ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 19
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| 4.1. Are Beliefs, Etc., Irreducible Facts? (cont.)
|
| Pragmatists and some of the American realists, the school whom one calls
| neutral monists, deny altogether that there is such a phenomenon as belief
| in the sense I am dealing with. They do not deny it in words, they do not
| use the same sort of language that I am using, and that makes it difficult
| to compare their views with the views I am speaking about. One has really
| to translate what they say into language more or less analogous to ours
| before one can make out where the points of contact or difference are.
|
| If you take the works of James in his 'Essays in Radical Empiricism'
| or Dewey in his 'Essays in Experimental Logic' you will find that they
| are denying altogether that there is such a phenomenon as belief in the
| sense I am talking of. They use the word "believe" but they mean something
| different. You come to the view called "behaviourism", according to which
| you mean, if you say a person believes a thing, that he behaves in a certain
| fashion; and that hangs together with James's pragmatism. James and Dewey
| would say: when I believe a proposition, that 'means' that I act in a certain
| fashion, that my behaviour has certain characteristics, and my belief is a true
| one if the behaviour leads to the desired result and is a false one if it does
| not. That, if it is true, makes their pragmatism a perfectly rational account
| of truth and falsehood, if you do accept their view that belief as an isolated
| phenomenon does not occur.
|
| That is therefore the first thing one has to consider.
| It would take me too far from logic to consider that
| subject as it deserves to be considered, because it
| is a subject belonging to psychology, and it is only
| relevant to logic in this one way that it raises a
| doubt whether there are any facts having the logical
| form that I am speaking of.
|
| In the question of this logical form that involves two or more verbs you
| have a curious interlacing of logic with empirical studies, and of course
| that may occur elsewhere, in this way, that an empirical study gives you
| an example of a thing having a certain logical form, and you cannot really
| be sure that there are things having a given logical form except by finding
| an example, and the finding of an example is itself empirical. Therefore in
| that way empirical facts are relevant to logic at certain points. I think
| theoretically one might know that there were those forms without knowing
| any instance of them, but practically, situated as we are, that does not
| seem to occur. Practically, unless you can find an example of the form
| you won't know that there is that form. If I cannot find an example
| containing two or more verbs, you will not have reason to believe
| in the theory that such a form occurs.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 82-83.
|
| 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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