Module 6 : BERTRAND RUSSELL

Presentation - 16

 

Consider the first sentence "The present king of France is bald". Russell rewrites it in the following manner.

  1. There is somebody or other, for whom it is true,
  2. He is a present king of France,
  3. Nobody other than that person is a king of France at present, and
  4. He is bald.

So in this propositional function, the entire thing comes to the predicate structure of the expression. It can be symbolically represented as:

  1. There is an individual object 'x', such that
  2. 'x' is king of France at present
  3. One and only one is identical with 'x'
  4. 'x' is bald.

Now we are getting the existential quantifiers, which express about 'some' but not 'all'. Hence identifying the referent is a possible phenomenon. In this context, Russell expressed that the definite descriptions are "incomplete symbols", if the propositions are unsaturated and constituted of the propositional functions. For example,

(b) "The golden mountain does not exist".

Here, we explicate this sentence by knowing a thing or a fact intuitively. Russell said that although it appears in subject-predicate form, but in reality,

  1. It is not in a subject-predicate form.
  2. Golden Mountain is neither a denoting nor a referring expression.
  3. It does not function as a name.
  4. Here the predicate does not express the exact predicate.

Thus, the "name" and its "description" must be disclosed. For him, "there is something which does not exist", clearly emphasizes that "there is something and that something cannot be defined as nothing". "Something exists" means "something subsists". It may be found in the Platonic world. If it is not so, then it has no meaning. He further argued that, it is factually wrong to claim that 'x is golden and mountain' is false for all the values of "x". It is because "existence is a property", and thus "made of gold and mountain" are treated as predicate form.