Abstract
There are all kinds of interesting questions concerning what ultimately motivates logical atomists to conclude that it is both important and possible to analyze all meaningful statements into an ideal language whose key terms refer to logical atoms. It is tempting to think that Russell’s interest in logical atomism is tied closely to his conviction that direct acquaintance is not only the key to understanding direct knowledge but also the key to understanding what I call direct thought. I think a version of that view is correct, but that one should keep distinct the question of how to understand the distinction between direct and indirect thought from more specific ideas about how to locate the objects of direct thought. I’ll try to suggest that there are good reasons for divorcing the idea of direct thought from what I take to be the view that Russell never gave up, the view that the analysis of direct thought involves the idea of direct acquaintance.
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Notes
- 1.
It is not at all clear to me that Mill was a Millian. See Fumerton (2009: 185–9).
- 2.
He stated the same principle in a slightly different way in (RSDP: 11).
- 3.
Stevenson (1937: 15) offered the following criterion for an analysis being successful: “Those who have understood the definition must be able to say all that they then wanted to say by using the term in the defined way. They must never have occasion to use the term in the old, unclear sense.”
- 4.
See Fales (1990: Chap. 12).
- 5.
Again, Russell didn’t explicitly state the view in terms of the idea of direct thought. As we noted, he often raised it in the context of his related distinction between genuine names and disguised descriptions. Terms of the conditions required for understanding a sentence, but it is clear from the corpus of his work that he believes that thought doesn’t conceptually require language, and that the view would be extended to any sort of complex thought. To be possible that thought would need to be constructed out of simple thoughts each of which relates the thinker to an object with which the thinker is directly acquainted.
- 6.
Or to accommodate something like Hume’s idea of the missing shade of blue, something very much like the property in question.
- 7.
Perhaps, we will sometime be able to routinely manipulate the brain so as to produce the direct thought of phenomenal redness even in unsighted people.
- 8.
This is, I believe, the view that Addis settled on. Bergmann always included in his analysis of thought a “meaning relation. “The thought that P means P whether there is a fact that P or not. But I put “meaning relation” in scare quotes precisely because Bergmann denies that the intentional relation of meaning requires any existing relata. But he also doesn’t seem to want to embrace a Meinongian realm of subsistence, so I’m not sure with what we are left.
References
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Fumerton, R. (2018). The Underlying Presuppositions of Logical Atomism. In: Elkind, L., Landini, G. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94364-0_13
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