Fallacious appeals to authority

Intruduction

In reasoning to argue a claim, a fallacy is reasoning that is evaluated as logically incorrect and that undermines the logical validity of the argument and permits its recognition as unsound. Regardless of their soundness, all registers and manners of speech can demonstrate fallacies.

Because of their variety of structure and application, fallacies are challenging to classify so as to satisfy all practitioners. Fallacies can be classified strictly by either their structure or content, such as classifying them as formal fallacies or informal fallacies, respectively. The classification of informal fallacies may be subdivided into categories such as linguistic, relevance through omission, relevance through intrusion, and relevance through presumption. On the other hand, fallacies may be classified by the process by which they occur, such as material fallacies (content), verbal fallacies (linguistic), and again formal fallacies (error in inference). In turn, material fallacies may be placed into the more general category of informal fallacies as formal fallacies may be clearly placed into the more precise category of logical or deductive fallacies[clarification needed]. Yet, verbal fallacies may be placed in either informal or deductive classifications; compare equivocation which is a word or phrase based ambiguity, e. g. "he is mad", which may refer to either him being angry or clinically insane, to the fallacy of composition which is premise and inference based ambiguity, e. g. "this must be a good basketball team because each of its members is an outstanding player".

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Fallacious appeals to authority take the general form of:

• 1. Person (or people) P makes claim X. Therefore, X is true.

A fundamental reason why the Appeal to Authority can be a fallacy is that a proposition can be well supported only by facts and logically valid inferences. But by using an authority, the argument is relying upon testimony, not facts. A testimony is not an argument and it is not a fact.

Now, such testimony might be strong or it might be weak the better the authority, the stronger the testimony will be and the worse the authority, the weaker the testimony will be. Thus, the way to differentiate between a legitimate and a fallacious appeal to authority is by evaluating the nature and strength of who is giving the testimony.

Obviously, the best way to avoid making the fallacy is to avoid relying upon testimony as much as possible, and instead to rely upon original facts and data. But the truth of the matter is, this isnt always possible: we cant verify every single thing ourselves, and thus will always have to make use of the testimony of experts. Nevertheless, we must do so carefully and judiciously.

The different types of the Appeal to Authority are:

• Legitimate Appeal to Authority
• Appeal to Unqualified Authority
• Appeal to Anonymous Authorit
• Appeal to traditions
• Appeal to numbers 

 Logical Fallacies | Legitimate Appeal to Authority »

Fallacy Name:
Legitimate Appeal to Authority

Alternative Names:
None

Category:
Fallacy of Relevance > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:

Not every reliance upon the testimony of authority figures is fallacious. We often rely upon such testimony, and we can do so for very good reason. Their talent, training and experience put them in a position to evaluate and report on evidence not readily available to everyone else.

But we must keep in mind that for such an appeal to be justified, certain standards must be met:

• 1. The authority is an expert in the area of knowledge under consideration.

• 2. The statement of the authority concerns his or her area of mastery.

• 3. There is agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.

Examples and Discussion:
Lets take a look at this example:

• 4. My doctor has said that medicine X will help my medical condition. Therefore, it will help me with my medical condition.

Is this a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? First, the doctor has to be a medical doctor a doctor of philosophy simply wont do. Second, the doctor has to be treating you for a condition in which she has training it isnt enough if the doctor is a dermatologist who is prescribing you something for lung cancer. Finally, there has to be some general agreement among other experts in this field if your doctor is the only one using this treatment, then the premise does not support the conclusion.

Of course, we must keep in mind that even if these conditions are fully met, that does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. We are looking at inductive arguments here, and inductive arguments do not have guaranteed true conclusions, even when the premises are true. Instead, we have conclusions which are probably true.

An important issue to consider here how and why anyone might be called an expert in some field. It isnt enough to simply note that an appeal to authority is not a fallacy when that authority is an expert, because we need to have some way to tell when and how we have a legitimate an expert, or when we just have a fallacy.

Lets look at another example:

• 5. Channeling the spirits of the dead is real, because John Edward says he can do it and he is an expert.

Now, is the above a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? The answer rests with whether or not it is true that we can call Edward an expert on channeling the spirits of the dead. Lets do a comparison of the following two examples to see if that helps:

• 6. Professor Smith, shark expert: Great White Sharks are dangerous.

• 7. John Edward: I can channel the spirit of your dead grandmother.

When it comes to the authority of Professor Smith, it isnt so hard to accept that he might be an authority on sharks. Why? Because the topic that he is an expert on involves empirical phenomena; and more importantly, it is possible for us to check on what he has claimed and verify it for ourselves. Such verification might be time consuming (and, when it comes to sharks, perhaps dangerous!), but that is usually why an appeal to authority is made in the first place.

But when it comes to Edward, the same things cannot really be said. We simply do not have the usual tools and methods available to us to verify that he is, indeed, channeling someones dead grandmother and thereby getting information from her. Since we have no idea how his claim might be verified, even in theory, it simply isnt possible to conclude that he is an expert on the subject.

Now, that does not mean that there cannot be experts or authorities on the behaviorof people who claim to channel the spirits of the dead, or experts on the social phenomena surrounding belief in channeling. This is because the claims made by these so-called experts can be verified and evaluated independently. By the same token, a person might be an expert on theological arguments and the history of theology , but to call them an expert on god would just ben begging the question .

« Appeal to Authority Overview | Appeal to Unqualified Authority »

Name:
Appeal to Unqualified Authority

Alternative Names:
Argumentum ad Verecundiam

Category:
Fallacies of Relevance > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:
An appeal to an Unqualified Authority looks much like a legitimate appeal to authority, but it violates at least one of the three necessary conditions for such an appeal to be legitimate:

• 1. The authority is an expert in the area of knowledge under consideration.

• 2. The statement of the authority concerns his or her area of mastery.

• 3. There is agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.

People dont always bother to think about whether these standards have been met. One reason is that most learn to defer to authorities and are reluctant to challenge them this is the source of the Latin name for this fallacy, Argumentum ad Verecundiam, which means argument appealing to our sense of modesty. It was coined by John Locke to communicate how people are browbeaten by such arguments into accepting a proposition by the testimony of an authority because they are too modest to base a challenge on their own knowledge.

Authorities can be challenged and the place to start is by questioning whether or not the above criteria have been met. To begin with, you can question whether or not the alleged authority really is an authority in this area of knowledge.

It isnt uncommon for people to set themselves up as authorities when they dont merit such a label.

For example, expertise in the fields of science and medicine require many years of study and practical work, but some who claim to have similar expertise by more obscure methods, like self-study. With that, they might claim the authority to challenge everyone else; but even if it turns out that their radical ideas are right, until that is proven, references to their testimony would be a fallacious.

Examples and Discussion:
An all-too-common example of this is movie stars testifying on important matters before Congress:

• 4. My favorite actor, who appeared in a movie about AIDS, has testified that the HIV virus doesnt really cause AIDS and that there has been a cover-up. So, I think that AIDS must be caused by something other than HIV and the drug companies are hiding it so that they can make money from expensive anti-HIV drugs.

Although there is little evidence to support the idea, perhaps it is true that AIDS is not caused by HIV; but that is really beside the point. The above argument bases the conclusion on the testimony on an actor, apparently because they appeared in a movie on the topic.

This example might seem fanciful but many actors have testified before Congress based on the strength of their movie roles or pet charities. This doesnt make them any more of an authority on such topics than you or I. They certainly cant claim the medical and biological expertise to make authoritative testimony on the nature of AIDS. So just why is it that actors are invited to testify before Congress on topics other than acting or art?

A second basis for challenge is whether or not the authority in question is making statements in his or her area of expertise.

Sometimes, it is obvious when that is not happening. The above example with actors would be a good one - we might accept such a person as an expert on acting or how Hollywood works, but that doesnt mean they know anything about medicine.

There are many examples of this in advertising indeed, just about every bit of advertising which uses some sort of celebrity is making a subtle (or not-so-subtle) appeal to unqualified authority. Just because someone is a famous baseball player doesnt make them qualified to say which mortgage company is best, for instance.

Often the difference can be much more subtle, with an authority in a related field making statements about an area of knowledge close to their own, but not quite close enough to warrant calling them an expert. So, for example, a dermatologist might be an expert when it comes to skin disease, but that doesnt mean that they should be accepted as also being an expert when it comes to lung cancer.

Finally, we can challenge an appeal to authority based on whether or not the testimony being offered is something which would find widespread agreement among other experts in that field. After all, if this is the only person in the entire field making such claims, the mere fact that they have expertise doesnt warrant belief in it, especially considering the weight of contrary testimony.

There are entire fields, in fact, where there is widespread disagreement on just about everything psychiatry and economics are good examples of this. When an economist testifies to something, we can be almost guaranteed that we could find other economists to argue differently. Thus, we cannot rely upon them and should look directly at the evidence they are offering.

« Legitimate Appeal to Authority | Appeal to Anonymous Authority »

Fallacy Name:
Appeal to Anonymous Authority

Alternative Names:
Hearsay
Appeal to Rumor

Category:
Fallacy of Weak Induction > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:

This fallacy occurs whenever a person claims we should believe a proposition because it is also believed or claimed by some authority figure or figures but in this case the authority is not named.

Instead of identifying who this authority is, we get vague statements about experts or scientists who have proven something to be true.

This is a fallacious Appeal to Authority because a valid authority is one who can be checked and whose statements can be verified. An anonymous authority however, cannot be checked and their statements cannot be verified.

Examples and Discussion:

We often see the Appeal to Anonymous Authority used in arguments where scientific matters are at question:

• 1. Scientists have found that eating cooked meat causes cancer.2. Most doctors agree that people in America take too many unnecessary drugs.

Either of the above propositions may be true but the support offered is completely inadequate to the task of supporting them. The testimony of scientists and most doctors is only relevant if we know who these people are and can independently evaluate the data which they have used.

Sometimes, the Appeal to Anonymous Authority doesnt even bother to rely upon genuine authorities like scientists or doctors instead, all we hear about are unidentified experts:

• 3. According to government experts, the new nuclear storage facility poses no dangers.4. Environmental experts have demonstrated that global warming does not really exist.

Here we dont even know if the so-called experts are qualified authorities in the fields in question and that is in addition to not knowing who they are so we can check the data and conclusions.

For all we know, they have no genuine expertise and/or experience in these matters and have only been cited because they happen to agree with the speakers personal beliefs.

Sometimes, the Appeal to Anonymous Authority is combined with an insult:

• 5. Every open-minded historian will agree that the Bible is relatively historically accurate and that Jesus existed.

The authority of historians is used as a basis to argue that the listener should believe both that the Bible is historically accurate and that Jesus existed. Nothing is said about who the historians in question are as a result, we cannot check for ourselves whether or not these historians have a good basis for their position.

The insult comes in via the implication that those who believe the claims are open-minded and, therefore, those who dont believe arent open-minded. No one wants to think of herself as being closed-minded, so an inclination to adopt the position described above is created. In addition, all historians who reject the above are automatically excluded from consideration because they are simply closed-minded.

This fallacy can also be used in a personal way:

• 6. I know a chemist who is an expert in his field, and according to him evolution is nonsense.

Who is this chemist? What field is he an expert in? Does his expertise have anything at all to do with a field which relates to evolution? Without that information, his opinion about evolution cannot be regarded as any reason to doubt evolutionary theory.

Sometimes, we dont even get the benefit of an appeal to experts:

• 7. They say that crime is increasing because of a lax court system.

This proposition may be true, but who is this they who says so? We dont know and we cannot evaluate the claim. This example of the Appeal to Anonymous Authority fallacy is particularly bad because it is so vague and vacuous.

The Appeal to Anonymous Authority fallacy is sometimes called an Appeal to Rumor and the above example shows why. When they say things, that is just a rumor it might be true, or it might not be.

We cannot accept it as true, however, without evidence and the testimony of they cannot even begin to qualify.

 Prevention and Treatment:

Avoiding this fallacy can be difficult because we all have heard things that have led to our beliefs, but when called upon to defend those beliefs we cant find all of those reports to use as evidence. Thus, it is very easy and tempting to simply refer to scientists or experts.

This isnt necessarily a problem provided, of course, that we are willing to make the effort to find that evidence when asked. We should not expect anyone to believe it just because we have cited the so-called authority of unknown and anonymous figures. We also shouldnt jump on someone when we see them doing the same. Instead, we should remind them that an anonymous authority isnt sufficient to get us to believe the claims in question and ask them to provide more substantive support.

The Stranger, novel by Albert Camus

The Stranger, enigmatic first novel by Albert Camus, published in French as L’Étranger in 1942. It was published as The Outsider in England and as The Stranger in the United States.

Summary

The title character of The Stranger is Meursault, a Frenchman who lives in Algiers (a pied-noir). The novel is famous for its first lines: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” They capture Meursault’s anomie briefly and brilliantly. After this introduction, the reader follows Meursault through the novel’s first-person narration to Marengo, where he sits vigil at the place of his mother’s death. Despite the expressions of grief around him during his mother’s funeral, Meursault does not show any outward signs of distress. This removed nature continues throughout all of Meursault’s relationships, both platonic and romantic.

Raymond, an unsavoury friend, is eventually arrested for assaulting his mistress and asks Meursault to vouch for him to the police. Meursault agrees without emotion. Raymond soon encounters a group of men, including the brother of his mistress. The brother, referred to as “the Arab,” slashes Raymond with a knife after Raymond strikes the man repeatedly. Meursault happens upon the altercation and shoots the brother dead, not out of revenge but, he says, because of the disorienting heat and vexing brightness of the sun, which blinds him as it reflects off the brother’s knife. This murder is what separates the two parts of the story.

The novel’s second part begins with Meursault’s pretrial questioning, which primarily focuses on the accused’s callousness toward his mother’s funeral and his murder of “the Arab.” His lack of remorse, combined with his lack of sadness expressed toward his mother, works against him and earns him the nickname “Monsieur Antichrist” from the examining magistrate. During the trial itself, Meursault’s character witnesses do more harm than good, because they highlight Meursault’s apparent apathy and disengagement. Eventually, Meursault is found guilty of murder with malice aforethought and is sentenced to death by guillotine. As he waits for his impending death, he obsesses over the possibility of his appeal being accepted. A chaplain visits Meursault against his wishes, only to be greeted by Meursault’s intense atheisticand nihilistic views. In a cathartic explosion of rage, Meursault brings the chaplain to tears. This, however, brings Meursault peace and helps him to accept his death with open arms.

Analysis

Camus utilized The Stranger as a platform to explore absurdity, a concept central to his writings and at the core of his treatment of questions about the meaning of life. However, Camus did not identify himself as a philosopher. In fact, he abjured “armchair” philosophy and argued that sitting around and thinking was not enough. One needed to live life as well. He also did not identify himself as an existentialist. He agreed with some proponents of existentialist thought that life has no inherent meaning, but he criticized others for their pursuit of personal meaning. Camus’s concept of the absurd instead implored people to accept life’s lack of meaning and rebel by rejoicing in what life does offer. Elements of this philosophy can be seen in Meursault, as he refuses to behave as if there is meaning where there is none—or, as Camus himself put it in a preface to The Stranger, Meursault “does not play the game.” Society thus feels threatened and cuts off Meursault’s head. Similar themes can be seen in Camus’s essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), also published in 1942.

Camus wrote The Stranger from a place of tragedy and suffering. His father had died in World War I, and the unfolding carnage of World War II forced a questioning of life and its meaning. Camus had also witnessed mistreatment of native Algerians during the French occupation of Algeria, which had begun in the first half of the 19th century and, after World War I, was opposed by a growing nationalist movement. This conflict can be seen specifically in Meursault’s killing of “the Arab,” the only name he uses to refer to Raymond’s mistress’s brother. The murder has been read by some as a metaphor for the treatment of Algerian Muslims by the colonizing French. Camus published The Stranger at a time when Algerians were demanding political autonomy with increased forcefulness; although France did extend some rights during the 1940s, ongoing conflicts and failed French promises of more independence culminated in the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954.

Descartes: I think therefore I am

I think therefore I am: Descartes’s cogito

This quote was taken from the Discourse on Method by René Descartes.

Descartes is looking for an unalterable foundation to build the knowledge, a fixed point from which knowledge could be erected.

For this, Descartes proposes two methods:
– the doubt
– the evil genius

Both methods reach the same result: the certainty of the existence of subjectivity: I think therefore I am.

1 / The methodical doubt: the active channel
Descartes’s philosophical project is to decide voluntarily to question all their knowledge and opinions. What is he? It was he who doubts. However, to doubt, think. So, if I may, I think, and if I think I am.
Doubt, which initially put everything into question, reverses and becomes a source of certainty.

2 / The evil genius: the passive channel

Descartes made the assumption that a force is cheating, making him pass for true or misrepresented.
But again, if I may be wrong, if my senses can be a source of illusions, the fact remains that I can suspend my decision. And again, this suspension is an action by the thought that comes conclusively prove my existence.

“So I suppose […] that some evil genius, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, has employed all his ingenuity in deceiving me, and I think the sky, air, earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all other external things are nothing but illusions and dreams which he used to set traps for my credulity, I consider myself as having no hands, d ‘eyes, no flesh, no blood, as having no meaning, but mistaken belief have all these things, I will remain steadfastly committed to this idea, and if, by this means he is not in my power obtaining knowledge of any truth, at least it is in my power to suspend my judgments: which is why I take the greatest care not receive any falsity in my belief, and so will prepare my mind all the tricks of the great deceiver, that for powerful and cunning he is, he will never impose anything on me”

“But what is it that I am?” A thinking thing. What is a thinking thing? Is one thing which doubts, which means that conceives, affirms, denies, wants, who does not want, which also imagines and feels. Certainly, this is not much if all these things belong to my nature. But why do they not belong? Am I not the one doubt that even now almost everything, who nevertheless hears and sees things, who affirms these alone be true, who denies all the others, wants and desires to know more, who will not be deceived who imagines many things, sometimes even despite that I may have, and who feels as much as through the organs of the body. Are there any of that that is not also true that it is I am certain that I exist and that, even if I could sleep forever, and that gave me being would use his entire industry to deceive? there is also none of those attributes that can be distinguished from my thought, or that can be said to be separated from myself? Because it is self-evident that if it is I who doubt, hear that and wishes that he not need anything here Add to explain it. And I certainly also the power to imagine, for, although it may be (as I assumed before) I imagine that things are not true”

In both methods, active or passive, the certainty of the cogito is acquired. The Subjectivity, sure of his existence, can act as the home of the Truth.

This statement, now considered as obvious, revolutionised philosophy and served as the premise of modern philosophy. Kant, Spinoza, or Sartre and Husserl never questioned this philosophical achievement: I think therefore I am.

Kant : Critique of Pure Reason

Introduction

The Critique of Pure Reason  (1781, Riga; second edition 1787) is a book by Immanuel Kantthat has exerted an enduring influence on Western philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's First Critique, it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgment (1790). In the preface to the first edition Kant explains that by a critique of pure reason he means not "a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience" and that he aims to reach a decision about "the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general". Kant builds on the work of empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as rationalists such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He expounds new ideas on the nature of space and time, and tries to provide solutions to Hume's scepticism regarding human knowledge of the relation of cause and effect, and René Descartes' scepticism regarding knowledge of the external world. This is argued through the transcendental idealism of objects (as appearance) and their form of appearance. Kant regards the former "as mere representations and not as things in themselves", and the latter as "only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves". This grants the possibility of a priori knowledge, since objects as appearance "must conform to our cognition . . . which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us".

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Summary of the Critique of Pure Reason:

The Critique of Pure Reason, published by Immanuel Kant in 1781, is one of the most complex structures and the most significant of modern philosophy, bringing a revolution at least as great as that of Descartes and his Discourse on Method.

The complexity of the first review (the second is the critique of practical reason, and the third is a critique of the faculty of judging), is such that Kant himself published an introductory text, entitled Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

The aim of this book is summed up quite easily, however: metaphysics is a battle that needs to be ordered. Kant proposes to everyone agreed, giving a new status to reason and new contours to the understanding. In summary, the critique of pure reason tries to define credible to the question: How do I know? To this question Kant answers, I can think of the objects of metaphysics (God, I, the world), but not knowing in the sense that I know the laws of physics

Analysis of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant:

Kant makes two crucial distinction: between a priori and a posteriori and between analytic and synthetic judgments.

A posteriori knowledge is knowledge gained from the experience and knowledge a priori knowledge is necessary and universal, independent of experience, such as our knowledge of mathematics.

In an analytical statement, the predicate is contained in the concept in the subject, as, for example, in Judgement, “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” In summary judgments, the predicate contains information not included in the concept. Typically, one associates with the knowledge a posteriori synthetic judgments a priori knowledge and analytical judgments. For example, the decision “all swans are white” is synthetic because the whiteness is not a part of the concept of “Swan” (a black swan is a swan yet), but it is also a posteriori because we can not whether all swans are white.

Kant argues that math and science principles are synthetic a priori knowledge. For example, the ruling “7 + 5 = 12” is a priori because it is a necessary and universal truth, and it is synthetic, because the concept of “12” is not contained in the concept of “7 + 5” .

Because man is capable of synthetic knowledge a priori, pure reason is then able to know important truths. However, Kant is at odds with the rationalist metaphysics poses the omnipotence of reason, capable of penetrating the mysteries. On the contrary, Kant argues that it is about shaping the reality around him. The subject is not only affected by the world, he is actively involved in its creation. We shall return to this Copernican revolution.

Time and space, according to Kant, are pure intuitions of our sensibility, and concepts of physics such as causality or inertia are pure intuitions of our faculty of understanding. In other words, the subject experiences the real and the information received is processed, organized, analyzed by reason. However, the reality is that a compound of phenomena, behind which there are things in themselves (“noumena”). The phenomena is the world as it appears on the noumena the world as it is, without a viewer.

After giving an explanation of how synthetic a priori knowledge makes math and science possible, Kant turns to metaphysics. Metaphysics is the realm of pure reason, ie the scope of a priori

Kant, rationalism and empiricism to criticism

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant achieves a synthesis between rationalist and empiricist traditions. Rationalism, it takes up the idea that pure reason is capable of importt knowledge, and empiricism, he admits the idea that knowledge comes primarily from the experience. Thus, it avoids the metaphysical speculations of the rationalists without falling into metaphysical skepticism.

Kant realizes what he calls a Copernican revolution in philosophy: that is to overthrow the report subject / object, that is to ask that is the thought that perceives the object. Kant denies the idea of ​​making the mind a blank page or a receiver of stimuli in the world. The mind does not only receive information, it also provides information that shape. Knowledge, and is not something that exists in the outside world and is then introduced into an open mind. Knowledge is rather something created by the mind.

Kant differs from its predecessors by claiming that rationalists pure reason can discern the shape, but not the content of reality. Rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz have speculated about the nature of time, space, causality, God, thinking that pure reason was entitled to find satisfactory answers to these objects.

The critique of pure reason opens a third way for metaphysics, half way between rationalism that claims to know everything, and empiricism that defies reason to be able to find anything out of the experience: this path is that of criticism (or transcendental philosophy), which limits the power of reason to re-legitimized.

Bertrand Russell

British Philosopher and logician

Introduction

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS ( 18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.  At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism".He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system) and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and "welcomed with enthusiasm" world government.  He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, Russell concluded that war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and criticized Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought"

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Bertrand Russell, in full Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell of Kingston Russell, Viscount Amberley of Amberley and of Ardsalla, (born May 18, 1872, Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales—died February 2, 1970, Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth), British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. To the general public, however, he was best known as a campaigner for peace and as a popular writer on social, political, and moral subjects. During a long, productive, and often turbulent life, he published more than 70 books and about 2,000 articles, married four times, became involved in innumerable public controversies, and was honoured and reviled in almost equal measure throughout the world. Russell’s article on the philosophical consequences of relativity appeared in the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Russell was born in Ravenscroft, the country home of his parents, Lord and Lady Amberley. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was the youngest son of the 6th Duke of Bedford. In 1861, after a long and distinguished political career in which he served twice as prime minister, Lord Russell was ennobled by Queen Victoria, becoming the 1st Earl Russell. Bertrand Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell in 1931, after his elder brother, Frank, died childless.

Russell’s early life was marred by tragedy and bereavement. By the time he was age six, his sister, Rachel, his parents, and his grandfather had all died, and he and Frank were left in the care of their grandmother, Countess Russell. Though Frank was sent to Winchester School, Bertrand was educated privately at home, and his childhood, to his later great regret, was spent largely in isolation from other children. Intellectually precocious, he became absorbed in mathematics from an early age and found the experience of learning Euclidean geometry at the age of 11 “as dazzling as first love,” because it introduced him to the intoxicating possibility of certain, demonstrable knowledge. This led him to imagine that all knowledge might be provided with such secure foundations, a hope that lay at the very heart of his motivations as a philosopher. His earliest philosophical work was written during his adolescence and records the skeptical doubts that led him to abandon the Christian faith in which he had been brought up by his grandmother.

In 1890 Russell’s isolation came to an end when he entered Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study mathematics. There he made lifelong friends through his membership in the famously secretive student society the Apostles, whose members included some of the most influential philosophers of the day. Inspired by his discussions with this group, Russell abandoned mathematics for philosophy and won a fellowship at Trinity on the strength of a thesis entitled An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, a revised version of which was published as his first philosophical book in 1897. Following Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), this work presented a sophisticated idealist theory that viewed geometry as a description of the structure of spatial intuition.

In 1896 Russell published his first political work, German Social Democracy. Though sympathetic to the reformist aims of the German socialist movement, it included some trenchant and farsighted criticisms of Marxist dogmas. The book was written partly as the outcome of a visit to Berlin in 1895 with his first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith, whom he had married the previous year. In Berlin, Russell formulated an ambitious scheme of writing two series of books, one on the philosophy of the sciences, the other on social and political questions. “At last,” as he later put it, “I would achieve a Hegelian synthesis in an encyclopaedic work dealing equally with theory and practice.” He did, in fact, come to write on all the subjects he intended, but not in the form that he envisaged. Shortly after finishing his book on geometry, he abandoned the metaphysical idealism that was to have provided the framework for this grand synthesis.

Russell’s abandonment of idealism is customarily attributed to the influence of his friend and fellow Apostle G.E. Moore. A much greater influence on his thought at this time, however, was a group of German mathematicians that included Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor, and Richard Dedekind, whose work was aimed at providing mathematics with a set of logically rigorous foundations. For Russell, their success in this endeavour was of enormous philosophical as well as mathematical significance; indeed, he described it as “the greatest triumph of which our age has to boast.” After becoming acquainted with this body of work, Russell abandoned all vestiges of his earlier idealism and adopted the view, which he was to hold for the rest of his life, that analysis rather than synthesis was the surest method of philosophy and that therefore all the grand system building of previous philosophers was misconceived. In arguing for this view with passion and acuity, Russell exerted a profound influence on the entire tradition of English-speaking analytic philosophy, bequeathing to it its characteristic style, method, and tone.

Inspired by the work of the mathematicians whom he so greatly admired, Russell conceived the idea of demonstrating that mathematics not only had logically rigorous foundations but also that it was in its entirety nothing but logic. The philosophical case for this point of view—subsequently known as logicism—was stated at length in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). There Russell argued that the whole of mathematics could be derived from a few simple axioms that made no use of specifically mathematical notions, such as number and square root, but were rather confined to purely logical notions, such as proposition and class. In this way not only could the truths of mathematics be shown to be immune from doubt, they could also be freed from any taint of subjectivity, such as the subjectivity involved in Russell’s earlier Kantian view that geometry describes the structure of spatial intuition. Near the end of his work on The Principles of Mathematics, Russell discovered that he had been anticipated in his logicist philosophy of mathematics by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, whose book The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) contained, as Russell put it, “many things…which I believed I had invented.” Russell quickly added an appendix to his book that discussed Frege’s work, acknowledged Frege’s earlier discoveries, and explained the differences in their respective understandings of the nature of logic.

The tragedy of Russell’s intellectual life is that the deeper he thought about logic, the more his exalted conception of its significance came under threat. He himself described his philosophical development after The Principles of Mathematics as a “retreat from Pythagoras.” The first step in this retreat was his discovery of a contradiction—now known as Russell’s Paradox—at the very heart of the system of logic upon which he had hoped to build the whole of mathematics. The contradiction arises from the following considerations: Some classes are members of themselves (e.g., the class of all classes), and some are not (e.g., the class of all men), so we ought to be able to construct the class of all classes that are not members of themselves. But now, if we ask of this class “Is it a member of itself?” we become enmeshed in a contradiction. If it is, then it is not, and if it is not, then it is. This is rather like defining the village barber as “the man who shaves all those who do not shave themselves” and then asking whether the barber shaves himself or not.

At first this paradox seemed trivial, but the more Russell reflected upon it, the deeper the problem seemed, and eventually he was persuaded that there was something fundamentally wrong with the notion of class as he had understood it in The Principles of Mathematics. Frege saw the depth of the problem immediately. When Russell wrote to him to tell him of the paradox, Frege replied, “arithmetic totters.” The foundation upon which Frege and Russell had hoped to build mathematics had, it seemed, collapsed. Whereas Frege sank into a deep depression, Russell set about repairing the damage by attempting to construct a theory of logic immune to the paradox. Like a malignant cancerous growth, however, the contradiction reappeared in different guises whenever Russell thought that he had eliminated it.

Eventually, Russell’s attempts to overcome the paradox resulted in a complete transformation of his scheme of logic, as he added one refinement after another to the basic theory. In the process, important elements of his “Pythagorean” view of logic were abandoned. In particular, Russell came to the conclusion that there were no such things as classes and propositions and that therefore, whatever logic was, it was not the study of them. In their place he substituted a bewilderingly complex theory known as the ramified theory of types, which, though it successfully avoided contradictions such as Russell’s Paradox, was (and remains) extraordinarily difficult to understand. By the time he and his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, had finished the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), the theory of types and other innovations to the basic logical system had made it unmanageably complicated. Very few people, whether philosophers or mathematicians, have made the gargantuan effort required to master the details of this monumental work. It is nevertheless rightly regarded as one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

Principia Mathematica is a herculean attempt to demonstrate mathematically what The Principles of Mathematics had argued for philosophically, namely that mathematics is a branch of logic. The validity of the individual formal proofs that make up the bulk of its three volumes has gone largely unchallenged, but the philosophical significance of the work as a whole is still a matter of debate. Does it demonstrate that mathematics is logic? Only if one regards the theory of types as a logical truth, and about that there is much more room for doubt than there was about the trivial truisms upon which Russell had originally intended to build mathematics. Moreover, Kurt Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem (1931) proves that there cannot be a single logical theory from which the whole of mathematics is derivable: all consistent theories of arithmetic are necessarily incomplete. Principia Mathematica cannot, however, be dismissed as nothing more than a heroic failure. Its influence on the development of mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics has been immense.

Despite their differences, Russell and Frege were alike in taking an essentially Platonic view of logic. Indeed, the passion with which Russell pursued the project of deriving mathematics from logic owed a great deal to what he would later somewhat scornfully describe as a “kind of mathematical mysticism.” As he put it in his more disillusioned old age, “I disliked the real world and sought refuge in a timeless world, without change or decay or the will-o’-the-wisp of progress.” Russell, like Pythagoras and Plato before him, believed that there existed a realm of truth that, unlike the messy contingencies of the everyday world of sense-experience, was immutable and eternal. This realm was accessible only to reason, and knowledge of it, once attained, was not tentative or corrigible but certain and irrefutable. Logic, for Russell, was the means by which one gained access to this realm, and thus the pursuit of logic was, for him, the highest and noblest enterprise life had to offer.

In philosophy the greatest impact of Principia Mathematica has been through its so-called theory of descriptions. This method of analysis, first introduced by Russell in his article “On Denoting” (1905), translates propositions containing definite descriptions (e.g., “the present king of France”) into expressions that do not—the purpose being to remove the logical awkwardness of appearing to refer to things (such as the present king of France) that do not exist. Originally developed by Russell as part of his efforts to overcome the contradictions in his theory of logic, this method of analysis has since become widely influential even among philosophers with no specific interest in mathematics. The general idea at the root of Russell’s theory of descriptions—that the grammatical structures of ordinary language are distinct from, and often conceal, the true “logical forms” of expressions—has become his most enduring contribution to philosophy.

Russell later said that his mind never fully recovered from the strain of writing Principia Mathematica, and he never again worked on logic with quite the same intensity. In 1918 he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which was intended as a popularization of Principia, but, apart from this, his philosophical work tended to be on epistemology rather than logic. In 1914, in Our Knowledge of the External World, Russell argued that the world is “constructed” out of sense-data, an idea that he refined in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918–19). In The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927), he abandoned this notion in favour of what he called neutral monism, the view that the “ultimate stuff” of the world is neither mental nor physical but something “neutral” between the two. Although treated with respect, these works had markedly less impact upon subsequent philosophers than his early works in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and they are generally regarded as inferior by comparison.

Connected with the change in his intellectual direction after the completion of Principia was a profound change in his personal life. Throughout the years that he worked single-mindedly on logic, Russell’s private life was bleak and joyless. He had fallen out of love with his first wife, Alys, though he continued to live with her. In 1911, however, he fell passionately in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. Doomed from the start (because Morrell had no intention of leaving her husband), this love nevertheless transformed Russell’s entire life. He left Alys and began to hope that he might, after all, find fulfillment in romance. Partly under Morrell’s influence, he also largely lost interest in technical philosophy and began to write in a different, more accessible style. Through writing a best-selling introductory survey called The Problems of Philosophy (1911), Russell discovered that he had a gift for writing on difficult subjects for lay readers, and he began increasingly to address his work to them rather than to the tiny handful of people capable of understanding Principia Mathematica.

In the same year that he began his affair with Morrell, Russell met Ludwig Wittgenstein, a brilliant young Austrian who arrived at Cambridge to study logic with Russell. Fired with intense enthusiasm for the subject, Wittgenstein made great progress, and within a year Russell began to look to him to provide the next big step in philosophy and to defer to him on questions of logic. However, Wittgenstein’s own work, eventually published in 1921 as Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922), undermined the entire approach to logic that had inspired Russell’s great contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. It persuaded Russell that there were no “truths” of logic at all, that logic consisted entirely of tautologies, the truth of which was not guaranteed by eternal facts in the Platonic realm of ideas but lay, rather, simply in the nature of language. This was to be the final step in the retreat from Pythagoras and a further incentive for Russell to abandon technical philosophy in favour of other pursuits.

During World War I Russell was for a while a full-time political agitator, campaigning for peace and against conscription. His activities attracted the attention of the British authorities, who regarded him as subversive. He was twice taken to court, the second time to receive a sentence of six months in prison, which he served at the end of the war. In 1916, as a result of his antiwar campaigning, Russell was dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity College. Although Trinity offered to rehire him after the war, he ultimately turned down the offer, preferring instead to pursue a career as a journalist and freelance writer. The war had had a profound effect on Russell’s political views, causing him to abandon his inherited liberalism and to adopt a thorough-going socialism, which he espoused in a series of books including Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), Roads to Freedom (1918), and The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923). He was initially sympathetic to the Russian Revolution of 1917, but a visit to the Soviet Union in 1920 left him with a deep and abiding loathing for Soviet communism, which he expressed in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920).

In 1921 Russell married his second wife, Dora Black, a young graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, with whom he had two children, John and Kate. In the interwar years Russell and Dora acquired a reputation as leaders of a progressive socialist movement that was stridently anticlerical, openly defiant of conventional sexual morality, and dedicated to educational reform. Russell’s published work during this period consists mainly of journalism and popular books written in support of these causes. Many of these books—such as On Education (1926), Marriage and Morals (1929), and The Conquest of Happiness (1930)—enjoyed large sales and helped establish Russell in the eyes of the general public as a philosopher with important things to say about the moral, political, and social issues of the day. His public lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian,” delivered in 1927 and printed many times, became a popular locus classicus of atheistic rationalism. In 1927 Russell and Dora set up their own school, Beacon Hill, as a pioneering experiment in primary education. To pay for it, Russell undertook a few lucrative but exhausting lecture tours of the United States.

During these years Russell’s second marriage came under increasing strain, partly because of overwork but chiefly because Dora chose to have two children with another man and insisted on raising them alongside John and Kate. In 1932 Russell left Dora for Patricia (“Peter”) Spence, a young University of Oxford undergraduate, and for the next three years his life was dominated by an extraordinarily acrimonious and complicated divorce from Dora, which was finally granted in 1935. In the following year he married Spence, and in 1937 they had a son, Conrad. Worn out by years of frenetic public activity and desiring, at this comparatively late stage in his life (he was then age 66), to return to academic philosophy, Russell gained a teaching post at the University of Chicago. From 1938 to 1944 Russell lived in the United States, where he taught at Chicago and the University of California at Los Angeles, but he was prevented from taking a post at the City College of New York because of objections to his views on sex and marriage. On the brink of financial ruin, he secured a job teaching the history of philosophy at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Although he soon fell out with its founder, Albert C. Barnes, and lost his job, Russell was able to turn the lectures he delivered at the foundation into a book, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), which proved to be a best-seller and was for many years his main source of income.

In 1944 Russell returned to Trinity College, where he lectured on the ideas that formed his last major contribution to philosophy, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). During this period Russell, for once in his life, found favour with the authorities, and he received many official tributes, including the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. His private life, however, remained as turbulent as ever, and he left his third wife in 1949. For a while he shared a house in Richmond upon Thames, London, with the family of his son John and, forsaking both philosophy and politics, dedicated himself to writing short stories. Despite his famously immaculate prose style, Russell did not have a talent for writing great fiction, and his short stories were generally greeted with an embarrassed and puzzled silence, even by his admirers.

In 1952 Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, and finally, at the age of 80, found lasting marital harmony. Russell devoted his last years to campaigning against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, assuming once again the role of gadfly of the establishment. The sight of Russell in extreme old age taking his place in mass demonstrations and inciting young people to civil disobedience through his passionate rhetoric inspired a new generation of admirers. Their admiration only increased when in 1961 the British judiciary system took the extraordinary step of sentencing the 89-year-old Russell to a second period of imprisonment.

When he died in 1970 Russell was far better known as an antiwar campaigner than as a philosopher of mathematics. In retrospect, however, it is possible to see that it is for his great contributions to philosophy that he will be remembered and honoured by future generations.