Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits was published by Allen and Unwin in London and by Simon & Schuster in New York in 1948. It was Russell’s last major work of technical philosophy, written when he was seventy-six, and it represents his final attempt to address the foundational questions that had occupied him since The Problems of Philosophy (1912): What can we know? How can we know it? What is the relationship between our experience and the external world?
The book is organized in six parts: “The World of Science,” “Language,” “Science and Perception,” “Scientific Concepts,” “Probability,” and “The Postulates of Scientific Inference.” Russell’s central concern is the gap between individual experience (which is private, immediate, and certain in a limited sense) and scientific knowledge (which claims to describe an objective world that no individual can directly experience). How do we get from “I see a patch of red” to “There is a table in front of me” to “Matter is composed of atoms”?
Russell’s answer involves what he calls “postulates of scientific inference” — assumptions that cannot themselves be proved but that are necessary for science to be possible: that the future will resemble the past (the uniformity of nature), that similar effects have similar causes, and that spatiotemporally contiguous events are more likely to be causally related than distant ones. These postulates are not logical truths but empirical generalizations that have worked so far — and Russell acknowledges that their justification is ultimately pragmatic rather than deductive.
The book is Russell’s most systematic late work, and it shows the influence of his engagement with logical positivism (particularly Carnap and the Vienna Circle) as well as his continuing debates with Wittgenstein, whose later philosophy Russell found increasingly unintelligible.
Collecting Human Knowledge
First edition (Allen and Unwin, London, 1948): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75