33 ideas
6420 | Only by analysing is progress possible in philosophy [Russell] |
Full Idea: I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible, …for example, by analysing physics and perception, the problem of mind and matter can be completely solved. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: I don't share his confidence in the second part of this, but I subscribe to the maxim that 'analsis is the path to wisdom'. It is a very western view, and lots of people (mostly of a mystical disposition) hate it, but I see no better path. |
6432 | Analysis gives new knowledge, without destroying what we already have [Russell] |
Full Idea: It seems to me evident that, as in the case of impure water, analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: I agree. On the whole, opponents of analysis are sentimental mystics who are reluctant to think carefully about life. I'm not sure what careful and concentrated thought is capable of, apart from analysis. |
6437 | The theory of types makes 'Socrates and killing are two' illegitimate [Russell] |
Full Idea: 'Socrates and killing are two' would be an illegitimate sentence according to the doctrine of types. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
A reaction: This nicely shows how Ryle's notion of a 'category mistake', although it is a commonsense observation of bogus reasoning, arises out of Russell's logical analysis of sets. Of course, the theory of types has its critics. |
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? |
6436 | I gradually replaced classes with properties, and they ended as a symbolic convenience [Russell] |
Full Idea: My original use of classes was gradually more and more replaced by properties, and in the end disappeared except as a symbolic convenience. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
A reaction: I wish I knew what properties are. On the whole, though, I agree with this, because it is more naturalistic. We may place things in classes because of their properties, and this means there are natural classes, but classes can't have a life of their own. |
4975 | A thought can be split in many ways, so that different parts appear as subject or predicate [Frege] |
Full Idea: A thought can be split up in many ways, so that now one thing, now another, appears as subject or predicate | |
From: Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.199) | |
A reaction: Thus 'the mouse is in the box', and 'the box contains the mouse'. A simple point, but important when we are trying to distinguish thought from language. |
7528 | Leibniz bases everything on subject/predicate and substance/property propositions [Russell] |
Full Idea: The metaphysics of Leibniz was explicitly based upon the doctrine that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every fact consists of a substance having a property. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.5) | |
A reaction: I think it is realised now that although predicates tend to attribute properties to things, they are far from being the same thing. See Idea 4587, for example. Russell gives us an interesting foot in the door of Leibniz's complex system. |
6439 | Names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate [Russell] |
Full Idea: Unlike descriptions, names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
A reaction: This interests Russell because of its ontological implications. If we reduce language to names, we can have a pure ontology of 'objects'. We need a system for saying whether a description names something - which is his theory of definite descriptions. |
9949 | There is the concept, the object falling under it, and the extension (a set, which is also an object) [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
Full Idea: For Frege, the extension of the concept F is an object, as revealed by the fact that we use a name to refer to it. ..We must distinguish the concept, the object that falls under it, and the extension of the concept, which is the set containing the object. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by A.George / D.J.Velleman - Philosophies of Mathematics Ch.2 | |
A reaction: This I take to be the key distinction needed if one is to grasp Frege's account of what a number is. When we say that Frege is a platonist about numbers, it is because he is committed to the notion that the extension is an object. |
6423 | We tried to define all of pure maths using logical premisses and concepts [Russell] |
Full Idea: The primary aim of our 'Principia Mathematica' was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts definable in logical terms. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.7) | |
A reaction: This spells out the main programme of logicism, by its great hero, Russell. The big question now is whether Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems have succeeded in disproving logicism. |
6425 | Formalism can't apply numbers to reality, so it is an evasion [Russell] |
Full Idea: Formalism is perfectly adequate for doing sums, but not for the application of number, such as the simple statement 'there are three men in this room', so it must be regarded as an unsatisfactory evasion. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
A reaction: This seems to me a powerful and simple objection. The foundation of arithmetic is that there are three men in the room, not that one plus two is three. Three men and three ties make a pattern, which we call 'three'. |
6424 | Formalists say maths is merely conventional marks on paper, like the arbitrary rules of chess [Russell] |
Full Idea: The Formalists, led by Hilbert, maintain that arithmetic symbols are merely marks on paper, devoid of meaning, and that arithmetic consists of certain arbitrary rules, like the rules of chess, by which these marks can be manipulated. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
A reaction: I just don't believe that maths is arbitrary, and this view pushes me into the arms of the empiricists, who say maths is far more likely to arise from experience than from arbitrary convention. The key to maths is patterns. |
6426 | Intuitionism says propositions are only true or false if there is a method of showing it [Russell] |
Full Idea: The nerve of the Intuitionist theory, led by Brouwer, is the denial of the law of excluded middle; it holds that a proposition can only be accounted true or false when there is some method of ascertaining which of these it is. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: He cites 'there are three successive sevens in the expansion of pi' as a case in point. This seems to me an example of the verificationism and anti-realism which is typical of that period. It strikes me as nonsense, but Russell takes it seriously. |
18995 | Frege mistakenly takes existence to be a property of concepts, instead of being about things [Frege, by Yablo] |
Full Idea: Frege's theory treats existence as a property, not of things we call existent, but of concepts instantiated by those things. 'Biden exists' says our Biden-concept has instances. That is certainly not how it feels! We speak of the thing, not of concepts. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Stephen Yablo - Aboutness 01.4 | |
A reaction: Yablo's point is that you must ask what the sentence is 'about', and then the truth will refer to those things. Frege gets into a tangle because he thinks remarks using concepts are about the concepts. |
6419 | In 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism [Russell] |
Full Idea: In the years 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: This is interesting (about Russell) because he only labelled it as 'logical atomism' in about 1912, and only wrote about it as such in 1918. It is helpful to understand that the theory of definite descriptions was part of his logical atomism. |
6438 | Complex things can be known, but not simple things [Russell] |
Full Idea: I have come to think that, although many things can be known to be complex, nothing can be known to be simple. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
A reaction: This appears to be a rejection of his logical atomism. It goes with a general rebellion against foundationalist epistemology, because the empiricists foundations (e.g. Hume's impressions) seem devoid of all content. |
6434 | Facts are everything, except simples; they are either relations or qualities [Russell] |
Full Idea: Facts, as I am using the word, consist always of relations between parts of a whole or qualities of single things; facts, in a word, are whatever there is except what (if anything) is completely simple. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
A reaction: This is the view that goes with Russell's 'logical atomism', where the 'completely simple' is used to build up the 'facts'. If World War One was a fact, was it a 'relation' or a 'quality'. Must events then be defined in terms of those two? |
10317 | It is unclear whether Frege included qualities among his abstract objects [Frege, by Hale] |
Full Idea: Expositors of Frege's views have disagreed over whether abstract qualities are to be reckoned among his objects. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Bob Hale - Abstract Objects Ch.2.II | |
A reaction: [he cites Dummett 1973:70-80, and Wright 1983:25-8] There seems to be a danger here of a collision between Fregean verbal approaches to ontological commitment and the traditional views about universals. No wonder they can't decide. |
6440 | Universals can't just be words, because words themselves are universals [Russell] |
Full Idea: Those who dislike universals have thought that they could be merely words; the trouble with this view is that a word itself is a universal. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
A reaction: Russell gradually lost his faith in most things, but never in universals. I find it unconvincing that we might dismiss nominalism so easily. I'm not sure why the application of the word 'cat' could not just be conventional. |
10535 | Frege's 'objects' are both the referents of proper names, and what predicates are true or false of [Frege, by Dummett] |
Full Idea: Frege's notion of an object plays two roles in his semantics. Objects are the referents of proper names, and they are equally what predicates are true and false of. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) Ch.4 | |
A reaction: Frege is the source of a desperate desire to turn everything into an object (see Idea 8858!), and he has the irritating authority of the man who invented quantificational logic. Nothing but trouble, that man. |
6430 | In epistemology we should emphasis the continuity between animal and human minds [Russell] |
Full Idea: It seems to me desirable in the theory of knowledge to emphasise the continuity between animal and human minds. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: I strongly agree with this, mainly because it avoids overemphasis on language in epistemology. It doesn't follow that animals know a lot, and there is a good case for saying that they don't actually 'know' anything, despite having true beliefs. |
6441 | Pragmatism judges by effects, but I judge truth by causes [Russell] |
Full Idea: Pragmatism holds that a belief is to be judged if it has certain effects, whereas I hold that an empirical belief is to be judged true if it has certain kinds of causes. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
A reaction: I'm with Russell here, and this seems to me a convincing objection to pragmatism. The simple problem is that falsehoods can occasionally have very beneficial effects. Beliefs are made true by the facts, not by their consequences. |
6431 | Empiricists seem unclear what they mean by 'experience' [Russell] |
Full Idea: When I began to think about theory of knowledge, I found that none of the philosophers who emphasise 'experience' tells us what they mean by the word. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: A very significant comment about empiricism. Hume does not seem very clear about what an 'impression' is. Russell's problem has been dealt with intensively by modern empiricists, who discuss 'the given', and conceptualised perception. |
6444 | True belief about the time is not knowledge if I luckily observe a stopped clock at the right moment [Russell] |
Full Idea: Not all true beliefs are knowledge; the stock example to the contrary is that of a clock which has stopped by which I believe to be going and which I happen to look at when, by chance, it shows the right time. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
A reaction: [in his 1948:112] Russell had spotted Gettier-type problems long before Gettier. The problem of lucky true beliefs dates back to Plato (Idea 2140). This example is also a problem for reliabilism, if the clock is usually working fine. |
6433 | Behaviourists struggle to explain memory and imagination, because they won't admit images [Russell] |
Full Idea: Behaviourists refuse to admit images because they cannot be observed from without, but this causes them difficulties when they attempt to explain either memory or imagination. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
A reaction: This is a striking objection to behaviourism, and it is rarely mentioned in modern discussions of the topic. They might try denying the existence of private 'images', but that wouldn't be very plausible. |
6443 | Surprise is a criterion of error [Russell] |
Full Idea: Surprise is a criterion of error. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
A reaction: Russell is not too precise about this, but it is a nice point. Surprise is thwarted expectation, which implies prior misjudgement. |
9839 | Frege equated the concepts under which an object falls with its properties [Frege, by Dummett] |
Full Idea: Frege equated the concepts under which an object falls with its properties. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.201) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.8 | |
A reaction: I take this to be false, as objects can fall under far more concepts than they have properties. I don't even think 'being a pencil' is a property of pencils, never mind 'being my favourite pencil', or 'not being Alexander the Great'. |
4973 | As I understand it, a concept is the meaning of a grammatical predicate [Frege] |
Full Idea: As I understand it, a concept is the meaning of a grammatical predicate. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.193) | |
A reaction: All the ills of twentieth century philosophy reside here, because it makes a concept an entirely linguistic thing, so that animals can't have concepts, and language is cut off from reality, leading to relativism, pragmatism, and other nonsense. |
9167 | Frege felt that meanings must be public, so they are abstractions rather than mental entities [Frege, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: Frege felt that meanings are public property, and identified concepts (and hence 'intensions' or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Hilary Putnam - Meaning and Reference p.150 | |
A reaction: This is the germ of Wittgenstein's private language argument. I am inclined to feel that Frege approached language strictly as a logician, and didn't really care that he got himself into implausible platonist ontological commitments. |
6427 | Unverifiable propositions about the remote past are still either true or false [Russell] |
Full Idea: There is no conceivable method by which we can discover whether the proposition 'It snowed on Manhattan Island on the 1st January in the year 1 A.D.' is true or false, but it seems preposterous to maintain that it is neither. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
A reaction: I love this example, which seems so simple and so clear-cut. It criticises verificationism, and gives strong intuitive support for realism, and supports the law of excluded middle. |
4974 | For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts [Frege] |
Full Idea: For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.196n) | |
A reaction: Given the acknowledgement here that two very different sentences in different languages can express the same thought, he should recognise that at least some aspects of a thought are non-linguistic. |
6435 | You can believe the meaning of a sentence without thinking of the words [Russell] |
Full Idea: If you have just heard a loud clap of thunder, you believe what is expressed by 'there has just been a loud clap of thunder' even if no words come into your mind. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
A reaction: This seems to me important, and accurate. We should not be too mesmerised by language. Animals have beliefs, and this is a nice example of an undeniable non-linguistic human belief. |
7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |