An angry young man - A close reading of Arthur Prior's contribution to social ontology

This paper is about Arthur Prior’s first published piece of philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual” (1937). Its aims are (1) to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s; (2) to interpret Prior’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation; (3) to connect Prior’s ideas with Searle’s social ontology. I. Arthur Prior was 23 when he published his first piece of philosophy, his five-page article “The Nation and the Individual” (Prior 1937), in the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, at least if we do not count his very early contributions to the Open Window (among them Prior 1933a, 1933b, 1935) as philosophy papers. That was long before he became a logician. It shows him as an angry young man, a political mind disgusted with totalitarianism. My paper has three aims: (1) to show that Prior made a well-informed, creative and remarkable contribution to social ontology in the context of the analytic philosophy of the 1930s which is still interesting from a systematic point of view; (2) to interpret Prior’s proposal as a promise of reduction by (sophisticated) translation. (3) to connect Prior’s proposal with John Searle’s social ontology. Prior’s paper is little known, so it requires and deserves a close reading. It makes clear why there is a connection between reductionism and anti-reductionism in social ontology and in other fields, for instance the debate about the reduction of macro-properties-talk to micro-properties-talk or about the reduction of biological-properties-talk to physicalproperties-talk. It is a paper on ontology well before Quine is said to have reinvented the field (Quine 1948). It is best interpreted as an attempt to formulate a theory which avoids an ontological commitment to social entities (in particular: nations) while trying to account for sentences which contain, as their grammatical subjects, expressions which seem to refer to nations, but which in fact do not refer to anything, because nations do not exist. Interestingly, Prior’s text deals with ethics insofar as it hints at certain ethical consequences of the proposed semantic reconstruction of nation-talk. So there is a lot happening on those five pages. II. Some work must be done in order to isolate the relevant points from Prior’s text. (1) The text must be placed before its historical background. I hope that I will be able to have a look at the black scrapbook no1 in box 11 of the Nachlass in the Bodleian Library which, along with his personal copy of the paper, seems to contain (political) literature that Prior read at the time and kept. It would be interesting to find out more about influences on the religious young intellectual. New Zealand had suffered heavily in World War I, and there seems to have been a certain tradition of pacifism and conscientious objection (which, while possible, had severe consequences) – a tradition that, according to the interview Mary Prior gave to Per Hasle, continued in World War II. The philosophical background of the paper is the battle between the organicists (Hans Driesch, worse: Othmar Spann) on one side and the reductionists of the Vienna circle on the other side. It is particularly visible in an important paper by Moritz Schlick, “Über den Begriff der Ganzheit”, (“On the very concept of a whole”) (Schlick 1935a, 1935b). The theoretical conflict is correlated with political frontlines