An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

The book argues that an empiricist theory of knowledge must be grounded in basic propositions—statements reporting immediate sensory experience, typically in first-person form—whose truth is guaranteed by the experience they describe. Russell then confronts the consequence: if knowledge rests on such private, momentary reports, how can it support the intersubjective truth claims of science? He rejects the logical atomist assumption that analysis can neatly separate language from psychology, insisting instead that meaning must be analysed through the speaker's beliefs and experiences. He also rejects behaviourist reductions of meaning, arguing that the psychological dimension of assertion cannot be eliminated without losing what sentences actually do.

Egocentric particulars are words like 'this,' 'here,' 'now,' and 'I' whose reference shifts with the context of utterance. Russell devotes sustained attention to them because they expose a tension at the heart of his project. Basic propositions, the foundation of empirical knowledge, are naturally expressed using egocentric terms—'this is red now.' But if truth is objective, a proposition whose meaning depends on who utters it and when cannot serve as a stable foundation. Russell attempts to resolve this by analysing egocentric particulars as constructions from more neutral descriptive content, but the solution remains incomplete. The problem anticipates later debates about indexicals and context-sensitivity in the philosophy of language.

Russell distinguishes two dimensions of an assertion. On the subjective side, a sentence expresses a state of the speaker—a belief that can exist without words, in animals or prelinguistic children. On the objective side, if true, it indicates a fact; if false, it attempts but fails to indicate one. This distinction allows Russell to analyse belief attributions without treating the embedded proposition as a straightforward component of the fact believed. The subjective side captures the psychological reality of assertion, while the objective side preserves the relation to truth. The distinction is Russell's attempt to keep psychology and logic in productive tension rather than collapsing one into the other, a balance that critics have found unstable.

Pascal Engel identifies two reasons for the book's relative neglect . The first is stylistic: the Inquiry, originally delivered as lectures, lacks the sharpness and polish of early essays like 'On Denoting' or The Problems of Philosophy. The second is philosophical atmosphere: readers accustomed to Russell as a founder of analytic philosophy—committed to logical analysis purified of psychological considerations—are disconcerted by the Inquiry's extensive use of psychological concepts in analysing meaning. Engel notes that the book mixes epistemological, linguistic, and ontological considerations in ways that resist the clean methodological identity many associate with analytic philosophy. This hybrid character, once a liability, now makes the book valuable for understanding Russell's development.

The Inquiry revises rather than repeats the logical atomist program of 1918. Russell no longer presents analysis as the construction of a logically perfect language mirroring atomic facts; instead, he begins from the actual conditions of empirical knowledge and asks what propositions could serve as its foundation. The basic propositions of the Inquiry are not the atomic propositions of logical atomism but first-person reports of immediate experience. This shift reflects Russell's growing recognition that the logical structure of language cannot be separated from the psychological processes of speakers. The book thus marks a transition from Russell's 'first philosophy' of logical analysis to a more epistemological and psychologically informed 'second philosophy,' as Engel characterizes it .

Russell delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940, and the book was published that same year by W. W. Norton in New York and George Allen & Unwin in London . A contemporary review in Philosophy of Science praised Russell's scope and systematic attack while noting his preference for an epistemology that begins from accepted science rather than Cartesian doubt . The reviewer also observed that Russell's suspicion of behaviourism gave him an advantage over logical positivists who had embraced it. Despite this respectful reception, the book never achieved the canonical status of Russell's earlier logical and epistemological works, and it remains less studied than The Problems of Philosophy or 'On Denoting.'