Alexander Bryan Johnson
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Alexander Bryan Johnson
Johnson, Alexander Bryan (1786-1867) American philosopher of language. Born in England, Johnson emigrated to America in 1801 and had a successful career as a banker. His philosophical interests centred upon language, whose misunderstanding he regarded as responsible for endless confusion and error. In a manner reminiscent of Berkeley he distinguished the ‘sensible’ meaning of terms, tied closely to the experiences to which they refer, from merely ‘verbal’ meaning. The sensible meaning of a sentence is given by what would now be thought of as the verification conditions or assertibility conditions of a sentence. Johnson's conviction that we erroneously attribute extra significance to sentences is a forerunner of the logical positivists’ polemic on the same point. Johnson's principal work was the Treatise on Language (1836). His remark that ‘we can no more exemplify with words that there is a limit to their applicability, than a painter can demonstrate with colours, that there are phenomena that colours cannot delineate’, is a striking anticipation of Wittgenstein's more famous distinction between what can be shown and what can be said.
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Alexander Bryan Johnson
For other people named Alexander Johnson, see Alexander Johnson (disambiguation).
Alexander Bryan Johnson (May 29, 1786 – September 9, 1867) was an American philosopher and banker.
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Biography
Born in Gosport, Hampshire, England, at age 16 he emigrated to the United States, and settled at Utica, where he was a banker for many years. He was admitted to the bar, but never practised.
Philosophy
From his youth he had given all his leisure to the study of problems in intellectual philosophy, and especially of the relations between knowledge and language. He attempted to show the ultimate meaning of words, apart from their meaning as related to each other in ordinary definition, and thus to ascertain the nature of human knowledge as it exists independent of the words in which it is expressed.
His 1836 work, A Treatise on Language, was little recognised in his own time, and this remained the case for nearly a century after his death. It can now be seen to have anticipated the thrust of logical positivism, at least in arguing that misunderstandings of how language operates bedevil philosophical questions, and theories of modern linguistics.
Writings
- Philosophy of Human Knowledge, or a Treatise on Language (New York, 1828)
- Treatise on Language, or the Relation which Words bear to Things (1836)
- Religion in its Relation to the Present Life (1840), in which he aims to establish the congruity of Christian precepts with man's physical, intellectual, and emotional nature
- The Meaning of Words Analyzed into Words and Unverbal Things, and Unverbal Things Classified into Intellections, Sensations, and Emotions (1854), in which he confesses that he had been 50 years in arriving at a clear comprehension of the object of his search
- Physiology of the Senses, or How and What we See, Hear, Taste, Feel, and Smell (1856)
- Encyclopaedia of Instruction, or Apologues and Breviates on Men and Manners (1857)
- The Philosophical Emperor: A Political Experiment; or The Progress of a False Proposition (New York, 1841), attributed to him
He wrote several works on financial and political topics.
See also
External links
Further reading
- Robert Sonkin, (1977). Alexander Bryan Johnson: Philosophical Banker.
References
- Edward Craig (1998), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article on Johnson pp. 120–2.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Johnson, Alexander Bryan". The American Cyclopædia. 1879.
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