The Analysis of Mind - Bertrand Russell (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗
- Author: Bertrand Russell
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(Oxford, 1906). According to this view, any set of propositions
other than the whole of truth can be condemned on purely logical
grounds, as internally inconsistent; a single proposition, if it
is what we should ordinarily call false, contradicts itself
irremediably, while if it is what we should ordinarily call true,
it has implications which compel us to admit other propositions,
which in turn lead to others, and so on, until we find ourselves
committed to the whole of truth. One might illustrate by a very
simple example: if I say “so-and-so is a married man,” that is
not a self-subsistent proposition. We cannot logically conceive
of a universe in which this proposition constituted the whole of
truth. There must be also someone who is a married woman, and who
is married to the particular man in question. The view we are
considering regards everything that can be said about any one
object as relative in the same sort of way as “so-and-so is a
married man.” But everything, according to this view, is
relative, not to one or two other things, but to all other
things, so that from one bit of truth the whole can be inferred.
The fundamental objection to this view is logical, and consists
in a criticism of its doctrine as to relations. I shall omit this
line of argument, which I have developed elsewhere.* For the
moment I will content myself with saying that the powers of logic
seem to me very much less than this theory supposes. If it were
taken seriously, its advocates ought to profess that any one
truth is logically inferable from any other, and that, for
example, the fact that Caesar conquered Gaul, if adequately
considered, would enable us to discover what the weather will be
to-morrow. No such claim is put forward in practice, and the
necessity of empirical observation is not denied; but according
to the theory it ought to be.
* In the article on “The Monistic Theory of Truth” in
“Philosophical Essays” (Longmans, 1910), reprinted from the
“Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,” 1906-7.
Another objection is that no endeavour is made to show that we
cannot form a consistent whole composed partly or wholly of false
propositions, as in a novel. Leibniz’s conception of many
possible worlds seems to accord much better with modern logic and
with the practical empiricism which is now universal. The attempt
to deduce the world by pure thought is attractive, and in former
times was largely supposed capable of success. But nowadays most
men admit that beliefs must be tested by observation, and not
merely by the fact that they harmonize with other beliefs. A
consistent fair-ytale is a different thing from truth, however
elaborate it may be. But to pursue this topic would lead us into
difficult technicalities; I shall therefore assume, without
further argument, that coherence is not sufficient as a
definition of truth.
III. Many difficult problems arise as regards the verifiability
of beliefs. We believe various things, and while we believe them
we think we know them. But it sometimes turns out that we were
mistaken, or at any rate we come to think we were. We must be
mistaken either in our previous opinion or in our subsequent
recantation; therefore our beliefs are not all correct, and there
are cases of belief which are not cases of knowledge. The
question of verifiability is in essence this: can we discover any
set of beliefs which are never mistaken or any test which, when
applicable, will always enable us to discriminate between true
and false beliefs? Put thus broadly and abstractly, the answer
must be negative. There is no way hitherto discovered of wholly
eliminating the risk of error, and no infallible criterion. If we
believe we have found a criterion, this belief itself may be
mistaken; we should be begging the question if we tried to test
the criterion by applying the criterion to itself.
But although the notion of an absolute criterion is chimerical,
there may be relative criteria, which increase the probability of
truth. Common sense and science hold that there are. Let us see
what they have to say.
One of the plainest cases of verification, perhaps ultimately the
only case, consists in the happening of something expected. You
go to the station believing that there will be a train at a
certain time; you find the train, you get into it, and it starts
at the expected time This constitutes verification, and is a
perfectly definite experience. It is, in a sense, the converse of
memory instead of having first sensations and then images
accompanied by belief, we have first images accompanied by belief
and then sensations. Apart from differences as to the time-order
and the accompanying feelings, the relation between image and
sensation is closely similar in the two cases of memory and
expectation; it is a relation of similarity, with difference as
to causal efficacy—broadly, the image has the psychological but
not the physical effects that the sensation would have. When an
image accompanied by an expectation-belief is thus succeeded by a
sensation which is the “meaning” of the image, we say that the
expectation-belief has been verified. The experience of
verification in this sense is exceedingly familiar; it happens
every time that accustomed activities have results that are not
surprising, in eating and walking and talking and all our daily
pursuits.
But although the experience in question is common, it is not
wholly easy to give a theoretical account of it. How do we know
that the sensation resembles the previous image? Does the image
persist in presence of the sensation, so that we can compare the
two? And even if SOME image does persist, how do we know that it
is the previous image unchanged? It does not seem as if this line
of inquiry offered much hope of a successful issue. It is better,
I think, to take a more external and causal view of the relation
of expectation to expected occurrence. If the occurrence, when it
comes, gives us the feeling of expectedness, and if the
expectation, beforehand, enabled us to act in a way which proves
appropriate to the occurrence, that must be held to constitute
the maximum of verification. We have first an expectation, then a
sensation with the feeling of expectedness related to memory of
the expectation. This whole experience, when it occurs, may be
defined as verification, and as constituting the truth of the
expectation. Appropriate action, during the period of
expectation, may be regarded as additional verification, but is
not essential. The whole process may be illustrated by looking up
a familiar quotation, finding it in the expected words, and in
the expected part of the book. In this case we can strengthen the
verification by writing down beforehand the words which we expect
to find.
I think all verification is ultimately of the above sort. We
verify a scientific hypothesis indirectly, by deducing
consequences as to the future, which subsequent experience
confirms. If somebody were to doubt whether Caesar had crossed
the Rubicon, verification could only be obtained from the future.
We could proceed to display manuscripts to our historical
sceptic, in which it was said that Caesar had behaved in this
way. We could advance arguments, verifiable by future experience,
to prove the antiquity of the manuscript from its texture,
colour, etc. We could find inscriptions agreeing with the
historian on other points, and tending to show his general
accuracy. The causal laws which our arguments would assume could
be verified by the future occurrence of events inferred by means
of them. The existence and persistence of causal laws, it is
true, must be regarded as a fortunate accident, and how long it
will continue we cannot tell. Meanwhile verification remains
often practically possible. And since it is sometimes possible,
we can gradually discover what kinds of beliefs tend to be
verified by experience, and what kinds tend to be falsified; to
the former kinds we give an increased degree of assent, to the
latter kinds a diminished degree. The process is not absolute or
infallible, but it has been found capable of sifting beliefs and
building up science. It affords no theoretical refutation of the
sceptic, whose position must remain logically unassailable; but
if complete scepticism is rejected, it gives the practical method
by which the system of our beliefs grows gradually towards the
unattainable ideal of impeccable knowledge.
IV. I come now to the purely formal definition of the truth or
falsehood of a belief. For this definition it is necessary first
of all to consider the derivation of the objective reference of a
proposition from the meanings of its component words or images.
Just as a word has meaning, so a proposition has an objective
reference. The objective reference of a proposition is a function
(in the mathematical sense) of the meanings of its component
words. But the objective reference differs from the meaning of a
word through the duality of truth and falsehood. You may believe
the proposition “to-day is Tuesday” both when, in fact, to-day is
Tuesday, and when to-day is not Tuesday. If to-day is not
Tuesday, this fact is the objective of your belief that to-day is
Tuesday. But obviously the relation of your belief to the fact is
different in this case from what it is in the case when to-day is
Tuesday. We may say, metaphorically, that when to-day is Tuesday,
your belief that it is Tuesday points TOWARDS the fact, whereas
when to-day is not Tuesday your belief points AWAY FROM the fact.
Thus the objective reference of a belief is not determined by the
fact alone, but by the direction of the belief towards or away
from the fact.* If, on a Tuesday, one man believes that it is
Tuesday while another believes that it is not Tuesday, their
beliefs have the same objective, namely the fact that it is
Tuesday but the true belief points towards the fact while the
false one points away from it. Thus, in order to define the
reference of a proposition we have to take account not only of
the objective, but also of the direction of pointing, towards the
objective in the case of a true proposition and away from it in
the case of a false one.
* I owe this way of looking at the matter to my friend Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
This mode of stating the nature of the objective reference of a
proposition is necessitated by the circumstance that there are
true and false propositions, but not true and false facts. If
to-day is Tuesday, there is not a false objective “to-day is not
Tuesday,” which could be the objective of the false belief
“to-day is not Tuesday.” This is the reason why two beliefs which
are each other’s contradictories have the same objective. There
is, however, a practical inconvenience, namely that we cannot
determine the objective reference of a proposition, according to
this definition, unless we know whether the proposition is true
or false. To avoid this inconvenience, it is better to adopt a
slightly different phraseology, and say: The “meaning” of the
proposition “to-day is Tuesday” consists in pointing to the fact
“to-day is Tuesday” if that is a fact, or away from the fact
“to-day is not Tuesday” if that is a fact. The “meaning” of the
proposition “to-day is not Tuesday” will be exactly the opposite.
By this hypothetical form we are able to speak of the meaning of
a proposition without knowing whether it is true or false.
According to this definition, we know the meaning of a
proposition when we know what would make it true and what would
make it false, even if we do not know whether it is in fact true
or false.
The meaning of a proposition is derivative from
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