ONT Re: Russell -- Philosophy Of Logical Atomism
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POLA. Note 21
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| 4.1. Are Beliefs, Etc., Irreducible Facts? (cont.)
|
| I come back now to the theory of behaviourism which I spoke of a moment ago.
| Suppose, e.g. that you are said to believe that there is a train at 10.25.
| This means, we are told, that you start for the station at a certain time.
| When you reach the station you see it is 10.24 and you run. That behaviour
| constitutes your belief that there is a train at that time. If you catch
| your train by running, your belief was true. If the train went at 10.23,
| you miss it, and your belief was false. That is the sort of thing that
| they would say constitutes belief. There is not a single state of mind
| which consists in contemplating this eternal verity, that the train
| starts at 10.25.
|
| They would apply that even to the most abstract things.
| I do not myself feel that that view of things is tenable.
| It is a difficult one to refute because it goes very deep
| and one has the feeling that perhaps, if one thought it
| out long enough and became sufficiently aware of all
| its implications, one might find after all that it
| was a feasible view; but yet I do not 'feel' it
| feasible.
|
| It hangs together, of course, with the theory of neutral monism, with
| the theory that the material constituting the mental is the same as the
| material constituting the physical, just like the Post Office directory
| which gives you people arranged geographically and alphabetically. This
| whole theory hangs together with that. I do not mean necessarily that
| all the people that profess the one profess the other, but that the
| two do essentially belong together.
|
| If you are going to take that view, you have to explain away belief
| and desire, because things of that sort do seem to be mental phenomena.
| They do seem rather far removed from the sort of thing that happens in
| the physical world. Therefore people will set to work to explain away
| such things as belief, and reduce them to bodily behaviour; and your
| belief in a certain proposition will consist in the behaviour of your
| body. In the crudest terms that is what that view amounts to. It
| does enable you to get on very well without mind.
|
| Truth and falsehood in that case consist in the relation of your
| bodily behaviour to a certain fact, the sort of distant fact which
| is the purpose of your behaviour, as it were, and when your behaviour
| is satisfactory in regard to that fact your belief is true, and when
| your behaviour is unsatisfactory in regard to that fact your belief
| is false.
|
| The logical essence, in that view, will be a relation between two facts
| having the same sort of form as a causal relation, i.e. on the one hand
| there will be your bodily behaviour which is one fact, and on the other
| hand the fact that the train starts at such and such a time, which is
| another fact, and out of a relation of those two the whole phenomenon
| is constituted.
|
| The thing you will get will be logically of the same form as you have
| in cause, where you have "This fact causes that fact". It is quite
| a different logical form from the facts containing two verbs that
| I am talking of today.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 84-86.
|
| 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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