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Victoria, Lady WelbyVictoria, Lady Welby (also styled the Hon. Victoria, Lady Welby-Gregory; 1837–1912) was a prominent English philosopher.
Life and careerWelby was born in 1837 to the Hon. Charles and Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, and christened Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley. Her early life is poorly recorded; she certainly spent a great deal of time travelling, for she wrote a journal describing her experiences around the world; in fact she was in Beirut when her parents died. In 1863 she married Sir William Earle Welby-Gregory 4th Baronet (1829–1898), a politician, and they lived together at Denton Manor in Lincolnshire. Welby had had very little formal education, but she began to invite prominent thinkers to the Manor, and to correspond with them, educating herself through mixing and conversing with some of the greatest thinkers of her day. She started out in the field of theology, especially the interpretation of the Christian scriptures, and this was the subject of her first book, Links and Clues (1881). By the late 19th century, however, this interest had developed into the more philosophical arena, and she had begun writing scholarly papers on meaning, which were published in the leading academic journals 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. In the same year she contributed a long article on “Significs” to the EncyclopFdia Britannica (11th ed.); this was the name that she had given to her theory of meaning. She also wrote on the reality of time, publishing papers and a book, Time As Derivative (1907). The first of her books, What Is Meaning?, was reviewed for The Nation by the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce, and this led to a correspondence between them which lasted six years (published as Semiotics and Significs in 1977). Welby and Peirce had a good deal in common philosophically, having similar approaches to the problem of meaning, and developing similar theories. Another of Welby's correspondences was with C. K. Ogden. He had contacted her in 1910, and his work was very much influenced by her theories, though he tried to minimise this in his book The Meaning of Meaning (1923). She also corresponded with William James, F. C. S. Schiller , Giovanni Vailati , Mario Calderoni , Bertrand Russell, and F. Cook Wilson . She also wrote poetry and plays. Her varied activities included founding the Sociological Society of Great Britain and the Decorative Needlework Society , and writing poetry and plays. She served as Maid of Honour to her godmother, Queen Victoria. She had three children. Welby died in 1912. Significs
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 held this term to be preferable to ‘semiotics’ and ‘semantics’, because they 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 relationships between them and ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and social values. She divided sense into three main kinds: sense, meaning, and significance. these, she argued, corresponded to three levels of consciousness, which she called: planetary, solar, and cosmic respectively, and which she explained in terms of a sort of Darwinian theory of evolution. Welby's writings and theories on signification in general formed one approach among a number that were current from the 1890s onwards, and which foreshadowed contemporary semantics, semiotics, and semiology. She had a direct effect on the Significs group , most of whose members are Dutch, including Gerrit Mannoury and Frederik van Eeden , and so indirectly on L. E. J. Brouwer and the founding of intuitionistic logic. Bibliography & referencesPrimary texts
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