Russellian Propositions

Abstract

Reviews 181 RUSSELLIAN PROPOSITIONS GIOVANNI DE CARVALHO Rua Adriano, 102/801 cob 20735-060 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil GIOVANNIDUARTE@UOL.COM.BR Guillermo Hurtado. Proposiciones Russellianas. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional AutonoIlla de Mexico, 1998. Pp. 337. $120.00 Mexican pesos. G iven its scope and the amount of problems with which it deals, this bO.:Jk is not an easy one. Hurtado assigned himself the job ofscrutinizing an old project Russell had plit aside under severe criticism from Wittgenstein. I'm talking about the 1913 manuscript of Theory ofKnowledge. Wittgenstein showed Russell that the theory of belief he presented in that manuscript was inconsistent . Hurtado was particularly intrigued by the fact that Russell was paralysed by Wittgenstein's famous objection. The problem was a hard one, he admitted, bur it could be resolved, given enough effort. Then why didn't Russell resolve it? Hurtado's inquietude led him to proceed with an investigation, which resulted in the writing of this book. The book provides a completely new and systematic account of Russell's early philosophy by focusing on its cornerstones: Russell's ideas of predication, propositional function and the proposition. Hurtado claims to have fullyexamined what Russell said about those subjects during the years 1900 through 1913, which are considered his most productive years. It turns out that these conceptions are far more profound and obscure than is currently supposed. His task was to examine them under a new light. The book has a hybrid nature, in which historical facts are mixed together with Hurtado's own philosophical insights into Russell's ideas. In spite of Hurtado's efforts to separate things, this way of exposing Russell's viewpoint in contrast to his own, in my opinion, may bring some confusion, and at times it is hard to tell whether he is elucidating what Russell said or stating his own 182 Reviews ideas about it. Hurtado divides the book into three parts, dealing respectively with (1) relations and predication; (2) denotation and propositional functions; and (3) descriptions, logical types and beliefs. In the epilogue he proposes what he claims to be his own contribution to "a neo-Russellian theory of predication". The first part of the book deals with relations and predication. It is currently accepted that Russell vigorously rejected the idea that all relations are internal. But Hurtado shows that neither Russell nor the idealists were very clear about what an internal relation is. It is against this background that Russell's doctrines of external relations must be understood. And what about Russell's conception of predication? Here Hurtado sees Russell subject to apparently antagonistic intuitions. On pages 84-5 of The Principles ofMathematics, Russell supports the intuition that the copula is not a relation but has a relational nature. In Chapter IV of the same book he says that predication is logically a relation but is not a relation. This means that Russell recognizes the relational nature ofpredication but cannot accommodate this view in the framework of his ontology. The problem remains offinding a substratum for predication, something that relates without being a relation. In the epilogue Hurtado proposes a way of doing it. The second part of the book deals with denotation and propositional functions . Hurtado is particularly intrigued by the fact that Russell's positions regarding propositional functions have always been ambivalent. It is true, he points out, that on occasions, in the Principles, Russell held the position that we have to take the notion of propositional function as primitive, but Hurtado thinks this position must be understood in the context of the Russellian logicist project in the Principles. To the specific ends of that project (mainly to reduce mathematics to formal logic without the theory of types), yes, we have to take the notion of propositional function as primitive. On the other hand, Russell also said many interesting things about propositional functions that go far beyond the necessities of the logicist project. If, according to Hurtado, we can find in the Principles the elements for a theory of propositional functions, then why did Russell say that we have to take this notion as primitive? Hurtado's interpretation is, in his own words, that "maybe Russell...