46 ideas
| 6095 | The business of metaphysics is to describe the world [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me that the business of metaphysics is to describe the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §III) | |
| A reaction: At least he believed in metaphysics. Presumably he intends to describe the world in terms of its categories, rather than cataloguing every blade of grass. |
| 6106 | Reducing entities and premisses makes error less likely [Russell] |
| Full Idea: You diminish the risk of error with every diminution of entities and premisses. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: If there are actually lots of entities, you would increase error if you reduced them too much. Ockham's Razor seems more to do with the limited capacity of the human mind than with the simplicity or complexity of reality. See Idea 4456. |
| 6090 | Facts make propositions true or false, and are expressed by whole sentences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A fact is the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false, …and it is the sort of thing that is expressed by a whole sentence, not by a single name like 'Socrates'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: It is important to note a point here which I consider vital - that Russell keeps the idea of a fact quite distinct from the language in which it is expressed. Facts are a 'sort of thing', of the kind which are now referred to as 'truth-makers'. |
| 18348 | Not only atomic truths, but also general and negative truths, have truth-makers [Russell, by Rami] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell held that beside atomic truths, also general and negative truths have truth-makers. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Adolph Rami - Introduction: Truth and Truth-Making note 04 |
| 13985 | A true proposition seems true of one fact, but a false proposition seems true of nothing at all. [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Whereas there might be just one fact that a true proposition was like, we would have to say that a false proposition was unlike any fact. We could not speak of the fact that it was false of, so we could not speak of its being false of anything at all. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: Ryle brings out very nicely the point Russell emphasised so much, that the most illuminating studies in philosophy are of how falsehood works, rather than of how truths work. If I say 'the Queen is really a man' it is obvious what that is false of. |
| 13984 | Two maps might correspond to one another, but they are only 'true' of the country they show [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: One map of Sussex is like another, but it is not true of that other map, but only of the county. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: One might question whether a map is in any sense 'true' of Sussex, though one must admit that there are good and bad maps of Sussex. The point is a nice one, which shows that there is no simple account of truth as correspondence. |
| 6103 | Normally a class with only one member is a problem, because the class and the member are identical [Russell] |
| Full Idea: With the ordinary view of classes you would say that a class that has only one member was the same as that one member; that will land you in terrible difficulties, because in that case that one member is a member of that class, namely, itself. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VII) | |
| A reaction: The problem (I think) is that classes (sets) were defined by Frege as being identical with their members (their extension). With hindsight this may have been a mistake. The question is always 'why is that particular a member of that set?' |
| 13979 | Logic studies consequence, compatibility, contradiction, corroboration, necessitation, grounding.... [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Logic studies the way in which one thing follows from another, in which one thing is compatible with another, contradicts, corroborates or necessitates another, is a special case of another or the nerve of another. And so on. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], IV) | |
| A reaction: I presume that 'and so on' would include how one thing proves another. This is quite a nice list, which makes me think a little more widely about the nature of logic (rather than just about inference). Incompatibility isn't a process. |
| 6092 | In a logically perfect language, there will be just one word for every simple object [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §II) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there would be no universals, only names? All that matters is that a language can successfully refer (unambiguously) to anything it wishes to. There must be better ways than Russell's lexical explosion. |
| 6101 | Romulus does not occur in the proposition 'Romulus did not exist' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Romulus does not occur in the proposition 'Romulus did not exist'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: A very nice paradoxical assertion, which captures the problem of finding the logical form for negative existential statements. Presumably the proposition refers to the mythical founder of Rome, though. He is not, I suppose, rigidly designated. |
| 6102 | You can understand 'author of Waverley', but to understand 'Scott' you must know who it applies to [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If you understand English you would understand the phrase 'the author of Waverley' if you had not heard it before, whereas you would not understand the meaning of 'Scott', because to know the meaning of a name is to know who it is applied to. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Actually, you would find 'Waverley' a bit baffling too. Would you understand "he was the author of his own destruction"? You can understand "Homer was the author of this" without knowing quite who 'Homer' applies to. All very tricky. |
| 10423 | There are a set of criteria for pinning down a logically proper name [Russell, by Sainsbury] |
| Full Idea: A logically proper name must be semantically simple, have just one referent, be understood by the user, be scopeless, is not a definite description, and rigidly designates. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], 24th pg) by Mark Sainsbury - The Essence of Reference Intro | |
| A reaction: Famously, Russell's hopes of achieving this logically desirable end got narrower and narrower, and ended with 'this' or 'that'. Maybe pure language can't do the job. |
| 7744 | Treat description using quantifiers, and treat proper names as descriptions [Russell, by McCullogh] |
| Full Idea: Having proposed that descriptions should be treated in quantificational terms, Russell then went on to introduce the subsidiary injunction that proper names should be treated as descriptions. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Gregory McCullogh - The Game of the Name 2.18 | |
| A reaction: McCulloch says Russell 'has a lot to answer for' here. It became a hot topic with Kripke. Personally I find Lewis's notion of counterparts the most promising line of enquiry. |
| 10426 | A name has got to name something or it is not a name [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A name has got to name something or it is not a name. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], 66th pg), quoted by Mark Sainsbury - The Essence of Reference 18.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be stipulative, since most people would say that a list of potential names for a baby counted as names. It may be wrong. There are fictional names, or mistakes. |
| 6104 | Numbers are classes of classes, and hence fictions of fictions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Numbers are classes of classes, and classes are logical fictions, so that numbers are, as it were, fictions at two removes, fictions of fictions. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: This summarises the findings of Russell and Whitehead's researches into logicism. Gödel may have proved that project impossible, but there is now debate about that. Personally I think of numbers as names of patterns. |
| 21708 | Russell's new logical atomist was of particulars, universals and facts (not platonic propositions) [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
| Full Idea: Russell's new logical atomist ontology was of particulars, universals and facts, replacing the ontology of 'platonic atomism' consisting just of propositions. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 1 | |
| A reaction: Linsky cites Peter Hylton as saying that the earlier view was never replaced. The earlier view required propositions to be 'unified'. I surmise that the formula 'Fa' combines a universal and a particular, to form an atomic fact. [...but Idea 6111!] |
| 19051 | Russell's atomic facts are actually compounds, and his true logical atoms are sense data [Russell, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell does not admit facts as fundamental; atomic facts are atomic as facts go, but they are compound objects. The atoms of Russell's logical atomism are not atomic facts but sense data. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Russell's Ontological Development p.83 | |
| A reaction: By about 1921 Russell had totally given up sense-data, because he had been reading behaviourist psychology. |
| 6089 | Logical atomism aims at logical atoms as the last residue of analysis [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I call my doctrine logical atomism because, as the last residue of analysis, I wish to arrive at logical atoms and not physical atoms; some of them will be particulars, and others will be predicates and relations and so on. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: However we judge it, logical atomism is a vital landmark in the history of 'analytical' philosophy, because it lays out the ideal for our assessment. It is fashionable to denigrate analysis, but I think it is simply the nearest to wisdom we will ever get. |
| 6100 | Once you have enumerated all the atomic facts, there is a further fact that those are all the facts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you have enumerated all the atomic facts in the world, it is a further fact about the world that those are all the atomic facts there are about the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §V) | |
| A reaction: There is obviously a potential regress of facts about facts here. This looks like one of the reasons why the original logical atomism had a short shelf-life. Personally I see this as an argument in favour of rationalism, in the way Bonjour argues for it. |
| 6105 | Logical atoms aims to get down to ultimate simples, with their own unique reality [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Logical atomism is the view that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: This dream is to empiricists what the Absolute is to rationalists - a bit silly, but an embodiment of the motivating dream. |
| 21709 | You can't name all the facts, so they are not real, but are what propositions assert [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Facts are the sort of things that are asserted or denied by propositions, and are not properly entities at all in the same sense in which their constituents are. That is shown by the fact that you cannot name them. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], p.235), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 2.2 | |
| A reaction: [ref to Papers vol.8] It is customary to specify a proposition by its capacity for T and F. So is a fact just 'a truth'? This contains the Fregean idea that things are only real if they can be picked out. I think of facts as independent of minds. |
| 18376 | Russell asserts atomic, existential, negative and general facts [Russell, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Russell argues for atomic facts, and also for existential facts, negative facts and general facts. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by David M. Armstrong - Truth and Truthmakers 05.1 | |
| A reaction: Armstrong says he overdoes it. I would even add disjunctive facts, which Russell rejects. 'Rain or snow will ruin the cricket match'. Rain can make that true, but it is a disjunctive fact about the match. |
| 13988 | Many sentences do not state facts, but there are no facts which could not be stated [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: There are many sentences which do not state facts, while there are no facts which (in principle) could not be stated. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Substitute') | |
| A reaction: Hm. This seems like a nice challenge. The first problem would be infinite facts. Then complex universal facts, beyond the cognizance of any mind. Then facts that change faster than thinking can change. Do you give up yet? Then there's.... |
| 5465 | Modern trope theory tries, like logical atomism, to reduce things to elementary states [Russell, by Ellis] |
| Full Idea: Russell and Wittgenstein sought to reduce everything to singular facts or states of affairs, and Armstrong and Keith Campbell have more recently advocated ontologies of tropes or elementary states of affairs. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.3 n 11 | |
| A reaction: A very interesting historical link. Logical atomism strikes me as a key landmark in the history of philosophy, and not an eccentric cul-de-sac. It is always worth trying to get your ontology down to minimal small units, to see what happens. |
| 6060 | 'Existence' means that a propositional function is sometimes true [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you take any propositional function and assert of it that it is possible, that it is sometimes true, that gives you the fundamental meaning of 'existence'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]), quoted by Colin McGinn - Logical Properties Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Functions depend on variables, so this leads to Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a variable". Assertions of non-existence are an obvious problem, but Russell thought of all that. All of this makes existence too dependent on language. |
| 6099 | Modal terms are properties of propositional functions, not of propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy discusses 'necessary', 'possible' and 'impossible' as properties of propositions, whereas in fact they are properties of propositional functions; propositions are only true or false. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §V) | |
| A reaction: I am unclear how a truth could be known to be necessary if it is full of variables. 'x is human' seems to have no modality, but 'Socrates is human' could well be necessary. I like McGinn's rather adverbial account of modality. |
| 13983 | Representation assumes you know the ideas, and the reality, and the relation between the two [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: The theory of Representative Ideas begs the whole question, by assuming a) that we can know these 'Ideas', b) that we can know the realities they represent, and c) we can know a particular 'idea' to be representative of a particular reality. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: Personally I regard the ideas as immediate (rather than acquired by some knowledge process), and I am dimly hoping that they represent reality (or I'm in deep trouble), and I am struggling to piece together the reality they represent. I'm happy with that. |
| 6098 | Perception goes straight to the fact, and not through the proposition [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I am inclined to think that perception, as opposed to belief, does go straight to the fact and not through the proposition. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a question of an intermediate stage, which is the formulation of concepts. Is full 'perception' (backed by attention and intellect) laden with concepts, which point to facts? Where are the facts in sensation without recognition? |
| 13980 | If you like judgments and reject propositions, what are the relata of incoherence in a judgment? [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Those who find 'judgments' everywhere and propositions nowhere find that some judgments cohere whereas others are incoherent. What is the status of the terms between which these relations hold? | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], IV) | |
| A reaction: Ryle is playing devil's advocate, but this strikes me as a nice point. I presume Russell after 1906 is the sort of thinker he has in mind. |
| 6097 | The theory of error seems to need the existence of the non-existent [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is very difficult to deal with the theory of error without assuming the existence of the non-existent. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.3) | |
| A reaction: This problem really bothered Russell (and Plato). I suspect that it was a self-inflicted problem because at this point Russell had ceased to believe in propositions. If we accept propositions as intentional objects, they can be as silly as you like. |
| 13978 | Husserl and Meinong wanted objective Meanings and Propositions, as subject-matter for Logic [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: It is argued by Husserl and (virtually) by Meinong that only if there are such entities as objective Meanings - and propositions are just a species of Meaning - is there anything for Logic to be about. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], IV) | |
| A reaction: It is presumably this proposal which led to the scepticism about meanings in Wittgenstein, Quine and Kripke. The modern view, which strikes me as right, is that logic is about inference, and so doesn't need a subject-matter. |
| 13977 | When I utter a sentence, listeners grasp both my meaning and my state of mind [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: If I have uttered my sentence aloud, a listener can both understand what I say or grasp my meaning, and also infer to my state of mind. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], I) | |
| A reaction: This simple observations seems rather important. If we shake written words onto the floor, they might add up to a proper sentence, but half of the point of a sentence is missing. Irony trades on the gap between meaning and state of mind. |
| 9022 | Russell uses 'propositional function' to refer to both predicates and to attributes [Quine on Russell] |
| Full Idea: Russell used the phrase 'propositional function' (adapted from Frege) to refer sometimes to predicates and sometimes to attributes. | |
| From: comment on Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Philosophy of Logic Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: He calls Russell 'confused' on this, and he would indeed be guilty of what now looks like a classic confusion, between the properties and the predicates that express them. Only a verificationist would hold such a daft view. |
| 6091 | Propositions don't name facts, because each fact corresponds to a proposition and its negation [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is obvious that a proposition is not the name for a fact, from the mere circumstance that there are two propositions corresponding to each fact, one the negation of the other. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: Russell attributes this point to Wittgenstein. Evidently you must add that the proposition is true before it will name a fact - which is bad news for the redundancy view of truth. Couldn't lots of propositions correspond to one fact? |
| 13976 | 'Propositions' name what is thought, because 'thoughts' and 'judgments' are too ambiguous [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: As the orthodox terms 'thoughts' and 'judgments' are equivocal, since they may equally well denote 'thinkings' as 'what-is-thought', the 'accusatives' of acts of thinking have come to be called 'propositions'. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], I) | |
| A reaction: I have understood propositions to be capable of truth or falsity. 'What is thought' could be a right old jumble of images and disjointed fragments. Propositions are famous for their unity! |
| 21702 | In 1918 still believes in nonlinguistic analogues of sentences, but he now calls them 'facts' [Russell, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell insists that the world does contain nonlinguistic things that are akin to sentences and are asserted by them; he merely does not call them propositions. He calls them facts. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Russell's Ontological Development p.81 | |
| A reaction: Clarification! I have always been bewildered by the early Russell view of propositions as actual ingredients of the world. If we say that sentences assert facts, that makes more sense. Russell never believed in the mental entities I call 'propositions'. |
| 13981 | Several people can believe one thing, or make the same mistake, or share one delusion [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: We ordinarily find no difficulty in saying of a given thing that several people believe it and so, if they think it false, 'make the same mistake' or 'labour under the same delusion'. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], IV) | |
| A reaction: Ryle is playing devil's advocate, but this (like 13980) strikes me as quite good support for propositions. I suppose you can describe these phenomena as assent to sentences, but they might be very different sentences to express the same delusion. |
| 13987 | We may think in French, but we don't know or believe in French [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Although we speak of thinking in French, we never talk of knowing or believing or opining in French. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Substitute') | |
| A reaction: Once again Ryle is playing devil's advocate, but he does it rather well, and offers good support for my belief in propositions. I love this. 'I know, in French, a bank where the wild thyme blows'. |
| 6094 | An inventory of the world does not need to include propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is quite clear that propositions are not what you might call 'real'; if you were making an inventory of the world, propositions would not come in. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §III) | |
| A reaction: I am not clear why this is "quite clear". Propositions might even turn up in our ontology as physical objects (brain states). He says beliefs are real, but if you can't have a belief without a proposition, and they aren't real, you are in trouble. |
| 6096 | I no longer believe in propositions, especially concerning falsehoods [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Time was when I thought there were propositions, but it does not seem to me very plausible to say that in addition to facts there are also these curious shadowy things going about as 'That today is Wednesday' when in fact it is Tuesday. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.2) | |
| A reaction: You need to give some account of someone who thinks 'Today is Wednesday' when it is Tuesday. We can hardly avoid talking about something like an 'intentional object', which can be expressed in a sentence. Are there not possible (formulable) propositions? |
| 21712 | I know longer believe in shadowy things like 'that today is Wednesday' when it is actually Tuesday [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Time was when I thought there were propositions, but it does not seem to me very plausible to say that in addition to facts there are also these curious shadowy things going about such 'That today is Wednesday' when it is in fact Tuesday. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], p.197), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 3.1 | |
| A reaction: [Ref to Papers v8] I take Russell to have abandoned his propositions because his conception of them was mistaken. Presumably my thinking 'Today is Wednesay' conjures up a false proposition, which had not previously existed. |
| 13989 | There are no propositions; they are just sentences, used for thinking, which link to facts in a certain way [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: There are no substantial propositions...There is just a relation between grammatical structure and the logical structure of facts. 'Proposition' denotes the same as 'sentence' or 'statement'. A proposition is not what I think, but what I think or talk in. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Conclusions') | |
| A reaction: The conclusion of Ryle's discussion, but I found his support for propositions much more convincing than his critique of them, or his attempt at an alternative linguistic account. He never mentioned animals, so he self-evidently hasn't grasped the problem. |
| 13982 | If we accept true propositions, it is hard to reject false ones, and even nonsensical ones [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: All the arguments for the subsistence of true propositions seem to hold good for the subsistence of false ones. We might even have to find room for absurd or nonsensical ones like 'some round squares are not red-headed'. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: A particularly nice example of a Category Mistake from the man who made them famous. Why can't we just make belief a proposition attitude, so I equally believe 'sea is blue', 'grass is pink' and 'trees are bifocal', but the status of my belief varies? |
| 6093 | The names in a logically perfect language would be private, and could not be shared [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would be, as regards its vocabulary, very largely private to one speaker; that is, all the names in it would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §II) | |
| A reaction: Wittgenstein obviously thought there was something not quite right about this… See Idea 4147, for example. I presume Russell's thought is that you would have no means of explaining the 'meanings' of the names in the language. |
| 6017 | Nomos is king [Pindar] |
| Full Idea: Nomos is king. | |
| From: Pindar (poems [c.478 BCE], S 169), quoted by Thomas Nagel - The Philosophical Culture | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the earliest recorded shot in the nomos-physis wars (the debate among sophists about moral relativism). It sounds as if it carries the full relativist burden - that all that matters is what has been locally decreed. |
| 6119 | You can discuss 'God exists', so 'God' is a description, not a name [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The fact that you can discuss the proposition 'God exists' is a proof that 'God', as used in that proposition, is a description and not a name. If 'God' were a name, no question as to its existence could arise. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Presumably 'a being than which none greater can be conceived' (Anselm's definition) is self-evidently a description, and doesn't claim to be a name. Aquinas caps each argument with a triumphant naming of the being he has proved. |