Directional Analysis in Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy of Physics
摘要
Recent efforts to recover the works of Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK’s first female philosophy professor, have focused largely on her germinal works on directional analysis, but largely left her extensive contributions to philosophy of physics out of account. To date, historians have often described Stebbing as ‘Moorean’ and argued that she abandoned directional analysis by the mid-to-late 1930s. This chapter builds the contrary case that Stebbing, in her 1937 Philosophy and the Physicists, deployed directional analysis and made arguments Moore would not and could not have made. Unlike Moore, Stebbing did not rebut idealist physicists’ claim that ‘matter has a mental nature’, as contravening common sense. She even stated that common-sense language has no application to microphysics. To assume micro-physical objects inherit the properties of macro-physical objects, she argued, is to commit a logical fallacy. In this chapter, these arguments are interpreted as deploying directional, not just conceptual, analysis. It is argued that passages taken as evidence for Stebbing’s abandoning directional analysis are upon closer inspection revealed to be statements of her increasingly strong opposition to Moorean sense-data theory.