In this article, I pay special expository attention to two pieces of philosophically relevant Wittgenstein–Russell correspondence from the period leading up to the ultimate demise of Russell's Theory of Knowledge manuscript (in June 1913). This is done in the hopes of shedding light on Wittgenstein's notoriously obscure criticisms of Russell's multiple relation theory of judgement. I argue that these two pieces of correspondence (the first, a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell dated January 1913, and the second, a letter from Russell (...) to Ottoline Morrell, reporting a tense confrontation with Wittgenstein on 26 May 1913) each refer to what is more or less the same approach to problems concerning the unity and well-formedness of propositions or judgements. However, the view advanced in Wittgenstein's January letter to Russell nevertheless differs in a key respect from the view of Russell's referred to in the May letter to Morrell. The difference involves Wittgenstein's incorporating qualities and relations as unsaturated parts of the copulae of atomic complexes, where these copulae are in turn conceived as logical forms. Because such an approach to logical form (and more specifically, to relations) was philosophically unpalatable to Russell, he undertook an alternative theoretical correction in the context of his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript. This theoretical correction was discussed with Wittgenstein during the tense confrontation on 26 May, and involved deploying a supplemental significance constraint on judgements. It was this significance constraint on judgements, moreover, which was the ‘premiss’ alluded to by Wittgenstein in the context of a June 1913 letter to Russell, wherein he claims to express his objection to Russell's theory ‘exactly.’. (shrink)

Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge zu den drei klassischen Disziplinen der Philosophie – dem Wahren, dem Guten, dem Schönen. Ihre Autoren zeichnet aus, dass sie aus dem akademischen Umfeld Michael Sukales zu seiner Zeit am Institut für Philosophie an der Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg stammen. Ihm ist dieses Buch zum Abschied von seiner aktiven Lehrtätigkeit in Oldenburg gewidmet. Die thematische Vielfalt der enthaltenen Texte spiegelt die Bandbreite seines philosophischen Schaffens wider.

Philosophy has four forms: wonder, faith, doubt and scepticism. These are not separate categories, but separate ideal possibilities. Modern academic philosophy has fallen, for several centuries, into an error: which is the error of supposing that philosophy is only what I call doubt. Philosophy may be doubt: indeed, it is part of my argument that this is undeniably one element of, or one possibility in, philosophy; but doubt is only one of four points of the compass. In this essay I (...) indicate the nature of each point of the compass as it has been found in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

It is occasionally claimed that the important work of philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries made Kant’s critical philosophy of geometry look somewhat unattractive. Indeed, from the wider perspective of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the rise of quantificational logic, Kant’s philosophy seems “quaint at best and silly at worst”.1 While there is no doubt that Kant’s transcendental project involves his own conceptions (...) of Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic, the issue at stake is whether the replacement of these conceptions collapses Kant’s philosophy into an unfortunate embarrassment.2 Thus, in evaluating the debate over the contemporary relevance of Kant’s philosophical project one is faced with the following two questions: (1) Are there any contradictions between the scientific developments of our era and Kant’s philosophy? (2) What is left from the Kantian legacy in light of our modern conceptions of logic, geometry and physics? Within this broad context, this paper aims to evaluate the Kantian project vis à vis the discovery and application of non-Euclidean geometries. Many important philosophers have evaluated Kant’s philosophy of geometry throughout the last century,3 but opinions with regard to the impact of non-Euclidean geometries on it diverge. In the beginning of the century there was a consensus that the Euclidean character of space should be considered as a consequence of the Kantian project, i.e., of the metaphysical view of space and of the synthetic a priori character of geometry. The impact of non-Euclidean geometries was then thought as undermining the Kantian project since it implied, according to positivists such.. (shrink)

To compute is to execute an algorithm. More precisely, to say that a device or organ computes is to say that there exists a modelling relationship of a certain kind between it and a formal specification of an algorithm and supporting architecture. The key issue is to delimit the phrase of a certain kind. I call this the problem of distinguishing between standard and nonstandard models of computation. The successful drawing of this distinction guards Turing's 1936 analysis of computation against (...) a difficulty that has persistently been raised against it, and undercuts various objections that have been made to the computational theory of mind. (shrink)

Strawson’s case in favor of panpsychism is at heart an updated version of a venerable form of argument I’ll call the ‘intrinsic nature’ argument. It is an extremely interesting argument which deploys all sorts of high caliber metaphysical weaponry (despite the ‘down home’ appeals to common sense which Strawson frequently makes). The argument is also subtle and intricate. So let’s spend some time trying to articulate its general form.

Structural realism is the view that scientific theories give us knowledge only of the structure of the unobservable world. The view faces an influential objection that was first posed by Max Newman: if our knowledge of the unobservable world were strictly limited to its structure, our knowledge turns out to be trivial, for it amounts to nothing more than knowledge of the cardinality of the world. In this paper, I shall propose a response to Newman’s objection. It shall be argued (...) that in having epistemic access to the intrinsic nature of our conscious experiences—knowledge that structural realists allow for—we have knowledge of what it is to exist as concrete phenomena. With the plausible assumption that the relations of the unobservable world are also similarly concrete, one can address Newman’s objection. I shall further contrast this response to other similar responses that have been proposed, and also address the objection that this response is not available to structural realists. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s conception of philosophy evolved dramatically in 1911 — the year he fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. For many years Russell had been an ardent advocate of the view that philosophers ought to look for truths that are certain. The co-author of Principia Mathematica altered his commitment to certainty in philosophy in 1911. An analysis of his published views and correspondence from this time strongly suggests that the radical transformation was induced by an epiphany brought about by (...) his emotional entanglement with his lover. (shrink)

Everything you always wanted to know about structural realism but were afraid to ask Content Type Journal Article Pages 227-276 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0025-7 Authors Roman Frigg, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE UK Ioannis Votsis, Philosophisches Institut, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, Geb. 23.21/04.86, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 2.

The Newman problem is a fundamental problem that threatens to undermine structural assumptions and structural theories throughout philosophy and science. Here, we consider the problem in the context of consciousness science. We introduce and discuss the problem, and explain why it is detrimental not only to structuralist assumptions, but also to theories of consciousness, if left unconsidered. However, we show that if phenomenal spaces, and mathematical structures of conscious experience more generally, are understood in the right way, the Newman problem (...) does not arise. The upshot of our paper is that consciousness science needs to be careful in which definition of structure to consider, but if it is, the Newman problem disappears. (shrink)

In this excellent book Sebastien Gandon focuses mainly on Russell's two major texts, Principa Mathematica and Principle of Mathematics, meticulously unpicking the details of these texts and bringing a new interpretation of both the mathematical and the philosophical content. Winner of The Bertrand Russell Society Book Award 2013.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the chapter's first paragraph: JOHN DEWEY AND BERTRAND RUSSELL were two of the premier philosophers of the twentieth century. During their long lives (each lived to be over 90), their paths crossed on several occasions. While cordial enough when in each others presence, the two men were definitely not on the best of terms. Sidney Hook, who knew and admired them both, once said that there were only two men who Dewey actively disliked—Mortimer (...) Adler and Bertrand Russell. Russell, for his part, never tired of making disparaging remarks about the pragmatists in general and Dewey in particular. This irked Dewey immensely. Still, the two men shared many philosophical traits—an internationalist outlook, a high regard for the scientific method, a concern for social matters, and a suspicion of dogma, especially religious dogma. In this chapter, I will focus upon the educational theories of Russell and Dewey, including the curious fact that each of them (for a short period of time) ran their own elementary schools. (shrink)

It is far from obvious that outside of highly specialized domains such as commercial agriculture, the methodology of biometrics—quantitative comparisons over groups of organisms—should be of any use in today’s bioinformatically informed biological sciences. The methods in our biometric textbooks, such as regressions and principal components analysis, make assumptions of homogeneity that are incompatible with current understandings of the origins of developmental or evolutionary data in historically contingent processes, processes that might have come out otherwise; the appropriate statistical methods are (...) those suited to random walks, not normal distributions. A valid methodology would further require that especially close attention be paid to the difference between aspects of processes that are plastic, those that encode their own histories or biographies, and the very small fraction of quantifications that can usefully and realistically be modeled as varying by colored noise around a central tendency that itself has some quantitative meaning. This point of view—that only a vanishingly small fraction of the quantitative information borne by any living organism is worth quantifying—is illustrated by some data on a human birth defect, namely, fetal alcohol syndrome. In a suggestive metaphor, the biometrician is like the pilgrim in Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, uncertain as to whether to measure the mountains or the clouds. The mountains stand for contingent history, the clouds for the subset of the data most closely matching controlled experiments suitable for quantitative biometric summary. Biometrics applies to the clouds, not the mountains. The success of statistical methods comes at the expense of all the theories that we simultaneously hold to be true about the biological materials to which they both pertain. Biometrics is thus complementary to all of the emerging reductionist sciences of biological structure. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that Russell's problems with the unity of the proposition were recurring and insoluble within the framework of the logical theory of his Principles of Mathematics. By contrast, Frege's functional analysis of thoughts (grounded in a type-theoretic distinction between concepts and objects) is commonly assumed to provide a solution to the problem or, at least, a means of avoiding the difficulty altogether. The Fregean solution is unavailable to Russell because of his commitment to the thesis that there (...) is only one ultimate ontological category. This, combined with Russell's reification of propositions, ensures that he must hold concepts and objects to be of the same logical and ontological type. In this paper I argue that, while Frege's treatment of the unity of the proposition has immediate advantages over Russell's, a deeper consideration of the philosophical underpinnings and metaphysical consequences of the two approaches reveals that Frege's supposed solution is, in fact, far from satisfactory. Russell's repudiation of the Fregean position in the Principles is, I contend, convincing and Russell's own position, despite its problems, conforms to a greater extent than Frege's with common sense and, furthermore, with certain ideas which are central to our understanding of the origins of the analytical tradition. (shrink)

Abstract Studies of irrationality in cognitive psychology have usually looked at areas where humans might be expected to be rational, yet appear not to be. In this paper the other extreme of human irrationality is examined: the delusion as it occurs in psychiatric illness. A parallel is suggested between the delusion as an aberration of cognition and some illusions which result from aberrations within optics. It is argued that, because delusions are found predominantly within certain limited areas of cognitive functioning, (...) they may represent a form of mental aberration which may tell us something about the abstract properties of mind. Possible implications of this model for several areas of cognitive science are discussed. (shrink)

When we use secure computer systems, we engage with carefully orchestrated and ordered interactions called “security ceremonies”, all of which exist to assure security. A great deal of attention has been paid to improving the usability of these ceremonies over the last two decades, to make them easier for end-users to engage with. Yet, usability improvements do not seem to have endeared end users to ceremonies. As a consequence, human actors might subvert the ceremony’s processes or avoid engaging with it. (...) Here, we consider whether beautification could be one way of making ceremonies more appealing. To explore beautification in this context, we carried out three studies. Study 1 surveyed 250 participants to derive a wide range of potential dimensions of “beautiful ceremonies”. These statements were sorted into dominant themes and converted into statements, which fed into the second study, with 309 respondents, to reveal the dominant dimensions constituting beauty. Study 3 asked 41 participants to carry out a Q-sort, which revealed the ways that people combine the identified dimensions when characterising security ceremonies as “beautiful”. These studies have allowed us to pin down the perceived dimensions of beauty in the context of security ceremonies, and also to understand how people combine these dimensions in different ways in judging security ceremonies to be beautiful, confirming the old adage of beauty being “in the eye of the beholder”. We conclude by highlighting the constraints imposed by the overarching requirement for security to be maintained in the face of any usability improvements and beautification endeavours. (shrink)

This article is a critical analysis of the most important assumptions of Chantal Mouffe’s political philosophy, along with its original categories such as agonism, radical democracy and hegemony. The sources of her concept are indicated and certain difficulties that the author falls into are distinguished. The thread that is considered central to this philosophy, with the most profound practical consequences, is an attempt to demonstrate the futility of a liberal doctrine that values consensus and deliberation and proclaims an apology for (...) individualism and rationalism. Mouffe’s diagnosis strikes at the most important liberal values with the intention of discrediting them although she tries to creatively adopt others, such as pluralism. She proposes a new paradigm, much fairer than existing ones, because it does not negate the conflictive nature of politics. Does an agonist dispute and radical democracy really have a chance to undermine liberal axiology? Are we dealing with a breakthrough in thinking about politics? (shrink)

Unification of natural science and social science is a centuries-old, unmitigated debate. Natural science has a chronological advantage over social science because the latter took time to include many social phenomena in its fold. History of science witnessed quite a number of efforts by social scientists to fit this discipline in a rational if not mathematical framework. On the other hand a tendency among some physicists has been observed especially since the last century to recast a number of social phenomena (...) in the mould of events taking place in physical world and governed by well-known systems and equations of physics. It necessitated the introduction of social physics as a new inter-disciplinary subject. Obviously this attempt is aimed at explaining hitherto unsolved or highly debated issues of social science. Physicists are showing special interest on problems on economics, ranging from some topics of normative economics to the movement of prices of derivatives. Statistics has been widely used in these attempts and at least two sub-disciplines of the subject, namely, stochastic process and time series analysis deserve special mention. All these research activities gave birth to another inter-disciplinary subject named as econophysics. Interestingly, global financial crisis of 2007–08 has revived the need of determination of prices of derivatives in a more accurate manner. This article adumbrates a sketch of the theoretical synthesis between physics and economics and the role played by statistics in this process. (shrink)

In the first part ("Determination"), I consider different notions of determination, contrast and compare modal with non-modal accounts and then defend two a-modality theses concerning essence and supervenience. I argue, first, that essence is a a-modal notion, i.e. not usefully analysed in terms of metaphysical modality, and then, contra Kit Fine, that essential properties can be exemplified contingently. I argue, second, that supervenience is also an a-modal notion, and that it should be analysed in terms of constitution relations between properties. (...) In the second part ("A Theory of Truthmaking"), I first review the literature on ontological commitment, and argue that the notion of truthmaking is better suited to play its explanatory rôle. I then argue that we should take truthmaker theory seriously, and that we should provide actual truthmakers for all truths there are. In the last chapter of this part, I review Armstrong's truthmaker theories and argue that they are unsatisfactory. I generalise my criticism to an argument against truthmaker necessitarianism, the view that truthmakers necessarily make true the truths they are truthmakers of. In the third part ("Properties and their Kind(s)"), I discuss qualitative determination. I present and endorse the truthmaker argument for universals, and defend universalism against friends of tropes, states of affairs and facts. I then give a novel characterisation of the important class of intrinsic properties, building on Lewis' work. With a workable notion of intrinsicness at hand, I argue that relations are ontologically – but not "ideologically" – dispensable: qualitative determination in general is a matter of intrinsic structure. In the future, I plan to add two parts and to publish my thesis as a book: In the fourth part ("Exemplification"), I argue for the existence of an exemplification relation tying universals and particulars together. I derive theoretical benefits from this relation by providing adverbialist theories of modality and tense and identify exemplification with a type of parthood. In the fifth part ("Qua qua qua"), I investigate the curious and interesting ontological category of so-called "qua-objects" (Picasso-as-a-painter, for example) and argue that they exist, are not identical with transworld indidivuals or modal parts and that they provide (contingent) truthmakers for all true predications. (shrink)

This paper seeks to evaluate the potential of the Newman objection to function as an immanent critique of Carnap's use of the Ramsey method of regimenting scientific theories. Stress is laid on the distinctive way in which ramseyfications are used by Carnap to formulate the analytic/synthetic distinction for the theoretical language and on the difference between the ontological and the epistemic readings of the Newman objection. While the former reading of the Newman objection is rejected as trading on an assumption (...) that Carnap did not share, the latter is accepted as critical. It is argued to turn on overlooking that the Ramsey sentence constitutes an idealization concerning which our normal expectations of what theories are like are bound to be frustrated. This idealisation need not reflect Carnap's considered view but can be regarded as adopted solely for the project of semantic explication. The distinctions drawn in the course of the argument also help to motivate Carnap's abstention from the discourse of realism and its denial. (shrink)

One of the main challenges faced by Russell's theory of judgement was to provide a satisfactory account of judgement that was not committed to the existence of true, false, or non-existent complex entities such as Meinongian objectives. In the study of the Russell-Wittgenstein debate on that theory, scholars never considered the idea that Wittgenstein might not have followed Russell on that issue. In this article. I address that question and hold, first, that problems raised by Russell's theory of judgement find (...) their solution in the picture theory. Then, I show that Wittgenstein hesitated for a long period of time in theNotebooksbetween a version of his solution which is committed to the existence of possible (non-existing) complex entities and one which is not. Finally, I argue that he did, along with Meinong, go for a committing version in theTractatus. (shrink)

For logicians and metaphysicians curious about the evolution of Russell's logic from The Principles of Mathematics to Principia Mathematica, no volume of the Collected Papers of Bertr...

John Searle believes that computational properties are purely formal and that consequently, computational properties are not intrinsic, empirically discoverable, nor causal; and therefore, that an entity’s having certain computational properties could not be sufficient for its having certain mental properties. To make his case, Searle’s employs an argument that had been used before him by Max Newman, against Russell’s structuralism; one that Russell himself considered fatal to his own position. This paper formulates a not-so-explored version of Searle’s problem with computational (...) cognitive science, and refutes it by suggesting how our understanding of computation is far from implying the structuralism Searle vitally attributes to it. On the way, I formulate and argue for a thesis that strengthens Newman’s case against Russell’s structuralism, and thus raises the apparent risk for computational cognitive science too. (shrink)

The paper describes the evolution of russell's theory of judgment between 1910 and 1913, With especial reference to his recently published "theory of knowledge" (1913). Russell abandoned the book and with it the theory of judgment as a result of wittgenstein's criticisms. These criticisms are examined in detail and found to constitute a refutation of russell's theory. Underlying differences between wittgenstein's and russell's views on logic are broached more sketchily.