ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 12
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| 1. Facts and Propositions (cont.)
|
| As to what one means by "meaning", I will give a few illustrations.
| For instance, the word "Socrates", you will say, means a certain man;
| the word "mortal" means a certain quality; and the sentence "Socrates
| is mortal" means a certain fact. But these three sorts of meaning are
| entirely distinct, and you will get into the most hopeless contradictions
| if you think the word "meaning" has the same meaning in each of these three
| cases. It is very important not to suppose that there is just one thing which
| is meant by "meaning", and that therefore there is just one sort of relation of
| the symbol to what is symbolized. 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 a statement has duality of truth and falsehood, which the
| fact does not have. A belief or a statement always involves a proposition.
| You say that a man believes that so and so is the case. A man believes that
| Socrates is dead. What he believes is a proposition on the face of it, and
| for formal purposes it is convenient to take the proposition as the essential
| thing having the duality of truth and falsehood.
|
| It is very important to realize such things, for instance,
| as that 'propositions are not names for facts'. It is quite
| obvious as soon as it is pointed out to you, but as a matter
| of fact I never had realized it until it was pointed out to
| me by a former pupil of mine, Wittgenstein. It is perfectly
| evident as soon as you think of it, that a proposition is not
| a name for a fact, from the mere circumstance that there are
| 'two' propositions corresponding to each fact. Suppose it
| is a fact that Socrates is dead. You have two propositions:
| "Socrates is dead" and "Socrates is not dead". And those two
| propositions corresponding to the same fact; there is one fact
| in the world which makes one true and one false. That is not
| accidental, and illustrates how the relation of proposition
| to fact is a totally different one 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. If there were, you could ascertain the truth
| about the world by examining propositions without looking
| around you.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 46-47.
|
| Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", pp. 35-155
| in 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', edited with an introduction
| by David Pears, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985. First published 1918.
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