Bertrand Russell: On Denotation

Bertrand Russell was initially a mathematician. That explains why he always used mathematical symbols to explain logical reasoning topics.  Russell and Whitehead are the authors of the most important logic work of our time, Principia Mathematica , which consisted of showing that mathematics was reducible to logical calculus. This is called logicism.

               

Today, Bertrand Russell is considered one of the thinkers who has contributed the most to the development of the Philosophy of Language, above all, for his theory of descriptions, which he masterfully exposes in an essay called On Denoting , first published in 1905 in the Journal of Mind Philosophy .

 

 Descriptions are expressions which he calls "denoting expressions." He distinguishes three types of cases, for example, 1.- An expression can be denotative and not denote anything, and then he places the famous example «the current king of France», but as is known, France does not have a King. 2.- A sentence can denote a certain object, example in On Dentonig "the present queen of England", in this case, if there is a certain woman who is queen of that country. 3.- An expression can denote something with a certain margin of vagueness, for example, “a man”, this expression does not make sense in isolation. Knowing this, we must consider that Russell is interested in the epistemological problem, so one must ask which of these three types of denotations really say something, what it contributes to knowledge, and if we can arrive through any of them to formulate logical arguments.

 

Russell distinguish that there are two types of knowledge, a) direct knowledge that comes from sensory data and of which we have a visual representation, for example, a tree and b) knowledge [about...], that is, of those things of which we take notice by means of denotative expressions. Here is the question for which Bertrand Russell is interested in the expressions [about...], due to the difficulties that these can present in the argument. He thinks that the denotative expressions never have a meaning in itself, but that every proposition in whose verbal expression those intervene, then has meaning. These make sense in the proposition. Understood by proposition those expressions of which we can judge whether they are true or false unequivocally. However, there are some linguistic expressions that mix in  speech and are repugnant to logic and science, so we must take care of it, science deals with fundamentally objective issues.

 

 Russell cites Meinong 's and Frege 's referential theories as an example of those contradiction.  .Let's analyze Meinong work. According to him, every grammatically correct denotative expression represents an object, for example, "the current king of France" or "the round square", for Russell this violates the "principle of contradiction" because it is impossible for something to be at the same time and in the same way, that is, it is claimed that the current king of France exists and that, at the same time, he does not exist, and that the "round square" is round and, at the same time, not round . These elements are [non-enties], so it is inferred that they cannot be the subject of a proposition. It does not even comply with the principle of the «excluded third», that is, in principle, everything has to be in being, example (A) is (B) or (A) is not (B), there will not be a third possibility.

 

This law is represented in symbolic logic as follows: (AV ¬ A) : the disjunction of a proposition and its negation is always true. An example in natural language would be: it is true that "it is day or it is not day", but never both at the same time. That is, both things are possible, but not at the same time. In Meinong 's referentialist theory , the expression "the current king of France" the king cannot exist and not exist at the same time, neither can "the round square". Meinnog asserts that the "current king of France" refers to a non-existent but subsisting little object.

               

       Frege would say that the linguistic expression "the present King of France" has meaning, but not reference, and since it has meaning, it has meaning, the lack of referent does not imply the lack of meaning, since meaning is meaning. Russell differs from this position, for how can (A) have meaning if (A) does not exist? A denotative expression is, by nature, part of a sentence and lacks, like the vast majority of isolated words, meaning on its own. For Bertrand Russell, denoting expressions are difficult to avoid in ordinary language, but they will become harmless if we know how to prevent them, symbolic logic manages to avoid them. Quoting Russell: "In the case of a thing of which we have no direct knowledge, but only a definition by means of denoting expressions, propositions in which that thing is introduced by means of a denoting expression will not really contain that thing." as a constitutive element, but only, instead, to the constitutive elements expressed by the various words of the denotative formula in question"

 

María Zambrano

Maria Zambrano Alarcon. (Vélez, Málaga, April 22, 1904 - Madrid, February 6, 1991). Spanish philosopher.

 

At the age of four she and  her family moved from Vélez (Málaga) to Madrid, and from there to Segovia, where he spent his adolescence. From 1924 to 1927 she studied Philosophy in Madrid, attending the classes of José Ortega y Gasset, Manuel García Morente , Julián Besteiro and Xavier Zubiri . During this period he participated in student movements and collaborated with various newspapers. His first work, Nuevo del liberalismo (1930), is the result of the political events of those years. Since 1931 she  worked as an assistant professor of the Chair of Metaphysics at the Central University, and in 1932 she collaborated in publications such as the Revista de Occidente, Cruz y Raya and Hora de España. In these years leading up to exile, she struck up friendships with members of the Generation of '27: Luis Cernuda, Emilio Prados, Miguel Hernández and Jorge Guillén, among others. He traveled to Havana and met José Lezama Lima there, in addition to giving a conference on José Ortega y Gasset.

 

When the war broke out, he returned to Spain to collaborate with the Republic; residing in Valencia and Barcelona until 1939, the year he crosses the French border into exile. After passing through cities such as Paris, New York or Havana, he settled in Mexico, where he taught Philosophy at the University of San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia. In Mexico he meets Octavio Paz and León Felipe. In this year begins a period of intense literary activity marked by exile and publishes  “Philosophy and poetry.”

 

After passing through the University of Puerto Rico, he traveled to Paris in 1946, where he met Albert Camus and René Char . From 1948 to 1953 he lived in Havana and later in Rome, where he wrote some of his most important works, such as Man and the Divine, Dreams and Time, and Person and Democracy, among others. In Rome she made friends with Italian intellectuals such as Elena Croce and Victoria Guerrini and with other exiled Spaniards such as Ramón Gaya, Rafael Alberti or Jorge Guillén. In 1964 he left Rome to settle in France and during this period of retirement her philosophical thought acquired a mystical tone that is reflected in works such as Claros del bosque or De la Aurora.

 

With the article The Dreams of María Zambrano by José Luis López Aranguren, published in 1966 in the Revista de Occidente, a slow recognition in Spain of the importance of her work began. Among other distinctions, in 1981 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award and wa

Back in Spain, a new stage of intellectual activity begins, devoting himself to the reissue of already published works and the writing of numerous articles. The recognition of her work culminated in 1988 when the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded her the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature and was named doctor honoris causa by the University of Malaga.

 

 

 Philosophy

For María Zambrano, philosophy begins with the divine, with the explanation of everyday events  with the gods. Until someone wonders, what are things? Then the philosophical attitude is created. For Zambrano there are two attitudes: the philosophical attitude, which is created in man when he questions something, due to ignorance, and the poetic attitude, which is the answer, the calm and in which, once deciphered, we find the meaning of everything. A philosophical attitude communicated with a very peculiar language and a creative exposition of her way of thinking, which determines her literary style,  and which, ultimately, would constitute the basis of what she herself will call the "method"

 

The question and its method

She establishes it under two great questions: the creation of the person and poetic reason. The first of them would present, let's say, the state of the matter: the being of the human being as a fundamental problem for the human being. And what the human being is, is constituted as a problem for the human being, because his being is presented primarily as yearning, nostalgia, hope, and tragedy. If satisfaction was the lot of humans, his own being would certainly not be proposed as a problem.

 

The theme of reason-poetics, on the other hand, without having been specially and systematically exposed in any of her works, nonetheless underlies all of them to the point of constituting one of the fundamental nuclei of her thought. Poetic-reason is constructed as the appropriate method for achieving the proposed goal: the creation of the person. Both topics she addressed extensively, bringing together as adjacent all other issues discussed. Thus, the creation of the person is closely related to the theme of the divine, with history and dreams, and the poetic reason with the relationship between philosophy and poetry or with the insufficiency of rationalism.

 

Politics

All the work of María Zambrano is structured by a political spirit that manifests itself in a very diverse way throughout her thought. Her political action is more direct during the years that preceded the establishment of the Second Republic and, of course, during the Civil War. However, it is true that Zambrano refused to participate in party politics, so she rejected the position of deputy for the Courts of the Republic that Jiménez de Asua offered her, opting instead for her philosophical vocation.  However, it cannot be said that Zambrano abandoned politics for philosophy, but rather that she chose to do politics from the very roots of thought, since, as she explains in his first book, Horizonte del liberalismo (1930), "I became political whenever one thinks of directing your own life” and this is precisely what she aspired to achieve through the exercise of her poetic reason and her criticism of all movements of a fascist or authoritarian nature, as well as with her profound criticism of discursive reason and rationalism.

Problems of contemporary philosophy

For metaphysics there is correspondence between the idea and things that are expressed by language through logical judgments. In this way, the subject maintains a relationship with all things prior to any linguistic nomination. Since the times of classical Greece, and particularly since Plato and Aristotle, it has been argued that the human being is a being who, due to his capacity for abstraction, can know the essence of reality and communicate it  to everyone.

 

For metaphysical thought (concepts), reality (things) and language (words) are linked to each other. Language expresses thought and means things, reality through thought.

 

Later, at the beginning of modernity, Descartes continues this line of thought by legitimizing it with his dictum: ¨cogito, ergo sum¨ which translates into dualities

 

Later, at the beginning of modernity, Descartes continued this line of thought by legitimizing it with his dictum: "cogito, ergo sum" which translates into dualities

•  mind-body

• spirit-matter

• subject-object

 

This traditional perspective constitutes the metaphysical nucleus of western thought that continues until well into the 20th century and in which the being of a thing was:

 

• One: Every time there is a thing, it appears as a thing. Being is one

 

• True: Because the truth is the appearance of the thing, the truth is something that is discovered

•  Good: Because it lacks predicates, determinations

 

Thus, for Plato, the Good was the name of being in an analogous way as God will be for medieval theology, that is, that which lacks determination. The one, the true and the good constitute the guarantee of unity and knowability of the referent beyond its sensible modification. Things are not as we think but are thought in accordance with what they are. Truth as adequacy is the core of traditional Western metaphysics, in which language expresses that correspondence through veritative judgments,

 

The search for the foundation

 

 

Gottlod Frege's most significant contribution to philosophy was the distinction between:

•         Sign

•        Sense

•        Referrer

 

Thus, for example, a linguistic sign has two aspects:

 

• In the case of speech: the sign constitutes a current of sound that we interpret linguistically

• In the case of writing: it is a visual and graphic representation that carries meaning

 

For example, a name is a sign that designates an object. That is, a word o phrase that designates an object. The referent would be what is designated by the sign, the referent of a name that is a particular object. The sense in this context would be the meaning. Beyond this simplification, for Frege there are other signs that he calls "conceptual words" and that also have meaning and referent. For Frege, "conceptual words" are signs that refer to a concept. The concept operates on the basis of a single argument whose value is a truth value. That is to say that the truth conditions of a statement depend on the real and external existence of the referent. For example:

X is Napoleon, X is the victor at Jena, X is the loser at Waterloo

true proposition

The referent is an individual whose historical existence has been verified

 

Frege breaks with psychologism, according to which meanings and concepts are private entities, to open up to a new paradigm of a Platonic nature; the realism of meaning, from where he argues that our words refer to objects in the world, have reference and also sense. The senses, the meanings of the words belong to communities of speakers and not to the minds of individuals, what belongs to the speakers are their subjective representations.

 

Also in Husserl, knowledge begins with real and external existence, that is, with experience. However, the concept of experience has another connotation. Husserl belongs to a tradition that goes back to Descartes and Kant: the philosophy of consciousness. Consciousness is always aware of something, so consciousness is not a thing to which we could refer, it is consciousness that refers to something, a thing, an X, even when that "thing" is unknown at first. ¨. Phenomenology through the concept of intentionality seems to successfully restore that self-identical referent, missing in Frege's logic. In this way, scientific discourse finds in consciousness the foundation that philosophy sought.

 

The linguistic twist

 

 

Inspired by Heidegger, Derrida proceeds to deconstruct the concept of presence. This concept operated as a guarantee of the referent's unity beyond its sensible modifications. Presence as what is presented. Derrida establishes that the present does not coincide with itself, there is no identity but difference because the present differs from itself. Consciousness is an illusion because being aware of something, of a present thing, is consequently an illusion.

 

By deconstructing the concept of presence, of that being one, true and good, Derrida begins the critique of what he calls "onto-theo-logy":

•  logos: speech

• onto: entity

 

• Theos: Good-Platonic model-Medieval God-Modern Man

 

The key to Derrida's deconstruction lies in the structural linguistics of Professor Saussure. For whom a linguistic sign is a biplane entity composed of a signifier and a signified. In relation to the truth, what defines an expression would not be its truth conditions but the acceptance within a given language by the inhabitants of the community language that guide our interpretation of the facts.

 

Another difference established by Saussure is:

 

• Pragmatic axis: typical of substitutions

•Syntagmatic axis: typical of successions

 

To illustrate this second difference, we take an example from Saussure himself: the tree signifier has a meaning in the  language, but its meaning changes when we speak of the "cherry tree" and the "family tree". The meaning is modified according to the phrase or the discursive succession. So even within the same language or culture, the terms have different meanings and meanings. Substitution and succession are going to become Derrida's discourse in two forms of difference.

 

The present element differs from itself, as Saussure defined language as "a system of differences without positive terms". The apparent identity of the sign is a real difference, in turn the meaning of that sign will depend on the discursive succession in which it is inscribed, both on the past of that succession and on its future. The meaning is always deferred, that is, the meaning of each term is always suspended.

 

Partial conclusions:

 

First consequence: The meaning of a signifier is not a referent ("the thing itself") but another signifier.

 

Second consequence: If the words do not re-present what was already present, then we cannot make a precise distinction between the univocal discourse of science and the equivocal discourse of fiction. We cannot speak of a figurative and a literal language.

 

Third consequence: ¨There are no facts, only interpretations¨. Which means that the signifier does not refer to a referent but to another signifier. Discourse is prior to things.

 

In summary:

·         The world is not a set of things that are first presented and then named by language. It is a cultural interpretation and as such poetic or metaphorical

•  ¨The world becomes fable¨. That is to say something that is told and that exists only in the narrative.

• Rorty argues that philosophers and scientists are poets who ignore themselves as such, that is, they are interpreters.

 

• Vattimo: The primacy of interpretation over facts characterizes the "hermeneutic" tradition, of philosophy that identifies with nihilism insofar as there is nothing outside of language or interpretation

 

Rational discourse and hermeneutical perspective

 

 

• Rational discourse: From the Enlightenment perspective, it was one in which the order and connection of ideas is identical to the order and connection of things ( science)

 

• Hermeneutic perspective: We never know things as they are outside of the discourses that speak about it and that in turn create and build meanings

 

What do we know? From the hermeneutic perspective, an interpretation or a creation of the facts. Our version is a version of that created version. When is a statement true? It is true when an interpretation coincides with another previous interpretation. Thus, Rorty maintains that propositions are elements of human languages, where there are no propositions, there is no truth, and human languages are human creations. Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead" expresses that there is nothing outside of interpretations. Because God was the foundation of rational discourse, that true and good unity, the appearance of the Biegn without attribute, prior to any judgment about it.

 

From the scientific point of view, a fact does not prove anything because it depends on an interpretation. Thus, philosophy and science become variants of rhetoric by giving up the idea of objective truth or rational discourse. In this sense, linguistics and literary theory, understood as rhetorical analysis, begin to occupy a central place in the intellectual debate from the 1960s. Both Derrida and Rorty read a philosophical discourse, for example, in the same way that they interpret a literary text.

 

The objection to metaphysics made by the followers of the "linguistic twist" to the defenders of objective truth or Enlightenment reason is that we know because we are part of a culture, a language in which each of the things has one or more meanings for us. various. In opposition to positive science or enlightened reason for those of us who inhabit nature, hermeneutics instead holds that we live in a "world". The world is a set of meanings, knowledge, values, tastes, certainties, a pre-interpretation or a pre-understanding. We inhabit a world, a language, a culture.

 

 

Hermeneutics as a philosophy of finitude

 

 

The subject, for the philosophers of the linguistic twist, is the bearer of a historical and finite language that makes posible meanings and in tur,conditions knowledge of itself and the world, in opposition to the autonomous subject of modernity. That is why Derrida maintains that it is the language that dominates its speakers. The language gives us its word in two different and correlative ways:

 

A significant system: from which we understand the world

He proposes us to trust it: we can only believe in the words given, in its  heritage and its promises

Language is not the foundation,like God or Man in the illustration, language is not One, it is multiple, and therefore creates different worlds, each one with its beings, events and facts. Each one inhabits a world but there is no longer, as was supposed, a single world. However, it is possible to "transcend" finitude through tradition. Tradition is a way of eluding the death of knowledge, of overcoming finitude within a community that no longer defines itself politically but rather culturally or ethnically.

 

The concept of finitude disrupts an essential aspect of the philosophy that went from Plato to Descartes and from this to Frege himself : the difference between Doxa and Episteme. That is, between "opinion" and "science", between "pre-judgment" and "unprejudiced knowledge". For this philosophical tradition, true statements about beigns imply seeing or thinking about them as they are and not as we believe or imagine them, to be according to the discourse of an era or a community. This implies withdrawing from cultural or historical interpretations and observing things beigns with a timeless and infinite gaze. Enlightenment reason is incompatible with the historical finitude of human beings and for this reason, it can take the place of God.

 

This mode of reasoning constitutes one more illusion of metaphysics. The pre-judgment of metaphysics was to think that a thought without prejudice was possible for man, what underlies this reasoning is the idea of a philosophy as a mirror of nature.

 

For hermeneutics, a statement is true when it is as established, accepted, instituted within a community of belonging. A true statement does not say what a thing is, but presupposes it within a particular culture.

 

 

The language games

 

 

Between the early to late 1970s, Wittgenstein's theory of "language games" will have its adherents in continental Europe , of which the German philosoher J. Habermas and the French philosopher F. Lyotard are just two examples of this thought trend. Also outside Europe , we can mention for example R. Rorty and P. Watzlawick .

 

Wittgenstein considered that the meaning of a term was identified with its use. What is important is what the speakers do with the term they use. In this respect Wittgenstein's logic can be considered pragmatic. For example:

 

Lassie is a bitch

you are a bitch

In the first case the use of the term "bitch" is used to inform, in the second to insult. Thus, informing, insulting, declaring, promising, interrogating, etc., are different ways of doing things with words.

 

For this reason, the validity of a statement depends on all the participants agreeing to play, act and consequently recognize the established rules of the game. Hence, both Habermas and Lyotard speak of a contract, explicit or not, between the players. The "social bond" is identified with these rules: to each institution there corresponds a precise language game in which a group of individuals participate.

 

Two consequences of language games:

 

Games are autonomous and heterogeneous

The subject does not have an identity prior to the role it plays in a certain language game

These conditions are not metaphysical, but, following Habermas , "communicative" or "playful"; rules to which that language game called science responds, for example. A statement is not scientific because it says something true about a state of affairs, it is because it respects certain rules of the game. The logical principle is replaced by a rhetorical principle. It is about convincing the addressees of the validity of a statement, and for them to accept it, the sender must respect certain rules of the game of science.

 

The problem of hermeneutical truth

 

 

Once again the problem of truth is raised, but this time within hermeneutic philosophies. The hermeneuts maintain that the truth is possible thanks to the original opening to the "world of life", a world that Habermas conceives as that "understanding" pre-established in a deep layer of evidence, of certainties, of realities that are never questioned. Habermas offers rather a pragmatic interpretation of this "world of life", the presuppositions to this "world" are the very rules of the language games and certain statements about which "everyone" agrees that they are valid in consequence as a rule.

 

Lyotard differs from Habermas . He proposes in ¨The postmodern condition¨ a legitimation of science that is not based on consensus but on ¨paralogy¨ . Which means looking for inconsistencies or blind spots in any system. Thus, the truth does not imply conformity with the established consensus, but on the contrary, its criticism or questioning. Scientific revolutions are unexpected even by the "revolutionaries" themselves.

 

Lyotard 's theory of legitimacy by paralogy ( truth =revolution) coincides, at first, with Rorty 's proposal , for whom "truth" begins with the creation of a new redescription . Except that for Lyotard it is not necessary for this creation to be legitimized by consensus or to be accepted by the ¨we¨, it is enough for it to open a new field of investigation for it to have legitimacy as such. In summary:

 

Habermas -truth-pre-established understanding-consensual aspect

Lyotard -truth-revolution- paralogy

Rorty -truth- redescription -consensual aspect

This constitutes a decisive point in the discussion of the philosophies of the end of the century and the beginning of this century . The problem with Lyotard 's approach is to identify the truth with the revolution: would this serve to legitimize any revolution as the bearer of  truth ? While Habermas and Rorty insist on their consensual or communicative aspect of truth in order not to fall into the duality between Doxa and Episteme, truth and opinion, and to avoid warding off the dangers of a government that is no longer based on consensus but on revolutionary truth, that installs a new orthodoxy. Plato in the Republic was based on the notion of Episteme to repress the sophists, masters of language games and rhetoric, who did not seek to find the truth but to persuade their fellow citizens, holding to their opinions and their ancestral beliefs. Apparently the problem is long-standing and is far from being closed.