ONT Re: Russell's Treatise On Propositions
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RTOP. Note 2
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| On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean (1919)
|
| Let us illustrate the content of a belief
| by an example. Suppose I am believing,
| but not in words, that "it will rain".
| What is happening?
|
| (1) Images, say, of the visual appearance of rain,
| the feeling of wetness, the patter of drops,
| interrelated, roughly, as the sensations
| would be if it were raining, i.e., there
| is a complex 'fact composed of images',
| having a structure analogous to that
| of the objective fact which would
| make the belief true.
|
| (2) There is 'expectation', i.e.,
| that form of belief which
| refers to the future;
| we shall examine
| this shortly.
|
| (3) There is a relation between (1) and (2),
| making us say that (1) is "what is expected".
| This relation also demands investigation.
|
| The most important thing about a proposition is that, whether
| it consists of images or of words, it is, whenever it occurs, an
| actual fact, having a certain analogy -- to be further investigated --
| with the fact which makes it true or false. A word-proposition, apart
| from niceties, "means" the corresponding image-proposition, and an
| image-proposition has an objective reference dependent upon the
| meanings of its constituent images.
|
| Russell, OP, p. 309.
|
| Bertrand Russell,
|"On Propositions: What They Are And How They Mean" (1919),
| pp. 285-320 in 'Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950',
| edited by Robert Charles Marsh, Routledge, London, UK, 1956.
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