Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 146

LANGUAGE Russell’s Theory of Descriptions One of James’s earliest and most trenchant critics was Bertrand Russell, who attacked the pragmatist account of truth in an article of 1908 entitled ‘Transatlantic Truth’ ‘According to the pragmatists’, he wrote, ‘to say ‘‘it is true that other people exist’’ means ‘‘it is useful to believe that other people exist’’ But if so, then these two phrases are merely different words for the same proposition; therefore when I believe the one I believe the other’ (James, T 278) But, Russell claimed, one proposition could be true and the other false; and in general it was often much easier in practice to find out whether p was true than whether it was good to believe that p ‘It is far easier’, Russell wrote, ‘to settle the plain question of fact ‘‘Have popes always been infallible?’’ than to settle the question whether the effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole good’ (James, T 273) In the years leading up to Principia Mathematica, however, Russell’s philosophical interests were focused less on the nature of truth than on the different kinds of meaning that words and phrases might have, and also the possible ways in which they might turn out to lack meaning When he wrote The Principles of Mathematics he had a very simple view of meaning which led to a very catholic view of being, reminiscent of Parmenides.2 Being is that which belongs to every conceivable term, to every possible object of thought—in short to everything that can possibly occur in any proposition, true or false, and to all such propositions themselves ‘A is not’ must always be either false or meaningless For if A were nothing it could not be said not to be; ‘A is not’ implies that there is a term A whose being is denied, and hence that A is Thus, unless ‘A is not’ be an empty sound, it must be false—whatever A may be, it certainly is Numbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces all have being, for if they were not entities of a kind, we could make no propositions about them Thus being is a general attribute of everything, and to mention anything is to show that it is (PM 449) It was not long before he began to believe that a system that made distinctions between different ways in which signs might signify was more credible than one in which the world contained a profusion of different kinds of object all related to symbols by a single simple relation of denotation He soon, for instance, adopted Frege’s method of dealing See vol I, pp 200–4 129