Logical Atomism Russell PDF

lOMoARcPSD|22657276 Logical Atomism Russell Analytic Philosophy (University of Delhi) Scan to open on Studocu Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected]) ...

lOMoARcPSD|22657276 Logical Atomism Russell Analytic Philosophy (University of Delhi) Scan to open on Studocu Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|22657276 RUSSELL’S LOGICAL ATOMISM (FACTS AND PROPOSITIONS) Bertrand Russell is quite influential in his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. The theory that he puts forth is called “Logical Atomism.” He claims in The Principles of Mathematics that everything can ultimately be brought back to logic in the strictest and most formal sense. He preaches a kind of an atomistic philosophy which means he believes that there are many separate things as opposed to a monistic one wherein it is believed that there is a single indivisible reality. According to him the truth about the matter is reached by seeking the absolutely “undeniable” data. The “undeniable” here is distinguished from the term “true” in that “undeniable” is a psychological term and “true” is not. When we say something is undeniable we mean that it is not the sort of thing that anybody is going to deny but it doesn’t follow that it is true, though it does follow we shall all think it true. When we consider any theory of knowledge, there is an unavoidable subjectivity which has to be dealt with because we are not just concerned with what is true but what we can know of the world. We start from arguments that appear to us as true. If it appears to us as true, there is no more to be done. We can’t go outside ourselves in order to see what we thought as true are actually true or not. Russell’s theory is called “Logical Atomism” because the atoms that he wishes to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them as he claims are “particulars” (example; little patches of colours or sounds, momentary things. Some of them will be predicates or relations and so on. Russell points out first that the undeniable data with which we start philosophizing are vague and ambiguous. For example; when we say there are a number of people in the room, it appears as an undeniable statement. But when we start defining what a room is, what it is for a person to be in a room, how we can distinguish one person from the other; we will realise that what we said in the beginning is fearfully vague and we don’t really know what we meant by that. The process of sound philosophizing consists in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear and definite. Through analysis and reflection we will come to realize that latter is actually the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow. Now the question arises if these precise things can retain the undeniability of the vague starting point. In trying to pass from the vague to the precise through reflection and analysis we run a certain risk of error. We might reach at something that is not true at all. The precise propositions that we arrive at may Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|22657276 be logically premises to the system that we build up upon the basis of them, but they are not premises for the theory of knowledge. We must understand the difference between that from which our knowledge is derived and that from which if we already had complete knowledge, we would deduce it. The sort of premiss that a logician will take for a science will be a proposition having great deductive power, great cogency and exactitude, which is quite a different thing from the actual premiss that our knowledge started from. The kind of premiss taken for theory of knowledge is not anything objective, but something that varies from man to man because the premiss of one man’s theory of knowledge will not be the same as those of another man’s. Russell points out that many a schools of thought try philosophize by carrying back their premises further and further into the region of the inexact and vague beyond the point where we ourselves are right back to the child or monkey. Russell asserts that trying to reach the primitive experiences instead of embracing our reflective abilities is a mistake. When our object is not simply to study the history or development of mind, but to ascertain the nature of the world, we don’t want to go back than we already are ourselves. We don’t want to go back to the primitive experiences of a monkey or a child as sufficient difficulty is raised by our own vagueness. Russell then affirms that we ought to take as premises in any kind of work of analysis those things which appear to us here and now, as undeniable. He argues that Descartes’ system is an effective one wherein we must set to doubt everything and retain only what we cannot doubt because of its clearness and distinctness. Russell then sets to introduce us to a truism, that the world contains facts. He doesn’t give us an exact definition of a fact. He explains fact as the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. For example; If I say, “It’s raining.”, what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of weather. Thus, it is the condition of weather that makes my statement true or false. Another example is if I say “Socrates is dead”, my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence which happened in Athens long ago. Russell clarifies here that when he speaks of a fact he doesn’t mean a particular existing thing. For example; All by himself Socrates doesn’t render any statement true or false even though we might be inclined to suppose that all by himself he would give truth to the statement “Socrates existed”. What Russell calls a fact is the sort of thing that is expressed by a whole sentence not by a single name like “Socrates”. When a single word does come to express a fact like “fire” or “wolf” it is always due to an unexpressed context and the full expression of the fact will always involve a fact. Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|22657276 We express a fact by saying that a certain thing has a certain property or that it has a certain relation to another thing. But the thing which has the property or the relation is not what Russell calls facts. Moreover, he points out that the facts belong to the objective world. They are not created by our thought or beliefs, except in special cases. He claims that the things that he calls facts are just as much a part of the real world as particular chairs and tables. Most of our statements except when they are psychological facts, express facts that will be about the outer world. Now, Russell brings to forth the distinction between various types of facts. There are particular facts such as “This is white” and then there are general facts such as “All men are mortal”. He says that both particular and general facts are important. It is a mistake to think that we could describe the world completely by means of particular facts alone. Another distinction is between that of positive and negative facts, such as “Socrates was alive”- a positive fact- and “Socrates is not alive”- a negative fact. He doesn’t expand much on this distinction. Then there are facts concerning particular things or particular relations and apart from them the completely general facts of the sort that we have in logic (where there is no mention of any constituent of the actual world, no mention of any particular thing or particular quality or particular relation). Example; “If one class is part of another, a term which is a member of the one is also a member of the other.” All these words that come in the statement of a pure logical proposition are words really belonging to syntax. Then there are facts about the properties of single things and facts about the relations between two things, three things and so on, and any number of classifications od some of the facts in the world. A fact cannot be either true or false. There are only just facts and there is not a dualism of true and false facts. Truth or falsehood is the quality of statements or propositions or judgement. A proposition is just a symbol. It is a complex symbol in the sense that is has parts which are also symbols: a symbol may be defined as complex when it has parts that are symbols. A sentence is therefore a complex symbol containing several words which are each symbols. The theory of symbolism is important to understand because otherwise we are certain to mistake the properties of the symbol for the properties of the thing. Big fallacies result from not getting the distinction between the symbol and what is being symbolized. Russell clarifies further what he means by symbolism. He uses it in a sense to include all language of every sort and kind so that every word is a symbol and every sentence and so forth. When he speaks of symbol he simply means something that “means” something else. As to what he means by “meaning”, he gives an example: the word “Socrates” means a certain man; the Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|22657276 word “mortal” means a certain quality; and the sentence “Socrates is mortal” means a certain fact. All these three sort of meaning are entirely distinct. Russell then points out that a name would be a proper symbol to use for a person; a sentence or a proposition is the proper symbol for a fact. A belief or statement has duality of truth and falsehood, which the fact doesn’t have. A belief or a statement always involves a proposition. It is very important to note that propositions are not names for facts. The relation of proposition to fact is totally different from the relation of name to the thing named. For each fact there are two propositions, one true and one false and there is nothing in the nature of the symbol to show us which is the true one and which is the false one. For example, we have two propositions: “Socrates is dead” and “Socrates is not dead” And these propositions correspond to the same fact, the one fact out there in the world which makes one true and one false. There are two different relations that a proposition may have to a fact, one being true to the fact and the other being false to the fact. Both are equally essential logical relations between the two. Whereas, in the case of a name, there is only one relation that it can have to what it names. A name can just name a particular or if it does not it is not a name at all, it is just a noise. It cannot be a name without having that one particular relation of naming a certain thing while a proposition doesn’t cease to be a proposition if it is false. Just as a word may be a name or be not a name but just a meaningless noise, so a phrase may be either true or false or may be meaningless (example; Napolean is an odd number, a case of meaningless statement) but the true and false belong together as against the meaningless. This demonstrates how the formal logical characteristics of propositions are quite different from those of names and that the relations they have to facts are quite different. Therefore, propositions are not names for facts. We cannot name facts at all. We can only assert them, deny them or desire them, will them, wish them or question them. We can never put the sort of thing that makes a proposition to be true or false in the position of a logical subject. Downloaded by khushi maurya ([email protected])