ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 6
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| 1. Facts and Propositions (cont.)
|
| I want you to realize that when I speak of a fact I do not mean a
| particular existing thing, such as Socrates or the rain or the sun.
| Socrates himself does not render any statement true of false. You
| might be inclined to suppose that all by himself he would give truth
| to the statement "Socrates existed", but as a matter of fact that is a
| mistake. It is due to a confusion which I shall try to explain in the
| sixth lecture of this course, when I come to deal with the notion of
| existence. Socrates himself, or any particular thing just by itself,
| does not make any proposition true or false. "Socrates is dead" and
| "Socrates is alive" are both of them statements about Socrates. One is
| true and the other false. What I call a fact is the sort of thing that
| is expressed by a whole sentence, not by a single name like "Socrates".
| When a single word does come to express a fact, like "fire" or "wolf",
| it is always due to an unexpressed context, and the full expression of
| a fact will always involve a sentence. We express a fact, for example,
| when we say that a certain thing has a certain property, or that it
| has a certain relation to another thing; but the thing which has
| the property or the relation is not what I call a "fact".
|
| Russell, POLA, p. 41.
|
| 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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