Rationalism & Empiricism Jerome Joseph Kennedy Seminar Notes Bertrand Russell - "What There Is" from "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (1918) "What There Is" presents an ontological statement of Russell's philosophy; what is it for something to exist? The fundamental features of his approach to finding what kind of things there are in the world are firstly a strong commitment to empiricism and secondly the use of analysis... "...One purpose that has run through all that I have said, has been the justification of analysis, i.e., the justification of logical atomism, of the view that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else. Simples, as I have tried to explain, are of an infinite number of sorts. There are particulars and qualities and relations of various orders, a whole hierarchy of different sorts of simples, but all of them, if we were right, have in their various ways some kind of reality that does not belong to anything else. The only other sort of object you come across in the world is what we call facts, and facts are the sort of things that are asserted or denied by propositions, and are not properly entities at all in the same sense in which their constituents are..." Bertrand Russell "What There Is" (3rd Paragraph) Russell distinguishes propositions from simples; the latter are basic and particular sense-data, the former a logical arrangement of these particulars. Propositions express facts about the world which have an obvious practical significance to us while their logical significance or meaning is to be sought within their constituent simples, the empirical apparatus that has built up the proposition... “...The things that we call real, like tables and chairs, 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. A table or chair will be a series of classes of particulars, and therefore a logical fiction...” Bertrand Russell "What There Is" (6th Paragraph) Propositions are built through and essentially symbolise clusters or of sense data, they are arrangements of sense- data. For instance, we do not experience a “chair” in itself, as a single metaphysical entity, but only the empirical appearances it presents to us; something in each particular appearance’s relation to each other enables us to collect all the particulars together and form the proposition “chair”. Russell's analytic method is to break down propostions to find whether the 'facts' they express can be verified by the particulars we experience. He shows the similarity and at the same time the distintion between his type of analysis or 'atomism' from that of scientific analysis... "...You find, if you read the works of physicists, that they reduce matter down to certain elements - atoms, ions, corpuscles, or what not [ ...] in any case the sort of thing you are aiming at in the physical analysis of matter is to get down to very little bits of matter that still are just like matter in the fact that they persist through time, and that they travel about in space. They have in fact all the ordinary everyday properties of physical matter, not the matter that one has in ordinary life - they do not taste or smell or appear to the naked eye-but they have the properties that you very soon get to when you travel toward physics from ordinary life. Things of that sort, I say, are not the ultimate constituents of matter in any metaphysical sense. Those things are all of them, as I think a very little reflection shows, logical fictions..." Bertrand Russell "What There Is" (5th Paragraph) ...a scientist also breaks things down to their constituents in the process of analysis. Formal properties, facts and concepts are then drawn up that complement and govern the laws of science, micro- bodies and forces are also found which affirm these laws. They all have a metaphysical existence, treated as 'real' entities, but Russell demonstrates that while they are certainly neccessary, they are nevertheless empirically insubstantial - we do not directly experience them as 'real' constituents of the world, but are rather our man-made 'logical fictions'. For instance, in arithmetic, numbers are logical fictions - they are incorporeal, but useful, demonstrating themselves to be consistently correct properties. We call them logical fictions, however, because as classes of classes, they are doubly removed from reality - an atom is an external corporeal object; but since we can never be directly conscious of an atom while readily accepting they exist, they too in a sense are removed from reality, they too are a 'logical fiction' - they cannot be verified by direct experience, by simple sense data... "...you cannot know the world unless you know the facts that make up the truths of the world; but the knowing of facts is a different sort of thing from knowing simples..." Bertrand Russell "What There Is" (3rd Paragraph) ...logical facts have a practical significance to us but we can only be truly aware of simples, particular sensations or sense data. It is these simples which we associate together in clusters to form the foundation for our propositions or logical fictions... "...What I can know is that there are a certain series of appearances linked together, and the series of those appearances I shall define as being a desk. 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..." Bertrand Russell "What There Is" (5th Paragraph) Simples are expressed in the symbolic language of propositions, therefore it follows that for these symbols (for instance, words in everyday language) to have true meaning they must be reducible in analysis to particular empirical data, to reality. Russell is aware that we cannot fully render sensations as reality (senses can lie, appearances can deceive) but these sensations must be recognised as being as real as anything can ever be to us. For Russell, reality is not permanent but ephemeral; a passing sensation cannot be experienced again, so he takes a positive imperative; we are obliged to build our reality from sense-data.