ONT Re: Epicyclic Recidivicious Regression Of Russell
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"Yet Another Random Node Of Inchoative Departure" (YARNOID)
Forgive me for the length of this note but I have been struggling
to trace out the structure of this knot for many moons now,
and the best that I can do for the moment is to return
to the context in which I found it last entangled.
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Subj: Pro Forma Remarks On Logical Formalization & Mechanization
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 00:24:17 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Arisbe <arisbe@stderr.org>,
SemioCom <semiocom@listbot.com>,
Standardize Unto Others <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
Pro Forma Interest Group:
I see that I cannot address the issue, or even indicate the scene,
unless I can succeed in throwing a little light on the background.
Because I have almost forgotten the intents that I had in setting
out this morning, I will re-quote myself and my source's epigraph.
| The following [is the text] of a course of eight lectures delivered
| in [Gordon Square] London, in the first months of 1918, [which] are
| very largely concerned with explaining certain ideas which I learnt
| from my friend and former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have had no
| opportunity of knowing his views since August, 1914, and I do not even
| know whether he is alive or dead. He has therefore no responsibility
| for what is said in these lectures beyond that of having originally
| supplied many of the theories contained in them.
|
| BR, POLA, page 35.
|
| Bertrand Russell,
|"The Philosophy of Logical Atomism",
| pages 35-155 in Bertrand Russell,
|'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism',
| edited with an intro. by David Pears,
| Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985.
| Originally published in 1918.
JA = Jon Awbrey
JCP = Josiane Caron-Pargue
JCP: I am completely O.K. with your criticisms of the formalization.
JCP: You have mentionned some extracts of my conversation with Adam.
You can find below the answer I did to him, and that I forgot
to send to SUO.
JCP: And you can also find some precisions below at the end of the mail.
JA: The phenomenon that I am trying to understand right now is more of a cultural one
than a properly ontological problem. Still, if ontology recapitulates phylology,
it may be possible to see a relation, or to force one. This connects with work
that my mind naturally turns to in summer, when Sue and I start thinking about
our next paper together, and so I am much more interested in aspects of things
that will no doubt seem like incidental reflections to the main body of the
SUO Working Group.
JA: The phenomena that come to mind are of long-standing concern to me,
and it is only that I see such active instances, object examples,
and obstinate reminders of them in the very way that this group
conducts its daily business, that I cannot seem to get away
from reflecting on them as I try to focus on the seemingly
detached or formal issues of ontology, logic, or semiotics.
JA: I constantly find myself asking, why do people who have such
similar backgrounds and educations, at least in their initial
segments, find it so difficult to understand each other about
such seemingly simple notions as sets, relations, signs, terms,
and so on, about the significance of such concepts in tackling
complex phenomena, about the proper use of technical concepts,
about the dangers of premature formalizations, and on and on?
JA: Most likely, I have come to view the 20th century from a different perspective
than many of the folks whose ways I can no longer understand. And not because
I started out in a different era, or hailed from a faraway planet -- even if
some may suspect it -- or even because I chanced to encounter a radically
different set of educational experiences along the way, at least, not in
the beginning, which was a perfectly standard post-Sputnik era palette.
I do kid people about the difference between having read two books in
logic and having read only one, by which I mean having been exposed
to more than one tradition in logic and only just the one that we
all learned first. I do not know if was the same where you were,
but here it was the 'Principian' way or nothing at all. Still,
that does not explain why some people grow restless with the
catechism of their childhood, in view of all the settings
where it begins to let them down, and some people just
go on denying that there is any problem to the faith.
JA: In my researches a decade ago, I thought that I had traced it back
to a particular "moment", a critical turning point, or a "tropism",
in Russell's work. I have of late returned to consider the impact
of this moment, and I reckon that it will do me some good, if none
else, to do a little bit of thinking aloud about it. Ergo, I will.
JA: Next time.
JA: And I will try to interlace these ruminations with
a more detailed consideration of the various sorts
of ideas that come to mind as I read your dialogue.
[Time Passes ...]
JA: The time is now next. And here is the passage that I see to
mark the cline, the moment, the swerve, the tropic, the turn --
its names are legend -- that I once encountered early, still
not too early, in the formative writings of Bertrand Russell.
| 'How shall we describe the logical form of a belief?'
|
| I want to try to get an account of the way that a belief is made up.
| That is not an easy question at all. You cannot make what I should call
| a map-in-space of a belief. You can make a map of an atomic fact but not of
| a belief, for the simple reason that space-relations always are of the atomic
| sort or complications of the atomic sort. I will try to illustrate what I mean.
| The point is in connexion with there being two verbs in the judgment and with the
| fact that both verbs have got to occur as verbs, because if thing is a verb it
| cannot occur otherwise than as a verb. Suppose I take "A believes that B loves C".
| "Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio." There you have a false belief.
| You have this odd state of affairs that the verb "loves" occurs in that proposition
| and seems to occur as relating Desdemona to Cassio whereas in fact it does not do so,
| but yet it does occur as a verb, it does occur in the sort of way that a verb should do.
| I mean that when A believes that B loves C, you have to have a verb in the place where
| "loves" occurs. You cannot put a substantive in its place. Therefore it is clear that
| the subordinate verb (i.e., the verb other that believing) is functioning as a verb, and
| seems to be relating two terms, but as a matter of fact does not when a judgment happens
| to be false. That is what constitutes the puzzle about the nature of belief. You will
| notice that whenever one gets to really close quarters with the theory of error one has
| the puzzle of how to deal with error without assuming the existence of the non-existent.
| I mean that every theory of error sooner or later wrecks itself by assuming the existence
| of the non-existent. As when I say "Desdemona loves Cassio", it seems as if you have
| a non-existent love between Desdemona and Cassio, but that is just as wrong as a
| non-existent unicorn. So you have to explain the whole theory of judgment in
| some other way. I come now to this question of a map. Suppose you try such
| a map as this:
|
| Othello
| |
| |
| beli|eves
| |
| v
| Desdemona -----------> Cassio
| loves
|
| The question of making a map is not so strange as you might suppose because it is
| part of the whole theory of symbolism. It is important to realize where and how
| a symbolism of that sort would be wrong: where and how it is wrong is that in
| the symbol you have this relationship relating these two things and in the fact
| it doesn't really relate them. You cannot get in space any occurrence which is
| logically of the same form as belief. When I say "logically of the same form"
| I mean that one can be obtained from the other by replacing the constituents
| of the one by the new terms. If I say "Desdemona loves Cassio" that is of
| the same form as "A is to the right of B". Those are of the same form,
| and I say that nothing that occurs in space is of the same form as
| belief. I have got on here to a new sort of thing, a new beast
| for our zoo, not another member of our former species but a new
| species. The discovery of this fact is due to Mr. Wittgenstein.
|
| BR, POLA, pages 89-91.
|
| Bertrand Russell,
|"The Philosophy of Logical Atomism",
| pages 35-155 in Bertrand Russell,
|'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism',
| edited with an intro. by David Pears,
| Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985.
| Originally published in 1918.
There is more ...
Jon Awbrey
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