Abstract
In his The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Russell entertained the existence of negative facts such as Socrates not being alive and a hippopotamus not being in this room. He seemed to think that he needed negative facts to serve as truthmakers for statements such as “A hippopotamus is not in this room” and falsemakers for statements such as “Socrates is alive”. In this paper, I explore Russell’s arguments for negative facts as well as the extent of his commitment to them. By looking more closely at a number of his works, I find that his commitment to negative facts was less thoroughgoing than commonly thought. I also outline five different ontological accounts of negative facts—in terms of a negative constituent, an absence, a negative universal, a negative exemplification relation, and a negative particular—and show that, due to Russell’s commitments and constraints, he was not able to embrace any of them. I conclude by considering a couple of alternative non-ontological approaches to negative facts.
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Notes
- 1.
Rosenberg (1972, p. 37) spells out Russell’s objection to Demos along the same lines.
- 2.
See Oaklander and Miracchi (1980, pp. 452–453) for further criticism of Russell’s move from absent facts to negative facts.
- 3.
It is, of course, possible that Russell thought of the physiological occurrence mentioned here as involving at some point a negative fact (the fact of there not being a heartbeat, or there not being breathing, etc.). What is certain is that even if he thought of it in such a way, there is no written evidence of it in Lecture I.
- 4.
See in particular Harry Costello’s notes, which have recently been uncovered and are being edited by Bernard Linsky.
- 5.
I owe this to Bernard Linsky and his paper “The Near Riot over Negative Facts” (in this volume).
- 6.
For a recent attempt to provide truthmakers for negative truths in terms of absences see Kukso (2006). He argues that absences should not be identified with negative facts or negative states of affairs; the latter are usually thought of as entities, whereas for Kukso absences are not entities.
- 7.
They write: “If the lake’s being frozen is the state of affairs that results when the (thin particular) lake is tied to the property of frozenness in one way, then the lake’s not being frozen is the state of affairs that results when the (thin particular) lake is tied to the property of frozenness in another way. If the first way is instantiation, then the second is anti-instantiation. The first way gives one kind of non-mereological whole, the second gives another. Neither kind of tie nor corresponding kind of whole is reducible to the other kind of tie or whole” (Barker and Jago 2012, p. 120).
- 8.
In Lecture I of the logical atomism lectures he writes something similar but rather than talking about complex correspondence, he mentions a relation of “being true to the fact” and “being false to the fact” (PLA, p. 168). Similar language can also be found in Lecture III, two pages prior to his discussion of negative facts. Herein, Russell talks of corresponding truly and corresponding falsely: “The essence of a proposition is that it can correspond in two ways with a fact, in what one may call the true way or the false way. […] Supposing you have the proposition ‘Socrates is mortal’, either there would be the fact that Socrates is mortal or there would be the fact that Socrates is not mortal. In the one case it corresponds in a way that makes the proposition true, in the other case in a way that makes the proposition false. That is one way in which a proposition differs from a name” (PLA, p. 185).
References
Works by Other Authors
Barker, Stephen and Mark Jago (2012). “Being Positive About Negative Facts.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LXXXV/1, 117–138.
Brownstein, Donald (1973). “Negative Exemplification.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1: 43–50.
Demos, R. (1917). “A Discussion of a Certain Type of Negative Proposition.” Mind, Vol. 26, No. 102: 188–196.
Hochberg, Herbert (1969). “Negation and Generality.” Nous, Vol. 3 No. 3: 325–343.
Kukso, Boris (2006). “The Reality of Absences.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 84, No. 1: 21–37.
Oaklander, L. Nathan and Silvano Miracchi (1980). “Russell, Negative Facts, and Ontology.” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 47, No. 3: 434–455.
Rosenberg, Jay F. (1972). “Russell on Negative Facts.” Nous, Vol. 6 No. 1: 27–40.
Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, edited and translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. Paris: Gallimard.
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Perovic´, K. (2018). Can We Be Positive About Russell’s Negative Facts?. 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_9
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