Victoria, Lady Welby

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Victoria, Lady Welby
Charles Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie
Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolBritish pragmatism[1]
Main interests
Philosophy of language, logic
Notable ideas
Significs
Signature
The House Builders (Portraits of Sir W.E. & The Hon. Lady Welby-Gregory). Painting (1880) by Frank Dicksee
Semiotics
 
General concepts
Fields
Methods
Semioticians
Related topics

Victoria, Lady Welby (27 April 1837 – 29 March 1912), more correctly Lady Welby-Gregory,

watercolourist
.

Early life

Welby was born to the Hon.

Queen Victoria's mother. On the death of the duchess she was appointed a maid of honour to her godmother
, the Queen herself.

In 1863 she married Sir

Nina, who married Edwardian rake and publisher Harry Cust
.

Academic career

Once her children were grown and had moved out of the house, Welby, who had had little formal education, began a fairly intense process of self-education. This included mixing, corresponding, and conversing with some of the leading British thinkers of her day, some of whom she invited to the Manor. It was not unusual for Victorian Englishmen of means to become thinkers and writers (e.g.

J. S. Mill, Charles Babbage
). Welby is one of the few women of her place and time to do the same.

Her early publications were on Christian theology, and particularly addressed the interpretation of the Christian

scriptures. The first, Links and Clues, was published in 1881, but like several that followed was little read and noticed. The process of wondering why this was so led Welby to become interested in language, rhetoric, persuasion, and philosophy. By the late 19th century, she was publishing articles in the leading English language academic journals of the day, such as 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. That same year, "Significs", the name she gave to her theory of meaning, was the title of a long article she contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Her writings on the reality of time culminated in her article Time As Derivative (1907).

What Is Meaning? was sympathetically reviewed for

The Nation by the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, which led to an eight-year correspondence between them, one that has been published three times, most recently as Hardwick (2001). Welby and Peirce were both academic outsiders, and their approaches to language and meaning had some things in common. 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 circulating copies of some of Peirce's letters to her, she did much to introduce Peirce to British thinkers. Contemporary Peircians have since returned the favour by being sympathetic students of Welby's ideas.

J. Cook Wilson and Henri Bergson
.

Welby's varied activities included founding the

Decorative Needlework Society
, and writing poetry and plays.

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 relations between them and ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and social values. She posited three main kinds of sense: sense, meaning, and significance. In turn, these corresponded to three levels of consciousness, which she called "planetary", "solar", and "cosmic", and explained in terms of a sort of Darwinian theory of evolution. The triadic structure of her thinking was a feature she shared with Peirce.

Welby's theories on signification in general were one of a number of approaches to the

Significs group, most of whose members were Dutch, including Gerrit Mannoury and Frederik van Eeden. Hence she indirectly influenced L. E. J. Brouwer, the founder of intuitionistic logic
.

Legacy

Following her death in 1912, Sir Charles Welby presented her collection of books to the University of London Library.[5]

In March 2023, she was one of a number of notable women with a connection to

South Kesteven District Council.[6]

Bibliography

First editions of works by Victoria Welby
Lectures

References

  1. ^ James McElvenny, "Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy", Language Sciences 41:212–221, January 2014.
  2. ^ Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 3.
  3. ^ She never adopted the additional name of Gregory and was always known as Lady Welby
  4. ^ She visited them in Italy in 1903: H. S. Thayer, 1968, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. P.333.
  5. ^ "University of London: the Historical Record (1836-1926)". British History Online. University of London Press, 1926. Retrieved 1 April 2023.
  6. ^ "Council officially launches film celebrating 'Inspirational Women' from Grantham and South Kesteven on International Women's Day". Grantham Journal. 8 March 2023. Retrieved 1 April 2023.

Further reading

  • Toennies, Ferdinand, 1901, "Note in response to Welby," Mind 10: 204–209.
  • 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.
  • Deledalle, Gerard, 1990. "Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce: meaning and signification" (in A. Eschbach [ed.] Essays on Significs John Benjamins, 1990)
  • Myers, William Andrew, 1995. "Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912)" in M.E. Waithe, ed., A History of Women Philosophers vol. 4, Kluwer.
  • Dale, Russell, 1996. The Theory of Meaning., Chapter 2, "The Theory of Meaning in the Twentieth Century".
  • Petrilli, Susan, 1999, "The biological basis of Victoria Welby's significs," Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies 127: nn-nn.
  • King, Peter J., 2004. One Hundred Philosophers. Apple Press,.
    ISBN 1-84092-462-4
  • Joseph, John E. 2012. "Meaning in the margins: Victoria Lady Welby and significs". Times Literary Supplement no. 5686, 23 March 2012, pp. 14–15.

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