ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 2
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| 1. Facts and Propositions
|
| This course of lectures which I am now beginning I have called
| the Philosophy of Logical Atomism. Perhaps I had better begin
| by saying a word or two as to what I understand by that title.
| The kind of philosophy that I wish to advocate, which I call
| Logical Atomism, is one which has forced itself upon me in the
| course of thinking about the philosophy of mathematics, although
| I should find it hard to say exactly how far there is a definite
| logical connection between the two. The things I am going to say
| in these lectures are mainly my own personal opinions and I do not
| claim that they are more than that.
|
| As I have attempted to prove in 'The Principles of Mathematics', when
| we analyse mathematics we bring it all back to logic. It all comes back
| to logic in the strictest and most formal sense. In the present lectures,
| I shall try to set forth in a sort of outline, rather briefly and rather
| unsatisfactorily, a kind of logical doctrine which seems to me to result
| from the philosophy of mathematics -- not exactly logically, but as what
| emerges as one reflects: a certain kind of logical doctrine, and on the
| basis of this a certain kind of metaphysic.
|
| The logic which I shall advocate is atomistic, as opposed to
| the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel.
| When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the
| common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do
| not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting
| merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible
| Reality. It results from that, that a considerable part of
| what one would have to do to justify the sort of philosophy
| I wish to advocate would consist in justifying the process
| of analysis.
|
| One is often told that the process of analysis is falsification, that
| when you analyse any given concrete whole you falsify it and that the
| results of analysis are not true. I do not think that is a right view.
| I do not mean to say, of course, and nobody would maintain, that when you
| have analysed you keep everything that you had before you analysed. If you
| did, you would never attain anything in analysing. I do not propose to meet
| the views that I disagree with by controversy, by arguing against those views,
| but rather by positively setting forth what I believe to be the truth about the
| matter, and endeavouring all the way through to make the views that I advocate
| result inevitably from absolutely undeniable data.
|
| When I talk of "undeniable data" that is not to be regarded as synonymous
| with "true data", because "undeniable" is a psychological term and "true"
| is not. When I say that something is "undeniable", I mean that it is not
| the sort of thing that anybody is going to deny; it does not follow from
| that that it is true, though it does follow that we shall all think it true --
| and that is as near to truth as we seem able to get.
|
| When you are considering any sort of theory of knowledge, you are more or less
| tied to a certain unavoidable subjectivity, because you are not concerned simply
| with the question what is true of the world, but "What can I know of the world?"
| You always have to start any kind of argument from something which appears to
| you to be true; if it appears to you to be true, there is no more to be done.
| You cannot go outside yourself and consider abstractly whether the things that
| appear to you to be true are true; you may do this in a particular case, where
| one of your beliefs is changed in consequence of others among your beliefs.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 35-37.
|
| 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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