Mysticism and Logic and Other EssaysRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Russell, Bertrand
Mathematics; Philosophy; Science
Returning now to Julius Cæsar, I assume that it will be admitted that
he himself is not a constituent of any judgment which I can make. But
at this point it is necessary to examine the view that judgments are
composed of something called "ideas," and that it is the "idea" of
Julius Cæsar that is a constituent of my judgment. I believe the
plausibility of this view rests upon a failure to form a right theory
of descriptions. We may mean by my "idea" of Julius Cæsar the things
that I know about him, e.g. that he conquered Gaul, was assassinated
on the Ides of March, and is a plague to schoolboys. Now I am
admitting, and indeed contending, that in order to discover what is
actually in my mind when I judge about Julius Cæsar, we must
substitute for the proper name a description made up of some of the
things I know about him. (A description which will often serve to
express my thought is "the man whose name was _Julius Cæsar_." For
whatever else I may have forgotten about him, it is plain that when I
mention him I have not forgotten that that was his name.) But although
I think the theory that judgments consist of ideas may have been
suggested in some such way, yet I think the theory itself is
fundamentally mistaken. The view seems to be that there is some
mental existent which may be called the "idea" of something outside
the mind of the person who has the idea, and that, since judgment is a
mental event, its constituents must be constituents of the mind of the
person judging. But in this view ideas become a veil between us and
outside things--we never really, in knowledge, attain to the things we
are supposed to be knowing about, but only to the ideas of those
things. The relation of mind, idea, and object, on this view, is
utterly obscure, and, so far as I can see, nothing discoverable by
inspection warrants the intrusion of the idea between the mind and the
object. I suspect that the view is fostered by the dislike of
relations, and that it is felt the mind could not know objects unless
there were something "in" the mind which could be called the state of
knowing the object. Such a view, however, leads at once to a vicious
endless regress, since the relation of idea to object will have to be
explained by supposing that the idea itself has an idea of the object,
and so on _ad infinitum_. I therefore see no reason to believe that,
when we are acquainted with an object, there is in us something which
can be called the "idea" of the object. On the contrary, I hold that
acquaintance is wholly a relation, not demanding any such constituent
of the mind as is supposed by advocates of "ideas." This is, of
course, a large question, and one which would take us far from our
subject if it were adequately discussed. I therefore content myself
with the above indications, and with the corollary that, in judging,
the actual objects concerning which we judge, rather than any supposed
purely mental entities, are constituents of the complex which is the
judgment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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