display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
15 ideas
| 5369 | It is rational to believe in reality, despite the lack of demonstrative reasons for it [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In the preceding chapter we agreed, though without being able to find demonstrative reasons, that it is rational to believe that our sense-data are signs of an independent reality. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: I wonder if Russell was the first to grasp this essential distinction. I suspect that three hundred years (1600-1900) were wasted in philosophy because they thought that everything rational had to be demonstrable. E.g. Hume on induction. |
| 5375 | Knowledge of truths applies to judgements; knowledge by acquaintance applies to sensations and things [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The word 'know' has two senses: the first is 'knowledge of truths', which is opposed to error, applies to judgements, and is knowing that something; the second is 'acquaintance', and is knowledge of things, particularly of sense-data. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: We can also add procedural knowledge ('knowing how'). The question for Russell is whether his 'knowledge by acquaintance' can ever qualify as knowledge on its own, without the intrusion of judgements. Does perception necessarily have content? |
| 21711 | Russell's 'multiple relations' theory says beliefs attach to ingredients, not to propositions [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
| Full Idea: The basic idea of Russell's new 'multiple relations' theory of belief was that belief does not relate an individual to a proposition composed of various individuals and universals, but rather relates the believer directly to those constituents. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Russell abandoned his commitment to propositions in 1908, and retained this new view until 1918. Wittgenstein gave Russell hell over this theory. This view made his 'congruence' account of the correspondence theory of truth possible. |
| 5427 | Truth is when a mental state corresponds to a complex unity of external constituents [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Judging or believing is a certain complex unity of which a mind is a constituent; if the remaining constituents, taken in the order which they have in the belief, form a complex unity, then the belief is true. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: The modern label of 'congruence' for this view of truth makes it clearer. We aim to get a complex unity of constituents in our minds which are in the same 'order' as the constituents in the world. It is a good proposal, but leaves 'facts' as a problem. |
| 6443 | Surprise is a criterion of error [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Surprise is a criterion of error. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: Russell is not too precise about this, but it is a nice point. Surprise is thwarted expectation, which implies prior misjudgement. |
| 21542 | Do incorrect judgements have non-existent, or mental, or external objects? [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Correct judgements have a transcendent object; but with regard to incorrect judgements, it remains to examine whether 1) the object is immanent, 2) there is no object, or 3) the object is transcendent. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.67) | |
| A reaction: Why is it that only Russell seems to have taken this problem seriously? Its solution gives the clearest possible indicator of how the mind relates to the world. |
| 22306 | To explain false belief we should take belief as relating to a proposition's parts, not to the whole thing [Russell] |
| Full Idea: To explain belief in what is false we shall have to regard what is called belief in a proposition as not a thought related to the proposition, but rather as a thought related to the constituents of the proposition. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Papers of 1906 [1906], V.321), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 40 '1906' | |
| A reaction: Russell proposed a new theory of judgement, in order to explain erroneous judgements, given that true propositions are identical with facts. Of course there might be errors about the constituents, as well as about their structure. Othello is his example. |
| 5425 | In order to explain falsehood, a belief must involve several terms, not two [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The relation involved in judging or believing must, if falsehood is to be duly allowed for, be taken to be a relation between several terms, not between two. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: His point is that if a belief relates to one object ('D's love for C') it will always be true. Russell is trying to explain what goes wrong when we believe a falsehood. It is not clear how the judgement 'x exists' involves several terms. |
| 6097 | The theory of error seems to need the existence of the non-existent [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is very difficult to deal with the theory of error without assuming the existence of the non-existent. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.3) | |
| A reaction: This problem really bothered Russell (and Plato). I suspect that it was a self-inflicted problem because at this point Russell had ceased to believe in propositions. If we accept propositions as intentional objects, they can be as silly as you like. |
| 21541 | The complexity of the content correlates with the complexity of the object [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Every property of the object seems to demand a strictly correlative property of the content, and the content, therefore, must have every complexity belonging to the object. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.55) | |
| A reaction: This claim gives a basis for his 'congruence' account of the correspondence theory of truth. It strikes me as false. If I talk of the 'red red robin', I don't mention the robin's feet. He ignores the psychological selection we make in abstraction. |
| 7531 | We don't assert private thoughts; the objects are part of what we assert [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I believe Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition 'Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high'; we do not assert the thought, which is a private psychological matter, but the object of the thought. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Letters to Frege [1902], 1904.12.12), quoted by Ray Monk - Bertrand Russell: Spirit of Solitude Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This would appear to be pretty much externalism about concepts, given that Russell would accept that other people know much more about Mont Blanc than he does, and their knowledge is included in what he asserts. |
| 5384 | A universal of which we are aware is called a 'concept' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A universal of which we are aware is called a 'concept'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: I am doubtful about this. Do children, and even animals, have a concept of 'my mother', without ever grasping the generalisation to 'his mother'? Is the word 'this' a non-universal concept? |
| 10583 | Abstraction principles identify a common property, which is some third term with the right relation [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The relations in an abstraction principle are always constituted by possession of a common property (which is imprecise as it relies on 'predicate'), ..so we say a common property of two terms is any third term to which both have the same relation. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §157) | |
| A reaction: This brings out clearly the linguistic approach of the modern account of abstraction, where the older abstractionism was torn between the ontology and the epistemology (that is, the parts of objects, or the appearances of them in the mind). |
| 10582 | The principle of Abstraction says a symmetrical, transitive relation analyses into an identity [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The principle of Abstraction says that whenever a relation with instances is symmetrical and transitive, then the relation is not primitive, but is analyzable into sameness of relation to some other term. ..This is provable and states a common assumption. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §157) | |
| A reaction: At last I have found someone who explains the whole thing clearly! Bertrand Russell was wonderful. See other ideas on the subject from this text, for a proper understanding of abstraction by equivalence. |
| 10584 | A certain type of property occurs if and only if there is an equivalence relation [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The possession of a common property of a certain type always leads to a symmetrical transitive relation. The principle of Abstraction asserts the converse, that such relations only spring from common properties of the above type. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §157) | |
| A reaction: The type of property is where only one term is applicable to it, such as the magnitude of a quantity, or the time of an event. So symmetrical and transitive relations occur if and only if there is a property of that type. |