ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 20
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| 4.1. Are Beliefs, Etc., Irreducible Facts? (cont.)
|
| When you read the words of people like James and Dewey on the subject of belief,
| one thing that strikes you at once is that the sort of thing they are thinking of
| as the object of belief is quite different from the sort of thing I am thinking of.
| They think of it always as a thing. They think you believe in God or Homer: you
| believe in an object. That is the picture they have in their minds. It is common
| enough, in common parlance, to talk that way, and they would say, the first crude
| approximation that they would suggest would be that you believe truly when there
| is such an object and that you believe falsely when there is not. I do not mean
| they would say that exactly, but that would be the crude view from which they
| would start. They do not seem to have grasped the fact that the objective side
| in belief is better expressed by a proposition than by a single word, and that,
| I think, has a great deal to do with their whole outlook on the matter of what
| belief consists of. The object of belief in their view is generally, not
| relations between things, or things having qualities, or what not, but
| just single things which may or may not exist. That view seems to me
| radically and absolutely mistaken.
|
| In the 'first' place there are a great many judgments you cannot possibly fit into
| that scheme, and in the 'second' place it cannot possibly give any explanation to
| false beliefs, because when you believe that a thing exists and it does not exist,
| the thing is not there, it is nothing, and it cannot be the right analysis of a
| false belief to regard it as a relation to what is really nothing.
|
| This an objection to supposing that belief consists simply in relation
| to the object. It is obvious that if you say "I believe in Homer" and
| there was no such person as Homer, your belief cannot be a relation to
| Homer, since there is no "Homer".
|
| Every fact that occurs in the world must be composed entirely of constituents
| that there are, and not of constituents that there are not. Therefore when
| you say "I believe in Homer" it cannot be the right analysis of the thing
| to put it like that. What the right analysis is I shall come on to in
| the theory of descriptions.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 83-84.
|
| 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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