Thinking to Some Purpose ('39)

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Susan Stebbing Everything Philosophers [mechanized audio] > .

"The worst type of potted thinking is when we start talking in slogans that have no thought behind them."

Pause. Reflect. Think: Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think clearly for themselves

In Thinking to Some Purpose, a philosophical text directed at the general public, British philosopher Susan Stebbing doesn’t settle for simply reflecting on various issues. Instead, she aims to educate people about how philosophy can be of benefit to the real world while also training its readers in how to practise it. The book is described on the cover of the Pelican edition as ‘A manual of first-aid to clear thinking, showing how to detect illogicalities in other people’s mental processes and how to avoid them in our own.’ Just as a car-user’s manual instructs the owner on how to (and how not to) navigate the road, Thinking to Some Purpose was written to provide its readers with manual for how to start thinking in the right kind of way and avoid common pitfalls.

For Stebbing, clear thinking was the solution to a particular problem for a group of people living at a particular time and place (1930s Britain).

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Stebbing's philosophical significance has been more recently recognised by, and explored within, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which commissioned, and in 2017 published, a publicly accessible online entry on her life and work by Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman. 

Susan Stebbing was a leading figure in British philosophy between the First and Second World Wars. She made significant contributions to the development of the analytic tradition, both in establishing it institutionally and in showing how its ideas and techniques could be applied in a wide range of domains. Her early work focused on logic and during her lifetime she was celebrated chiefly for A Modern Introduction to Logic (1930), which offered an account of both traditional, Aristotelian logic and the new mathematical logic associated particularly with the work of Russell and Whitehead. She went on to be both an important proponent of what came to be known as the Cambridge School of Analysis and an advocate of the relevance of logic to everyday questions and problems. In her early work on logic and increasingly in her later work on thinking and reasoning, she stressed the ways in which language is used and misused in ordinary communication and argued that philosophers must pay heed to these uses and misuses. Stebbing felt increasingly compelled to engage with practical contemporary issues and to address a wider public audience. Philosophy and the Physicists (1937) and Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) offer, respectively, critiques of the language used in popular science communication and in everyday genres such as political speeches, advertisements, and newspaper editorials. 

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"There is an urgent need to-day, for the citizens of a democracy to think well. It is not enough to have freedom of the Press and parliamentary institutions. Our difficulties are due partly to our own stupidity, partly to the exploitation of that stupidity, and partly to our own prejudices and personal desires."

The work arose out of a synopsis she wrote for a series of radio broadcasts intended for the BBC. Published on the eve of the Second World War, Stebbing wrote in the Preface:

"I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise."

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Stebbing completed Thinking to Some Purpose in November 1938, just under a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. Social and political developments in Germany and Russia are referred to throughout the text, and Stebbing was keen to compare and contrast them with politics at home in Britain. In particular, while she emphasised the value of the democratic system, she was also keen to point out the ways in which it would come under pressure if we didn’t endeavour to think freely both as individuals and as a nation. Stebbing believed that our very freedom itself is at stake if we don’t learn to think clearly.

However, it’s not all negative. Stebbing’s vision of the world, as she presents it in Thinking to Some Purpose, is essentially democratic. Each individual has the ability to think clearly; they just might not have had the kind of training that she had. For that reason, Stebbing offers her readers a manual – not a dogma – that individuals can use in order to secure their own freedom of thought.

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Towards the end of her life, her interests in logic and language became increasingly socially directed and politically engaged. Stebbing’s work foreshadowed a number of important subsequent developments both in philosophy itself and in linguistics.

The first book-length study of Stebbing's life and thought was published by Chapman in 2013.

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In many ways, Thinking to Some Purpose is a product of its time. The 1930s, ’40s and ’50s saw a rise in autodidacts: self-educated individuals who weren’t able to attend university, but nonetheless found themselves with a hunger for knowledge. The Pelican series (pioneered by Allen Lane) was designed to feed this hunger. As Lane himself put it, the Pelican books were ‘another form of education for people like me who’d left school at 16’. With Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing clearly bought into the spirit of Lane’s initiative and set out to do for philosophy what other Pelican books had done for history, literature and the sciences.

However, Thinking to Some Purpose is an important philosophical text for more than just historical reasons. Now, more than ever, philosophers are trying to find ways to promote their skills and ideas in the world outside university departments. For instance, there are several long-running and much listened-to philosophy podcasts, and books of popular philosophy are sometimes bestsellers. ... There are also ongoing discussions among philosophers, in more specialist settings, about what the aims of public philosophy should be and how it should be carried out. ... 

A recent blog post by the philosopher Timothy Williamson was widely circulated online in which he draws a distinction between popular philosophy and populist philosophy. Williamson argues that while the democratisation of knowledge in general should be encouraged, it should nonetheless be up to professional, academic philosophers to find ways to communicate their research and ideas to a public audience. For Williamson, philosophy is not something we can all do equally well; like any other science, it’s something that one has to be trained to do, since it involves adopting highly sophisticated research methods and familiarising oneself with a considerable amount of both historical and contemporary literature. Good popular philosophy, Williamson argues, is just like good popular science. It occurs when a specialist in the field finds a way to communicate their findings to non-specialists in an engaging and informative manner. If Williamson is right, a good popular philosopher is to philosophy what Bill Nye is to science.

Public philosophy is a two-way street. It requires an audience that’s proactive and eager to acquire knowledge:

This is a very different model of public philosophy to the approach that Stebbing adopts in Thinking to Some Purpose. According to her, one role of philosophy is to help us think clearly. This requires not only having the relevant information in front of us, but also knowing what to do with it. On Stebbing’s model of public philosophy, the aim is to train a public audience to develop practical thinking skills that are applicable in a range of contexts. This requires more than just a transfer of knowledge from an expert who has carried out the prerequisite research.

On this model, public philosophy is a two-way street. It doesn’t resemble a traditional university setting, where a lecturer delivers knowledge to a passive audience. Instead, it requires an audience that’s proactive and eager to acquire knowledge in the right kind of way. Stebbing explains:

An educator has two main objects: to impart information and to create those mental habits that will enable his students, or pupils, to seek knowledge and to acquire the ability to form their own independent judgment based upon rational grounds.

Stebbing thus both advocates and practises what we could label a ‘skills and training’ approach to public philosophy; one that requires its audience (ie, the public) to actively engage rather than passively receive information, and in which the audience is equipped with learning tools (ways of thinking) that are applicable beyond any specific domain of philosophy. Thinking to Some Purpose is primarily focused on public discourse surrounding British politics in the 1930s. Yet the obstacles to clear thinking and instructions on how to overcome it identified throughout the text ought, if Stebbing is right, to be applicable in any domain of public discourse.

A lot of public philosophy today resembles the approach outlined by Williamson where knowledge is transferred from an expert to an inexpert audience. There are plenty of digestible books and accessible podcasts that set out to make the reader aware of what philosophers think (or thought) and why. There are also more recent examples of texts that, like Thinking to Some Purpose, put the emphasis on critical thinking.

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