households who could not afford to marry; after the Humboldtian university
revolution, professors were middle-class specialists segregated in alliance networks
by their careers.- For instance, in his Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (1922: xxii) Russell
comments: “As one with long experience of the difficulties of logic and of the
deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of
the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on
which it is wrong.” - The doctrine of Stevenson (Quine’s pupil) that ethical statements are emotional
expressions (1944) had a similar effect in the United States. - Mauthner, who explored the philosophy of language during Wittgenstein’s youth
in Vienna, is sometimes regarded as an early influence or predecessor. Nevertheless,
Mauthner’s “critique of language” did not set the pathway Wittgenstein followed
from mathematical logic into a theory of propositions. The case of Mauthner
shows that the philosophical resonances of language were noticed from time to
time—as is to be expected in the increasing consciousness of symbol systems in
fields ranging from Neo-Kantianism to Freud. The movement to turn all of phi-
losophy into the study of ordinary language was a more specific and militant move
within the philosophical discipline, and that is where its structural causes are found. - Wittgenstein was merely an undergraduate at Cambridge during his period of
discipleship with Russell, never took a formal degree, although he was given a
Ph.D. pro forma upon returning in 1929. Russell and Moore also had enough
independent wealth (and, especially in the case of Russell, social eminence) to
dedicate themselves to their intellectual interests, even during periods without
academic support. Wittgenstein made ostentatious gestures of despising material
wealth, for instance, keeping no furniture in his college rooms during the 1930s,
so that his pupils had to bring their own chairs. It was the kind of sacrifice of
wealth for status of which the satiated rich are capable; in a more conventional
version, Wittgenstein cultivated entrée with the artistic elite upon his return to
Vienna in 1914 by donating a large amount of money to them (Monk, 1990: 109).
Something of the same self-confident eliteness was expressed in Russell’s insouciant
style. At the age of 27 he could treat the famous mathematician Poincaré in debate
as follows: “M. Poincaré requests a definition... Perhaps he will be shocked if I
tell him that one is not entitled to make such a request since everything that is
fundamental is necessarily indefinable... Since mathematicians almost invariably
ignore the role of definitions, and since M. Poincaré appears to share their disdain,
I will allow myself a few remarks on this topic” (Coffa, 1991: 130). Russell’s
polemical style was a form of mocking, often with an undertone of class conscious-
ness, as when he derided the Idealist conception of sensory experience as parts of
a whole by imagining the professor calling his college servant to testify what the
“plain man” thinks: “Well, sir, greenness is to me the name of a complex fact, the
factors of which essentially and reciprocally determine one another. And if you,
sir, choose to select one factor out of the complex, and to call it greenness, I will
not dispute about the term, for I know my place, sir” (Coffa, 1991: 96). - The organizational setting too played a role. Göttingen had been the main center
1018 •^ Notes to Pages 734–738