Only Bertrand Russell

I believe “On Denoting” was famously written in under two weeks. I think Russell may have been mistaken about the quality of his first drafts, given how much time has been spent by so many other people trying to figure out what some of those passages in that paper could possibly mean.

One of my undergraduate teachers said the following about (I think) Wilfrid Sellars.

He would write a first draft of his paper and any undergraduate could understand it. Then he would write a second draft and only a graduate student could understand it.
He would write a third draft and only a tenured professor could understand it.
He would write a fourth draft and only he could understand it.
And then he would write the final draft.

Later drafts are better if they get shorter. I once went to a reading by Mavis Gallant and she said her first draft of a short story would be something like six times as long as the final version and would then get cut down.

Here’s the piece by Russell that Corey Robins quotes from, and my favorite excerpt:

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose. Take the statement: “Some people marry their deceased wives’ sisters”. I can express this in language which only becomes intelligible after years of study, and this gives me freedom.

(By the way, he doesn’t claim that his first draft is necessarily good, just that his editing tends not to improve it.)

The Gray’s Elegy Argument in ‘On Denoting’ is one of the most frustratingly unclear passages in philosophy. Russell must’ve had in mind a crystal clear, logically sharp structure but just couldn’t be bothered to pin it down in words for mere mortals such as we.

Re. Sellars: I recall one of his former students, Tom Vinci, saying that Sellars was generally verbally clear (esp. in class) but obscure in his writing. I’ve known some people who are like that — clear talkers but unclear writers — and wondered what kind of neurological deficit underlies such a puzzling condition.

Re. editing as paring things down — I’ve heard that’s what Ezra Pound did to Eliot’s Waste Land. If that’s what he did, Pound should’ve been billed as a co-author.

> The Gray’s Elegy Argument in ‘On Denoting’ is one of the most frustratingly
> unclear passages in philosophy. Russell must’ve had in mind a crystal clear,
> logically sharp structure but just couldn’t be bothered to pin it down in words
> for mere mortals such as we.
I just read it. You mean you didn’t understand what he said there? Dude, I must be much, much smarter than I thought. This ain’t about epistemic humility. Jus’ the truth.

For anyone else trying to understand this passage – all you need to understand this passage is the following (this is what I did): task one, take a quick look at what he is saying is his theory (it is there up front in the paper); task two, make sure you understand the theory; then task three, browse through the page (page 485) before the Gray’s Elegy page (page 486); then task four, go through the Gray’s Elegy passage. It is important to do (task one) because, otherwise, you may be missing something that is part of the theory.

praymount @ 7

Pound’s annotations of The Waste Land have been published. He did much more than pare it down.

Take a look at the part that begins

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said –
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

Pure Pound; The evidence suggests that Eliot couldn’t have managed it at all, although his ear was good enough to recognize its genius. It was not for nothing that he called Pound il miglior fabbro.

On the other hand, I think Eliot was always the clearer thinker. Basil Bunting once said of Pound that he says too little and refers to too much. Exactly. With or without Pound’s help, Eliot always restrained those tendencies in his own writing, and his work was the better for it.

The link to Russell Peters, ahem, the other Russell’s paper, is here.

I would say – just read the theory (page 480), and see how it relates to the Gray’s Elegy passage. And you are more or less done. The key point that Russell is making is the theory. Everything is details. Of course, this is following the 80-20 rule. Is it okay for a professional philosopher to omit the 20 percent? Probably not. Is it okay for someone who is just reading it for fun to omit the 20 percent? Of course!

Let me phrase it more precisely. We are going to talk about it in terms of “irrelevance” (decision analysis).

What I am saying is that the key thing is to be familiar with a variety of methodologies. I am one of those people who is familiar with virtually all the methodologies to sufficient detail. In the context of this paper, I know exactly what the methodology M1 being used by Russell is. I am asserting that, given that we know M1, there is an irrelevance relation between the overall takeaway T1 and the unread part (what I could gain by reading more of the paper than I already have).

There is a “quote attributed to Einstein” … commonly given as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Of course he thought an antisymmetric tensor was the simplest thing possible.

On the other hand, distinct ways of expressing a source of vagueness has ensured the reputation of man a philosopher since before the early Christian era. “The thing than which nothing greater can be conceived,” as one example.

I note that even in the Russell quotation there’s an ellipsis. I think it’s more reasonable to live, by default, with a memory of the simple phrase “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I lacked the time.”

It’s also interesting to compare that paper with Edmund Gettier’s gem on Justified True Belief, which ironically may have restated a problem Russell formulated half a century earlier. So perhaps if you would not like to miss your chance at moving your field forward by half a century, you would do well to emulate Gettier and not Russell (or me in my recent comments)!

Russell qualifies his statement. He says that re-drafting does not improve the prose (“form”), but implies that it ameliorates the content (“substance”). In any case, this is a highly idiosyncratic process, not only between authors but for the same author. Several times I have rewritten something a few times, only to throw it away–it became a more and more polished turd. Other times, re-writing was beneficial to content and form and something good came out of the process. Hard to predict in advance

“Whenever I have trouble writing, I remember this passage from Philip Roth:”

When I remember Philip Roth I remember American Pastoral, and also the recent New Yorker article on his friends that went into some details on his relationship with John Updike which the author of the article thought had to do with the genesis of American Pastoral.

I was quite surprised that he would call the novel a Pastoral because being a country person I like pastoral writing, but it was not pastoral in the usual sense, only in a very pointed sense. There are two meanings to the term pastoral of course, that I think of anyway, the bucolic or the words of shepherding care. Being a Jewish writer, Philip Roth may have meant either or both of them.

It is interesting it was not popular or defended on the recent CT thread I think. It makes me wonder if it is because people do not like the mirror held up to them, or if there is another reason that I cannot think up. It did not seem sexist to me. I have not read his other work because they do not look to be suitable to my taste, at least the ones I’ve heard of.

Bastard indeed. In forty years of law practice I’ve never written a brief whose first sentence survived.

George Herbert Palmer was the chair of philosophy at Harvard during its golden years–the years of James, Santayana, and so on. Palmer was not in their league, and to his credit, he knew it. Since I too spent my career as an intellectual mediocrity surrounded by more brilliant colleagues, I have taken comfort from his example. He was a good man, and wrote many books, including a charming autobiography, which includes this reflection on writing:

“The peculiar feature of my writing for publication is the double copy, one for me, one for my reader. Whatever I write today is written with the aim of truth and fullness. Into it goes everything which might at this point have a bearing on the argument. But as this draft is merely a gathering of material, it would hardly be intelligible to any one but myself. Tomorrow I rewrite this, discharging from my mind all consideration of truth, and studying simply ease of apprehension on the reader’s part. The order of the sentences will frequently require revision. Some word or sentence will ‘stick out’ and attract undue notice. The sentences may have too little variety of pattern. I shall come upon hitches which will oblige a reader to pause an instant. Unnecessary words will be discovered, even repetitions. But everywhere ease should be the one thing sought, the test of its attainment being, Does the page on being read seem short?”

Not bad advice, I think.

To write, there are two simple practical rules for nonfiction that ALWAYS work:

1. Start by writing what everyone already knows. I.e., the first thing is to state indisputably what people know (or generally but erroneously believe) about the subject, then proceed from there.

2. If you are alone in the room writing, imagine someone sitting across from you whom you already know. A specific person in your life, even if only an acquaintance. It is best if it is someone who doesn’t know the subject, perhaps is younger and uneducated. Then: speak out loud to that person imaginarily sitting across from you, and explain it to them. Write down exactly what you are saying aloud.

If your writing problem is about style and expression, these two things will fix it. But they will also have a pronounced effect on the content and clarity of your ideas.

Edit and rewrite as you please, but don’t complexify unless it’s a separate paragraph, that also follows the two rules.

This is probably why Bertrand Russell thought his first drafts were best. His rewrites probably complicated the material.

This topic was thoroughly reviewed 50-odd years ago (from 7’20”)

Replying to anonymous commenters does not now seem to be a good idea any more. Who is to know who they are? And what their intentions are? If you would provide your real names and contact information or if the accomplished professors who blog at CT would comment, I will reply further.

@AJ “How do I do it? It may be because I am Jewish.”

I had no idea we could do this. First the Zionist conspiracy, now this. What else have my parents been keeping from me?

@35

Reading the rest of Russell’s passage gives context to Corey’s quotation. I think he escaped rewrites by having a long process of mental gestation before putting pen to paper.

His memory was undoubtedly exceptional, so I expect that helped to make his prose so clear. Warts and all, I admire the man too much to be really jealous. :)

mrearl, I often have the same experience. I no longer expect the first sentence to survive. Indeed, I frequently don’t bother with a first sentence until I’ve written a satisfactory draft of the rest and, therefore, perhaps for the first time, have a clear idea what I really want to say.

“Bertrand Russell would, I believe, surely be on my side of the argument.”

AJ,
Do you know that Russell was famously dismissive of the later Wittgenstein? Does that modify your opinion?

I recall a Jepardy show. “Bertrand Russell was thrown into prison for his opposition to this war.” Alex T. had to explain it was WW I, not Vietnam like one contestant guessed.

> Do you know that Russell was famously dismissive of the later Wittgenstein?
> Does that modify your opinion?
Perhaps you could elaborate on this? A technically precise response to my comment would require the following- you would have to show that the irrelevance argument I made above is incorrect. You can upload a decision diagram to some website in order to prove that my argument is incorrect – but I don’t see how you can do that.

It may be that people are focussing too much on the 80-20 argument I made above. That was a “very rough guide” to thinking about this. Rough guides have a purpose; however, they can also serve to distract from the point under consideration.It is better for people to read the irrelevance argument as the more precise statement of affairs. Indeed, as I have stated, that is the technically precise expression of what I was stating (and so you can pretty much ignore the 80-20 argument altogether if you understood the irrelevance argument).

Insofar as the document constructs a theory, it is reasonable to read the document (note: it is an essay, not a paper) as it stands. That is the rule for all research documents. I am certainly reading the document as it stands. It was clear to me, even at first reading, that there are parts of the document that would be open to multiple interpretations. That, to me, is an artifact of how the document was written. Indeed, it is not truly a paper at all but an essay. I am disposed to give Russell less credit than more credit for such ideas in this essay that people may want to attribute to him because maybe, just maybe, that idea is what he was intending to convey. I would expect him to clearly delineate those ideas that he think are novel so that it would be clear what the claims in the essay are.

Even if he did come up with some of the ideas that people seem to want to credit him with, these ideas would need to be more clearly fleshed out for him to get any more credit than I am willing to give him.

Anyway, the bottomline is this part of my argument – once you know the methodology M1 used in the essay, you can begin to see what is relevant and what is not.

” I think he escaped rewrites by having a long process of mental gestation before putting pen to paper.”

No Russell I, but this is me too. I used to teach comp students to freewrite, brainstorm, etc., with utter insincerity, because I’ve never been able to write like that. I have to turn it around in my head till it’s all straight, and then my first draft is 85% of the way to my final draft. I don’t recommend this “method,” but I can’t write otherwise. (In high school, when we had to do notecards and outlines, I wrote the paper a month early and retrofitted the “preliminaries.”)

That is awesome, Theophylact.

As such things go, 37 is probably a pretty good “random” number. It’s prime, it ends in a seven (which I’ve heard in places people seem to like, for whatever reason), and it’s comfortably in a nice middle ground between small and large. It’s double digit, so it’s smallish, but it’s well past the teens, so it’s not too small, but it’s still on the lower half of the double digits.

Also, L.J. Burnett, @36.

“There is a “quote attributed to Einstein” … commonly given as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Of course he thought an antisymmetric tensor was the simplest thing possible.”

And he was correct.

“If you ever find yourself on one side of and argument and Bertrand Russell on the other, it usually a good sign you should switch sides”

Just like Paul Krugman. How about that?