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Predication and Ontology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Karel Lambert
Karel Lambert*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA92717, U.S.A.
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Extract

It is an historical fact that one of Russell's greatest philosophical contributions was to highlight the role that premises about logical form play in ontological arguments. A pair of quotations will introduce his point that great metaphysical systems are often not only based on, but are debased by, the belief that certain statements of philosophical discourse are logically subject-predicate in form.

Speaking of Hegel's Absolute Idealism, Russell wrote in Our Knowledge of The Extemal World:

Mr. Bradley has worked out a theory according to which, in all judgment, we are ascribing a predicate to Reality as a whole; and this theory is derived from Hegel. Now the traditional logic holds that every proposition ascribes a predicate to a subject, and from this it easily follows that there can be only one subject, the Absolute, for if there were two, the proposition that there were two would not ascribe a predicate to either. Thus Hegel's doctrine, that philosophical propositions must be of the form, “the Absolute is such and such,” depends on the traditional belief in the universality of the subject-predicate form. This belief, being traditionaL scarcely self-conscious, and not supposed to be important, operates underground, and is assumed in arguments which, like the refutation of relations, appear at first sight to e;tablish its truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 603 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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Footnotes

*

This essay is a revised version of an invited address presented to the 10th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria in August, 1985. I am grateful to the directors of the Symposium for granting me permission to publish the current version of that address in this Journal.

References

1 Russell, Bertrand Our Knowledge of the External World (London: G. Allen & Unwin 1926) 41Google Scholar

2 Russell, Bertrand Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London: G. Allen & Unwin 1919) 168–9Google Scholar

3 Whitehead, A. and Russell, B. Principia Mathematica Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1950) 66Google Scholar

4 The Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966) 481-95

5 He does not regard ‘Vulcan’ in the usual contexts as irreferential. But he thinks there are occasions where a singular term can be irreferential. See his essay, ‘The Problem of Nonexistent Objects,’ Topoi 1 (1982) 97-140; especially footnote 6.

6 Quine, W.V.O. Word and Object (New York: The MIT Press 1960) 96Google Scholar. My italics.

7 Quine, Word and Object, 177

8 See my essay ‘Predication and Extensionality,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic 3 (1974) 255-64.

9 Scales, Ronald Reference and Attribution, University of Michigan microfilms (1969)Google Scholar

10 Quine, Word and Object, 187

11 Lambert, Karel ‘On the Elimination of Singular Terms,’ Logique et Analyse 108 (1984) 378–92Google Scholar

12 Revised Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969)