23 ideas
| 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'. |
| 16484 | There are four experiences that lead us to talk of 'some' things [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Propositions about 'some' arise, in practice, in four ways: as generalisations of disjunctions; when an instance suggests compatibility of terms we thought incompatible; as steps to a generalisation; and in cases of imperfect memory. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Modern logicians seem to have no interest in the question Russell is investigating here, but I love his attempt, however vague the result, to connect logic to real experience and thought. |
| 16486 | The physical world doesn't need logic, but the mental world does [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The non-mental world can be completely described without the use of any logical word, …but when it comes to the mental world, there are facts which cannot be mentioned without the use of logical words. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: He adds that logical words are not needed for physics, but are needed for psychology. I love Russell's interest in the psychology of logic (in defiance of the anti-psychologism of Frege). See also the ideas of Robert Hanna. |
| 2947 | Questions wouldn't lead anywhere without the law of excluded middle [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Without the law of excluded middle, we could not ask the questions that give rise to discoveries. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], c.p.88) |
| 16480 | A disjunction expresses indecision [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A disjunction is the verbal expression of indecision, or, if a question, of the desire to reach a decision. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Russell is fishing here for Grice's conversational implicature. If you want to assert a simple proposition, you don't introduce it into an irrelevant disjunction, because that would have a particular expressive purpose. |
| 16479 | 'Or' expresses hesitation, in a dog at a crossroads, or birds risking grabbing crumbs [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Psychologically, 'or' corresponds to a state of hesitation. A dog waits at a fork in the road, to see which way you are going. For crumbs on a windowsill, birds behave in a manner we would express by 'shall I be brave, or go hungry?'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: I love two facts here - first, that Russell wants to link the connective to the psychology of experience, and second, that a great logician wants to connect his logic to the minds of animals. |
| 16481 | 'Or' expresses a mental state, not something about the world [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When we assert 'p or q' we are in a state which is derivative from two previous states, and we express this state, not something about the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: His example: at a junction this road or that road goes to Oxford, but the world only contains the roads, not some state of 'this or that road'. He doesn't deny that in one sense 'p or q' tells you something about the world. |
| 16487 | Maybe the 'or' used to describe mental states is not the 'or' of logic [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It might be contended that, in describing what happens when a man believes 'p or q', the 'or' that we must use is not the same as the 'or' of logic. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the general verdict on Russell's enquiries in this chapter, but I love any attempt, however lacking in rigour etc., to connect formal logic to how we think, and thence to the world. |
| 16483 | Disjunction may also arise in practice if there is imperfect memory. [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Another situation in which a disjunction may arise is practice is imperfect memory. 'Either Brown or Jones told me that'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) |
| 7746 | We don't normally think of names as having senses (e.g. we don't give definitions of them) [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If Tully=Cicero is synthetic, the names must have different senses, which seems implausible, for we don't normally think of proper names as having senses in the way that predicates do (we do not, e.g., give definitions of proper names). | |
| From: John Searle (Proper Names [1958], p.89) | |
| A reaction: It is probably necessary to prize apart the question of whether Tully 'has' (intrinsically) a sense, from whether we think of Tully in that way. Stacks of books have appeared about this one, since Kripke. |
| 7747 | How can a proper name be correlated with its object if it hasn't got a sense? [Searle] |
| Full Idea: It seems that a proper name could not have a reference unless it did have a sense, for how, unless the name has a sense, is it to be correlated with the object? | |
| From: John Searle (Proper Names [1958], p.91) | |
| A reaction: This might (just) be the most important question ever asked in modern philosophy, since it provoked Kripke into answering it, by giving a social, causal, externalist account of how names (and hence lots of language) actually work. But Searle has a point. |
| 7748 | 'Aristotle' means more than just 'an object that was christened "Aristotle"' [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle being identical with an object that was originally christened will not suffice, for the force of "Aristotle" is greater than the force of 'identical with an object named "Aristotle"', for not just any object named "Aristotle" will do. | |
| From: John Searle (Proper Names [1958], p.93) | |
| A reaction: This anticipates Kripke's proposal to base reference on baptism. I remain unsure about how rigid a designation of Aristotle could be, in a possible world where his father died young, and he became an illiterate soldier who hates philosophy. |
| 7749 | Reference for proper names presupposes a set of uniquely referring descriptions [Searle] |
| Full Idea: To use a proper name referringly is to presuppose the truth of certain uniquely referring descriptive statements. ...Names are pegs on which to hang descriptions. | |
| From: John Searle (Proper Names [1958], p.94) | |
| A reaction: This 'cluster' view of Searle's has become notorious, but I think one could at least try to mount a defence. The objection to Searle is that none of the descriptions are necessary, unlike just being the named object. |
| 7750 | Proper names are logically connected with their characteristics, in a loose way [Searle] |
| Full Idea: If asked whether or not proper names are logically connected with characteristics of the object to which they refer, the answer is 'yes, in a loose sort of way'. | |
| From: John Searle (Proper Names [1958], p.96) | |
| A reaction: It seems to be inviting trouble to assert that a connection is both 'logical' and 'loose'. Clearly Searle has been reading too much later Wittgenstein. This is probably the weakest point in Searle's proposal, which brought a landslide of criticism. |
| 16475 | A 'heterological' predicate can't be predicated of itself; so is 'heterological' heterological? Yes=no! [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A predicate is 'heterological' when it cannot be predicated of itself; thus 'long' is heterological because it is not a long word, but 'short' is homological. So is 'heterological' heterological? Either answer leads to a contradiction. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: [Grelling's Paradox] Yes: 'heterological' is heterological because it isn't heterological; No: it isn't, because it is. Russell says we therefore need a hierarchy of languages (types), and the word 'word' is outside the system. |
| 22076 | Being is only perceptible to itself as becoming [Schelling] |
| Full Idea: Being is only perceptible to itself in the state of becoming. | |
| From: Friedrich Schelling (Of Human Freedom [1809], p.403), quoted by Jean-François Courtine - Schelling p.90 | |
| A reaction: Is the Enlightenment the era of Being, and the Romantic era that of Becoming? They like process, fluidity, even chaos. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 22074 | We must show that the whole of nature, because it is effective, is grounded in freedom [Schelling] |
| Full Idea: What is required is to show that everything that is effective (nature, the world of things) is grounded in activity, life, freedom. | |
| From: Friedrich Schelling (Of Human Freedom [1809], p.351), quoted by Jean-François Courtine - Schelling | |
| A reaction: I take the ancestor of this view of nature to be the monads of Leibniz, as the active principle in nature. Because this is an idealist view, it starts with the absolute freedom of the Self, and presumably sees nature in its own image. |
| 16476 | For simple words, a single experience can show that they are true [Russell] |
| Full Idea: So long as a man avoids words which are condensed inductions (such as 'dog'), and confines himself to words that can describe a single experience, it is possible for a single experience to show that his words are true. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: One might question whether a line can be drawn between the inductive and the non-inductive in this way. I'm inclined just to say that the simpler the proposition the less room there is for error in confirming it. |
| 16485 | Perception can't prove universal generalisations, so abandon them, or abandon empiricism? [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Propositions about 'some' may be proved empirically, but propositions about 'all' are difficult to know, and can't be proved unless such propositions are in the premisses. These aren't in perception, so forgo general propositions, or abandon empiricism? | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously related to the difficulty empiricists have with induction. You could hardly persuade logicians to give up the universal quantifier, because it is needed in mathematics. Do we actually know any universal empirical truths? |
| 22075 | Only idealism has given us the genuine concept of freedom [Schelling] |
| Full Idea: Until the discovery of idealism, the genuine concept of freedom has been missing from every modern system, whether it be that of Leibniz or of Spinoza. | |
| From: Friedrich Schelling (Of Human Freedom [1809], p.345), quoted by Jean-François Courtine - Schelling p.87 | |
| A reaction: Spinoza denied free will, and Leibniz fudged it. Evidently more medieval theological accounts were not good enough. I presume Fichte is Schelling's hero, and he seems to see freedom as axiomatic about the Self. |
| 16478 | A mother cat is paralysed if equidistant between two needy kittens [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I once, to test the story of Buridan's Ass, put a cat exactly half-way between her two kittens, both too young to move: for a time she found the disjunction paralysing. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Buridan's Ass is said to have starved between two equal piles of hay. Reason can't be the tie-breaker; reason obviously says 'choose one!', but intellectualism demands a reason for the one you choose. |