Graham Stevens

Russell's repsychologising of the proposition

Bertrand Russell’s 1903 masterpiece The Principles of Mathematics places great emphasis on the need to separate propositions from psychological items such as thoughts. In 1919 (and until the end of his career) Russell explicitly retracts this view, however, and defines propositions as “psychological occurrences”. These psychological occurrences are held by Russell to be mental images. In this paper, I seek to explain this radical change of heart. I argue that Russell’s re-psychologising of the proposition in 1919 can only be understood against the background of his struggle with the problem of the unity of the proposition in earlier work. Once this is recognized, and the solution to the problem offered by the 1919 theory is appreciated, new light is also shed on Russell’s naturalism. I go on to compare Russell’s psychological “picture theory” with the vehemently anti-psychological picture theory of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and suggest that, once the background of the dispute is brought into clearer focus, Russell’s position can be seen to have many advantages over its more celebrated rival.

The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege

finding the ‘historical context’ and ‘reception and influence’ sections rather too short. West’s analysis of Mill’s ethical thought is, as ever, both detailed and accurate. There are a number of points that the reader may feel frustrated with, however. Among the most interesting issues that West touches upon is the metaethical position that lies behind Mill’s moral philosophy. Writing that Mill ‘could be interpreted as an anti-realist with regard to moral judgments, but a realist in regard to value judgments’ (32, emphasis original), West neatly highlights an apparent tension in Mill’s metaethics, an area of his thought still relatively unexplored. Accommodating his noncognitivism (visible in Utilitarianism and made explicit in Chapter VI of his System of Logic) with the many statements that Mill makes implying that he regards normative claims to be susceptible to truth evaluation, and also with our expectations of what the natural metaethic of utilitarianism is, is no easy task. Reconciling his apparent anti-realism with his ethical naturalism, his epistemic argument for the principle of utility, and his notion of moral progressiveness is equally, if not more, difficult. West’s remarks indicate that he has considered the tensions, but we are left wanting for any attempt to tackle these issues here. A ‘reader’s guide’ may not be the place to make this attempt, however; we can perhaps hope for an exploration of these topics in the future. While this book is not without some contentious claims (that Mill was ‘an admirer of Darwin’s theory of evolution’ (86) and could have conceptualized an argument about the survival value of rationality in response to Aristotelian virtue theorists, for instance) West’s book is thorough and reliable, and will prove a useful resource for anybody looking at Utilitarianism in detail.

Philosophy, Linguistics, and the Philosophy of Linguistics

In this paper I suggest that, despite the overlap between philosophy of language and linguistics, philosophy of science has neglected linguistics. I argue that this has been to the detriment of philosophy of language. I examine the philosophical and linguistic treatments of definite descriptions as a case study to make this point.

Incomplete symbols and the theory of logical types

Central to Russell’s original logicist project as set out in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics was the view that there is only one logical type of entity.

Descriptions and Logical Form

This chapter marks a point of transition for this book. After the introductory work carried out in the first chapter, I have been focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on historical aspects of the theory of descriptions. In particular, I have sought to reassess some of the traditional interpretations of the place of the theory in Russell’s philosophy in terms of how it relates to the theory that preceded it, the motivations that led Russell to the theory, and the role that the theory played for him after its inception. In this chapter I will start to examine the ways in which the theory applies to contemporary philosophy — philosophy of language in particular.

Russell and the Philosophy of Language

It will be appropriate to begin this final chapter with a quote from Russell: Philosophers and bookish people generally tend to live a life dominated by words, and even to forget that it is the essential function of words to have a connection of one sort or another with facts, which are in general non-linguistic. Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should never be confronted with facts but should live in a pure, autonomous world where they are compared only with other words. When you say ‘the cat is a carnivorous animal’, you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is ‘metaphysics’ and is on this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views that are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.(Russell, 1959: 110)

History I: The 1903 Theory of Denoting

In the previous chapter, I examined the theory of descriptions from a largely ahistorical perspective. In particular, I ignored the historical and exegetical details of the role played by the theory in Russell’s philosophical project and its development. In this chapter and the following one, I will address historical aspects of the development of the theory. To some extent, the separation of the philosophical from the historical that has been made in these first three chapters reflects the response that the theory has received from philosophers since its inception, with many philosophers responding to the theory with little or no regard for the particular philosophical aims and concerns that motivated Russell when devising the theory. The understanding of the place of the theory in Russell’s overall philosophy has been left to historians who, in turn, have been fairly universal in their conclusion that the impact the theory has had on contemporary philosophy — primarily on the philosophy of language — is the result of an application of the theory to concerns that were quite alien to Russell himself. Although these first two chapters have also repeated the strategy of separating the place of the theory in contemporary philosophy from its place in Russell’s own philosophy, the strategy is employed here for ease of exposition only.

Extending the Theory II: Indexicality

If the theory of descriptions is to be a proper part of a theory of natural language semantics, it must be compatible with all other proper parts of the whole theory. These will include theories of linguistic phenomena such as anaphora, tense, nominalization, and many others. As Neale (1990: 10) observes, the best approach the natural language semanticist can take here is a modular one, dealing with each phenomenon in a piecemeal fashion and subsequently piecing them together. It is well beyond the scope of this book to deal with all of the phenomena that demand explanation. In this concluding chapter I want to focus on one in particular: indexicality. However, the phenomenon is, I will argue, so central that it has repercussions for other important and puzzling linguistic phenomena including the semantics of propositional attitude reports. As this book is not just concerned to defend the theory of descriptions, but also to defend Russell’s philosophy of language in general, I will focus particularly on Russell’s work on indexicality. Russell’s work in this area has received very little attention (and even less positive appraisal). I want to show, however, that there is more value in Russell’s analysis of indexicality than it has thus far been given credit for. The bulk of Russell’s writings that I will draw on are to be found in his later works, particularly An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and Human Knowledge.

History II: ‘On Denoting’ and the Genesis of the Theory of Descriptions

If the Meinongian interpretation of the Principles is to be rejected as the motivation behind Russell’s adoption of his 1905 theory, what account can we give in its place to explain why Russell abandoned the earlier theory for the later one? We know that Russell’s main concern during the period between the completion of the Principles and the writing of Principia was the contradiction and its relations. It is certainly not implausible, therefore, to speculate that this concern played some role in motivating the theory of descriptions.

Extending the Theory I: Complex Demonstratives

Complex demonstratives1 are phrases like ‘that woman’, ‘this book’, ‘that man wearing the polka dot trousers’, ‘those rocks’, ‘these apples’, ‘those apples that you left on those rocks beside that man wearing the polka dot trousers’, and so on. Syntactically, they are determiner phrases. When we consider the semantic profile of complex demonstratives, however, things do not appear to be as straightforward as they are with the standard class of determiner phrases. All of these (under the assumption that definite descriptions are quantifiers) are quantifiers. A distinguishing semantic feature of a quantifier expression, as we have seen in previous chapters, is that it does not contribute an individual object to the truth-conditions of a proposition in the way that a referring expression does. Quantified propositions are object independent.