display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
18 ideas
| 5431 | Knowledge cannot be precisely defined, as it merges into 'probable opinion' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: 'Knowledge' is not a precise conception: it merges into 'probable opinion', and so a very precise definition should not be sought. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This announcement comes as a relief, after endless attempts (mainly by American academics) to give watertight, carefully worded definitions. It seems to me undeniable that what we will accept as knowledge is partly a matter of social negotiation. |
| 16482 | All our knowledge (if verbal) is general, because all sentences contain general words [Russell] |
| Full Idea: All our knowledge about the world, in so far as it is expressed in words, is more or less general, because every sentence contains at least one word that is not a proper name, and all such words are general. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: I really like this, especially because it addresses the excessive reliance of some essentialists on sortals, categories and natural kinds, instead of focusing on the actual physical essences of individual objects. |
| 6430 | In epistemology we should emphasis the continuity between animal and human minds [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me desirable in the theory of knowledge to emphasise the continuity between animal and human minds. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: I strongly agree with this, mainly because it avoids overemphasis on language in epistemology. It doesn't follow that animals know a lot, and there is a good case for saying that they don't actually 'know' anything, despite having true beliefs. |
| 5780 | The three questions about belief are its contents, its success, and its character [Russell] |
| Full Idea: There are three issues about belief: 1) the content which is believed, 2) the relation of the content to its 'objective' - the fact which makes it true or false, and 3) the element which is belief, as opposed to consideration or doubt or desire. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (On Propositions: What they are, and Meaning [1919], §III) | |
| A reaction: The correct answers to the questions (trust me) are that propositions are the contents, the relation aimed at is truth, which is a 'metaphysical ideal' of correspondence to facts, and belief itself is an indefinable feeling. See Hume, Idea 2208. |
| 5426 | Belief relates a mind to several things other than itself [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A belief or judgement relates a mind to several things other than itself. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: Presumably we must say that if I believe that (say) 'x exists', this is relating x to the universal 'exists'. If so, Russell's point becomes a bit of a tautology. We believe propositions, which are combinations of concepts, so are multiple. |
| 5366 | We have an 'instinctive' belief in the external world, prior to all reflection [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We find a belief in an independent external world ready in ourselves as soon as we begin to reflect: it is what may be called an 'instinctive' belief. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: Somewhere Hume calls this a 'natural belief', and it is fairly central to his idea that most of our beliefs are built up fairly mechanically by associations. I am tempted to ask whether such things even count as beliefs, if they are so uncritical. |
| 17637 | The most obvious beliefs are not infallible, as other obvious beliefs may conflict [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Even where there is the highest degree of obviousness, we cannot assume that we are infallible - a sufficient conflict with other obvious propositions may lead us to abandon our belief, as in the case of a hallucination afterwards recognised as such. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Regressive Method for Premises in Mathematics [1907], p.279) | |
| A reaction: This approach to fallibilism seems to arise from the paradox that undermined Frege's rather obvious looking axioms. After Peirce and Russell, fallibilism has become a secure norm of modern thought. |
| 5359 | Descartes showed that subjective things are the most certain [Russell] |
| Full Idea: By showing that subjective things are the most certain, Descartes performed a great service to philosophy. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: This praise comes from an empiricist, who has just said that 'sense-data' are the most certain things. I presume that animals are more certain of the world than they are of subjective things. In fact, probably on philosophers agree with Russell. |
| 4758 | Naïve realism leads to physics, but physics then shows that naïve realism is false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false, therefore it is false. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], p.13) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to agree with this, though once you have gone off and explored representation and sense data you may be driven back to naïve realism again. |
| 21537 | I assume we perceive the actual objects, and not their 'presentations' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I prefer to advocate ...that the object of a presentation is the actual external object itself, and not any part of the presentation at all. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.33) | |
| A reaction: Although I am a fan of the robust realism usually favoured by Russell, I think he is wrong. I take Russell to be frightened that once you take perception to be of 'presentations' rather than things, there is a slippery slope to anti-realism. Not so. |
| 5377 | 'Acquaintance' is direct awareness, without inferences or judgements [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We shall say we have 'acquaintance' with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: Although Russell understands the difficulty of precise distinctions here, he implies that some knowledge is directly knowable, although truth only enters at the stage of judgement. Personally I would suggest that pure acquaintance is not knowledge. |
| 6510 | Russell (1912) said phenomena only resemble reality in abstract structure [Russell, by Robinson,H] |
| Full Idea: Russell held in 'Problems of Philosophy' that the physical world resembles the phenomenal only in abstract structure. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912]) by Howard Robinson - Perception VII.5 | |
| A reaction: Russell's problem is that he then requires full-blown and elaborate 'inferences' to get from the abstract structure to some sort of 'theory' of reality, but our experience seems much more direct, even if it isn't actually 'naïve'. |
| 5372 | There is no reason to think that objects have colours [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is quite gratuitous to suppose that physical objects have colours. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This has always seemed to me self-evident, from the day I started to study philosophy. I cannot make sense of serious attempts to defend direct (naïve) realism. Colour is a brilliant trick of natural selection for extracting environmental information. |
| 21580 | Science condemns sense-data and accepts matter, but a logical construction must link them [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Men of science condemn immediate data as 'merely subjective', while maintaining the truths of physics from those data. ...The only justification possible for this must be one which exhibits matter as a logical construction from sense-data. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 4) | |
| A reaction: Since we blatantly aren't doing logic when we stare out of the window, this aspires to finding something like the 'logical form' of perception. |
| 6466 | Where possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics [1914], §VI) | |
| A reaction: This seems to represent Russell's first move (in 1914) into what looks like phenomenalism. One might ask what is the difference between 'logical constructions' and 'inferred entities'. The latter appear to have unity, so I prefer them. |
| 6418 | Russell rejected phenomenalism because it couldn't account for causal relations [Russell, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: Russell reverted to realism when he recognised that the notion of causality is problematic for phenomenalism; things in the world seem to affect one another causally in ways that are difficult to account for properly by mere reports of sense-experiences. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Matter [1927]) by A.C. Grayling - Russell Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This is very interesting, and doesn't seem to have been enough to make A.J. Ayer eschew phenomenalism (Idea 5170). Once your metaphysics becomes realist (like Russell), your account of perception and objects has to change too. |
| 5373 | 'Idealism' says that everything which exists is in some sense mental [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We shall understand 'idealism' to be the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate whatever can be known to exist, must be in some sense mental. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: The interesting thing here is the phrase 'in some sense', which takes on a new light when we begin once against to take seriously ideas such as panpsychism. If the boundary between mind and brain is blurred, so is that between realism and idealism. |
| 5362 | It is not illogical to think that only myself and my mental events exist [Russell] |
| Full Idea: No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: The only real attempt to meet this challenge is Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, which tried to show that it would be a logical impossibility to speak a language if there were no other minds. Personally, I am with Russell. |