display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 13468 | Russell started philosophy of language, by declaring some plausible sentences to be meaningless [Russell, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: Russell inadvertently started the philosophy of language by declaring that some sentences (like "Everything is identical with itself") that seem utterly in order are meaningless and express no proposition. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 2 | |
| A reaction: The normal candidate for this honour would be Frege, with the sense/reference distinction, but this idea sounds right to me. Declaring that some sentences are 'meaningless' really gets people excited and interested. I like the example! |
| 5388 | Every understood proposition is composed of constituents with which we are acquainted [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This is somewhere between Hume and logical positivism, but it concerns understanding (not meaning) of propositions (not sentences), and its acquaintance can be of universals as well as of sense experience. I like Russell's version more than Ayer's. |
| 5387 | It is pure chance which descriptions in a person's mind make a name apply to an individual [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is a matter of chance which characteristics of a man's appearance will come into a friend's mind when he thinks of Bismarck; thus the description in the friend's mind is accidental; he knows the various descriptions all apply to the same entity. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be an internalist account of reference, later called the 'bundle' theory of reference and associated with John Searle. It was attacked by Kripke. Personally I side, unfashionably, with Russell. |
| 21724 | The main aim of the multiple relations theory of judgement was to dispense with propositions [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
| Full Idea: While the multiple relation theory (of belief, or of judgement) is nominally an account of belief and judgement, the emphasis in the account is on eliminating the need for propositions as objects of rational belief or judgement. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912]) by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 7.2 | |
| A reaction: The idea is that the mind relates directly with the ingredients of the proposition, and with the universals (such as relations) which connect them. He cuts out the middle man, just as he cut out sense-data, for similar reasons of economy. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |