14 ideas
| 21560 | Any linguistic expression may lack meaning when taken out of context [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Any sentence, a single word, or a single component phrase, may often be quite devoid of meaning when separated from its context. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Substitutional Classes and Relations [1906], p.165) | |
| A reaction: Contextualism is now extremely fashionable, in philosophy of language and in epistemology. Here Russell is looking for a contextual way to define classes [so says Lackey, the editor]. |
| 21561 | 'The number one is bald' or 'the number one is fond of cream cheese' are meaningless [Russell] |
| Full Idea: 'The number one is bald' or 'the number one is fond of cream cheese' are, I maintain, not merely silly remarks, but totally devoid of meaning. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Substitutional Classes and Relations [1906], p.166) | |
| A reaction: He connects this to paradoxes in set theory, such as the assertion that 'the class of human beings is a human being' (which is the fallacy of composition). |
| 18130 | Axiom of Reducibility: there is always a function of the lowest possible order in a given level [Russell, by Bostock] |
| Full Idea: Russell's Axiom of Reducibility states that to any propositional function of any order in a given level, there corresponds another which is of the lowest possible order in the level. There corresponds what he calls a 'predicative' function of that level. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Substitutional Classes and Relations [1906]) by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 8.2 |
| 11064 | Classes can be reduced to propositional functions [Russell, by Hanna] |
| Full Idea: Russell held that classes can be reduced to propositional functions. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by Robert Hanna - Rationality and Logic 2.4 | |
| A reaction: The exact nature of a propositional function is disputed amongst Russell scholars (though it is roughly an open sentence of the form 'x is red'). |
| 6407 | The class of classes which lack self-membership leads to a contradiction [Russell, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: The class of teaspoons isn't a teaspoon, so isn't a member of itself; but the class of non-teaspoons is a member of itself. The class of all classes which are not members of themselves is a member of itself if it isn't a member of itself! Paradox. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by A.C. Grayling - Russell Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: A very compressed version of Russell's famous paradox, often known as the 'barber' paradox. Russell developed his Theory of Types in an attempt to counter the paradox. Frege's response was to despair of his own theory. |
| 10418 | Type theory seems an extreme reaction, since self-exemplification is often innocuous [Swoyer on Russell] |
| Full Idea: Russell's reaction to his paradox (by creating his theory of types) seems extreme, because many cases of self-exemplification are innocuous. The property of being a property is itself a property. | |
| From: comment on Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by Chris Swoyer - Properties 7.5 | |
| A reaction: Perhaps it is not enough that 'many cases' are innocuous. We are starting from philosophy of mathematics, where precision is essentially. General views about properties come later. |
| 10047 | Russell's improvements blocked mathematics as well as paradoxes, and needed further axioms [Russell, by Musgrave] |
| Full Idea: Unfortunately, Russell's new logic, as well as preventing the deduction of paradoxes, also prevented the deduction of mathematics, so he supplemented it with additional axioms, of Infinity, of Choice, and of Reducibility. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by Alan Musgrave - Logicism Revisited §2 | |
| A reaction: The first axiom seems to be an empirical hypothesis, and the second has turned out to be independent of logic and set theory. |
| 23478 | Type theory means that features shared by different levels cannot be expressed [Morris,M on Russell] |
| Full Idea: Russell's theory of types avoided the paradoxes, but it had the result that features common to different levels of the hierarchy become uncapturable (since any attempt to capture them would involve a predicate which disobeyed the hierarchy restrictions). | |
| From: comment on Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by Michael Morris - Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus 2H |
| 21718 | Ramified types can be defended as a system of intensional logic, with a 'no class' view of sets [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
| Full Idea: A defence of the ramified theory of types comes in seeing it as a system of intensional logic which includes the 'no class' account of sets, and indeed the whole development of mathematics, as just a part. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 6.1 | |
| A reaction: So Linsky's basic project is to save logicism, by resting on intensional logic (rather than extensional logic and set theory). I'm not aware that Linsky has acquired followers for this. Maybe Crispin Wright has commented? |
| 18126 | A set does not exist unless at least one of its specifications is predicative [Russell, by Bostock] |
| Full Idea: The idea is that the same set may well have different canonical specifications, i.e. there may be different ways of stating its membership conditions, and so long as one of these is predicative all is well. If none are, the supposed set does not exist. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 8.1 |
| 18128 | Russell is a conceptualist here, saying some abstracta only exist because definitions create them [Russell, by Bostock] |
| Full Idea: It is a conceptualist approach that Russell is relying on. ...The view is that some abstract objects ...exist only because they are definable. It is the definition that would (if permitted) somehow bring them into existence. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908]) by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 8.1 | |
| A reaction: I'm suddenly thinking that predicativism is rather interesting. Being of an anti-platonist persuasion about abstract 'objects', I take some story about how we generate them to be needed. Psychological abstraction seems right, but a bit vague. |
| 18124 | Vicious Circle says if it is expressed using the whole collection, it can't be in the collection [Russell, by Bostock] |
| Full Idea: The Vicious Circle Principle says, roughly, that whatever involves, or presupposes, or is only definable in terms of, all of a collection cannot itself be one of the collection. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (Mathematical logic and theory of types [1908], p.63,75) by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 8.1 | |
| A reaction: This is Bostock's paraphrase of Russell, because Russell never quite puts it clearly. The response is the requirement to be 'predicative'. Bostock emphasises that it mainly concerns definitions. The Principle 'always leads to hierarchies'. |
| 21562 | There is no complexity without relations, so no propositions, and no truth [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Relations in intension are of the utmost importance to philosophy and philosophical logic, since they are essential to complexity, and thence to propositions, and thence to the possibility of truth and falsehood. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Substitutional Classes and Relations [1906], p.174) | |
| A reaction: Should we able to specify the whole of reality, if we have available to us objects, properties and relations? There remains indeterminate 'stuff', when it does not compose objects. There are relations between pure ideas. |
| 18284 | Particulars can be verified or falsified, but general statements can only be falsified (conclusively) [Popper] |
| Full Idea: Whereas particular reality statements are in principle completely verifiable or falsifiable, things are different for general reality statements: they can indeed be conclusively falsified, they can acquire a negative truth value, but not a positive one. | |
| From: Karl Popper (Two Problems of Epistemology [1932], p.256), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 18 'Laws' | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a logician's approach to science, but I prefer to look at coherence, where very little is actually conclusive, and one tinkers with the theory instead. |