Victoria Welby-Gregory, Lady Welby
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| Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy |
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|---|---|
| Name: | Victoria, Lady Welby |
| Birth: | 1837 |
| Death: | March 29, 1912 |
| School/tradition: | |
| Main interests: | Language, logic |
| Notable ideas: | Significs as meaning |
| Influences: | Darwin, Bergson, Schiller, Peirce |
| Influenced: | Peirce, Ogden |
Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912), also styled the Hon. Victoria, Lady Welby-Gregory, was a prominent English philosopher.
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[edit] Life and career
Welby was born to the Hon. Charles Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie and Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, and christened Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley. Her early life is poorly recorded; she certainly spent a great deal of time travelling, for she wrote a journal describing her experiences around the world; in fact she was in Beirut when her parents died. She served as Maid of Honour to her godmother, Queen Victoria.
In 1863 she married Sir William Earle Welby-Gregory fourth Baronet (1829–1898), who was active in British politics, and by whom she had three children. She and Sir William lived together at Denton Manor in Lincolnshire. Welby had had very little formal education, but she began a fairly intense self-education, that included mixing and conversing with some of the greatest thinkers of her day. She corresponded with prominent thinkers of her day, and invited them to the Manor.
She started out in the field of theology, especially the interpretation of the Christian scriptures, and this was the subject of her first book, Links and Clues (1881). By the late 19th century, however, this interest had developed into the more philosophical arena, and she had begun writing scholarly papers on meaning, which were published in the leading academic journals Mind and The Monist.
She published her first philosophical book, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance in 1903, following it with Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources in 1911. In the same year she contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica a long article titled "Significs", the name she gave to her theory of meaning. Her writings on the reality of time culminated in her book Time As Derivative (1907).
What Is Meaning? was reviewed for The Nation by the American pragmatist Charles Peirce, and this led to a correspondence between them which lasted eight years, which has been published three times, most recently as Hardwick (2001). Welby and Peirce had something in common, namely approaches to the problem of meaning that were not devoid of similarity, but most of the correspondence consists of Peirce elaborating his related theory of semiotics. Welby's replies did not conceal that she found Peirce hard to follow, but by duplicating and circulating some of Peirce's letters to her she did much to introduce Peirce to British thinkers. Peircians have since returned the favour by being among the most sympathetic students of Welby's ideas.
C. K. Ogden was also a correspondent of Welby's. He first contacted her in 1910, and his work was very much influenced by her theories, though he tried to minimise this in his book The Meaning of Meaning (1923). She also corresponded with William James, F. C. S. Schiller, the Italian pragmatists Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni[1], Bertrand Russell, and J. Cook Wilson.
Welby's varied activities included founding the Sociological Society of Great Britain and the Decorative Needlework Society, and writing poetry and plays.
[edit] Significs
"...every one of us is in one sense a born explorer: our only choice is what world we will explore, our only doubt whether our exploration will be worth the trouble. [...] And the idlest of us wonders: the stupidest of us stares: the most ignorant of us feels curiosity: while the thief actively explores his neighbour's pocket or breaks into the "world" of his neighbour's house and plate-closet". ("Sense, meaning, and interpretation (I)" Mind N.S. V; 1898)
Welby's concern with the problem of meaning included (perhaps especially) the everyday use of language, and she coined the word significs for her approach (replacing her first choice of "sensifics"). She preferred "significs" to semiotics and semantics, because the latter were theory-laden, and because "significs" pointed to her specific area of interest, which other approaches to language had tended to ignore.
She distinguished between different kinds of sense, and developed the various relationships between them and ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and social values. She divided sense into three main kinds: sense, meaning, and significance. these, she argued, corresponded to three levels of consciousness, which she called: planetary, solar, and cosmic respectively, and which she explained in terms of a sort of Darwinian theory of evolution.
Welby's writings and theories on signification in general were one of a number of approaches to the theory of language that began to emerge in the latter 19th century. The approaches anticipated contemporary semantics, semiotics, and semiology. Welby had a direct effect on the Significs group, most of whose members are Dutch, including Gerrit Mannoury and Frederik van Eeden, and thus she indirectly influenced L. E. J. Brouwer and the founding of intuitionistic logic.
[edit] Bibliography & references
[edit] Primary texts
- 1893, "Meaning and metaphor," Monist 3: 510–525. Reprinted in Welby (1985).
- 1896, "Sense, meaning, and interpretation I" Mind 5: 24–37. Reprinted in Welby (1985). Extract in M. Warnock, ed., 1996. Women Philosophers. J.M. Dent. ISBN 0-460-87721-6.
- 1896, "Sense, meaning, and interpretation II" Mind 5: 186–202. Reprinted in Welby (1985).
- 1901, "Notes on the ‘Welby Prize Essay," Mind 10: 188–209.
- 1931. Other Dimensions: A Selection from the Later Correspondence of Victoria, Lady Welby. Mrs Henry Cust, ed. Jonathan Cape.
- 1983 (1903). What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance. John Benjamins.
- 1985 (1911). Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources. Schmitz, H. Walter, ed., John Benjamins.
- 2001 (1977). Semiotic and Significs: Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Edited by Charles S. Hardwick, with the assistance of James Cook. Texas Tech University Press.
[edit] Secondary texts
- Deledalle, Gerard, 1990. "Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce: meaning and signification" (in A. Eschbach [ed.] Essays on Significs John Benjamins, 1990)
- King,Peter J., 2004. One Hundred Philosophers. Apple Press,. ISBN 1-84092-462-4
- Myers, William Andrew, 1995. "Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912)" in M.E. Waithe, ed., A History of Women Philosophers vol. 4, Kluwer.
- Susan Petrilli, Susan, 1999, "The biological basis of Victoria Welby's significs," Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies 127: nn-nn.
- Schmitz, H. Walter, 1985, "Victoria Lady Welby's significs: the origin of the signific movement." In Welby (1985).
- Schmitz, H. Walter, ed., 1990. Essays on Significs: Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912). John Benjamins.
- Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1901, "Note in response to Welby," Mind 10: 204–209.
[edit] Notes
- ^ She visited them in Italy in 1903: H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (1968), p.333.
[edit] External links
- Philosophers: The Hon. Victoria, Lady Welby-Gregory — short introduction
- Scholarship on the relations between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles S. Peirce — by Jaime Nubiola, in I. Angelelli & M. Cerezo [edd], Proceedings of the III Symposium on History of Logic (Gruyter, 1996) — contains a useful section on "Peirce's reception in British philosophy: Lady Welby, Ogden and Russell".
- Lady Welby Library — a collection in Senate House Library, University of London
