Russell - Hidden Logical Form
Project:
Russell's brand of Logicism led him to introduce the idea of a denoting term as an 'aboutness' shifter; he found this concept problematic, esp wrt talking about the meaning of such a term. This is raised the in Gray's Elegy argument. I need to understand this. Instead, he discovered a method for reconstruing sentences so to avoid reference to any entities that don't or may not have an objective correlate.
LING EXPRESS EX-LING CORRELATE
PART: word: term
- names -objects in the world (sense-datum)
- predicates -qualities, relations
WHOLE: sentence proposition
This is referred to as a one-step semantic theory. I'm not sure, beyond purely methodological considerations, why Russell doesn't take to sense. He is unconvinced that a proper name will need anything like a sense, though he of course sees the extra information asserted in a definite description. It might be simply that he thought his method of hidden logical form - i.e., hidden existential quantification, that we're speaking about some unique thing, and saying it has some properties - was sufficiently strong enough to deal with any cases of VAC, seen or unforeseen. He clearly sees some general application of this method, since he also tries to apply it to address the problem of unity of identity, also construing judgments as asserting the existence of a complex etc. At any rate, not only can empty definite descriptions be accounted for, but Russell feels entitled now to claim that anything that risks empty referent is actually just a disguised definite description: so "Phosphorus is Hesperus" really doesn't refer to any objects at all, but says states that some thing exists with unique properties, and some thing else does, and they are the same some thing.
This outlines a broad strategy: Russell now has found a way to deny that any given expression has correlative meaning, ie., names something in the world. Or: Russell only needs to admit correlative meaning to those linguistic entities as allowed by his other theoretical commitments.
Russell ends up with sense-data as the correlate of names because it is the only thing left over when everything that has the property of non-existence is shown to be a disguised definite description, but ALSO anything that coherently can be said to possibly not exist. We are not just concerned about the meaning of phrases with as a matter of fact non-existence entities in them, but also all coherent statements that something might not exist. We are not just plagued by the concept of actual non-existence, but also potential non-existence. If I can wonder whether "Plato exists", then Plato must be a disguised definite description. It is easy to see how only sense-data remain. This trajectory should've indicated that something had gone wrong, however Cartesian style world-regaining was more acceptable then - Husserl as well.
Project:
Russell's brand of Logicism led him to introduce the idea of a denoting term as an 'aboutness' shifter; he found this concept problematic, esp wrt talking about the meaning of such a term. This is raised the in Gray's Elegy argument. I need to understand this. Instead, he discovered a method for reconstruing sentences so to avoid reference to any entities that don't or may not have an objective correlate.
LING EXPRESS EX-LING CORRELATE
PART: word: term
- names -objects in the world (sense-datum)
- predicates -qualities, relations
WHOLE: sentence proposition
This is referred to as a one-step semantic theory. I'm not sure, beyond purely methodological considerations, why Russell doesn't take to sense. He is unconvinced that a proper name will need anything like a sense, though he of course sees the extra information asserted in a definite description. It might be simply that he thought his method of hidden logical form - i.e., hidden existential quantification, that we're speaking about some unique thing, and saying it has some properties - was sufficiently strong enough to deal with any cases of VAC, seen or unforeseen. He clearly sees some general application of this method, since he also tries to apply it to address the problem of unity of identity, also construing judgments as asserting the existence of a complex etc. At any rate, not only can empty definite descriptions be accounted for, but Russell feels entitled now to claim that anything that risks empty referent is actually just a disguised definite description: so "Phosphorus is Hesperus" really doesn't refer to any objects at all, but says states that some thing exists with unique properties, and some thing else does, and they are the same some thing.
This outlines a broad strategy: Russell now has found a way to deny that any given expression has correlative meaning, ie., names something in the world. Or: Russell only needs to admit correlative meaning to those linguistic entities as allowed by his other theoretical commitments.
Russell ends up with sense-data as the correlate of names because it is the only thing left over when everything that has the property of non-existence is shown to be a disguised definite description, but ALSO anything that coherently can be said to possibly not exist. We are not just concerned about the meaning of phrases with as a matter of fact non-existence entities in them, but also all coherent statements that something might not exist. We are not just plagued by the concept of actual non-existence, but also potential non-existence. If I can wonder whether "Plato exists", then Plato must be a disguised definite description. It is easy to see how only sense-data remain. This trajectory should've indicated that something had gone wrong, however Cartesian style world-regaining was more acceptable then - Husserl as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment