display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
7 ideas
| 5420 | Truth is a property of a belief, but dependent on its external relations, not its internal qualities [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal quality of the beliefs. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: Beliefs can have an intrinsic property of subjective certainty, but Russell is right that that is not enough. So is truth a property or a relation? |
| 6442 | Truth belongs to beliefs, not to propositions and sentences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Truth and falsehood both belong primarily to beliefs, and only derivatively to propositions and sentences. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure why a proposition which is date/place stamped ('it is raining, here and now') could not be considered a truth, even if no one believed it. Is not the proposition 'squares have four sides' true? |
| 5419 | Truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements, so a world of mere matter would contain no truth or falsehood. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: Can it be beliefs AND statements? What about propositions? All that matters here is to establish that truth is a feature of certain mental states. This makes possible my slogan that "the brain is a truth-machine". Out there are the 'facts'. |
| 14102 | What is true or false is not mental, and is best called 'propositions' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I hold that what is true or false is not in general mental, and requiring a name for the true or false as such, this name can scarcely be other than 'propositions'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is the Fregean and logicians' dream that that there is some fixed eternal realm of the true and the false. I think true and false concern the mental. We can talk about the 'facts' which are independent of minds, but not the 'truth'. |
| 5784 | In its primary and formal sense, 'true' applies to propositions, not beliefs [Russell] |
| Full Idea: We call a belief true when it is belief in a true proposition, ..but it is to propositions that the primary formal meanings of 'truth' and 'falsehood' apply. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (On Propositions: What they are, and Meaning [1919], §IV) | |
| A reaction: I think this is wrong. A proposition such as 'it is raining' would need a date-and-time stamp to be a candidate for truth, and an indexical statement such as 'I am ill' would need to be asserted by a person. Of course, books can contain unread truths. |
| 5417 | A good theory of truth must make falsehood possible [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A good theory of truth must be such as to admit of its opposite, falsehood. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.12) |
| 16477 | Asserting not-p is saying p is false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you do what a logician would call 'asserting not-p', you are saying 'p is false'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is presumably classical logic. If we could label p as 'undetermined' (a third truth value), then 'not-p' might equally mean 'undetermined'. |