Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (10 page)

On this basis Russell offers an ‘excursus into metaphysics’. Logical atomism is the view that in theory, if not in practice, analysis takes us down to the ultimate simples out of which the world is built. Simples are defined as whatever is non-complex – that is, not further analysable – and each is an independent self-subsisting thing. They are, moreover, very short-lived, so the complexes built out of them are ‘logical fictions’, put together to serve our epistemic and practical purposes.

Simples come in infinitely many kinds. There are various orders of particulars, qualities, and relations, but their common feature is that they have a reality not shared by anything else. The only other objects in the world are facts, which are the things that get asserted or denied by propositions. Facts do not have the same reality as their constituents, and knowledge of them is quite different from knowledge of simples; the former is knowledge by description, the latter knowledge by acquaintance.

Russell’s method of analysis involves Ockham’s razor, the principle that we should work with the most economical theory possible about what exists. It can be described as posing an insistent question, ‘What is the smallest number of simple undefined things at the start, and the smallest number of undemonstrated premisses, out of which you can define the things that need to be defined and prove the things that need to be proved?’ (PLA 271). When Ockham’s razor is applied, the account to be given of an ordinary physical object, such as a desk, is as follows. We think of the desk as an enduring object which exists when unperceived. As a sceptic might point out, this belief is based on intermittent perceptions of the desk, which by themselves tell us nothing about whether the desk continues to exist between times. Yet we say that all these different appearances of the desk are appearances of the
same
desk. What makes us say this? Russell’s answer is that the series of appearances is simply defined by us into a single persisting object. ‘In that way the desk is reduced to being a logical fiction, because a series is a logical fiction. In that way all the ordinary objects of daily life are extruded from the world of what there is, and in their place as what there is you find a number of passing particulars of the kind that one is immediately conscious of in sense,’ namely, sense-data (PLA 273). So the things we call real things ‘are systems, series of classes of particulars, and the particulars are the real things, the particulars being sense-data when they happen to be given to you’ (PLA 274).

This way with matters suggested to Russell an analysis of physics – physical atoms are construed as logical fictions too – and it began to incline him towards a view of mind called ‘neutral monism’. He did not work out either view fully at this stage; but later, and on the basis of some important changes in his outlook, he gave them express attention. He did so in
The Analysis of Matter
(1927) and
The Analysis of Mind
(1921) respectively. I defer more particular discussion of them.

Some problems in logical atomism

It is difficult to find logical atomism satisfactory. For one thing, Russell’s presentation of it is sketchy, and yet it is aimed at solving many different problems at once. It is an empiricist theory of meaning, which means that it has to offer component theories of knowledge, perception, and mind, with, at their centre, an empiricist account of how words work, and of how they are learned and understood. This latter task is complicated for Russell by his view that the surface forms of ordinary language are misleading and therefore, if not correctly analysed, will lead to bad philosophy:

I think the importance of philosophical grammar is very much greater than it is generally thought to be. I think that practically all traditional metaphysics is filled with mistakes due to bad grammar, and that almost all the traditional problems of metaphysics and traditional results – supposed results – of metaphysics are due to a failure to make the kind of distinctions in what we may call philosophical grammar.

(PLA 269)

So the analysis proceeds by assuming that there is an underlying structure of language, importantly different from its surface structure, which alone corresponds to the structure of the world revealed by its analysis. One large problem this therefore raises is whether the logic of
Principia Mathematica
is uniquely the correct way to represent the underlying logical form of natural language.

Russell’s theory unites a purely logical account of structure to a sensedata empiricism, by making sense-data the simples constituting the world’s structure. But it is necessary for him to include among simples not just things but their qualities and relations – that is, universals –and this immediately introduces another difficulty, for it is not clear that universals are simple in the way particulars are supposed to be. The marks of simplicity are unanalysability and independence. Do universals have these marks, even in Russell’s best example of colour-patches of a specific shade? No; for colour-patches are not independent of one another, and the expressions denoting them are capable of introducing incompatibilities between propositions.

Russell believed that such problems could be overcome by a completely thorough analysis of ordinary factual discourse. But he was never able to carry out such an analysis, and had to regard it as something for future scientific philosophy to achieve – or to deal with differently, if it could discover a way. This led him to make some interesting admissions:

When I speak of simples, I ought to explain that I am speaking of something not experienced as such, but known only inferentially as the limit of analysis. It is quite possible that, by greater logical skill, the need for assuming them could be avoided. A logical language will not lead to error if its simple symbols (i.e. those not having any parts that are symbols, or any significant structure) all stand for objects of some one type, even if these objects are not simple. The only drawback to such a language is that it is incapable of dealing with anything simpler than the objects which it represents by simple symbols. But I confess it seems obvious to me (as it did to Leibniz) that what is complex must be composed of simples, though the number of constituents may be infinite.

(
Logic and Knowledge
, 337)

In this passage Russell effectively concedes the problem of attaching his empiricism to his atomism – if sense-data are simples, and yet simples are inferred not experienced, then the theory is incoherent – and breaks the connection, elsewhere insisted upon, between simple symbols and simple entities: for here he is saying that simple symbols can stand for complex entities; the only requirement is that they should be of one type. Moreover, if simples are infinite in number the prospects even for a logically
perfect
language are exceedingly dim, because it would have to contain an infinity of names, and analysis itself, as a potentially infinite procedure, would never be fully achievable.

Some commentators suggest that logical atomism would fare better if it were detached from empiricism and treated as a purely formal theory, as Wittgenstein treated it in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. So considered, its essence is that expressions (other than those of logic, such as ‘and’) are of two kinds, those that denote existing (simple) things and those that are analysable into such expressions. When we leave aside the empiricism which says that the simple things are sensedata and therefore objects of acquaintance, we thereby leave aside any account of how people can learn and understand language, and this is a serious defect; it certainly mattered to Russell that such an account should be available, and it marks one of the chief differences between his and Wittgenstein’s versions of atomism. But since, as noted, trying to graft empiricism to atomism creates such difficulties, this defect might have to be accepted – although it would be entirely natural to argue that the incompatibility of atomism with these considerations (treated as constraints on any adequate account of language) might instead be taken as a reason for abandoning atomism itself.

But trying to detach empiricism from atomism makes difficulties for, among other things, Russell’s theory of names. According to this theory, logically proper names are very like the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’; they are empty of descriptive content, and their meanings are the particulars they denote. These meanings can therefore only be learned in episodes of acquaintance with the particulars they denote; but detaching empirical considerations means that this part of the theory is not now available. This creates a problem; for one of the main applications of this view lies in analysis of ordinary language expressions which appear to denote temporally persisting things – desks and the like. The pure form of the theory requires that, for each logically proper name, something exists for it to denote. On the empiricist theory such denotata are momentary sense-data, and therefore in addition to knowing what names denote, we know that they share an aspect of their denotata; they are temporary also. But on the pure theory it is not clear how to characterize names, because we do not know what the unknown – purely formal – ultimate existents are. Denying ourselves a theory about this means further that we have no view of how the naming relation works; there is, for example, no baptismal occasion as when, on the empiricist theory, someone christens a given sense-datum ‘that’ or something equally suitable. And this also means that we have nothing to say about why
this
name names
that
particular, and whether it could have named another; which anyway might seem a small problem once we have allowed ourselves to think of there being names without namers, language-learners, or perceivers.

This cluster of considerations suggests that the gain to be had from detaching atomism and empiricism is severely limited. It happens that these objections are not by themselves fatal to those aspects of logical atomism which offer an account of meaning; there are other ways of developing them, along with their connections to languageunderstanding. But a full evaluation should anyway take account of Russell’s own reasons for modifying some and abandoning other – rather central – features of logical atomism in his later thinking about mind and matter. To a sketch of these points I now turn.

Mind and matter

In the course of setting out his logical atomist views in 1918 Russell said that he was tempted but still unconvinced by William James’s ‘neutral monism’, a theory offered to solve long-standing problems about the differences and connections between mind and matter. Summarily stated, James’s theory is that the world ultimately consists neither of mental stuff, as idealists hold, nor material stuff, as materialists hold, but of a ‘neutral stuff’ from which the appearance of both mind and matter is formed. By Russell’s own account, he was converted to this theory soon after finishing the lectures on logical atomism. He had written about James’s views in 1914, and rejected them; in the 1918 lectures he was more sympathetic, but still undecided; but finally in a paper entitled ‘On Propositions’ (1919) he embraced the theory, and used it as a basis in 1921 for his book
The Analysis of Mind
(
AMd
). Russell refined the theory somewhat thereafter, but I shall draw mainly on
AMd
for this sketch.

Popular philosophy has it that mind and matter are very different, and that the difference lies in the fact that minds are conscious whereas material things, such as stones, are not. The question Russell therefore asks is: Is consciousness the essence of the mental? To answer this, one needs first to have some idea of the nature of consciousness. Reflection on standard examples of conscious phenomena – perceiving, remembering, thinking, believing – suggests that the principal feature of consciousness is that to
be conscious
in any of these ways is to
be conscious of
something. Philosophers give the name ‘intentionality’ to this characteristic, which might also be labelled ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’. Thus the notion of consciousness is an essentially relational one; an
act
of mind – an act of perceiving, or believing, or some such – is related to an
object –
the object perceived, the proposition believed. Indeed on some versions of the theory, for example Meinong’s, there are three elements in play: the act, the content, and the object. For example: suppose one thinks of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. There is one’s act of thinking; there is the character of the thought that makes it about St Paul’s and not about some other cathedral – this is the content; and then there is the object, namely St Paul’s itself.

Russell rejects such views. First, he says, there is no such thing as the ‘act’. The occurrence of the content of a thought is the occurrence of the thought, and there is neither empirical evidence nor theoretical need for an ‘act’ in addition. Russell’s diagnosis of why anyone might think otherwise is that we say, ‘
I
think so-and-so’, which suggests that thinking is an act performed by a subject. But he rejects this, for reasons very similar to those advanced by Hume, who held that the notion of the self is a fiction, and that we are empirically licensed to say no more than that there are bundles of thoughts which for convenience we parcel as ‘me’ and ‘you’.

Secondly, Russell criticizes the relation of content and object. Meinong and others had taken it that the relation is one of direct reference, but in Russell’s view it is more complicated and derivative, consisting largely of beliefs about a variety of more and less indirect connections among contents, between contents and objects, and among objects. Add to this the fact that, in imagination and non-standard experiences like hallucination, one can have thoughts without objects, and one sees that the content–object relation involves many difficulties – not least, Russell says, in giving rise to the dispute between idealists who think that content is more significant than objects, and realists who think objects are more significant than content. (Russell’s use of these labels, although standard, is misleading: we should for accuracy substitute the label ‘anti-realist’ for ‘idealist’ here; this is because whereas, at bottom, realism and anti-realism are indeed differing theses about the relation of contents to objects, and thus are
epistemological
theses, idealism is a
metaphysical
thesis about the nature of the world, namely, that it is ultimately mental in character. This point is frequently missed in philosophical debate, so Russell is in good company.) All these difficulties can be avoided, Russell claims, if we adopt a version of William James’s ‘neutral monist’ theory.