Bradley on the Validity of Inference

Bradley on the Validity of Inference JAMES W. ALLARD RECENT WORKon Bradley has shown that there is a great deal more to his theory of judgment than initially meets the eye. For example, it has been argued that Bradley's Principles of Logic is not concerned with metaphysics at all, but rather with purely logical problems and that understood in this way The Principles of Logic contains important logical insights. ~It has further been claimed that these insights are at the heart of philosophy and that more recent philosophers such as Russell and Wittgenstein were making in their more exact vocabularies some of the same points Bradley was making in his more arcane one. ~This view has not yet been accepted as a new orthodoxy, but it has shown that Bradley's theory of judgment is not the archaic, obsolete structure that it is sometimes taken to be. The same has not been done for Bradley's theory of inference. Even though Bradley devotes considerably more space to his theory of inference than to his theory of judgment, his theory of inference seems markedly the more obscure theory and is far and away the less discussed. Indeed, virtually all the papers devoted to Bradley's Principles of Logic since its publication in 1883 have dealt primarily with the theory ofjudgment. As far as recent work on Bradley is concerned, two reasons that explain this neglect are tolerably obvious. First, Bradley's theory of judgment, while obscure, does bear comparison with the rival theories of judgment developed by Russell, Frege, Moore, Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl. Since these theories have occupied an importance place in contemporary philosophy, a discus- ' E.g., Anthony Manser, Bradley'sLogic (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, a983), lo3-1o6; a19-3~. 2 E.g., Anthony Palmer, "Parasites Cut Loose," in Godfrey Vesey,ed., Idealism---Pastand Present, RoyalInstituteof PhilosophyLectureSeries 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1982), 197-~o9; GuyStock,"Bradley'sTheory ofJudgment," in AnthonyManserand GuyStock, eds.,ThePhilosophyofF. H.Bradley(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1984),131-54. [267] 268 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:2 APRIL i989 sion of Bradley's theory of judgment is of contemporary interest. But while theories of judgment were of great concern to these philosophers and central to their disagreements, the same was simply not true of theories of inference. The nature of inference was not a central concern of these or any other major twentieth-century philosophers. Second, recent interest in Bradley has linked him with some of the above mentioned figures by stressing his opposition to psychologism.a This opposition is much more difficult to find in his theory of inference than in his theory of judgment. Unlike his theory of judgment, his theory of inference does not contain an explicit rejection of psychologism. There is also a third, less obvious reason for this neglect and this has to do with Bradley's procedure. Like many other philosophers in the Hegelian tradition, Bradley is concerned not only with reality as it is in itself, but also with the various ways it appears to be when certain assumptions are made. Unfortunately, when Bradley describes reality he is not always careful to indicate whether he is describing it as it is in itself or just as it appears given certain assumptions. This state of affairs is ripe for confusion as his discussion of inference indicates. After spending pages describing the nature of valid inference on the assumption that some inferences are thoroughly reliable , Bradley suddenly shifts perspectives and begins to evaluate inference irrespective of this assumption. He then argues that no inference is ever valid. The paradoxicality of this conclusion and the reader whiplash caused by Bradley's way of reaching it have further discouraged serious discussion of his theory of inference. Despite these reasons for neglect, Bradley does succeed in raising some serious issues in his discussion of inference. This is particularly true of his closing remarks on the validity of inference. Even though Bradley's conclusion that no inference is ever valid has long been notorious as an example of the paradoxes of idealistic logic, it is rooted in an issue which is still of contemporary concern--at least that is what...