Bertrand Russell is concerned in this book with the foundations of knowledge. He approaches his subject through a discussion of language, the relationships of truth to experience and an investigation into how knowledge of the structure of language helps our understanding of the structure of the world. This edition includes a new introduction by Thomas Baldwin, Clare College, Cambridge.

In this article I address the Problem of Universals by answering questions about what facts a solution to the Problem of Universals should explain and how the explanation should go. I argue that a solution to the Problem of Universals explains the facts the Problem of Universals is about by giving the truthmakers (as opposed to the conceptual content and the ontological commitments) of the sentences stating those facts. I argue that the sentences stating the relevant facts are those like (...) 'a has the property F', that is, sentences stating that a particular has a certain property. Finally I show how answering these questions in this way transforms the Problem of Universals, traditionally conceived as the One over Many, that is, the problem of explaining how different particulars can have the same properties, into the Many over One, that is, the problem of explaining how the same particular can have different properties. The Problem of Universals is the problem of the Many over One. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers Vol.31(1) 2002: 49-61.

In this paper I argue, contra Fraser MacBride, that conceptual analysis, and in particular the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, can solve the Problem of Universals, whether understood as the One over Many or the as the Many over One. In this paper I show why the solutions needed to solve either version of the problem must be in terms of truthmakers, and that the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity is not sufficient to solve them.

We examine the arguments on both sides of the recent debate (Hale and Wright v. Field) on the existence, and modal status, of the natural numbers. We formulate precisely, with proper attention to denotational commitments, the analytic conditionals that link talk of numbers with talk of numerosity and with counting. These provide conceptual controls on the concept of number. We argue, against Field, that there is a serious disanalogy between the existence of God and the existence of numbers. We give (...) stronger reasons than those advanced by Wright for resisting Field's analogy. We argue that the rules governing the basic numerical notions commit us to the natural numbers as necessary existents. We also show that the latest twist in the debate involving 'surdons' leaves both sides in a stalemate. (shrink)