Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

It is very hard to disentangle these questions. The first question, as to formal theories, leads to the fourth, as to the relations of propositions to facts. E.g. “Brutus killed Cæsar” is true because of a certain fact; what fact? The fact that Brutus killed Cæsar. This keeps us in the verbal realm, and does not get us outside it to some realm of non-verbal fact by which verbal statements can be verified. Hence our fourth problem arises. But this leads us to our second problem, as to causes and effects of what is true or false, for it is here that we shall naturally look for the vital relation between propositions and facts. And here again we must distinguish between thinking truly and speaking truly. The former is an individual affair, the latter a social affair. Thus all our problems hang together.

I will begin with C, the difference between a belief and a statement. By a “statement” I mean a form of words, uttered or written, with a view to being heard or read by some other person or persons, and not a question, interjection, or command, but such as we should call an assertion. As to the question what forms of words are assertions, that is one for the grammarian and differs from language to language. But perhaps we can say rather more than that. The distinction, however, between an assertion and an imperative is not sharp. In England, notices say “Visitors are requested not to walk on the grass”. In America, they say “Keep off! This means you.” Effectively, the two have the same meaning: yet the English notice consists only of a statement, while the American notice consists of an imperative followed by a statement which must be false if read by more than one person. In so far as statements are intended to influence the conduct of others, they partake of the nature of imperatives or requests. Their characteristic, however, is that they endeavour to effect their aim by producing a belief which may or may not exist in the mind of the speaker. Often, however, they express a belief, without stopping to consider the effect upon others. Thus a statement may be defined as a form of words which either expresses a belief or is intended to create one. Our next step, therefore, must be the definition of “belief”.

“Belief” is a word which will be quite differently defined if we take an analytic point of view from the way in which we shall define it if we regard the matter causally. From the point of view of science, the causal point of view is the more important. Beliefs influence action in certain ways; what influences action in these ways may be called a belief, even if, analytically, it does not much resemble what would ordinarily be so called. We may therefore widen our previous definition of belief. Consider a man who goes to the house where his friend used to live, and, finding he has moved, says, “I thought he still lived here”, whereas he acted merely from habit without thought. If we are going to use words causally, we ought to say that this man had a “belief” and therefore a “belief” will be merely a characteristic of a string of actions. We shall have to say: A man “believes” a certain proposition p if, whenever he is aiming at any result to which p is relevant, he acts in a manner calculated to achieve the result if p is true, but not otherwise. Sometimes this gives definite results, sometimes not. When you call a telephone number, it is clear that you believe that to be the number of the subscriber you want. But whether you believe in the conservation of energy or a future life may be harder to decide. You may hold a belief in some contexts and not in others; for we do not think in accordance with the so-called “Laws of Thought”. “Belief” like all the other categories of traditional psychology, is a notion incapable of precision.

This brings me to the question whether the truth or falsehood of a belief can be determined either by its causes or by its effects. There is, however, a preliminary difficulty. I said just now that A believes p if he acts in a way which will achieve his ends if p is true. I therefore assumed that we know what is meant by “truth”. I assumed, to be definite, that we know what is meant by “truth” as applied to a form of words. The argument was as follows: From observation of a person’s acts, you infer his beliefs, by a process which may be elaborate as the discovery of Kepler’s Laws from the observed motions of the planets. His “beliefs” are not assumed to be “states of mind”, but merely characteristics of series of actions. These beliefs, when ascertained by observation, can be expressed in words; you can say, e.g. “This person believes that there is a train from King’s Cross at 10 A.M.” Having once expressed the belief in words of which the meaning is known, you have arrived at the stage where formal theories are applicable. Words of known meaning, put together according to a known syntax, are true or false in virtue of some fact, and their relation to this fact results logically from the meanings of the separate words and the laws of syntax. This is where logic is strong.

It will be seen that, according to what we have said, truth is applicable primarily to a form of words, and only derivatively to a belief. A form of words is a social phenomenon, therefore the fundamental form of truth must be social. A form of words is true when it has a certain relation to a certain fact. What relation to what fact? I think the fundamental relation is this: a form of words is true if a person who knows the language is led to that form of words when he finds himself in an environment which contains features that are the meanings of those words, and these features produce reactions in him sufficiently strong for him to use words which mean them. Thus “a train leaves King’s Cross at 10 A.M.” is true if a person can be led to say, “It is now 10 A.M., this is King’s Cross, and I see a train starting”. The environment causes words, and words directly caused by the environment (if they are statements) are “true”. What is called “verification” in science consists in putting oneself in a situation where words previously used for other reasons result directly from the environment. Of course, given this basis, there are innumerable indirect ways of verifying statements, but all, I think, depend upon this direct way.

The above theory may be thought very odd, but it is partly designed to meet the fourth of our previous questions, namely, “How can we get outside words to the facts which make them true or false?” Obviously we cannot do this within logic, which is imprisoned in the realm of words; we can only do it by considering the relations of words to our other experiences, and these relations, in so far as they are relevant, can hardly be other than causal. I think the above theory, as it stands, is too crude to be quite true. We must also bring in such things as expectedness, which we discussed earlier. But I believe that the definition of truth or falsehood will have to be sought along some such lines as I have indicated.

I want in conclusion to indulge in two speculations. The first concerns a possible reconciliation of behaviourism and logic. It is clear that, when we have a problem to solve, we do not always solve it as the rat does, by means of random movements; we often solve it by “thinking”, i.e. by a process in which we are not making any overt movements. The same thing was sometimes true of Köhler’s chimpanzees. Now what is involved in the possibility of solving a problem by verbal thinking? We put words together in various ways which are not wholly random, but limited by previous knowledge of the sort of phrase that is likely to contain a solution of our problem. At last we hit upon a phrase which seems to give what we want. We then proceed to an overt action of the kind indicated by the phrase; if it succeeds, our problem is solved. Now this process is only intelligible if there is some connection between the laws of syntax and the laws of physics—using “syntax” in a psychological rather than a grammatical sense. I think this connection is assumed in logic and ordinary philosophy, but it ought to be treated as a problem requiring investigation by behaviourist methods. I lay no stress on this suggestion, except as giving a hint for future investigations. But I cannot think that the behaviourist has gone far towards the solution of his problem until he has succeeded in establishing a connection between syntax and physics. Without this, the efficacy of “thought” cannot be explained on his principles.

My second speculation is as to the limitations which the structure of language imposes upon the extent of our possible knowledge of the world. I am inclined to think that quite important metaphysical conclusions, of a more or less sceptical kind, can be drawn from simple considerations as to the relation between language and things. A spoken sentence consists of a temporal series of events; a written sentence is a spatial series of bits of matter. Thus it is not surprising that language can represent the course of events in the physical world; it can, in fact, make a map of the physical world, preserving its structure in a more manageable form, and it can do this because it consists of physical events. But if there were such a world as the mystic postulates, it would have a structure different from that of language, and would therefore be incapable of being verbally described. It is fairly clear that nothing verbal can conform or confute this hypothesis.

A great deal of the confusion about relations which has prevailed in practically all philosophies comes from the fact that relations are indicated, not by relations, but by words which are as substantial as other words. Consequently, in thinking about relations, we constantly hover between the unsubstantiality of the relation itself and the substantiality of the word. Take, say, the fact that lightning precedes thunder. We saw earlier that to express this by a language closely reproducing the structure of the fact, we should have to say simply: “lightning, thunder”, where the fact that the first word precedes the second means that what the first word means precedes what the second word means. But even if we adopted this method for temporal order, we should still need words for all other relations, because we could not without intolerable ambiguity symbolise them also by the order of our words. When we say “lightning precedes thunder”, the word “precedes” has a quite different relation to what it means from that which the words “lightning” and “thunder” have to what they respectively mean. Wittgenstein[12] says that what really happens is that we establish a relation between the word “lightning” and the word “thunder”, namely the relation of having the word “precedes” between them. In this way he causes relations to be symbolised by relations. But although this may be quite correct, it is sufficiently odd to make it not surprising that people have thought the word “precedes” means a relation in the same sense in which “lightning” means a kind of event. This view, however, must be incorrect. I think it has usually been held unconsciously, and has produced many confusions about relations which cease when it is exposed to the light of day—for example, those which lead Bradley to condemn relations.

[12] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Kegan Paul).