Russell's Robust Sense of Reality: A Reply to Butchvarov (original) (raw)

Free author download. Six recommendations and over 365 reads on ResearchGate as of January 16, 2025. Presented to the Bertrand Russell Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in December 1987, published in 1988. It is the first work in which I offer my interpretation of the 1918 Russell as having three senses of "exists" which work together. In the primary (Parmenidean) sense, to be is not to be nothing. In the secondary (Berkeleyan and Humean) sense, to be real is to be a lawful series of classes of sensibilia. In the tertiary (Fregean) sense, existence is the individual quantifier. Comments and replies are published in the same journal issue. This paper is superseded by chapter 4 of The Ontology of the Analytic Tradition and Its Origins. The three senses of "exists" become three implicit levels of modality in chapter 3 in both editions of Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance. The ontology book has the best and fullest presentation of the three senses of "exists," but omits their modal implications. A good faith effort was made to request permission from the publisher to post the paper here in its original format. The emailed request was promptly acknowledged by a representative of the publisher, and a reasonable period of time (over six weeks) was waited; but the publisher never replied with an answer. I hand-lined out a duplicate line near the middle of page 160. I saw it in 1988, but at the time I somehow persuaded myself that it was a correct duplicate line.

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Russell and the Ontological Argument

It is well known that in Principia Mathematica Russell oTers a theory of deWnite descriptions and holds that 'existence' is not a property. It is less well known that in "On Denoting" he discusses the version of Anselm's ontological argument for God formulated by Descartes, accepting the premiss "Existence is a perfection" and assessing the argument as valid but question-begging. This is diTerent from his later comments in A History of Western Philosophy which Wnd the argument invalid. Indeed, given the sanctions of Principia, one might have thought he would Wnd the argument logically ungrammatical. This paper shows how Russell might formulate and evaluate Anselm's ontological argument and the version oTered by Descartes in a way that avoids the conXict. 1

Paradoxical Aspects of the Russellian Conception of Existence

Foundations of Science, 2021

In this paper, the authors try to clarify the relations between Meinong's and Russell's thoughts on the ontological ideas of existence. The Meinongian theory on non-existent objects does not in itself violate the principle of non-contradiction, since the problem that this hypothesis offers to the theory of definite descriptions is not so much a logical problem as an ontological problem. To demonstrate this we will establish what we believe are the two main theses basic to the theory of descriptions: the epistemological thesis and logical thesis.

Analysis and Logical Form in Russell: The 1913 Paradigm

Dialectica, 2005

In the unpublished work Theory of Knowledge† a complex is assumed to be “anything analyzable, any- thing which has constituents” (p. 79), and analysis is presented as the “discovery of the constituents and the manner of combination of a given complex” (p. 119). The notion of complex is linked in various ways with the notions of relating relation, logical form and proposition, taken as a linguistic expression provided with meaning. This paper mainly focuses on these notions, on their links and, more widely, on the role of logical form, by offering a new way of understanding what Russell was doing in TK as concerns the logical-ontological matter of this manuscript. In particular, a new account of Russell's theory of judgment will be given, by taking a stand with respect to the main accounts already given, and it will be argued for the presence in TK of a notion of type different from the one applied to propositional functions in ML and PM.

Bertrand Russell versus Arthur Prior on Meaningfulness.

This paper goes naturally with my earlier paper 'The importance of Russell's Theory of Types for the emergence of twentieth-century nonsensicalism'. In it I discuss the method Prior proposes in his paper ‘Entities’ for dealing with Russell’s Paradox without appealing to the concept of nonsense.

The Tenability of Russell's Early Philosophy

Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, 1988

WINCHESTER: I'm hoping this will be a very informal session. Our panelists will, of course, feel free to say anything that they feel like, that they want to get off their chests, and then the audience will take it upon themselves to make comments. AYER: I think I'd like the audience to interrupt if they feel like it-if we say anything outrageous or platitudinous, or both. I'll start off by saying a few words. I noticed that early on we had a very well-known, typical Russell quotation, namely, that, where possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities. But an interesting one that passed unquoted occurs in The Problems of Philosophy, namely that every proposition we can understand must be composed of constituents with which we are acquainted. It seems to me-and this is something I would like my companions to discuss-that this ties Russell very closely to phenomenalism, because he argued as early as The Problems of Philosophy that the only particulars we are acquainted with in addition to our Selves are sense-data; and he excludes Selves by the time he gets to The Analysis of Mind. Otherwise, he allows us to be acquainted with universals. Now if you interpret the theory of definite descriptions in the way that Quine does (and I agree with Quine), Russell should be interpreted as permitting-not only permitting but encouraging-the elimination of singular terms. This means that all the stuffing, as it were, in your statements gets into the predicates, and there's nothing left to be a value of the existentially quantified variable except something that requires no connotation, namely the object of a demonstrative. If that is so, and if the object of demonstratives for Russell can be only sense-data-something he maintained throughout his career right up to Inquiry into Meaning (J.nd Truth-it means that you are only referring to sense-data and to what properties they can have. This leaves you no other alternative but phenomenalism. * In passing two series of proofs of the discussion, the panelisls and "olher voices" nol infrequently revised the wording ascribed to them. The result offered here. while nol a verbatim transcript of the discussion that took place on 24 June 1984, is what each speaker wishes printed. Editorial thanks for assistance with the transcription are extended to

Beyond Witches, Angels and Unicorns. The Possibility of Expanding Russell's Existential Analysis

Abstrakt: This paper attempts to be a contribution to the epistemological project of explaining complex conceptual structures departing from more basic ones. The central thesis of the paper is that there are what I call " functionally structured concepts " , these are non-harmonic concepts in Dummett's sense that might be legitimized if there is a function that justifies the tie between the inferential connection the concept allows us to trace. Proving this requires enhancing the russellian existential analysis of definite descriptions to apply to functions and using this in proving the legitimacy of such concepts. The utility of the proposal is shown for the case of thick ethical terms and an attempt is made to use it in explaining the development of natural numbers. This last move could allow us to go one step lower in explaining the genesis of natural numbers while maintaining the notion of abstract numbers as higher order entities.

Russell and the Materialist Principle of Logically Possible Worlds

Organon F, 2018

Free download. Twenty-four recommendations and over 75 reads on ResearchGate as of January 16, 2025. This paper might have been better entitled "Russell *Against* the Materialist Principle of Logically Possible Worlds," since as I explain in the paper, Russell was no materialist, and could not have held such a principle. ABSTRACT: In his review in Organon F, Martin Vacek knows that the second edition of my Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance (xv + 649 pages) has a difficult mission of revealing two previously unsuspected major new dimensions in a great thinker whose work has already been investigated for over a century. Vacek has a fine understanding of the book, and expresses only a few doubts about its success. I explain away his doubts as misunderstandings. I show that Russell’s talk of modality and possible worlds is neither circular nor incomplete. Vacek's Armstrongian materialist principle is that all logically possible worlds are (possible) distributions of matter in space-time. I argue that that the materialist principle can be true only for materialists (idealists, dualists, and monists would all reject it, since they would all accept infinitely many possible worlds that have no matter), and that Russell was never a materialist. Therefore while materialists can consistently accept the materialist principle, Russell would reject it as incompatible with his metaphysics at every stage of his philosophical development.

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Sense, Realism, and Ontological Difference

Idealism, Relativism, and Realism: New Essays on Objectivity Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide, ed. by Dominik Finkelde and Paul M. Livingston (De Gruyter, 2020), 2020