Abstract
In his 1910–11 lectures that became Some Main Problems of Philosophy, Moore made critical and explicit use of an intentional relation — referring — which he took to hold between beliefs and facts:
Obviously this expression ‘referring to’ stands for some relation which each true belief has to one fact and to one only; and which each false belief has to no fact at all; and the difficulty was to define this relation.... and we may know both that there is such a relation, and that this relation is essential to the definition of truth. And what I want to point out is that we do in this sense know this relation.... Take any belief you like; it is, I think, quite plain that there is just one fact, and only one,... which would have no being — would simply not be, if the belief were false. And as soon as we know what the belief is, we know just as well and as certainly what the fact is which in this sense corresponds with it.1
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Notes
G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy (SMPP), G. Allen and Unwin, London 1953, pp. 267–68.
Thus Moore writes “... in what would this belief of his consist? What is the correct analysis of the event that would be happening in his mind?” (SMPP, p. 258).
Moore does not explicitly appeal to such attributes, since, after rejecting propositional entities, he proposes “to give up the attempt to analyze beliefs” (SMPP, p. 266). But, he does implicitly appeal to such attributes in his discussion by speaking of“the belief that lions exist” and he recognizes that he must account for different particular beliefs having the same content as well for particular states of belief with different contents (SMPP, pp. 258–59). For a detailed discussion of Moore’s attempt to analyse belief see H. Hochberg, Thought, Fact, and Reference: The Origins and Ontology of Logical Atomism, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis 1978, pp. 3–12; 53–86.
SMPP, p. 267.
SMPP, pp. 256, 257.
Russell obscured matters by speaking of “such an entity as the relation R” existing or not existing in such a case. What he had in mind was clearly the obtaining or existing of the relation between a and b. His speaking of “the relation” perhaps prevented him from seeing the problem. On this matter, see my `Descriptions, Situations, and Russell’s ExtensionalAnalysis of Intentionality’,Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 49, 4, 1989.
B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy,William and Norgate, London 1956, p. 128.
L. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (NB), ed. by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M.Anscombe, B. Blackwell, Oxford 1961, pp. 82, 129. There is a familiar problem concerning the interpretation of the Tractatus and passages of the notebooks regarding Wittgenstein’s views about properties and relations, on the one hand, and predicates, on the other. For my purposes here, I will simply treat his view in the Tractatus as “realistic” in that he would take an ideal language to contain predicates representing properties and relations. This is not to say that the realistic interpretation is correct, as it is usually presented. Rather, as I see it, Wittgenstein thinks of predicates as both representing functions, in Frege’s sense, that are “completed” by objects and as being functions that are completed by objects, the latter objects being names of the former. It is the ambiguous nature of Fregean functions (concepts), being incomplete entities that are contrasted with objects, that accounts for the realistic remarks as well as for the nominalistic tone of other remarks in the Tractatus. See ‘Frege on Concepts as Functions: A Fundamental Ambiguity’, in H. Hochberg, Logic, Ontology, and Language, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1984.
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (PG), ed. by R. Rhees, Trans. by A. Kenny, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1978, p. 161.
The letter is reproduced in NB, p. 121; the discussion occurs on p. 96.
B. A. W. Russell, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8, ed. by J. G. Slater, G. Allen and Unwin, London 1986, pp. 253–284.
A. N. Whitehead and B. A. W. Russell, Principia Mathematica, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1960, p. 662. Ironically, this analysis is essentially repeated, in a confused version, by P. Geach as his “theory” in Mental Acts (B. Blackwell, Oxford 1957). Geach, writing many years later, does not note or mention the connection, while offering criticisms of Russell’s 1912 version of the multiple relation theory that, in part, repeat Wittgenstein’s criticisms and, in part, complain about the supposed inability of the multiple relation theory to handle relational contents. Geach can be excused for not being aware of Russell’s 1913 manuscript dealing with the latter issue, though even the first edition of Principia has the technical devices for handling relational contents in terms of the early form of lambda abstraction Russell employs; the failure to mention the 2nd edition Principia discussion is another matter.
The earliest of Bergmann’s papers on the subject is ‘A Positivistic Metaphysics of Consciousness’, Mind, 45, 1945. But, it is not until `Bodies, Minds and Acts’, in The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, Longmans, Green and Co., New York 1954 and `Intentionality’, in Semantica. Archivio di Filosofia, 1955, reprinted in Meaning and Existence, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1959, that he explicitly develops the views we are considering.
To preserve his claim that M-connections were analytic, Bergmann proposed a revised analysis of the concept of analyticity, seeking to provide an ontological ground for analytic truths. Thus he not only followed Moore’s lead in his analysis of intentional contexts, but he returned to issues that Russell had tried to resolve in 1912–13, issues concerning the ontological ground of logical truth. For a discussion of the development of Bergmann’s analysis of intentionality and of various problems with it, see my “Intentions, Facts, and Propositions” in Classics of Analytical Metaphysics, ed. by L. Blackman, Macmillan, New York 1984; `Intentionality, Logical Structure, and Bergmann’s Ontology’, Nous,15, 2, 1981; ‘Belief and Intention’, in Hochberg (1984); and ’Gustav Bergmann’ in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. by H. Burkhardt and B. Smith, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1991.
B. A. W. Russell, Theory of Knowledge, v. 7, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, ed. E. Eames et al., G. Allen and Unwin, London 1984, p. 195.
For a detailed discussion of the various senses of ‘same content’ involved in such matters see ’Belief and Intention’, pp. 399–406 and ’Descriptions, Situations, and Russell’s ExtensionalAnalysis of Intentionality’.
PG, p. 144.
Russell (1984), p. 115.
Ibid., pp. 115–116.
Ibid., p. 109.
Discussions of Russell’s various theories of types often ignore a basic sense of ‘type’ in which Russell takes monadic, dyadic, triadic, etc. attributes and relations to be of logically different types. On the importance of this sense of ‘type’ and its relevance for Russell’s paradox see my ’Russell’s Paradox, Russellian Relations, and the Problems of Predication and Impredicativity’, in Rereading Russell: Essays on Bertrand Russell ’s Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. by C. Savage and C. Anderson, in Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science, Vol. 12, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis 1989, pp. 63–87.
Russell (1984), p. 117.
D. Pears, `Russell’s 1913 Theory of Knowledge Manuscript’, in Rereading Russell: Essays on Bertrand Russell’s Metaphysics and Epistemology, cit., pp. 169–182.
Pears (1989), p. 179.
Russell (1984), p. 116.
On a page (Russell 1984, p. 197) cited as Appendix B. 1 Folio 2, by the editors, Russell speaks of positive and negative facts and the neutral fact that is involved in judgment and which replaces the form of his old theory. The idea seems to be that the neutral fact (situation) can exist as a positive or negative fact, thus providing a truth ground for an atomic sentence or its negation. Propositions, or atomic sentences, would then represent neutral facts irrespective of their truth or falsity. This suggests Wittgenstein’s influence on Russell, as culminating in the logical atomism lectures, `On Propositions’ of 1919, and the appendix to the 2nd edition ofPrincipia cited above. It should be noted that Wittgenstein’s `Notes on Logic’ are printed as an appendix to the NB and are dated September, 1913, when Wittgenstein dictated some of them to Russell and supplemented them with a typescript sent to Russell a “few days later”. See R. Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Jonathan Cape, New York 1990, p. 93.
Russell (1984), p. 134.
Ibid., p. 135. In the 1918 logical atomism lectures Russell takes expressions for logical forms to employ free variables, thus returning to his Principia notation for such forms. Following Russell’s use at different places I use ‘xRy’ as well as R(x,y)’ for the dyadic relational form.
Pears (1989), pp. 176–178. Russell might have been influenced by Wittgenstein’s views as recorded in the latter’s notebooks. Though the relevant entries date from later than Russell’s manuscript, Wittgenstein and Russell had been discussing and communicating about such matters in the period prior to and during Russell’s work on the manuscript. Thus, in a letter of January, 1913 Wittgenstein writes: “I now think that qualities, relations (like love) etc. are all copulae! That means I for instance analyse a subject-predicate proposition, say, ”Socrates is human“ into ”Socrates“ and ”something is human“, (which I think is not complex).” (Wittgenstein (1969), appendix iii, pp. 120–121.) This could have suggested the idea that forms are existentially general facts. In the NB, p. 17, Wittgenstein also writes that he “had thought that the possibility of the truth of the proposition Oa was tied up with the fact (3x)(30).0x”, and on p. 22, “(Similarly (3x)Ox would be the form of Oa, as I actually thought).”
Pears 1989, p. 178.
Russell 1984, p. 131. In the following discussion I will follow Russell’s notation and use `S’ in place of `x’ for the variable that would be replaced by a constant representing a person.
See Truth Makers, Truth Predicates, and Truth Types’, in Language, Truth and Ontology, ed. by K. Mulligan, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 1991, pp. 87–117. The crucial issues concern (i) the use of a negation in specifying that no fact of a certain kind is among the atomic facts; (ii) the use of the quantifiers in specifying truth conditions for generalized sentences; (iii) the appeal to sets of atomic facts, particulars, and properties; (iv) possible regresses of the kind Frege and Bradley raised.
D. Davidson, Truth and Meaning’, Synthese, 17, 1967, p. 309.
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Hochberg, H. (1995). Intentional Reference as a Logical Relation: A Variation on a Theme in Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Bergmann. In: Egidi, R. (eds) Wittgenstein: Mind and Language. Synthese Library, vol 245. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3691-6_11
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