ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 9
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| 1. Facts and Propositions (cont.)
|
| It is obvious that there is not a dualism of true and false facts;
| there are only just facts. It would be a mistake, of course, to
| say that all facts are true. That would be a mistake because
| true and false are correlatives, and you would only say of
| a thing that it was true if it was the sort of thing that
| 'might' be false. A fact cannot be either true or false.
|
| That brings us on to the question of statements or propositions or
| judgments, all those things that do have the quality of truth and
| falsehood. For the purposes of logic, though not, I think, for the
| purposes of theory of knowledge, it is natural to concentrate upon
| the proposition as the thing which is going to be our typical vehicle
| on the duality of truth and falsehood.
|
| A proposition, one may say, is a sentence in the indicative,
| a sentence asserting something, not questioning or commanding
| or wishing. It may also be a sentence of that sort preceded
| by the word "that". For example, "That Socrates is alive",
| "That two and two are four", "That two and two are five",
| anything of that sort will be a proposition.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 43-44.
|
| 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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