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Was Russell Shot or Did He Fall?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Nicholas Griffin
Nicholas Griffin
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

In his critical notice of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, R. E. Tully takes issue with my interpretation of Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's theory of judgment. Against it he raises two objections and also sketches an alternative interpretation. On Tully's characterization, I believe that Russell was shot out of the tree by a subtle but devastating argument, while Tully believes that he was shaken out of the tree by a much broader but non-lethal attack on his conception of a proposition. The metaphor is not inappropriate. I certainly believe that Wittgenstein's attack was lethal to Russell's theory of judgment and shows extraordinary marksmanship. But I do not want to deny that there was a lot of tree shaking going on at the same time—concerning, in particular, the logical constants and the concept of a proposition, both of which were topics closely related to the theory of judgment. Thus, while I maintain that Russell was shot, I do not subscribe to a single-bullet theory (although it must be admitted that, in such cases, the individuation of bullets is far from precise).

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Fall 1991 , pp. 549 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1991

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References

Notes

1 Tully, R. E., “Forgotten Vintage,” a critical notice of Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge, edited by Eames, E. R. and Blackwell, K., Vol. 7 in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984)Google Scholar in Dialogue, 27 (1988): 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article of mine he cites is “Wittgenstein's Criticisms of Russell's Theory of Judgment,” Russell, 5, 3 (1985–86): 132–45Google Scholar; but see also my “Russell's Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment,” Philosophical Studies, 47 (1985): 213–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Letters to Russell, Moore, and Keynes, edited by von Wright, G. H. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 23.Google Scholar

3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 2.0211.Google Scholar

4 Tully, “Forgotten Vintage,” p. 318.

5 Tully, “Forgotten Vintage,” p. 318.

6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, “Notes on Logic,” in Notebooks 1914–1916, edited by von Wright, G. H. and Anscombe, G. E. M., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 103.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Russell, Bertrand and Whitehead, Alfred North, Principia Mathematica, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925–27), Vol. 1, p. 41–48.Google Scholar

8 There are historical reasons why Wittgenstein would not have used the term ‘presupposition’ in 1913. It had been used by both Russell and Moore in logical work around the turn of the century, but a satisfactory characterization of it had never emerged. As a result it gave way to implication. Wittgenstein in 1913 would have associated no very clear meaning with it. Its present popularity, of course, stems from Strawson's work in the 1950s.

9 Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge, p. 144–48.

10 Ibid., p. 148.

11 This is not inconsistent with my interpretation of Wittgenstein's criticism (cf. my “Russell's Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment,” p. 231–32). On my interpretation, Wittgenstein's objection that propositions are not names is an additional bullet, not the fatal one.