39 ideas
| 21584 | A sense of timelessness is essential to wisdom [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Both in thought and in feeling, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 6) | |
| A reaction: A very rationalist and un-Heraclitean view of wisdom. This picture may give wisdom a bad name, if wise people are (at a minimum) at least expected to give good advice about real life. |
| 21572 | Philosophical disputes are mostly hopeless, because philosophers don't understand each other [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Explicit controversy is almost always fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 1) | |
| A reaction: Contemporaries don't even seem to read one another very much, especially these days, when there are thousands of professional philosophers. (If you are a professional, have you read all the works written by your colleagues and friends?) |
| 21571 | Philosophical systems are interesting, but we now need a more objective scientific philosophy [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The great systems of the past serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly worthy of study. But something different is required if philosophy is to become a science, and to aim at results independent of the tastes of the philosophers who advocate them. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], Pref) | |
| A reaction: An interesting product of this move in philosophy is (about sixty years later) the work of David Lewis, who set out to be precise and scientific, and ended up creating a very personal system. Why not a collaborative system? |
| 21574 | Hegel's confusions over 'is' show how vast systems can be built on simple errors [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's confusion of the 'is' of predication with the 'is' of identity ...is an example of how, for want of care at the start, vast and imposing systems of philosophy are built upon stupid and trivial confusions. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 2 n1) | |
| A reaction: [He explains the confusion in more detail in the note] Russell cites an English translation, and I am wondering how this occurs in the German. Plato has been accused of similar elementary blunders about properties. Russell treats Berkeley similarly. |
| 21587 | Philosophers sometimes neglect truth and distort facts to attain a nice system [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The desire for unadulterated truth is often obscured, in professional philosophers, by love of system: the one little fact which will not come inside the philosophical edifice has to be pushed and tortured until it seems to consent. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 8) | |
| A reaction: Bit of hypocrisy here. Russell was continually trying to find a system, grounded in physics and logic. Presumably his shifting views are indications of integrity, because he changes the system rather than the facts. |
| 21582 | Physicists accept particles, points and instants, while pretending they don't do metaphysics [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Physicists, ignorant and contemptuous of philosophy, have been content to assume their particles, points and instants in practice, while contending, with ironical politeness, that their concepts laid no claim to metaphysical validity. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably physicists are allowed to wave their hands and utter the word 'instrumentalism', and then get on with the job. They just have to ensure they never speculate about what is being measured. |
| 21573 | When problems are analysed properly, they are either logical, or not philosophical at all [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 2) | |
| A reaction: [All Lecture 2 discusses 'logical'] I think Bertie was getting carried away here. In his life's corpus he barely acknowledges the existence of ethics, or political philosophy, or aesthetics. He never even engages with 'objects' the way Aristotle does. |
| 18996 | A statement S is 'partly true' if it has some wholly true parts [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A statement S is 'partly true' insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 01.6) | |
| A reaction: He suggests that if we have rival theories, we agree that it is one or the other. And 'we may have pork for dinner, or human flesh' is partly true. |
| 19006 | An 'enthymeme' is an argument with an indispensable unstated assumption [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: An 'enthymeme' is a deductive argument with an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 11.1) |
| 18999 | y is only a proper part of x if there is a z which 'makes up the difference' between them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The principle of Supplementation says that y is properly part of x, only if a z exists that 'makes up the difference' between them. [note: that is, z is disjoint from y and sums with y to form x] | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) |
| 21588 | Logic gives the method of research in philosophy [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Logic gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics gives the method in physics. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 8) | |
| A reaction: I'm struck by how rarely philosophers actually prove anything. Mostly they just use the language of logic as a tool for disambiguation. Only a tiny handful of philosophers can actually create sustained and novel proofs. |
| 21586 | The logical connectives are not objects, but are formal, and need a context [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Such words as 'or' and 'not' are not names of definite objects, but are words that require a context in order to have a meaning. All of them are formal. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 7) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Wittgenstein's 1922 Tractatus in a footnote - presumably in a later edition than 1914] This is the most famous idea which Russell acquired from Wittgenstein. It was yet another step in his scaling down of ontology. |
| 19001 | 'Pegasus doesn't exist' is false without Pegasus, yet the absence of Pegasus is its truthmaker [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'Pegasus does not exist' has a paradoxical, self-undermining flavour. On the one hand, the empty name makes it untrue. But now, why is the name empty? Because Pegasus does not exist. 'Pegasus does not exist' is untrue because Pegasus does not exist. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.7 n20) | |
| A reaction: Beautiful! This is Yablo's reward for continuing to ask 'why?' after everyone else has stopped in bewilderment at the tricky phenomenon. |
| 21585 | The tortoise won't win, because infinite instants don't compose an infinitely long time [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The idea that an infinite number of instants make up an infinitely long time is not true, and therefore the conclusion that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise does not follow. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 6) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle spotted this, but didn't express it as clearly as Russell. |
| 13472 | Hilbert aimed to eliminate number from geometry [Hilbert, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: One of Hilbert's aims in 'The Foundations of Geometry' was to eliminate number [as measure of lengths and angles] from geometry. | |
| From: report of David Hilbert (Foundations of Geometry [1899]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 2 | |
| A reaction: Presumably this would particularly have to include the elimination of ratios (rather than actual specific lengths). |
| 9546 | Euclid axioms concerns possibilities of construction, but Hilbert's assert the existence of objects [Hilbert, by Chihara] |
| Full Idea: Hilbert's geometrical axioms were existential in character, asserting the existence of certain geometrical objects (points and lines). Euclid's postulates do not assert the existence of anything; they assert the possibility of certain constructions. | |
| From: report of David Hilbert (Foundations of Geometry [1899]) by Charles Chihara - A Structural Account of Mathematics 01.1 | |
| A reaction: Chihara says geometry was originally understood modally, but came to be understood existentially. It seems extraordinary to me that philosophers of mathematics can have become more platonist over the centuries. |
| 18742 | Hilbert's formalisation revealed implicit congruence axioms in Euclid [Hilbert, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| Full Idea: In his formal investigation of Euclidean geometry, Hilbert uncovered congruence axioms that implicitly played a role in Euclid's proofs but were not explicitly recognised. | |
| From: report of David Hilbert (Foundations of Geometry [1899]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 2 | |
| A reaction: The writers are offering this as a good example of the benefits of a precise and formal approach to foundational questions. It's hard to disagree, but dispiriting if you need a PhD in maths before you can start doing philosophy. |
| 18217 | Hilbert's geometry is interesting because it captures Euclid without using real numbers [Hilbert, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Hilbert's formulation of the Euclidean theory is of special interest because (besides being rigorously axiomatised) it does not employ the real numbers in the axioms. | |
| From: report of David Hilbert (Foundations of Geometry [1899]) by Hartry Field - Science without Numbers 3 | |
| A reaction: Notice that this job was done by Hilbert, and not by the fictionalist Hartry Field. |
| 19002 | A nominalist can assert statements about mathematical objects, as being partly true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If I am a nominalist non-Platonist, I think it is false that 'there are primes over 10', but I want to be able to say it like everyone else. I argue that this because the statement has a part that I do believe, a part that remains interestingly true. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.8) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously a key motivation for Yablo's book, as it reinforces his fictional view of abstract objects, but aims to capture the phenomena, by investigating what such sentences are 'about'. Admirable. |
| 21684 | Atomic facts may be inferrable from others, but never from non-atomic facts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps one atomic fact may sometimes be capable of being inferred from another, though I do not believe this to be the case; but in any case it cannot be inferred from premises no one of which is an atomic fact. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], p.48) | |
| A reaction: I prefer Russell's caution to Wittgenstein's dogmatism. I presume utterly simple facts give you nothing to work with. Hegel thought that you could infer new concepts from given concepts. |
| 22316 | A positive and negative fact have the same constituents; their difference is primitive [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It must not be supposed that a negative fact contains a constituent corresponding to the word 'not'. It contains no more constituents than a positive fact of the correlative positive form. The differenece between the two forms is ultimate and irreducible. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], VIII.279), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 41 'Neg' | |
| A reaction: ['Harvard Lectures'] The audience disliked this. How does one fact exclude the other fact? Potter asks whether absence is a fact, and whether an absence can be a truthmaker. |
| 21576 | With asymmetrical relations (before/after) the reduction to properties is impossible [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When we come to asymmetrical relations, such as before and after, greater and less etc., the attempt to reduce them to properties becomes obviously impossible. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 2) | |
| A reaction: The traditional Aristotelian reduction to properties is attributed by Russell to logic based on subject-predicate. As an example he cites being greater than as depending on more than the mere magnitudes of the entities. Direction of the relation. |
| 21575 | When we attribute a common quality to a group, we can forget the quality and just talk of the group [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When a group of objects have the similarity we are inclined to attribute to possession of a common quality, the membership of the group will serve all the purposes of the supposed common quality ...which need not be assumed to exist. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 2) | |
| A reaction: This is the earliest account I have found of properties being treated as sets of objects. It more or less coincides with the invention of set theory. I am reminded of Idea 9208. What is the bazzing property? It's what those three things have in common. |
| 18998 | Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Most relations obtain only between certain kinds of thing. To learn that x is a part of y, however, tells you nothing about x and y taken individually. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Too sweeping. To be a part of crowd you have to be a person. To be part of the sea you have to be wet. It might depend on whether composition is unrestricted. |
| 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. |
| 21583 | When sense-data change, there must be indistinguishable sense-data in the process [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In all cases of sense-data capable of gradual change, we may find one sense-datum indistinguishable from another, and that indistinguishable from a third, while yet the first and third are quite easily distinguishable. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 5) | |
| A reaction: This point is key to the sense-data theory, because it gives them independent existence, standing between reality and subjective experience. It is also the reason why they look increasingly implausible, if they may not be experienced. |
| 21577 | Empirical truths are particular, so general truths need an a priori input of generality [Russell] |
| Full Idea: All empirical evidence is of particular truths. Hence, if there is any knowledge of general truths at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is independent of empirical evidence. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 2) | |
| A reaction: Humean empiricists respond by being a sceptical of general truths. At this stage of his career Russell looks like a thoroughgoing rationalist, and he believes in the reality of universals, relations and propositions. He became more empirical later. |
| 19004 | Gettier says you don't know if you are confused about how it is true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: We know from Gettier that if you are right to regard Q as true, but you are sufficiently confused about HOW it is true - about how things stand with respect to its subject matter - then you don't know that Q. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to approach Gettier by focusing on the propositions being expressed, where his cases tend to focus on the literal wording of the sentences. What did the utterer mean by the sentences - not what did they appear to say. |
| 21579 | Objects are treated as real when they connect with other experiences in a normal way [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Objects of sense are called 'real' when they have the kind of connection with other objects of sense which experience has led us to regard as normal; when they fail this, they are called 'illusions'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 3) | |
| A reaction: This rests rather too much on the concept of 'normal', but offers an attractive coherence account of perception. Direct perceptions are often invoked by anti-coherentists, but I think coherence is just as much needed in that realm. |
| 21578 | Global scepticism is irrefutable, but can't replace our other beliefs, and just makes us hesitate [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Universal scepticism, though logically irrefutable, is practically barren; it can only, therefore, give a certain flavour of hesitancy to our beliefs, and cannot be used to substitute other beliefs for them. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 3) | |
| A reaction: Spot on. There is no positive evidence for scepticism, so must just register it as the faintest of possibilities, like the existence of secretive fairies. |
| 19007 | A theory need not be true to be good; it should just be true about its physical aspects [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A physical theory need not be true to be good, Field has argued, and I agree. All we ask of it truth-wise is that its physical implications should be true, or, in my version, that it should be true about the physical. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: Yablo is, of course, writing a book here about the concept of 'about'. This seems persuasive. The internal terminology of the theory isn't committed to anything - it is only at its physical periphery (Quine) that the ontology matters. |
| 18993 | If sentences point to different evidence, they must have different subject-matter [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'All crows are black' cannot say quite the same as 'All non-black things are non-crows', for the two are confirmed by different evidence. Subject matter looks to be the distinguishing feature. One is about crows, the other not. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: You might reply that they are confirmed by the same evidence (but only in its unobtainable totality). The point, I think, is that the sentences invite you to start your search in different places. |
| 19003 | Most people say nonblack nonravens do confirm 'all ravens are black', but only a tiny bit [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The standard response to the raven paradox is to say that a nonblack nonraven does confirm that all ravens are black. But it confirms it just the teeniest little bit - not as much as a black raven does. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 06.5) | |
| A reaction: It depends on the proportion between the relevant items. How do you confirm 'all the large animals in this zoo are mammals'? Check for size every animal which is obviously not a mammal? |
| 6416 | Other minds seem to exist, because their testimony supports realism about the world [Russell, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: Russell gives an argument that other minds exist, because if one is entitled to believe this, then one can rely on the testimony of others, which, jointly with one's own experience, will give powerful support to the view that there a real spatial world. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 3) by A.C. Grayling - Russell Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: I rather like this argument. It is quite close to Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, which also seems to refute scepticism about other minds. I think Russell's line, using testimony, knowledge and realism, may be better than Wittgenstein's. |
| 18992 | Sentence-meaning is the truth-conditions - plus factors responsible for them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, AND the factors responsible for that truth-value. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The thesis of his book, which I welcome. I'm increasingly struck by the way in which much modern philosophy settles for a theory being complete, when actually further explanation is possible. Exhibit A is functional explanations. Why that function? |
| 18994 | The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Assertive content - what a sentence is heard as saying - can be at quite a distance from compositional content. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the obvious reason why semantics cannot be entirely compositional, since there is nearly always a contextual component which then has to be added. In the case of irony, the compositional content is entirely reversed. |
| 18997 | Truth-conditions as subject-matter has problems of relevance, short cut, and reversal [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If the subject-matter of S is how it is true, we get three unfortunate results: S has truth-value in worlds where its subject-matter draws a blank; learning what S is about tells you its truth-value; negating S changes what it's about. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 02.8) | |
| A reaction: Together these make fairly devastating objections to the truth-conditions (in possible worlds) theory of meaning. The first-objection concerns when S is false |
| 19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The idea that negation is, or can be, a cancellation device raises an interesting question. What does one do to wipe the slate clean after an improper assertion? Not-A is too strong; it reverses our stand on A rather than nullifying it. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 09.8) | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing a remark of Strawson 1952] It seems that 'not' has two meanings or uses: a weak use of 'nullifying' an assertion, and a strong use of 'reversing' an assertion. One could do both: 'that's not right; in fact, it's just the opposite'. |
| 21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
| Full Idea: There is no reason in experience to suppose that there are times as opposed to events: the events, ordered by the relations of simultaneity and succession, are all that experience provides. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 4) | |
| A reaction: We experience events, but also have quite an accurate sense of how much time has passed during the occurrence of events. If asked how much time has lapsed, why don't we say '32 events'? How do we distinguish long events from short ones? |