Beardsley, Hayek and the day meaning slipped its author

On 18 September 1944 the University of Chicago Press published the American edition of a short political book by an Austrian economist teaching at the London School of Economics. The first printing was 2,000 copies. Milton Friedman, introducing the fiftieth anniversary edition, records that it went almost at once, that Orville Prescott reviewed it in the New York Times on 20 September, and that the Press ordered more printings after Henry Hazlitt's front-page notice in the Sunday book section. Within six months some 30,000 copies had gone. The book was The Road to Serfdom, and the British edition, from Routledge, had appeared in March. The condensation that carried it to millions ran in Reader's Digest in April 1945, a year later than it is usually remembered — a detail worth keeping, since the whole interest of Hayek's argument lies in what people do with information they have not checked.

Forty-one years later, on 18 September 1985, Monroe Beardsley died at sixty-nine. He had spent a career at Swarthmore and Temple arguing, against most of what teachers of literature were then telling their students, that what a poem means is not settled by what its author meant. The essay for which he is remembered, "The Intentional Fallacy", was written with the Yale critic W. K. Wimsatt, appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1946, and reached most of its readers through Wimsatt's collection The Verbal Icon in 1954.

Two arguments sharing a date by accident: one that economic order arises from knowledge no single head contains, one that literary meaning arises from a text no single head controls. The coincidence earns a piece because the same day supplies the objections. F. H. Bradley, who died on 18 September 1924, spent his life insisting that nothing holds together unless something holds it. Barbara Skarga, who died on 18 September 2009, spent eleven years inside a system whose cruelty nobody in particular had to intend.

What Wimsatt and Beardsley actually argued#

The slogan version — the author is dead, intention is irrelevant — is not what the essay says, and Beardsley spent three decades saying so. The claim on the first page is narrower and harder: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art". Two words carry it. Not available: the poet's intention is not a thing we can consult, since all we have is the poem plus whatever the poet later says, which is itself a text needing interpretation. Not desirable: even if we could consult it, a poem that fails is not redeemed by the discovery that its author meant well.

They did not say that nothing outside the poem counts. Internal evidence, meaning what the words do in the language and what the poem's structure establishes, is public and admissible. External evidence, the letters and diaries and the poet's later gloss, is at best indirect, and when it contradicts the poem it loses. Their most quoted sentence is about ownership rather than psychology: "The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public." The poem, they write, "is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it".

A companion piece, "The Affective Fallacy", followed in the Sewanee Review in 1949, and is routinely confused with the first. It runs the other way. If the intentional fallacy derives a poem's meaning from its cause, the affective fallacy derives it from its effect, from what the reader felt. Take both away and what is left is the poem, which was the point. Beardsley restated the case in The Possibility of Criticism in 1970, against E. D. Hirsch, who held that a text means what its author meant and that criticism without that anchor drifts. The dispute was never settled, and its afterlife is ironic: the readings most indebted to Beardsley, deconstructive and then historicist, tended to dissolve the stable public text he had been defending. He dispensed with the author to keep the work; much of what followed dispensed with both. Gadamer on why understanding has no method and Schleiermacher's hermeneutic lectures carry the same quarrel in a different vocabulary.

The book that sold, and the paper that mattered#

The Road to Serfdom is not where Hayek's best argument is. The book is a wartime polemic dedicated to "the socialists of all parties", and its central prediction — that planning concentrates power in hands that will eventually be unscrupulous — is a claim about institutions, not about knowledge. The epistemology arrived the following year, in the American Economic Review for September 1945: a fourteen-page paper called "The Use of Knowledge in Society", pages 519 to 530.

Hayek's move there is to say that the problem of economic order has been misdescribed. It is not a problem of calculation given the data, because "the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" held by separate people. Hence his best-known image, of the price system as "a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers". And then the sentence that names the thing: "The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly."

The phrase Hayek borrowed for this, from Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, is that such arrangements are the result of human action but not the execution of any human design. It is a fine formulation and it does not settle the politics, which is where Hayek's admirers overreach. Oskar Lange had already replied, in The Review of Economic Studies in 1936 and 1937, that a planning board could reach the same prices by iterative trial and error. The objection to Lange is not that dispersed knowledge makes his scheme incoherent; it is that the tacit, local and perishable knowledge Hayek cared about is exactly what a board never gets told. That is an empirical bet, and whether machine learning on transaction data changes the odds remains a live question.

Bradley's regress is the objection the day contains#

F. H. Bradley died at Merton College on 18 September 1924, aged seventy-eight, having held a fellowship there since 1870 that required no teaching. Appearance and Reality came out in 1893; its third chapter holds the argument that survived him.

Suppose two qualities, A and B, stand in a relation, C. What is C? If it is real in its own right, alongside A and B, then it must itself be related to them, and that relating requires a further relation, D. "But such a makeshift leads at once to the infinite process." Bradley's summary is blunt: "The problem is to find how the relation can stand to its qualities; and this problem is insoluble." His conclusion is not that relations do not exist but that they are appearance; that the world of distinct things in distinct relations is how the Absolute shows up to finite minds, and that reality itself is one all-inclusive experience.

Nobody defends the Absolute now, and Russell and Moore built analytic philosophy partly by refusing it. But the regress outlived the metaphysics, and remains the standard difficulty for any account of how a fact is more than a list of its constituents. Set beside Hayek and Beardsley, Bradley is the day's dissenting voice: an order with no unifying mind, he would say, is not an order at all, only the appearance of one. That objection has never quite been answered, merely set aside.

Bain paid for Mind; Bernays wrote Hilbert's Grundlagen#

Alexander Bain died in Aberdeen on 18 September 1903, aged eighty-five, in the city where he was born and where he held the Regius Chair of Logic from 1860. He founded Mind in 1876, and he is very often said to have edited it, which he did not. He installed George Croom Robertson, a former pupil, as editor, and paid the bills himself until Robertson resigned through ill health in 1891; Henry Sidgwick took over the subsidy, and after his death the Mind Association was formed so that the journal no longer depended on one man's bank balance. Bain created an institution and then declined to direct what it said.

He also supplied pragmatism with its founding definition, without meaning to. Bain held that a belief is "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Nicholas St John Green pressed the definition on the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Peirce, writing in 1906, conceded that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary", which is why he called Green, not himself, the grandfather of the doctrine. A Scottish logician's working account of belief is the seed of American philosophy's one indigenous movement, and he never claimed it.

Paul Bernays died in Zurich on 18 September 1977, aged eighty-eight. Born in London in October 1888, he went to Göttingen in 1917 as Hilbert's assistant on the foundations of arithmetic, and was made extraordinary professor, without tenure, in 1922. The two volumes of Grundlagen der Mathematik appeared in 1934 and 1939 under Hilbert's name first; the text was Bernays's, much of it his working out of questions Hilbert had posed in outline. His own axiomatic set theory, in seven papers between 1937 and 1954 on foundations von Neumann had laid, is known, with Gödel's modifications, as von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel. The names on these things are a poor guide to who did the thinking, which Wimsatt and Beardsley would have enjoyed. What happened to Bernays in 1933 is not enjoyable. Under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Göttingen stopped his teaching in April, terminated his assistantship in August and withdrew his right to lecture in September, because he was a Jew. Hilbert kept him on privately for six months. Then he left. There was nothing spontaneous about that order: it had authors, and they signed.

Amélie Rorty, and the self that is not one authority either#

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty died on 18 September 2020, on Rosh Hashanah, at eighty-eight. Born in Belgium in May 1932 to Polish Jewish parents and brought up on a Virginia farm, she went to Chicago at about sixteen, took a doctorate at Yale and a second master's in anthropology at Princeton, and taught at Rutgers for twenty-six years before Brandeis, Boston University and Tufts. She married Richard Rorty when both were graduate students; they divorced in 1972. They are constantly confused in citations, and the confusion does her the greater disservice, since their projects had almost nothing in common.

Her contribution to the day's argument is the volume she edited for California in 1976, The Identities of Persons, and her closing essay in it, "A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals", which separates four things ordinary talk of identity runs together: the character a culture recognises, the person who bears rights, the self that reflects, the individual who survives all three. Her point, pressed further in Explaining Emotions (1980) and in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, edited with Martha Nussbaum in 1992, was that the emotions are not intrusions of irrationality into an otherwise governed mind, and that the mind in question has no single governor. If Beardsley says the poem has no author in charge of it, Rorty says the same of the person doing the reading.

Skarga's camps are the case this thread cannot absorb#

Barbara Skarga was born in Warsaw in October 1919 and died in Olsztyn on 18 September 2009, in her sleep, at eighty-nine. The NKVD arrested her on 8 September 1944 for her work as a liaison officer in the Home Army, and sentenced her to ten years of katorga and lifelong exile: Prawieniszki near Kaunas, the Ukhta camps, a transfer to Balkhash in 1948, then a collective farm near Petropavlovsk after her release. She reached Poland again in 1955, took a doctorate at Warsaw in 1957, became a full professor in 1988, edited Etyka, and wrote on metaphysics, positivism and the philosophy of time until the year she died. Her account of the camps appeared in Paris in 1985 under the name Wiktoria Kraśniewska, since she was still living in Poland.

She marks the limit of the day's argument. The Soviet camp system was, in one sense, exactly what Hayek and Beardsley describe: an order that ran without anyone in particular intending its outcomes, a machinery of quotas and transfers whose cruelties were emergent rather than authored. That is no mitigation. An order can be unauthored and monstrous, so the absence of a directing mind tells you nothing whatever about whether an arrangement is good. Skarga's verdict on the people who ran it was stranger than condemnation: people are small and weak, she said, and should be forgiven. Only someone who has earned that can say it.

Pinker at seventy-two, and the case against the inner author#

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal on 18 September 1954 and turns seventy-two today. He is a cognitive psychologist, not a philosopher, and it does him no favours to call him one; his standing rests on experimental work on language acquisition and a real gift for exposition. But the central claim of How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) is the strongest living version of the thread running through this date: that intelligent behaviour comes from an assembly of specialised computational systems, with no homunculus in the middle doing the understanding, no ghost in the machine, as he puts it, borrowing Ryle's phrase. That is the intentional fallacy applied to minds, and it is where this day's argument meets the fight over whether a language model can mean anything; see Searle's Chinese Room and the row over authorship bans in Philosophy and Public Affairs.

His later books are another matter, and the criticism of them is serious. Enlightenment Now (2018) argues that reason, science and humanism have delivered measurable improvement across most indicators of human welfare. John Gray, in the New Statesman of 22 February 2018, called it embarrassingly feeble, argued that Pinker's Enlightenment is a construct assembled to flatter present-day liberals, and objected that no quantity of data establishes an ethical position. Homi Bhabha has pressed the case that Enlightenment thought was entangled with slavery and empire rather than merely coincident with them. And the statistical spine of The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) has been attacked on its own ground: Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Physica A in 2016, argued that the distribution of war casualties is so heavy-tailed that the post-1945 record is consistent with no change at all in the underlying propensity to violence. Pinker's answer is that his series concern rates rather than guarantees. Whether a fat-tailed process licenses his inference is unsettled, and it would be dishonest to report it otherwise.

Also on the day#

Four meetings are running. The Lacan Today Conference is at Ghent University on 18 and 19 September, with Darian Leader, Jamieson Webster, Bracha Ettinger and Stijn Vanheule among the speakers. Philosophica II, on words and language, is at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin on 17 and 18 September, with Matti Eklund, Luca Gasparri, J. T. M. Miller and Julia Zakkou. The Toronto Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy runs from Friday afternoon to Saturday evening as a celebration of Deborah Black's work on Avicenna, Averroes and the Arabic Aristotelian tradition. And the sixth biennial conference of the East European Network for Philosophy of Science meets in Bucharest on 18 and 19 September, with Dana Jalobeanu and Sabina Leonelli giving the keynotes and no registration fee. The season is in our autumn calendar; the last instalment of this series is here.