JOHNSON, Alexander Bryan (1787–1867)
Alexander Bryan Johnson was born in 29 May 1787 in the English channel town of Gosport,
Hampshire. He emigrated in 1801 to New York as a teenager and lived rest of his life in Utica,
upstate New York, where he amassed a fortune as a banker. He married thrice, the first wife being
Abigail Adams, John Adams‘s granddaughter. He corresponded with America‘s second president
and later with the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. He had distinguished Jewish ancestors and
he served as a director of a number of financial institutions in New York. Johnson had eleven
children and he died in Utica in 9 September 1867.
An autodidact in scholarly issues, Johnson published ten books and a number of essays,
pamphlets, periodical, and journal articles on philosophy, economics, and religion. One of his books,
A Treatise on Language: or The Relation Which Words Bear to Things, stands out as a notable
anticipation of contemporary topics in philosophy of language. The Treatise was published in 1836,
the same year as Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s magnum opus On Language. In the book Johnson took
research on language to comprise a study of the meaning and significance of linguistic expressions
and utterances. One may relate his remarks to a number of topics discussed in the field of semantics
and, to a degree, in that of pragmatics. With this book as an early contribution to the field of
linguistic meaning, Johnson may well have a good claim to being the first American philosopher of
language.
The Treatise, which presents his main theses on language, was not widely read at that time. It
has not been widely read even after being reissued by David Rynin in 1947 and again in 1959 and
1968. The latter republication was accompanied by a comprehensive collection devoted to Johnson‘s
work edited by Charles S. Todd and Russell T. Blackwood, Language and Value (1969). An
extensive biography, Alexander Bryan Johnson, Philosophical Banker written by Todd and Robert
Sonkin, was published in 1977.
Scholarly work on Johnson is noticeably scarce. In addition to the works of Rynin (1947,
1968), Todd & Blackwood (1967) and Todd & Sonkin (1977), only one book, by Lars Gustafsson,
originally in German, Speech and Lies: Three Extremists in the Philosophy of Language: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Alexander Bryan Johnson and Fritz Mauthner (1982), is devoted to investigating his
philosophy of language. Gustafsson (1992) wrote an extensive entry on Johnson in the International
Handbook on the Philosophy of Language.
The occasional reference to Johnson‘s philosophical contributions is found in some older
works on the language sciences, most noticeably in S. I. Hayakawa‘s Language in Thought and
Action (1939). Irving J. Lee, working in the ‗General Semantics‘ tradition, quoted Johnson‘s book at
length in his Language Habits in Human Affairs (1941). The Language of Wisdom and Folly (1949),
edited by Lee, included two chapters drawn from Johnson‘s corpus, ―Questioning Questions‖ and
―The Individuality of Things and the Generality of Language‖. There is an informed chapter
―History of Semantics‖ by Norman Kretzmann (1967) in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy with
paragraphs devoted to Johnson‘s theory of meaning.
Alexander Bryan Johnson nevertheless is not recognised in most authoritative works on the
history of semantics, such as W. Terrence Gordon (1982), Birgitte Nerlich (1991), Nerlich and
David C. Clarke (1996) and Hans Aarsleff (1982). We do not find him mentioned in the histories of
linguistics by Holger Pedersen (1931) or Julie Tetel Andersen (1990), or in the historiography of
linguistics in America by Joseph (2002).
Kretzmann (1967: 393) noted that Johnson‘s ―work was unusual for its time both in its
insights and in its mistakes‖. Being unusual might explain some of the neglect, but what does it
mean here? Rynin called such a neglect ―a most remarkable fact of nonhistory‖ (Todd & Blackwood
1967: 23). Johnson has fallen into oblivion among philosophers as well as linguists despite some
attempts to revive that knowledge at the centenary of his death. Some lack of knowledge may be
explained by the fact that the usual historiographies on semantics simply have not attempted to cover
the early 19th century works at all, or have covered it only with respect to what was happening on
Europe, taking for granted that the history of semantics has shorter roots than it actually does. But
ignorance is inevitably also due to Johnson being a precursor of ideas and topics to which readers
were unaccustomed at the time. As he never held a university position, his writings were not
particularly academic and he felt no need to promote or defend them in public.
Johnson‘s philosophy of language can be located between verificationist and referential
theories. There are also some connections between his theory of language and 20th century
pragmatics. However, there are two and to some extent conflicting tendencies that may be discerned
in his overall thoughts about language. First, Johnson argues for, though he is not using that term,
verificationism, or what in the philosophy of science is known as operationalism. According to that
conception, meanings of expressions are formed and need to be tested by sensible observation and
experience. What a sentence means is to be found in those experiences that confirm or disconfirm
the sentence or provide evidence or counter-evidence for its truth. In a closely related operationalist
sense, the meaning of a concept is identified with the observable operations and procedures that are
used to measure the concept in experiments.
The operationalist conception is thus unmistakeable. According to Johnson, ―We must make
our senses the expositors of words, instead of making words the expositors of what our senses
reveal‖ (T: 40; references are to 1968 edition). We ought not, Johnson states, ―make language the
expositor of nature‖, but make ―nature the expositor of language‖ (T: 59). He believes that
―interpreting nature by language enables us to communicate‖ solely and merely ―an artificial interest
to scientifick experiments‖, concluding from this that experiments ―constitute a part of the meaning‖
of assertions and that ―language in which every experiment is announced must be interpreted by the
experiment. We must not interpret the experiment by the language‖ (T: 118).
The second major current that flows through his treatise is the referential account of meaning.
According to that conception, words have meaning through standing for things. The meaning of a
proposition or sentence equates with the factual matters in the world that makes them to be the case:
―Till we know the particulars to which a proposition refers, its meaning is unknown to us‖ (T: 129),
he states and continues that ―[p]ropositions are neither significant nor insignificant, but as they refer
to our sensible experience‖ (T: 141).
According to Johnson, the phenomenon to which a word refers constitutes the signification
of the word. It is thus not merely a physicalist conception of reference that is at issue, as Johnson is
eager to point out that the referent need not exist in the physical world but may well be an object of
consciousness, a phenomenon. Nevertheless, his referential notion, even by his own words, is very
much like comparing language to a mirror. What language represents varies with the object to which
it is applied just as the representations of a mirror vary with the object that is placed before it.
A consequence of such empiricism is that negative statements are meaningless, since a
negation of an expression refers to ―no sensible particular‖ (T: 140). Kretzmann (1967) and Max
Black (1969) both noted this discrepancy. In fact, Johnson himself seems to have observed what
looms large here. He attempted to circumvent the problem by defining experimentally unaffirmable
sentences, which would otherwise be insignificant, to have a meaning since their negations are
insignificant. This solution is quite ad hoc and does not seem to bear much fruit, since negations of
unaffirmable sentences can also be experimentally unaffirmable. The problem is similar to the early
positivists‘s attempt to define experimentally meaningful sentences.
Johnson‘s conception of meaning nevertheless anticipated logical empiricists‘ verificationist
postulates. His conception may moreover be seen to be an early formulation of pragmatic meaning.
According to the pragmatic account introduced by Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and William
James (1842–1910), the meaning of assertions and utterances lies in their conceivable practical
consequences as we go about interpreting and acting upon them.
Johnson took the meaning of a proposition such as ―The earth is a sphere‖ to be in the proof
or experiment that the earth‘s shadow on a moon is always similarly round, or that a ship gradually
disappears over the horizon, and the meaning is in those kinds of proofs or experiments only. The
list of possible experimental proofs that need to be run through concerning our intellectual concepts
and propositions completely and definitely determines, according to Johnson, the meaning that goes
together with a sentence such as ―The earth is a sphere‖.
Johnson further observed that mere dictionary definitions do not exhaust the meaning of
expressions. He used as an example experiments in which a small piece of indigo or a lump of sugar
cast into water diffuses through it, as well as those in which the light and heat diffuses through the
room after opening the window and letting the sun shine in. If we wish to ―discover the sensible
meaning of the diffused‖, Johnson argues, ―in these several uses, we must resort to our senses, and
not to our dictionaries‖ (Johnson, quoted in Lee 1941: 51). The effects of observable experiments
are to be found, Johnson argues, in the media or methods by which we communicate the sensible
meaning of expressions.
Johnson‘s conception of referential meaning, on the other hand, is familiar to us from early
analytic philosophy, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s (1889–1951) Tractatus (1921) and the early
writings of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). According to Johnson‘s referential account, universals
are not real and individual objects are the only proper referents to our concepts. ―Individuality is
characteristick of nature‖ (T: 80), he states in one place, and remarks later that ―words signify the
objects to which they are applied‖ (T: 114). In the hands of Russell and Wittgenstein, the idea
became known as ‗logical atomism‘, the doctrine that it is the world that expresses the meaning of
its target, namely the spoken, written, and otherwise communicated system of signs, the language.
However, a tension exists between these two currents in Johnson‘s work, because the kind of
empiricist verificationism that he advocated faces difficulties if the meaning of the proposition must
correspond to those processes of verification that concern the case in the actual world. It may well be
the case that it is not possible to detect any observable outcomes of an application of a word or
sentence in actu, and thus one must state its meaning by reference to hypothetical states of affairs,
subjunctive conditionals or ‗possible worlds‘ in logicians‘ lingo, in which such outcomes could or
would conceivably happen in the future. For example, if the meaning of the assertion ―The Earth is a
sphere‖ is an actual attempt to set sail in this ‗one world‘ of ours, then every experiment we perform
upon that assertion would constitute its meaning, and if so, language cannot be misused and genuine
communication and understanding will be impossible.
A closely related difficulty that Johnson encounters is that, if those who go about verifying
their linguistic utterances are actual persons using language in actual communicative situations, then
they will fall victim to semantic relativism. If all action and experiments conducted by actual
persons constitutes the meaning of assertions, there will be no false or predictive sentences. Johnson
indirectly admits this by stating that ―nearly every proposition is true when interpreted as the speaker
interprets it‖ (T: 133).
The difficulty is that the concept of ―sensible experience‖ (T: 140) that puts the meaning of
our assertions to test and controls them is too primitive. In the end, Johnson does not avoid the
pitfalls of empiricist verificationism. His view was that if no sensible experience is able to test the
meaning of an assertion, and that is the case, for example, as he himself admits, with negative
statements, then such an assertion will ―possesses no sensible significance‖, in other words is
―insignificant‖ and so lacks meaning altogether (T: 140).
Johnson was influenced by Scottish common sense philosophy; in particular, psychologist
and philosopher Thomas Reid‘s (1710–1796) Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of
Common Sense. Reid was important also for Peirce, who admired his ―subtle but well-balanced
intellect‖ (Peirce 1931–58: Vol. 5, §444) and who inspired Peirce‘s own ‗critical common-sensism‘.
According to Peirce‘s version, truth is defined in terms of doubt and belief, where doubt is a
lack of belief that is resolved through experience. Common sense philosophy is equally present in
Johnson‘s works. For example, he explains that the meaning of the ―hardness of a stone‖ is not in the
rock as we press against it and feel pain, it is in what contribution our experiments performed upon
the stone have to our beliefs. But their contributions must, according to Johnson, be checked in this
actual world of our sensory experience. In contrast, on Peirce‘s pragmatist doubt-belief theory, the
meaning of the ―hardness of a stone‖ is in the conceivable contributions that a stone would have if it
were to be pressed or scratched. Reid had earlier pronounced that much of our beliefs are kinds of
instincts dictated to be such by human nature and thus lie beyond sceptical doubt.
Johnson also referred to other Scottish psychologists and philosophers, including Reid‘s
disciple Dugald Stewart (1753–1823), also on Peirce‘s list of favourite Scottish influences, and
Hugh Blair (1718–1800), Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh. Johnson held Blair in high respect in
underscoring the importance of clear analysis and proper organisation of the linear structure of
language in the expression of thought. Blair‘s Lectures was studied widely in American colleges
between the years 1760–1860 and the re-editions were plentiful.
In addition to the above, Johnson‘s Treatise on Language has one very distinct feature: it
attempts to divide language into what we recognise as the three components of syntax, semantics
and pragmatics. That he really had this trichotomy in his early book might appear less surprising as
soon as it is acknowledged that these components are reminiscent of the medieval trivium of
speculative grammar, critic and rhetoric. These components were not circumspectly differentiated
in the body of the text in Johnson‘s Treatise, however. Parts 1 and 2 of Johnson‘s Treatise deal with
critic, subtitled as ―language with reference to existences which are external to man‖ and ―to
phenomena internal of man‖. They pertain to semantics, the study of the relationships between
language and its objects. Johnson took this to be the most important portion of study of language,
and he thought that the proper analysis of language should indeed begin with discourses that concern
―not the relative meaning which words bear to each other, but the relation which words bear to
created existences‖ (T: 39).
Part 3 concerns speculative grammar, ―language with reference to the relation which words
bear to each other‖. Johnson discusses reasoning, taking it to consist of deductive passages in which
information in the conclusions must be admitted by the information already extant in the premises.
His conception of reasoning was Aristotelian.
The last part 4 of his Treatise is about ―language with reference to some of the uses to which
we apply it‖. This is rhetoric, in modern terms pragmatics. Among his notable suggestions was a
distinction between sensible and verbal significance. By the sensible significance of a word or
expression, Johnson referred to the meaning that our senses reveals with respect to that word or
expression. Sensible significance is our perspective, vertical mode of knowing and recognising the
significance. Verbal significance, in contrast, is the horizontal mode which is given by translating a
word or expression into another word or expression and hence explaining its meaning in terms of the
meaning of other words and expressions.
More to the concerns of modern pragmatics, Johnson discussed not only the meaning of
declarative sentences but also interrogatives and ‗conversational implicatures‘ in assertions. He
termed these the expressions ―involving our actions in general propositions‖ (T: 127). This is one of
the many instances in which language use is discussed in the ‗wrong‘ part of the book—the part
intended to articulate the semantic relationships between expressions and their environment. But this
is only to be expected, given that by the environment Johnson meant things that are ―external‖ to the
language user.
What is also notable here is that Johnson did not, unlike many of the early linguists who had
semantics on their agenda, confine his study of language to lexical meaning but took sentences,
propositions, and assertions as its main subject matter. Most of his examples concerned the meaning
of propositions and sentences.
Johnson was surely an early precursor to the 20th century ―linguistic turn‖. He aimed at
tackling philosophical problems through an attentive analysis of the meaning of language. He
clarified functions of language and related the meanings of its expressions to the reality external to
language. It was an earnest attempt, at least century ahead of its time, to accomplish what we
routinely think of as linguistic philosophy and the study of semantics and pragmatics.
In attacking philosophical problems using an analysis of language Johnson was prefiguring
thinkers like Wittgenstein. ―Much of what is esteemed as profound philosophy‖, Johnson maintains,
―is nothing but a disputatious criticism on the meaning of words‖ (T: 282). Moreover, he believed
that ―We impute to nature the ambiguities and unintelligibility which are produced by a misuse of
language‖ (T: 289). While Johnson‘s referential account of meaning was reflected in Wittgenstein‘s
earlier philosophy in the Tractatus, these latter sentiments are reflected in Wittgenstein‘s later
philosophy.
As a matter of fact Wittgenstein owned, for a short time, a copy of Johnson‘s Treatise, sent
to him by its editor David Rynin in 1947, together with the inscription, ―To Ludwig Wittgenstein
with the respect and admiration of David Rynin‖. Wittgenstein forwarded the copy to his student
Calvin Rollins, ―with kind regards from Ludwig Wittgenstein‖. That Wittgenstein‘s knowledge of
Johnson‘s work influenced his thinking during the last three or four years of his life is not very likely,
however. In the very least, it is unlikely to have had much impact on Wittgenstein‘s Philosophical
Investigations to which he made final revisions in 1944–45. Stillman Drake, the rediscoverer of
Alexander Bryan Johnson‘s work on language and meaning, mentions having contacted
Wittgenstein in 1944, and has exposed further parallels between Johnson and Wittgenstein (Drake
1969).
Johnson‘s ideas were forgotten for a long time, despite efforts to resurrect them by Drake,
Rynin and some others. The incoherence of his account notwithstanding, which is not noted in
Rynin (1968) or in the reviews that were commissioned on the re-release of the Treatise on
Language (see e.g. Richards 1948), the original publication does not present clear reasons as to why
Johnson‘s work went unnoticed. The Treatise was released by Harper & Bros in New York City in
1836, so it was not a marginal publication. The answer is more likely to lie in Johnson‘s status as a
recluse, independent thinker, outside academia, without an occasion, or even interest, to promote his
ideas further. I. A. Richards (1948) summarises the case as follows:
Here is a highly isolated thinker absorbed—apparently without opportunities for discussion—with the
problems of intellectual method in the sciences. He produces, a hundred years earlier, many of the
most distinctive views and traits of thinkers whose group activity, membership of ‗movements‘ and
immersion in discussion has been remarkable. (Richards 1948, p. 252)
Time and again, those signed up for the membership get the credit while the secluded and eccentrics
are ousted. In Johnson‘s case, that might have been a voluntary decision due to his profession and
career. Later generations have been slow to acknowledge the seeds that he planted on the largely
virgin soil of linguistic meaning.
Aside from philosophy and linguistics, Johnson‘s writings on economic theory (Johnson
1813) prefigure Keynesian principles and Thorstein Veblen‘s Theory of the Leisure Class. Many of
his other writings bear on religious topics (Johnson 1841), and there are plentiful newspaper stories
echoing aspects of his personal life. His manuscript material is deposited in the library of Hamilton
College in Clinton, N.Y.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Johnson, Alexander Bryan. An Inquiry into the Nature of Value and of Capital, and into the
Operation of Government Loans, Banking Institutions and Private Credit, with an Appendix
Containing an Inquiry into the Causes which Regulate the Rate of Interest, and the Price of Stocks
(New York, John Forbes, private printer, 1813).
Johnson, Alexander Bryan. A Treatise on Language. Edited, with a Critical Essay on Johnson‘s
Philosophy of Language, by David Rynin (New York, Dover, 1968). (Includes Johnson‘s
The Philosophy of Human Knowledge, or a Treatise on Language, New York, G. & C. Carvill, 1828;
A Treatise on Language: or The Relation Which Words Bear to Things, New York, Harper &
Brothers, 1836; The Meaning of Words: Analyzed into Words and Unverbal Things, and Unverbal
Things Classified into Intellections, Sensations, and Emotions, New York, D. Appleton & Co, 1854.
First edited, with a Critical Essay on his Philosophy of Language, by David Rynin (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1947). First re-edition by David Rynin (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1959.)
Johnson, Alexander Bryan. Religion in Its Relation to the Present Life. In a Series of Lectures,
Delivered before the Young Men’s Association of Utica (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1841).
Other Relevant Works
Todd, Charles L. & Blackwood, Russell T. eds. Language and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial
Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson, September 8-9, 1967, Utica, New
York (New York & London, Greenwood, 1969), pp. 49-66.
Todd, Charles L. and Sonkin, Robert. Alexander Bryan Johnson: Philosophical Banker (Syracuse,
Syracuse University Press, 1977).
Further Reading
Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Andersen, Julie Tetel. Linguistics in America 1769-1924 (London & New York, Routledge, 1990).
Black, Max. ―Johnson‘s Language Theories in Modern Perspective,‖ in Language and Value:
Proceedings of the Centennial Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson,
September 8-9, 1967, Utica, New York, eds. Todd, Charles L. & Blackwood, Russell T. (New York
& London, Greenwood, 1969), pp. 49-66.
Drake, Stillman. ―Back from Limbo: The Rediscovery of Alexander Bryan Johnson,‖ in Language
and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan
Johnson, September 8-9, 1967, Utica, New York, eds. Todd, Charles L. & Blackwood, Russell T.
(New York & London, Greenwood, 1969), pp. 3-15.
Gordon, W. Terrence. A History of Semantics (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 1982).
Gustafsson, Lars. Sprache und Lüge: Drei sprachphilosophische Extremisten: Friedrich Nietzsche,
Alexander Bryan Johnson, Friz Mauthner (Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 1982).
Gustafsson, Lars. ―Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786-1867),‖ in Sprachphilosophie: An International
Handbook of Contemporary Research, vol. 1, eds. Dascal, Gerhardus, Lorenz, Meggle (Berlin &
New York, De Gruyter, 1992), pp. 393-401.
Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action (New York, Harcourt, 1939).
Joseph, John E. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics
(Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2002).
Kretzmann, Norman. ―History of Semantics,‖ in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards
(London, Macmillan, 1967), pp. 348-406.
Lee, Irving J. Language Habits in Human Affairs: An Introduction to General Semantics (New York,
Harper, 1941).
Lee, Irving J. The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York,
Harper, 1949).
Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London, Oxford University Press, 1958).
Nerlich, Brigitte. Semantic Theories in Europe, 1830-1930: From Etymology to Contextuality
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991).
Nerlich, Brigitte and David C. Clarke. Language, Action and Context: The Early History of
Pragmatics in Europe and America (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 1996).
Pedersen, Holger. The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the 19th Century (Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1931).
Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5, eds. Charles Hartshorne and
Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1934).
Richards, I. A. ―Review of Rynin: A Treatise‖, ISIS 38 (1948): pp. 251-252.
Todd, Charles L. and Blackwood, Russell T. Language and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial
Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson, September 8-9, 1967, Utica, New
York (New York & London, Greenwood, 1969).
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Ahti-Veikko J. Pietarinen
University of Helsinki