ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 13
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| 1. Facts and Propositions (concl.)
|
| There are two different relations, as you see, that a proposition
| may have to a fact: the one the relation that you may call being
| true to the fact, and the other being false to the fact. Both are
| equally essentially logical relations which may subsist 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 a noise. It
| cannot be a name without having just that one particular relation
| of naming a certain thing, whereas a proposition does not cease
| to be a proposition if it is false. It has two ways, of being
| true and being false, which together correspond to the property
| of being a name. Just as a word may be a name or be not a name
| but just a meaningless noise, so a phrase which is apparently a
| proposition may be either true or false, or may be meaningless,
| but the true and false belong together as against the meaningless.
| That shows, of course, that the formal logical characterictics of
| propositions are quite different from those of names, and that the
| relations they have to facts are quite different, and therefore
| propositions are not names for facts. You must not run away with
| the idea that you can name facts in any other way; you cannot.
| You cannot name them at all. You cannot properly name a fact.
| The only thing you can do is to assert it, or deny it, or
| desire it, or will it, or wish it, or question it, but all
| those are things involving the whole proposition. You can
| never put the sort of thing that makes a proposition to be
| true or false in the position of a logical subject. You can
| only have it there as something to be asserted or denied or
| something of that sort, but not something to be named.
|
| Russell, POLA, p. 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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