The Concept of Incorrigibility

Extract

In the last thirty-five years philosophers have often referred to corrigible and incorrigible statements or judgements. This usage probably began with the Inaugural lecture of the Wykeham Professor of logic at Oxford University on 5 March, 1936, which was called ‘Truth and Corrigibility’ and discussed the theory that ‘all judgements are corrigible'. Price did not say there that he himself invented this usage. On the contrary, he said that “it is maintained by many philosophers that all judgements are corrigible”. But he gave no reference to support this statement; and it seems that in fact only Bradley preceded him in writing of a ‘corrigible statement', and Bradley did so only in a single (though thrice repeated) paragraph, once taken up by Russell. The effective disseminator of the notion was probably Price himself.

The Oxford English Dictionary in 1893, when its C volume appeared, knew of no such thing as a corrigible judgement or statement. The possible owners of corrigibility then were things, men, disorders, votes, faults, weaknesses, passions, abuses, dispositions, inclinations, offenders, sinners, and necks. (“Bending down his corrigible neck”, Antony and Cleopatra, 4, 14, 74).