I agree with the logical way that Russell is trying to explain his reasoning, such that he puts forth dialog as: "What do I really assert when I assert “I
met a man”?"(Russell 1919, 168) then compares it to "I met Jones" and then stating that “I met a man, but it was not Jones” is not a lie because the description of man is ambiguous. As Russell states, "Confusion of primary and secondary
occurrences is a ready source of fallacies where descriptions
are concerned"(179), because of the ambiguous descriptions words are understood a certain way by different people like the fact if X (the King of France) is bald. However, there are some problems for me.
Something that I somewhat disagreed with about Russell's is that in the real world, we take words in to context such that there is the ambiguous word 'man' and there is a name 'Jones', Jones is a man, so it would not be a lie that we see Jones as the 'man' in 'I met a man' which is Jones by a description. I can't really wrap my head around the ambiguity when we usually use words in other conjectures. Although we can think otherwise.
A somewhat confusing part of the reading was the part about the Scott and Waverley: "This will be satisfied by
merely adding that the c in question is to be Scotch." as Russell states about that existence on page 178.
In less I am much mistaken, you seem to be replacing "a man" with "the man". "C(x) where x is human is not always false (Russell 1905, p.481)," pertains to the general ambiguous denoting phrase. So substituting "Jones" for "a man" creates a different phrase in which Jones is actually "the man." I will not try to extend Russell's logic on this, as it is accessible on page 482 of On Denoting.
ReplyDeleteI was quite interested in Russell's paragraphs about the difference between saying "I met a man" and saying "I met Jones", to me, however, they are different because they seem to state one "exclusive" and one "inclusive" facts. When I hear "I met a man", I interpret it as such: "I met a singular entity"; "this entity is among men"; "men are significantly different from anything that are not men". When I hear "I met Jones", I interpret it as such; "I met a singular entity"; "this singular entity is specific"; "this specific entity is significantly different from anything else". So to me "I met a man" and "I met Jones" are really not significant different. We just use them depending on how precise we what to deliver our idea. For example, when I just started dating my boyfriend, he always told me something like "I did X, Y, Z...with a friend", and sometimes he would say "I did A, B, C... with a friend, and his name is Joe". To me at that point, those two ways of description really were not significant different, because all I knew about this person was whatever he/she did with my boyfriend, and yes the name Joe (but the name itself doesn't provide any more information to me than the stories he/she involved in I knew anyways). However, after I knew more and more about my boyfriend, it became important to point out it the name Joe, because at that point, when I heard Joe, I could recall some more information about this person without him telling me all the stories again. For example, when he told me "I did 1, 2, 3...with Joe", I know oh "he did 1, 2, 3... with (the person he did X, Y, Z... with)".
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