Remember that Russell's basic project is to beef up the philosophical tools of empiricism sufficiently to enable us to speak of the existence of an external world (apart from our ideas of it) in ways that (1) avoid the pitfalls of idealism; while (2) granting that we do not have direct experience of the objective world; and (3) illuminating the ambiguities of language that give rise to confusion; so that ultimately we can (4) show how it is possible to develop scientific knowledge of the external world (in light of our inability to experience it directly).
Russell presents his thoughts on universals in Chapters 9 and 10. Classically, the problem of universals is often approached by way of what is called the One Many problem. Russell illustrates it with the more Platonic example of justice (and later whiteness). The idea, speaking generally, is that properties (or qualities) are often shared by many different individual objects. So, e.g., the apple, the book jacket, and the car outside are all "red"; the wallet, the jacket, and the shoes are all "leather," and (though the linguistic form is importantly different) both Paris and Algiers are "south of" London.
The classical problem gets its start with a simple analysis of very basic sentences consisting of a subject and a predicate, like "The apple is red." Here the subject expression--"the apple" refers to a particular thing, the apple, while the predicate expression, "is red" refers to.... Well, that's really the problem. What does the predicate expression refer to? Classically, the predicate expression is taken to refer to a universal or an abstract idea, but for the empiricist tradition, starting with Berkeley, our simple sentence is just a roundabout way of referring to a collection (or complex) of particular qualities. On this model, "The apple is red" does nothing more than point out two qualities of one region of my visual field--color and shape. All of my experiences of the external world are just experiences of sensory qualities, so all descriptive sentences function to pick out different sensory qualities. One of the very intriguing features of Russell's analysis is that he will accept the empiricist idea that sensations are particulars, while insisting that our ability to think about them coherently, and most importantly, to relate them to one another, must involve knowledge of universals.
More broadly, he thinks that the mind-independent world must include relations, and that these relations are not simply reducible to the objects (in this case, relata) which those relations relate. So, for example, Dallas is (approximately) 730 miles from Atlanta. Here the phrase "is 730 miles from" is a relation that takes two objects. Moreover, it is true whenever we plug into it any two objects (i.e. locations) which are 730 miles apart. Of course, we can quibble about the identity conditions (or precise boundaries) of cities, or the arbitrariness of different possible units of measure, but Russell has done his best to argue that our best evidence points to the existence of a mind-independent world with mind-independent features, and those features prominently include different spatial locations, the mere existence of which suffices to show that there must be distances. (Any plurality of non-overlapping spacial locations in a shared space imply the existence of distance; moreover, any given spatial location of greater than zero dimension must itself possess a quantifiable measure in at least one dimension.)
A quick word on framing: Russell tends to think of philosophical problems in terms of linguistic analysis. So it will often help to frame his thoughts with examples of sentences and propositions. But when we do this, we need to keep in mind that Russell is extremely sensitive to the ambiguities of language. So just to bear this in mind, consider again our apparently simple sentence, "The apple is red."
On the most basic level, this is just a simple sentence of the English language. As such, it is a particular expression of a general proposition. So, for example, we might say "der Apfel ist rot" or "la pomme est rouge," but we generally take those different strings of words to express identical propositional content. And in general, the metaphysical project consists of trying to get clear about propositional content--about what sort of items we need to recognize in order to make sense both of propositional content and the ways in which that content may plausibly match up with the mind-independent world. And when we start thinking about these difficulties, we notice that our original sentence harbors a number of potential ambiguities. So consider the following ways we might analyze it:
(1) An objective fact: There exists one object such that that object is an apple and that object is red.
(2) A subjective perception: I have a (visual) sense-datum such that my sense datum is apple-shaped and red.
(3) A common experience: We each have (different) sense data caused by a single object, such that our sense data are apple-shaped and red.
These might wind up begging certain questions, but a bit of thought about them should help you to understand the type of investigation Russell is up to. He tends to think of terms like "red" and "apple" as thoroughly general in character, and absent further qualification, such terms might refer to:
- A sense datum (e.g. visual, tactile, taste, olfactory, or auditory sensation);
- A physical object, not subject to direct acquaintance;
- A concept (the mental content by which we recognize novel instances of the kind "apple")
- An abstract quality, instantiated by (at least) diverse sense data, and possibly diverse physical objects);
- A token idea, in the mind of a particular person at a particular time;
- A general idea, common to all people who possess the relevant concept(s).
Notice here that we have a sort of proliferation of one-many problems, which is just one reason Russell thinks a proper analysis of the distinction between universals and particulars is so important. Given the way analytic philosophers of Russell's ilk tend to think about problems like this, were we to develop a transparent logic, we would need to specify, in each meaningful string, which type of object and which type of predicate we intend. Ideally, we should like to be able to trace our most robust scientific knowledge of the world to our corresponding concepts and sense-data. That was the dream at the root of the enterprise. (There's much more to be said here, but the general impulse is rooted in the epistemic primacy of first-person experience. On this picture, although the physical world is ontologically prior to our thoughts about it, our first-person experience is epistemically prior, insofar as it provides the common gateway through which we all have to pass to get to the point of scientific inquiry.)
In my follow-up post, I will summarize a roughly contemporaneous (1911-1912) essay that Russell wrote about Universals, entitled "On The Relations of Universals and Particulars." I hope it will help to expand and reinforce Russell's remarks on the topic in chapters 9 and 10.
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