ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 29
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| 4.4. The Question of Nomenclature (concl.)
|
| I notice that in my syllabus I said I was going to deal with truth and
| falsehood today, but there is not much to say about them specifically
| as they are coming in all the time. The thing one first thinks of as
| true or false is a proposition, and a proposition is nothing. But a
| belief is true or false in the same way as a proposition is, so that
| you do have facts in the world that are true or false.
|
| I said a while back that there was no distinction of true and false among
| facts, but as regards that special class of facts that we call "beliefs",
| there is, in that sense that a belief which occurs may be true or false,
| though it is equally a fact in either case.
|
| One 'might' call wishes false in the same sense when one wishes
| something that does not happen. The truth or falsehood depends
| upon the proposition that enters in.
|
| I am inclined to think that perception, as opposed to belief, does go
| straight to the fact and not through the proposition. When you perceive
| the fact you do not, of course, have error coming in, because the moment it
| is a fact that is your object error is excluded. I think that verification
| in the last resort would always reduce itself to the perception of facts.
| Therefore the logical form of perception will be different from the logical
| form of believing, just because of that circumstance that it is a 'fact' that
| comes in. That raises also a number of logical difficulties which I do not
| propose to go into, but I think you can see for yourself that perceiving
| would also involve two verbs just as believing does. I am inclined to
| think that volition differs from desire logically, in a way strictly
| analogous to that in which perception differs from belief. But it
| would take us too far from logic to discuss this view.
|
| Russell, POLA, p. 93.
|
| 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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