Project Gutenberg #72981
Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1927Russell's survey of knowledge from behaviourist psychology through modern physics to ethics and the great philosophers; published in Britain as An Outline of Philosophy.
Project Gutenberg #72981 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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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).
In all this I have been considering the question of the relation between the structure of language and the structure of the world. It is clear that anything that can be said in an inflected language can be said in an uninflected language; therefore, everything that can be said in language can be said by means of a temporal series of uninflected words. This places a limitation upon what can be expressed in words. It may well be that there are facts which do not lend themselves to this very simple schema; if so, they cannot be expressed in language. Our confidence in language is due to the fact that it consists of events in the physical world, and, therefore, shares the structure of the physical world, and therefore can express that structure. But if there be a world which is not physical, or not in space-time, it may have a structure which we can never hope to express or to know. These considerations might lead us to something like the Kantian a priori, not as derived from the structure of the mind, but as derived from the structure of language, which is the structure of the physical world. Perhaps that is why we know so much physics and so little of anything else. However, I have lapsed into mystical speculation, and will leave these possibilities, since, by the nature of the case, I cannot say anything true about them.