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Propositions, Functions, and Analysis This Page Intentionally Left Blank Propositions, Functions, and Analysis Selected Essays on Russell’S Philosophy Propositions, Functions, and Analysis This page intentionally left blank Propositions, Functions, and Analysis Selected Essays on Russell’s Philosophy PETER HYLTON CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Peter Hylton 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928635–3 978–0–19–928635–5 13579108642 To the memory of Burton S. Dreben, 1927–1999 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The intellectual debts incurred in writing each of these essays are acknowledged in a note written when I wrote the essay; I shall not reiterate those acknowledge- ments here. I do, however, want to thank those who have helped in one way or another with this volume and with its Introduction. The original idea for such a volume came from André Carus,almost exactly six years ago.As my work on the volume proceeded, by fits and starts, I also received advice and encouragement from Warren Goldfarb, Bill Hart, Gary Kemp, Andrew Lugg, Tom Ricketts, and Sally Sedgwick.(In compiling this list I have the sense that I may well have omit- ted one or more crucial contributors; I can only ask the forgiveness of anyone who falls into that category.) I should like to thank my Department, and in particular its Chair, Bill Hart, for providing an unusually supportive and collegial environment in which to work. Those I worked with at Oxford University Press, primarily Rebecca Bryant and Peter Momtchiloff, were invariably understanding and helpful. Jacqueline Pritchard was my copy-editor for the second time and was again both meticulous and tactful. The book is dedicated to the memory of Burt Dreben. My understanding of Russell, and indeed of philosophy quite generally,owes more to him than is sug- gested by the acknowledgements attached to the several essays.I greatly miss his friendship, his wise advice, and his unsparing criticism. This page intentionally left blank SOURCES OF THE ESSAYS With one exception, all of these essays have been previously published; the exception was commissioned for a volume which has yet to appear. I should like to thank the publishers and editors mentioned below for permission to reprint the essays. 1. ‘The Nature of the Proposition and the Revolt Against Idealism,’ Philosophy in Context,eds.R.Rorty,J.Schneewind and Q.R.D.Skinner,(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 375–97; reproduced here with permission from the publishers. 2. ‘Beginning With Analysis,’ Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy, eds. R. Monk and A. Palmer, (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), pp. 183–216; reproduced here with permission from the publishers. 3. ‘Logic in Russell’s Logicism,’ The Analytic Tradition, eds. D. Bell and N. Cooper, (Oxford:Basil Blackwell,1990),pp.137–72.Reprinted in Bertrand Russell:Critical Assessments, ed. A. Irvine, (London: Routledge, 1998); reproduced here with permission from the publishers. 4. ‘The Vicious Circle Principle: Comments on Philippe de Rouilhan,’ Philosophical Studies, 65 (1992), pp. 183–91; reproduced here with permission from the publish- ers, the Taylor and Francis Group, plc (http://www.tandf.co.uk). 5. ‘Russell’s Substitutional Theory’, Synthese 45 (1980) pp. 1–31; reproduced here with permission from the publishers, Springer SBM. 6. ‘Review of Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy,’ in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. XCII, n. 10 (October 1995), pp. 556–63; reproduced here with per- mission from the Journal. 7. ‘Frege and Russell’,to appear in The Cambridge Companion to Frege,ed.T.Ricketts, forthcoming; reproduced here with permission from the publishers. 8. ‘Functions and Propositional Functions in Principia Mathematica,’ Russell and Analytic Philosophy, ed. A. Irvine and G. Wedeking, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1994),pp.342–60;reproduced here with permission from the editors. 9. ‘Functions, Operations, and Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, Early Analytic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky, ed. W. W. Tait, (LaSalle, III.: Open Court Press, 1997), pp. 91–105; reproduced here with permission from the publishers. 10. ‘Russell on Denoting’, Cambridge Companion to Russell, ed. N. Griffin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 202–40; reproduced here with permission from the publishers. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. The Nature of the Proposition and the Revolt against Idealism 9 2. Beginning with Analysis 30 3. Logic in Russell’s Logicism 49 4. Russell’s Substitutional Theory 83 5. The Vicious Circle Principle 108 6. Review of Dummett’s Origins of Analytical Philosophy 115 7. Functions and Propositional Functions in Principia Mathematica 122 8. Functions, Operations, and Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 138 9. Frege and Russell 153 10. The Theory of Descriptions 185 Abbreviations 216 Bibliography 217 Index 225 This page intentionally left blank Introduction The work of Bertrand Russell had a decisive influence on the emergence of analytic philosophy, and on its subsequent development. More than any other single figure, Russell set the tone and the agenda for anglophone analytic philo- sophy in at least the first half of the twentieth century.Frege takes precedence in the development of something resembling a modern system of logic, and in the use of that logic to resolve philosophical problems. Russell’s version of logic, however, was far more influential than Frege’s. More important, Russell com- pletely rejected the views of Kant and of the post-Kantian idealists,deploying his logic to bolster this opposition. In particular, he completely rejected the idea of necessary structures of thought which impose an a priori form upon our knowledge. Russell came to see mathematics as the crucial test-case. Like Frege, he argued that mathematics is reducible to logic;in Russell’s hands,however,this claim was part of a general argument against Kant and the idealists. In other ways, too, Russell’s ambitions for the use of logic in philosophy were greater than Frege’s.Two related points are particularly worth stressing.First, it is in Russell’s work that one can first clearly see the application of modern logic to empirical knowledge.According to Russell’s view,the foundation of all knowledge is a kind of direct and unmediated contact between the mind and the known entity, which may be either abstract or given in sensation. This direct contact is what Russell himself calls acquaintance. He claims that logic is the means by which something like the rich and far-ranging knowledge that we take ourselves to have can be assembled out of the simple constituents given to us in acquaintance. Showing how this could happen is then an extremely ambitious and far-reaching philosophical programme. Many philosophers, of course, have rejected this pro- gramme. Many have also rejected the underlying idea that our knowledge is based on a fundamental kind of direct sensory knowledge. But Russell’s influence is manifest in the extraordinary tenacity of his ideas—the frequency with which they were, and are, disputed and rejected—as well as in their occasional revivals. The second point I wish to stress is that Russell articulates the idea of a logically perfect language. (The idea is, again, foreshadowed in Frege, but in Russell it is full-blown.) The syntax or structure of such a language would be given by logic; its vocabulary would be terms which have a meaning in virtue of the speaker’s being acquainted with the corresponding entities (which may be abstract).The logically perfect language would thus fully reveal the structure of our thought and our knowledge. It would give us the solutions to metaphysical 2|Introduction problems: we could read the nature of the world off from the language, so to speak. More modestly, the idea of a logically perfect language goes along with a view which, in one form or another, has run through much twentieth-century analytic philosophy: that in philosophy we are misled by the apparent structure of our language. (So-called ordinary language philosophy is an ironic reversal of this, with its insistence that it is only the philosopher’s misunderstanding of ordinary language, or his distortion of it, that leads to philosophical problems.) The essays reprinted here concern Russell’s work in what I take to be its most influential and important period, namely the two decades following his break with Idealism in 1899.
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