cartesians for
holding it (Stebbing, 1937: 51–5). Eddington went further than Newton,
Locke, and the Cartesians had done. In his ‘scientific world’, he found
not just equivalents of secondary qualities but duplicates of their subjects,
too. He claimed to be writing his book sitting at two tables at once.

Two tables! Yes, there are duplicates of every object about me . . . One
of them has been familiar to me from earliest years . . . it has exten-
sion, it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all, it is
substantial . . . Table No. 2 is my scientific table . . . There is noth-
ing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space.
(Eddington, 1928: xi–xii)

In isolation, the above might seem like a harmless metaphorical use of

language. But Eddington emphasised that he meant the language of dupli-
cates of each object existing in ‘a spiritual world alongside the physical
world’ (Eddington, 1928: 288) literally. On Stebbing’s view, the positing
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of two tables alongside each other was simply a mistake. The familiar
table is a logical construct. We all understand, at the level of ordinary
language, what it means to say that it is solid, coloured, and substantial.
The atoms which are mostly empty space and the fields which oscil-
late to produce electromagnetic waves are resultants of analysis. They
reside at the level of the most basic facts of physics. These basic facts
are composed of elements which, as far as we know, are simple. What
can correctly be predicated of them cannot be predicated of the table.
At least, we cannot make such predications without careful qualifica-
tion; we may be able to say, ‘at the subatomic level, the table consists
mostly of empty space’. This statement sounds counter-intuitive but may
constitute a summary of an appropriate, physical analysis of the ordin-
ary, solid table. The new mathematics taught us that we cannot deny that
 42 Women in the History of Philosophy

infinite sets have proper parts the same size as them just because it sounds
counter-intuitive. The same is true of the analysis of the table in terms of
atoms which are themselves mostly empty space. Its counter-intuitive
appearance is not grounds to declare it false. Nor does it give us reason
to posit two tables, one solid and one tenuous.
Eddington’s reduplications further forced a strong and, according to
Stebbing, unhelpful Bifurcation of Nature into mind and body. She
described the way Eddington compared the human mind to a newspaper
office providing a ‘free translation’ of ‘messages’ from the outside world.
These messages we, or rather ‘the editor’ in our mind, that is, ‘the per-
ceiving part of our mind’ (Stebbing, 1937: 84), ‘dress’ with colour, space,
and substance which are not really there (Stebbing, 1937: 82). Stebbing
objected that Eddington relied on the metaphor of the newspaper editor
not as an illustration of something further to be explained but as an argu-
ment by analogy. Eddington offered up this argument in support of the
conclusions that our belief in the external world is ‘a remote inference’
(Stebbing, 1937: 85), that we know the world only because ‘its fibres
stretch into our consciousness’, and that yet we have grounds to identify it
with what is in common between many consciousnesses (Stebbing, 1937:
87). We have seen in Section 2.1 that Stebbing generally deplored the
use of metaphor as argument in philosophy of science because she cat-
egorised metaphors, in that context, as reasoning from weak analogy
(Stebbing, 1930: 253–4). The ‘editor’ metaphor is no different; the ana-
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logy between the perceiving part of our mind and a newspaper editor
soon breaks down. Stebbing, then, saw no reason to revise her views
on the basis of Eddington’s argument from analogy. She maintained her
Whiteheadian view that the external world is not inferred from percep-
tions but directly apprehended: ‘there is equally no doubt that we are able,
as a result of our past experience, immediately to perceive that this is a
so-and-so. In such immediate recognition no inference is involved’ (Steb-
bing, 1930: 211). She reiterated the same conclusion for which she had
found support in her 1929 ‘perceptual science’ view that physics need
not justify other minds because they are inevitably presupposed by its
method: ‘Physics as a science results from the conjoint labour of many
minds or persons’ (Stebbing, 1937: 108). Stebbing wondered whether
Eddington’s mention of ‘fibres’ of consciousness constituted a further
 Susan Stebbing 43

metaphor and was inclined to think not (Stebbing, 1937: 85); Eddington
derived the conclusion that we really only know our own consciousness
and that nerve impulses do not resemble the external world ‘in intrinsic
nature’ (Stebbing, 1937: 86).
Stebbing was sympathetic to part of Eddington’s case, in particular
to his suggestion that physics does not tell us the intrinsic nature of
things. After all, physics abstracts away from the macro-individuals, with
their absolutely determinate qualities which we are in touch with, in
favour of a constructed system of generalities which details their rela-
tions to each other: their extrinsic connections. Stebbing wrote, “‘the
world of physics” is nothing but a constructed system stated in terms
of imperceptibles, the system being such that it permits, under cer-
tain conditions, of interpretation by reference to perceptual elements’
(Stebbing, 1933–4: 9). She could sympathise with some of Eddington’s
structuralist assumptions, familiar to her from Russell and Carnap (Steb-
bing 1934b), including the suggestion that the information physics gives
us allows for multiple interpretations as long as those interpretations
share the structure of the information provided: ‘A constructed system
may be capable of interpretation in terms of a given set of facts. It may
then be adequate to this set, but it could never be exhaustive . . . physics
is abstract’ (Stebbing, 1933–4: 25).
Stebbing’s view, dating back to her 1920s papers, that modern physics
is in itself compatible with either an idealist or a materialist interpret-
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ation also provides support for the conclusion that physics does not
reveal the intrinsic natures of things. She criticised the overconfidence
of nineteenth-century materialist physicists who felt very sure that they
knew the intrinsic nature of matter and atoms (Stebbing, 1937: 96). Yet
Eddington (unlike Stebbing) assumed that there nevertheless is some
intrinsic nature to be known and that we have reason to assume that it
is conscious. He began by arguing that there are ‘(a) a mental image,
which is in our minds and not in the external world; (b) some kind of
counterpart in the external world, which is of inscrutable nature; (c) a set
of pointer-readings, which exact science can study’ (Eddington, 1928:
254). He then added the premises that the schedule of pointer-readers
must be ‘attached to some unknown background’ and that ‘for pointer-
readers of my own brain I have an insight which is not limited to the
 44 Women in the History of Philosophy

evidence of pointer-readings. That insight shows that they are attached

to a background of consciousness’ (Eddington, 1928: 259). He concludes
that ‘it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity’.
Stebbing was unimpressed, declaring the argument ‘a complete mud-
dle’ (Stebbing, 1937: 99). Perhaps Eddington has insight into what is
going on in his own consciousness, she countered, but he has no such
self-knowledge about his brain, much less direct insight into the attach-
ment of any pointer-readings concerning his brain to his consciousness.
Knowledge about what the pointer-readers concerning one’s own brain
say is knowledge inferred from that of pointer-readers concerning other
people’s brains. There is no direct insight here.
How, then, are we to settle the question what physics is about? Steb-
bing believed that progress might be made by careful philosophical
analysis, but this would always be a piecemeal project of assessing
individual idealist or materialist proposals. Stebbing wrote,

it seems to me quite clear that the new physics does not imply
idealism. Neither, however, does it imply materialism . . . There are
problems in plenty to be dealt with concerning the inter-connexions
of mental and bodily activity, but none of these problems are in any
way affected by developments in physics. To pursue this topic further
it would be necessary to consider in detail the various abstractions by
means of which we are able to divide ‘the sciences’ up, assigning some
problems to physicists, some to chemists, some to biochemists, some
to physiologists, and some to psychologists. (Stebbing, 1942–3, 184)
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In her final works on the question, then, Stebbing appeared to suggest

what we would now call a naturalistic line. She continued to believe that
analytic philosophers ought to search for a philosophy which could fit
around the latest results of the sciences and was now beginning to make
explicit room for at least some social sciences within this project, given
her mention of psychology. Psychology had begun to separate itself from
‘mental philosophy’ from the early analytic period and was beginning
to grow into a quantitative science to be reckoned with. According to
Stebbing, the question whether idealism, materialism, dualism, or some
other alternative is true should be addressed by collaboration between
practitioners of different sciences plus well-informed philosophers of
science.
 Susan Stebbing 45

4 Metaphysics
Stebbing’s metaphysics, especially her distinction between metaphysical
and grammatical analysis, is the part of her oeuvre which has so far
received the most attention from historians of analytic philosophy. Older
texts which mention Stebbing (e.g. Urmson, 1956; Passmore, 1966)
focus on her views on metaphysical analysis. Many recent commenta-
tors (Beaney, 2003; Milkov, 2003; Beaney, 2016) do the same but tend to
describe her view repeatedly as ‘Moorean’ (see also Section 1).4 Milkov
even applies Moore’s name to a position which Stebbing claimed as
her own, giving the name ‘Moore’s directional analysis’ (Milkov, 2003:
358) to what Stebbing herself describes (in a paper about Moore) as ‘an
analysis I once called “directional analysis” ’(Stebbing, 1942: 527). Of
course, Stebbing acknowledged a debt to Moore in her work on analysis.
But, in my view, it can be shown that Stebbing’s directional analysis in
fact made a key advance on Moore. She succeeded in solving at least one
key problem which baffled Moore in his ‘Defence of Common Sense’,
as we will see in this section. Stebbing made interesting contributions to
several other areas of metaphysics, too, such as the metaphysics of lan-
guage, causation, and mereology. But due to limitations of space, I will
discuss the former only in passing and hope to cover the latter two in
future work.
Stebbing’s distinction between metaphysical and grammatical analysis
constituted progress in philosophy. In effect, we may think of her dis-
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tinction and the use she put it to as having already solved the paradox
of analysis ten years before Langford formulated it (Langford, 1942).
Langford presented the paradox as a conundrum for Moore’s views on
analysis, in the form of a dilemma. Do the common-sense propositions
which Moore calls ‘truisms’ (Moore, 1925: 32) and their analyses have
the same meaning? If the answer is ‘yes’, then the analysis conveys no
more than the original truism; then analysis is pointless and trivial. But if
the answer is ‘no’, the two do not have the same meaning; then the ana-
lysis is false. Langford wrote, ‘One is tempted to say that there must be
some appropriate sense of ‘meaning’ in which the two verbal expressions

4 Coliva (2021) is an exception.

 46 Women in the History of Philosophy

do have the same meaning and some other appropriate sense in which
they do not’ (Langford, 1942: 323).
Stebbing had provided an explication of these two different senses
of ‘meaning’ in 1932. Unlike Moore, Stebbing had, from at least 1930,
insisted that the philosopher analyses not propositions but sentences or
sub-sentential expressions (Stebbing, 1930: 155, 441). She also clari-
fied that definitions do not define objects, or concepts, but expressions
(Stebbing, 1930: 439–41). Two years later, she made use of this view
to dispel the conflation between different kinds of ‘meaning’ which
Langford would complain about ten years afterwards. Stebbing wrote,
‘For my purpose it is sufficient to consider only two kinds of intellec-
tual analysis, namely, grammatical analysis and metaphysical analysis.
In grammatical analysis the elements of a sentence, viz., words, are
detected. . . . Grammatical analysis is analysis at what might be called the
same level’ (Stebbing, 1932–33: 77–8). She then sharply distinguished
grammatical analysis from metaphysical analysis: ‘The metaphysician is
concerned with what the words refer to, i.e., with the constituents there
must be in the world if the sentence is so used as to say what is true’
(Stebbing, 1932–33: 78).
Grammatical, or same-level, analysis explains a sentence in terms
of another stretch of language. Such analysis, if it consists in defi-
nition, or conceptual analysis, may well be a priori, or analytically
true. By contrast, metaphysical analyses are never analytic or a priori.
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Metaphysical analysis describes what facts, with which components,

the world will contain in case the sentence is true. We should not
expect to know this a priori. Nor should we expect always to be able
to recognise, without inspecting the world, whether a sentence and its
metaphysical analysis are synonymous. Which individuals, in which con-
figurations, the world contains is an a posteriori matter; to know it,
we have to inspect the world: ‘metaphysical analysis presupposes cer-
tain assumptions with regard to the constitution of the world. These
assumptions are not logically necessary’ (Stebbing, 1932–33: 80). The
paradox of analysis is solved by separating grammatical analysis, where
sameness of linguistic meaning is often expected, from directional ana-
lysis, which searches for the reference, not the discursive meaning, of a
sentence.
 Susan Stebbing 47

In 1932, Stebbing wrote about directional analysis as to an extent

inspired by Moore – though noting that she did not ‘wish to sug-
gest . . . that he would agree with what I say’ (Stebbing, 1932–3: 76). By
contrast, a few months later, in 1933, she firmly cordoned off her own
philosophical method from Moore’s. She wrote, ‘Where he, in his later
and clearer statement, speaks of “understanding the meaning of a propos-
ition” I prefer to speak of “understanding a sentence”. Where he speaks
of “knowing what a proposition means in the sense of being able to give a
correct analysis of its meaning” I prefer to speak of ‘knowing the analysis
of a sentence”, (Stebbing, 1933b: 9). Moore’s difficulty in accounting for
the two different kinds of ‘meaning’ required in analysis rested, Stebbing
obliquely pointed out, on his failure to be maximally clear about what the
objects of analysis are. To solve the conundrum over ‘meaning’, we must
first focus on the analysis of sentences, not propositions.
Stebbing’s distinction allows us to solve a problem which Moore raised
in his published writings but was unable to dispense with. In his anti-
idealist paper ‘Defence of Common Sense’, Moore started off strong but
ended in a kind of aporia. Insisting that his common sense ‘truisms’,
like ‘There exists at present a living human body, which is my body’
and ‘The earth has existed for many years past’, were known ‘with cer-
tainty’ (Moore, 1925: 32–3) ruled out relatively few versions of idealism.
It was certainly incompatible with the idiosyncratic idealism of Bradley.
Bradley, we have seen, did hold that ordinary-language truisms were not
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ultimately true because they misrepresented the structureless One-ness

of Reality. But then, towards the end of his paper, Moore tried to use
philosophical analysis to rule out more conventional forms of ontological
idealism. He found that he could not manage to do so.
An assumption which Stebbing took over from Moore was that, how-
ever certain we may be of a given truism, no specific analysis follows
from it. Suppose I am convinced of the certain truth of ‘This is a human
hand’, while looking at my hand. I cannot see all of my hand at once, so
I must begin with sense-data, the things I can perceive directly. Moore
attempted three analyses of ‘This is a human hand’, all of which fail.
Each attempt at an analysis starts with ‘This [sense-datum] is part of
the surface of a human hand’. The first attempt lays out a totally mate-
rialist analysis, according to which hands are physical objects, logical
 48 Women in the History of Philosophy

constructions out of physical sense-data. Physical sense-data are just the

surfaces of physical objects. This first analysis cannot account for dou-
ble vision, so Moore dismissed it as inadequate for his purposes. The
second analysis takes hands to be material, sense-data mental. Moore
dismissed this analysis, too, because of its reliance on the mysterious
relation of ‘being an appearance of’. The last kind of analysis is idealist.
Sense-data are mental and hands are logical constructions out of sense
data. Moore could not see how to rule out this analysis or declare it cat-
egorically worse than the first and second alternatives, but it clearly gave
him pause, as he called it ‘paradoxical’ (Moore, 1925: 59). His use of
the word ‘paradoxical’ may suggest that he had some preliminary aware-
ness of a version of the paradox of analysis. But I hypothesise that the
paradox Moore had in mind here resulted from the contrast between com-
mon sense labelling hands ‘material things’ (Moore, 1925: 42) and an
analysis which takes them ultimately to be identical with ‘permanent
possibilities of sensation’ (Moore, 1925: 57), that is, mental rather than
material.
Stebbing’s directional analysis dispatched the issue which had so baf-
fled Moore. On Stebbing’s view, which distinguishes grammatical from
metaphysical analysis, there need be nothing wrong with metaphysical
analyses which have a paradoxical ring to them. Stebbing would have
found this easy to see because of her years of expertise in the philosophy
of physics. In Section 3.2, we saw that ‘This solid table is composed of
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atoms which are, at the sub-atomic level, mostly empty space’ has an air
of paradox about it and is nevertheless true according to our best theory
of physics. We do not throw out paradoxical-sounding analyses offered
up by physics. We learn to live with them and distinguish them from the
truisms of the language of common sense. At the level of ordinary lan-
guage, ‘This table is solid’ does imply statements like, ‘This table does
not have large holes’, ‘This table is robust’, and ‘This table will bear
the weight of my books’. But none of that contradicts its being mostly
empty space at the subatomic level. This is a kind of directional analysis,
which we rely on both in physics and in metaphysics. We do not neces-
sarily take directional analyses to have failed if they sound paradoxical.
A paradoxical-sounding definition, or a paradoxical-sounding attempt at
conceptual analysis, would be problematic because those are kinds of
 Susan Stebbing 49

same-level analysis. There, we often expect synonymy. In the case of

directional analysis, we should not.
‘This is a hand’, at the level of ordinary language, implies ‘This is a
material object’ and is incompatible with ‘This is a mental object’. The
latter, said of a human hand, sounds analytically false. But ‘This is a hand,
therefore, at the level of analysis, it is composed of permanent possibil-
ities of sensation’ should be allowed as a candidate directional analysis
and not written off merely because it sounds paradoxical. Stebbing would
again have explained away the air of paradoxicality as relying on a by
now familiar fallacy. Just as we cannot say that ‘if men are numerous
and Socrates is a man, it would follow that Socrates is numerous’ (Steb-
bing, 1933a: 505), we similarly cannot infer from ‘This is a hand’ and
‘This hand is a logical construction out of permanent possibilities of sen-
sation’ that the hand is a permanent possibility of sensation, and hence a
mental rather than a material object.
The analytic philosopher can no longer rest content with what Steb-
bing called a ‘constructed deductive’ system (Stebbing, 1932–3: 68) of
metaphysics, one which starts from axioms taken to be necessarily true
and derives theorems from those axioms using logical rules of deduc-
tion, for we no longer have a grip on necessary truth. Our certainty that
some truths are self-evident was demolished by the advent of unintu-
itive systems such as transfinite arithmetic, infinitary set theory, and
non-Euclidean geometry, and the unintuitive consequences of the new
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physics. Metaphysics in the twentieth century must rest on a basis of a

posteriori truths. What these a posteriori truths are, and how we know
about them, is a fraught question according to Stebbing.
Stebbing’s metaphysical analysis presupposed a metaphysics of levels:
levels of logical construction. Ordinary-language assertions are gener-
ally about logical constructs – humans, dogs, roses, tables – and their
properties. Correspondence theorists say that a true sentence or propos-
ition corresponds to a fact. But these facts themselves admit of analysis;
macro-facts, like macro-physical objects, are logical constructs. The phil-
osopher does not decompose facts themselves, but aims to arrive, by
successive steps of analysis, at ever simpler facts: to ‘determine the elem-
ents and the mode of combination of those elements to which reference
is made when any given true assertion is made’ (Stebbing, 1932–3: 79).
 50 Women in the History of Philosophy

Stebbing also called metaphysical analysis ‘directional analysis’

because it has a direction: it tends towards ever greater simplicity. It
descends down the levels of logical construction, in the direction of the
simplest kinds of fact. The logical atomists, Russell and Moore, and by
this time also Wittgenstein, were engaged in a foundationalist project, in
the sense that, for the foundationalist, our knowledge of the world derives
from knowledge of its individually knowable constituents. In this sense
of ‘foundationalist’, what is known need not be mental (it may be phys-
ical or a universal), but it needs to be such that our minds can reach out
and grasp it. The young Russell and Moore had insisted, against the ideal-
ists, that reality certainly is composed of mind-independent, individually
cognisable, individuals in some arrangement and that these individuals
and their arrangements are knowable by us. If they in turn endlessly
decompose into further arrangements, we cannot be sure that we truly
have grasped an individually cognisable chunk of reality. As Stebbing put
it, on this view ‘There must be something directly presented, otherwise
there would be an infinite, vicious, regress’ (1932–33: 71). So, the logical
atomist must be a strong foundationalist: they must believe that analysis
terminates in what Stebbing called ‘basic facts’ (Stebbing, 1932–33: 80;
Stebbing, 1934c: 34), namely facts whose elements are simples, uncon-
figured elements. The lowest level is the level of simples. Higher levels
have increasingly greater complexity. Grammatical analysis is ‘analysis
at the same level’ (Stebbing, 1932–33: 77) because it links sentences
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to other sentences. Sentences are themselves high-level logical con-

structs, namely linguistic types: ‘the type is a logical construction out of
tokens having similarity or conventional association’ (Stebbing, 1935:
9).5 Grammatical analysis, then, links high-level logical constructs to
logical constructs of the same level. It does not aim to explicate the
analysandum in terms of a much simpler analysans. But directional,
metaphysical, analysis must. And the logical atomist in particular must
believe in analysis which terminates in an ultimate level of basic facts.
That there is an ultimate level of basic facts is, as Stebbing noted, not
logically true. It is not logically true because it can be coherently denied.
The statements ‘There are no basic facts’ or ‘Analysis has no stopping

5 For more on Stebbing’s metaphysics of language, see Wetzel (2018).

 Susan Stebbing 51

point’ are not self-contradictory. Towards the end of her paper, Stebbing
concluded, ‘When we have made explicit what is entailed by directional
analysis, we find we must make assumptions which so far from being
certainly justified, are not even very plausible’ (Stebbing, 1932–33: 91–
2). That there are simple, unconfigured elements which enter into basic
facts is a major metaphysical assumption about the nature and structure
of the world. It is not a logical truth; it may be false.
The further epistemological claim that the basic facts are also know-
able by us is, similarly, at best an a posteriori truth. It is not only not
necessarily true but it may easily be actually false. The logical atomist
who also endorses Russell’s statement that ‘Every proposition which we
can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we
are acquainted’ (Russell, 1910–11: 117) makes an even stronger claim
than the above. Such a logical atomist makes the claim that simples are
not just knowable by us but known by acquaintance, directly, without
intermediary. This last claim is the one Stebbing seems to have regarded
as the least plausible.
Stebbing explained that ‘Russell . . . sought to discover a simple fact,
which he could regard as an indubitable datum’ (Stebbing, 1933b: 503).
This turned out to be ‘the sense-datum . . . with regard to [which] doubt
is impossible . . . sense-data are to be regarded as data in simple facts’
(Stebbing, 1933b: 503). But Stebbing did not think that philosophy and
physics should take sense-data as a point of departure. As we saw in Sec-
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tion 3.1, Stebbing thought that both the philosopher and the physicist had
to start from a basis of ‘perceptual science’, which included not just ‘(1)
I am now seeing a red patch’ but also ‘(2) I am now perceiving a piece of
blotting paper’ and ‘(6) Other people besides myself have seen that piece
of blotting paper’ (Stebbing, 1929, 147). While (1) may be indubitable,
(2) and (6) are not; (2) describes a physical object, and (6) other minds.
Russell regarded belief in physical objects and other minds as ‘a risky
inference’ standing in need of justification (Stebbing, 1933b: 504). But
Stebbing saw no need for an indubitable basis for philosophy. After all,
she viewed philosophy as having the same observational basis of phys-
ics and took it to be obvious that the presuppositions of physics included
the existence of extra-mental entities and other minds. ‘The problem is
not one of justifying an inference; it is a problem of analysis. We must
 52 Women in the History of Philosophy

not start from sense-data; we must start from the perceptual judgment’
(Stebbing, 1932–33: 72). Stebbing saw no need for analysis to terminate
in basic facts containing sense-data, nor did she think that our process
of analysing a sentence must start from the consideration of sense-data.
Although Stebbing regularly presented this anti-foundationalist point as
disagreement with Russell, it also constitutes, to a lesser extent, dis-
agreement with Moore. All of Moore’s analyses of ‘This is a hand’ in
‘Defence of Common Sense’ start with ‘This is part of the surface of a
human hand’, which Moore called ‘undoubtedly a proposition about the
sense-datum, which I am seeing’ (Moore, 1925: 55).
It may be that Stebbing’s expertise in the philosophy of physics
enabled her to see clearly how problematic the assumption is that we
have direct epistemic access to unconfigured elements of basic facts.
According to our current best theory of physics, the simples are sub-
atomic particles: quarks, and leptons such as electrons. But we cannot
observe electrons directly. This difficulty is not a matter of our ignor-
ance or issues with our measuring equipment which we can rectify. It is
a matter of physics: to try to observe an electron, we must shine light on
it, but the electron is smaller than the wavelength of visible light (Steb-
bing, 1937: 181). Hence there are at least some candidate simples which
we cannot even in principle observe directly.
Stebbing’s metaphysics, then, retained some aspects of logical atom-
ism but dropped its strongly foundationalist assumptions. She moved
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towards a modest, empirically informed foundherentism which made

room for the more holist Quinean and late Wittgensteinian strands of
analytic philosophy which were soon to become dominant (Janssen-
Lauret, 2017: 14–16). Stebbing took the view that metaphysical analysis
has a legitimate role in philosophy, but whether there are basic facts, what
the basic facts are, and how we know them, are all a posteriori. She was
not a follower of Moore but rather an original, transitional figure who
played a pivotal role in moving analytic philosophy on from its early
phase – in particular the logical atomist phase of one tributary of analytic
philosophy – towards a more holist middle phase. Stebbing’s style of
metaphysical analysis, I conclude, by contrast to Moore’s, has a versatil-
ity and empiricist orientation which allows us to read her as a foremother
of later, empirically informed, analytic metaphysics. Stebbing’s views
 Susan Stebbing 53

on metaphysics, as well as her sensitivity to ordinary language, point the

way to middle and later analytic philosophy.

5 Critical Thinking and Politics

As the 1930s progressed, Stebbing felt increasingly horrified by the rise
of fascism and Nazism. Stebbing supported Jewish colleagues in finding
academic employment (Körber, 2019) and, with her friends and sister,
took in Jewish refugee children at their school. Chapman (2013: 159)
cites a letter from 1940, at which point more than fifty Jewish refugee
pupils studied at the school. Feeling that she must do more, Stebbing
turned her mind to the intersection of politics and what we would now
call informal logic, or critical thinking. Apart from the very pressing
problem of giving people the analytical tools to resist Nazism, fascism,
and related ideologies, Stebbing also felt that the public ought to be
given the intellectual resources to detect and overcome attempts made
by politicians, journalists and newspaper editors, religious authorities,
advertisements, and propaganda to manipulate them through fallacious
argument or misleading uses of language.
Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose was not an academic work – in
the 1930s there was not yet a recognised academic discipline of infor-
mal logic – but a book accessible to the general public. It was not the
first such book; it was not even the first such book by Susan Stebbing,
who had published Logic in Practice in 1934. Thouless’s Straight and
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Crooked Thinking preceded both and also aimed to teach the general
public about good reasoning. Yet Stebbing’s book was highly innova-
tive and proved very popular, in part because of her determination to
provide examples of real reasoning, argument, rhetoric, and persuasion,
taken from political speeches, journalism, letters to newspaper editors,
and advertising. To the present day, many critical thinking textbooks still
attempt to teach students to recognise good and bad reasoning based only
on artificial, invented examples. Stebbing was ahead of her time, as a pre-
1950s analytic philosopher, in paying close attention to ordinary usage
and taking great care to supply and analyse ordinary-language examples
in her work on critical thinking and politics. Her view of thinking as an
activity, engaged in by humans tied to a particular culture, language, and
intellectual climate was innovative, too. She aimed to teach the public
 54 Women in the History of Philosophy

to engage in goal-directed reasoning, recognise and learn to circumvent

their biases, and gain an awareness of when they were being persuaded
or manipulated by sham reasoning or by merely rhetorical devices. Her
goal was not to persuade the population of her own views but to empower
the voting public to think for themselves and to promote ‘the urgent need
for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to
unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance’ (Stebbing, 1939: 5).
We saw in Section 2.1 that, for an early analytic philosopher, Stebbing
was unusually alert to the view of reasoning as an activity, engaged in
by human persons who have their own distinctive personalities, speak
a particular language, have a certain set of background beliefs or body
of knowledge, and live in a specific cultural and intellectual climate. In
modern parlance, Stebbing’s reasoners are socially situated.
Even in her earliest works on logic, Stebbing wrote that the scien-
tist ‘does not always achieve – even in his published writings – that
impersonality of thought which is necessary for exactness of statement.
Moreover, no thinker, not even the physicist, is wholly independent of
the context of experience provided for him by the society within which
he works’ (Stebbing, 1930: 16). In Philosophy and the Physicists, she
criticised Eddington and Jeans for speaking as though pronouncements
came straight from science itself. Stebbing objected,

Science is not a goddess or a woman. We cannot ask science, but only

scientists. Moreover, we must ask our questions of the scientist at a
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moment when he is in a scientific temper, capable of giving us ‘the

ascertained facts and provisional hypotheses’ without any admixture
of the emotional significance which he reads into these facts in his
least scientific moods. (Stebbing, 1937: 16)

It was in Logic in Practice that she first wrote, ‘thinking is an activity of

the whole personality’ (Stebbing, 1934a: vii). In Thinking to Some Pur-
pose, variations on this statement recur multiple times (Stebbing, 1939:
19, 32, 35, 100, 186).

At this point we need to remember that it is persons who think, and,

therefore, persons who argue. I think, not something thinks in me.
My intellect does not function apart from the rest of my personality.
This is a statement about all thinking beings. . . from infancy upwards
 Susan Stebbing 55

we are forming habits, reacting to situations, experiencing emotions

of various kinds; we are being constantly affected by the beliefs and
modes of behaviour of those belonging to the various groups with
which we have contact. (Stebbing, 1939: 32)

Stebbing consistently described reasoning as an activity and a goal-

directed activity. She contrasted thinking, and reasoning, with the kind
of mental activity which consists in idle reverie or free association of
thought. Stebbing was concerned with the sense of ‘thinking’ ‘in which
“to think” means “to think logically” ’ (Stebbing, 1930: 5). This kind
of thinking is purposive and goal-directed. ‘Thinking is an activity. We
think in order to do. . . . The distinction between what is often called
practical thinking and theoretical thinking lies wholly in the purpose for
which the thinking is pursued. In both cases the thinking process is the
same; it is purposive, and thus directed’ (Stebbing, 1934a: 1–2). Political
action, according to Stebbing, was not a wholly separate category from
reasoning but continuous with it and dependent to a large extent on good
habits of thought. She wrote,

But what can we do? This is the question that is likely to be asked by
those who are at all sensitive to the avoidable suffering that is being
endured to-day through-out the world . . . in a time of such stress, it
is nevertheless worth while for us to overhaul our mental habits, to
attempt to find reasons for our beliefs, and to subject our assumptions
to rigorous criticisms . . . A person who is called upon thus to act is
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more likely to act fortunately the more he has previously meditated

upon actions of a similar kind. (Stebbing, 1939: 18)

Thinking, according to Stebbing, is not merely an activity but ‘an activ-

ity of the whole personality’ (see also Pickel, 2022). She interpreted
‘personality’ broadly. It included elements of culture, common know-
ledge held in that culture, and general intellectual climate, a person’s
job (Stebbing, 1939: 35) as well as what are more conventionally called
personality traits, such as honesty or dishonesty (Stebbing, 1939: 82),
confidence or lack of confidence (Stebbing, 1939: 99), charisma ver-
sus lack of charisma (Stebbing, 1939: 99), and being practically oriented
or not (Stebbing, 1939: 42). Perhaps influenced by her reading of Aris-
totle, Stebbing appears to have thought of personality traits as not fixed
 56 Women in the History of Philosophy

but shaped by habit. Habits may be individual or collective, instilled

by someone’s work, newspaper reading, or engagement with their reli-
gious community or by their whole culture. No person is without habits
of thought and ‘emotional tendencies’ (Stebbing, 1939: 33), nor with-
out views shaped to an extent by their wider culture. Habits shaped by
culture can be positive, for example when a teacher can ‘create those
mental habits that will enable his students, or pupils, to seek know-
ledge and to acquire the ability to form their own independent judgment
based upon rational grounds’ (Stebbing, 1939: 89). Still, some habits
tend in the opposite direction: our cultures may lead us astray or tempt
us towards mental habits which are ‘lazy’ (Stebbing, 1939: 92). But by
teaching ourselves good habits of reasoning, we can learn to overcome
any lazy, dishonest, or overly emotional cultural conditioning, as well
as learn to dispense with stale habits of thought which do not serve us
well.
Among Stebbing’s examples of inculcating good habits of reasoning in
oneself is to recognise the fallacy of special pleading: to endorse a general
principle but refuse to apply it to some particular case, especially one’s
own case. Stebbing quoted from a letter to The Times by a Dr Lyttleton,
who argues that poverty is good for children: ‘they learn by ten years of
age that there is more joy in service than in sweets; more interest in the
welfare of others than in their own’ (Dr Lyttleton, The Times, 7 October
1936, quoted in Stebbing, 1939: 45). Stebbing commented,
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You will probably have guessed that he is a man who has not himself
been brought up in a poor family . . . Does he seriously believe – we
should ask him – that it would have been a moral advantage to his own
family had he been poor? If he assents, then he ought in consistency to
wish that he had given up his income, worked hard for a low wage, and
lived in a poor, over-crowded neighbourhood. If, on the contrary, he
is unwilling to apply the principle to the case of his own family, then
he has fallen into a serious logical confusion . . . A safeguard against
this mistake is to change you into I. (Stebbing, 1939: 45–6)

Here, Stebbing can be found recommending to the reader the men-

tal habit of checking whether they would feel the same about a
given situation if they imagine it applying to themselves instead of
others.
 Susan Stebbing 57

Special pleading can also take place at the level of subcultures, or

whole cultures, rather than individuals. Here, it may often be more
difficult to change a plural you, or a they, into a we if much of a person’s
culture represents a certain point of view and they are not exposed to the
alternatives, Stebbing wrote, ‘I have noticed that some Englishmen are
much surprised to hear that some intelligent and not markedly Fascist
Italians hold that a reasonable justification can be made out for the Ital-
ian invasion of Abyssinia’ (Stebbing, 1939: 21). She also drily noted,
‘Few newspapers report the opinions of foreigners about British pol-
icy, unless that opinion happens to be favourable’ (Stebbing, 1939: 84).
Stebbing recommended the habits of reading a broad range of different
newspapers, since they will often include little discussion of opposing
points of view to their prevailing political positions (Stebbing, 1939:
84) and will devote much more space to topics based on their politics
(Stebbing, 1939: 223). But she recognised that formation and scrutiny
of individual habits, for this problem, provided only a partial fix. She
further recommended the more overtly political solution to consider
‘our dependence upon newspapers for supplying us with information
about what happens in the world’ (Stebbing, 1939: 81) and their div-
ided loyalties given how many newspapers are in the hands of a very
few people and their aim ‘to pay large dividends to . . . share-holders’
(Stebbing, 1939: 82). She concluded that ‘editors and journalists for the
most part do very little to help us to develop habits of critical thinking’
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(Stebbing, 1939: 87).

Among other habits we can overcome is being taken in by ‘potted
thinking’, that is, distilling complex thought down to simplistic slo-
gans, and by overtly emotional or subtly emotionally charged language.
Examples of potted thinking include reducing Freud’s system to the slo-
gan ‘Everything is sex’ (Stebbing, 1939: 65) and the anti-taxation slogan
‘Food taxes mean dear food’, to which Stebbing objected, ‘whether food
is dear or not depends partly upon the increase in real wages and in the
purchasing power of money. This potted statement is likely to close the
minds of unthinking or of ignorant people to any argument in favour of
imposing taxes upon food, since no one wants to have dear food’ (Steb-
bing, 1939: 64). By teaching ourselves to think through what follows
from a statement of this sort, we can learn to resist ‘potted thinking’. We
 58 Women in the History of Philosophy

learn the habit of putting to the test whether a slogan makes sense when
we unpack it.
Stebbing took a nuanced view concerning the role of emotion in
reasoning, as we would expect from someone who believes that we
think with our whole personality. Stebbing emphasised that ‘enthusi-
asm is not necessarily an enemy of thinking clearly’ (Stebbing, 1939:
29) and that ‘We are not purely rational beings’ (Stebbing, 1939: 30).
She explained, ‘I do not in the least wish to suggest that it is undesir-
able for us to be set on thinking by emotional considerations . . . it is
not emotion that annihilates the capacity to think clearly, but the urge
to establish a conclusion in harmony with the emotion and regardless
of the evidence’ (Stebbing, 1939: 33). Appeals to emotion, neverthe-
less, may lead us away from reasoning in subtle and very unsubtle
ways. Among the subtler ways are constant use of positively charged
words for our own side, or the side we favour, and negatively charged
words for the opposing side. Stebbing cited with approval research
by Julian Huxley on language used by The Times for participants in
the Spanish Civil War. The right-wing government and the socialist
rebellion were labelled respectively as ‘Referring to the Spanish Govern-
ment: Loyal, Spanish, Spanish Government, Republican, Anti-Fascist,
Communist. Referring to their opponents: Revolt, Insurrection, Fascist,
Anti-Government, “Rebel”.’ Stebbing subjoined, ‘You will notice, for
instance, that by putting “Rebel” (in inverted commas) there is conveyed
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the implication that the opponents were a legitimate party engaged in

a non-rebellious struggle’ (Stebbing, 1939: 59–60). Emotional language
may, by contrast, at times be very unsubtle and outright aim to subvert
our powers of reasoning. Stebbing quoted some antisemitic hate speech
by Oswald Mosley and noted that, while she ‘very much dislike[d]’ it, it
was, in a certain sense, effective at achieving its goal of arousing emo-
tion, as he ‘sought to be offensive’. Nevertheless, she concluded, his
‘habit of using strongly toned language does make for twisted thinking’
(Stebbing, 1939: 57).
Stebbing maintained that speakers have a responsibility to moder-
ate their use of persuasive devices which persuade not through con-
vincing reasoning but by other means (Stebbing, 1939: 100). Among
 Susan Stebbing 59

these devices, she counted not merely fallacious reasoning, inappropriate

simplification, economic power, or inappropriate appeal to emotion but
also a charismatic personality. Stebbing clearly included among the per-
suasive devices the cheap tricks of overconfident presentation. She wrote,
‘when anyone begins an argument with such a remark as “It is indisput-
ably true that”, “Everyone knows that” or “No reasonable man can doubt
that” then the people addressed may be sure that the speaker has taken
for granted what he is about to assert’ (Stebbing, 1939: 35). But Steb-
bing went further and also included speakers naturally possessed of ‘a
commanding presence, a fine voice and expressive gestures’ as thereby
having access to persuasive devices which did not convince by reason
alone. She cautioned that such a speaker ‘must be especially careful not
to adopt a commanding manner and confident tone of voice when he is
putting forward a statement which he knows to be extremely doubtful. In
short, such a speaker would seem to be under an especial obligation to
refrain from exploiting his personality; and subduing his hearers without
convincing them’ (Stebbing, 1939: 99).
Through cultivating habits of good reasoning, Stebbing believed that
we could overcome our ingrained biases, conscious and unconscious. She
made repeated use of the language of virtue and vice in this connection,
exhorting her readers to ‘scrutinize their reasoning with sufficient care’
(Stebbing, 1939: 38). Aware that all humans have biases of sorts, Steb-
bing took pains to disclose her own to her readership. She wrote, for
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example, ‘I may be doing Mr Ervine an injustice but I have the impres-

sion that he is a man with a mission, so that his articles are primarily
intended to induce his readers to agree with him’ (Stebbing, 1939: 44)
and ‘I personally disapprove of Sir Oswald Mosley’s intention’ (Steb-
bing, 1939: 45). In doing so, she aimed to demonstrate to the reader what
the process of belief revision and good habit formation in action could
look like:

I have myself strong opinions on some of the topics that I cite as

examples; I do not hope to succeed in escaping bias either in my selec-
tion or in my exposition of these examples. I should like to be able to
do so, but I am aware that on many questions of practical importance
I hold views that seem to me so definitely correct that I am unable to
 60 Women in the History of Philosophy

believe that those who differ from me thereon have seen clearly what
I see. (Stebbing, 1939: 54)

6 Conclusion
Susan Stebbing was not merely a disciple of G. E. Moore or an author
of popular books and textbooks. She was a vital and influential figure
within analytic philosophy from the 1920s to the 1940s and should be
considered as one of its ‘founding mothers’. We must get Stebbing out
from under the shadow of Moore, recover her contributions, and further
the perception of her as an important analytic philosopher, an original,
transitional figure who moved British analytic philosophy on from an
overly narrow and foundationalist logical atomism towards the holism
and philosophy of language of middle analytic philosophy.
We have seen that Stebbing held original views on philosophical ana-
lysis, logical construction, and complete and incomplete symbol theory.
She embraced incomplete symbol theory for its ability to make sense of
negative existentials, so useful in philosophy of science as well as logic,
but she demurred from Russell’s and Moore’s views that analysis ana-
lyses propositions or judgements, is analytically true, and terminates in
sense-data. She took issue in particular with Russell’s assumption that
we can know the termini of analysis directly, by acquaintance. Steb-
bing’s writings on these topics are interesting in isolation but are seen
to have particular strength when we begin to consider her as a systematic
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philosopher in her own right, whose views in some areas of philosophy

shaped her other views. For example, Stebbing’s work on the philosophy
of physics had brought home to her the fact that we physically can-
not directly perceive certain simples such as electrons and that analyses
may well be theoretically useful without being analytically true, such as
the paradoxical-sounding but true analysis according to which my solid
wooden desk consists at the subatomic level mostly of empty space.
Stebbing’s substantial contributions to the philosophy of science, a
topic of which Moore never made any serious study, put clear blue water
between her and her mentor figure Moore and make apparent that she
was certainly no mere disciple. Stebbing went in search of a philosophy
to match the new Einsteinian physics, a topic on which she was self-
taught, having been denied an education in the sciences as a Victorian
 Susan Stebbing 61

girl with a disability. Her views resembled those of the philosopher of

physics and logician Whitehead in that Stebbing considered secondary
qualities to be part of nature, not mental additions. Yet she opposed
Whitehead’s event ontology and offered different arguments from his
against the Bifurcation of Nature into primary and secondary qualities.
In her book Philosophy and the Physicists, Stebbing investigated the
then popular interpretation, due to the physicist Eddington, of Einsteinian
physics in idealist terms. Stebbing, well-versed in paradoxical-sounding
analyses in physics, saw no reason to dismiss the idealist interpretation
as offending against common sense or internally contradictory. By itself,
she maintained, physics does not force either an idealist or a materi-
alist interpretation. Though agreeing with Eddington that physics does
not tell us what the intrinsic natures of material things are, but only
their extrinsic, structural relations, Stebbing saw no reason to infer from
this structuralist knowledge the conclusion that its intrinsic nature is
‘the stuff of consciousness’. As Eddington’s views are currently under-
going a twenty-first-century resurgence, Stebbing’s careful, measured
counterarguments are of contemporary relevance as well.
Stebbing also made great advances in metaphysical analysis which,
far from merely following Moore, made a distinct advance on his views.
She distinguished what she called grammatical analysis or analysis at
the same level, namely analysis of language in terms of further lan-
guage, from metaphysical or directional analysis, which reveals what
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configuration of objects the world contains if a sentence is true. Steb-

bing maintained that same-level analysis could be analytically true or
a priori. But, she argued, metaphysical analysis is not a process which
we should expect to yield analytic, platitudinous, or logically necessary
truths. This is the heart of Stebbing’s solution to the paradox of analysis,
pressed against Moore by Langford but never adequately addressed by
Moore. Stebbing also put her metaphysical views to work in productive
analyses of linguistic types, parts and wholes, and philosophy of phys-
ics. She deployed it to show why word-types can be said to be constituted
out of word-tokens, and why the unintuitive nature of analysis in modern
physics does not imply an idealist interpretation of it.
Lastly, Stebbing was a pioneer of the analysis of ordinary-language
argumentation. An innovative logician who always strove to bring
 62 Women in the History of Philosophy

together the rigours of formally correct, universally applicable logic and

its practical manifestations in inferences drawn by human beings living
within language communities, cultures, and political contexts, Stebbing
considered purposive thinking to be especially important in the polit-
ical realm. In her works on critical thinking, she argued in favour of
clearly laid-out moral and political values and ideals and above all for the
paramount importance of careful analysis of political language. Many of
Stebbing’s social and political worries remain pertinent today. Her care-
ful consideration of ordinary-language examples and pragmatic attention
to habits of reasoning retain their relevance and have much to teach us in
the twenty-first century.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the series editor, Jacqueline Broad, and to Sophia

Connell, Siobhan Chapman, Maheshi Gunawardane, Fraser MacBride,
Thomas Uebel, to audiences at the Universities of Boise State, Cam-
bridge, Durham, Glasgow, Leiden, London, and Manchester, especially
Simone Kotva, Bridger Landle, Bryan Pickel, Catherine Pickstock,
Lukas Verburgt, and Peter West, and to the students in my MA History of
Analytic Philosophy course and in my third-year Language and Analysis
course.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Women in the History of Philosophy

Jacqueline Broad
Monash University

Jacqueline Broad is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University,

Australia. Her area of expertise is early modern philosophy, with a special focus on
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women philosophers. She is the author of
Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press,
2002), A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (with Karen
Green; Cambridge University Press, 2009), and The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An
Early Modern Theory of Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Advisory Board
Dirk Baltzly
University of Tasmania
Sandrine Bergès
Bilkent University
Marguerite Deslauriers
McGill University
Karen Green
University of Melbourne
Lisa Shapiro
Simon Fraser University
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Emily Thomas
Durham University

About the Series

In this Cambridge Elements series, distinguished authors provide concise and
structured introductions to a comprehensive range of prominent and
lesser-known figures in the history of women’s philosophical endeavour, from
ancient times to the present day.
 Women in the History of Philosophy

Elements in the Series

Pythagorean Women
Caterina Pellò
Frances Power Cobbe
Alison Stone
Olympe de Gouges
Sandrine Bergès
Simone de Beauvoir
Karen Green
Im Yunjidang
Sungmoon Kim
Early Christian Women
Dawn LaValle Norman
Mary Shepherd
Antonia LoLordo
Mary Wollstonecraft
Martina Reuter
Susan Stebbing
Frederique Janssen-Lauret
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026925 Published online by Cambridge University Press

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EWHP