I propose to begin today the analysis of facts and propositions, for in a way the chief thesis that I have to maintain is the legitimacy of analysis, because if one goes into what I call Logical Atomism that means that one does believe the world can be analyzed into a number of separate things with relations and so forth, and that the sort of arguments that many philosophers use against analysis are not justifiable. In a philosophy of logical atomism one might suppose that the first thing to do would be to discover the kinds of atoms out of which logical structures are composed. But I do not think that is quite the first thing; it is one of the early things, but not quite the first. There are two other questions that one has to consider, and one of these at least is prior. You have to consider:

1. Are the things that look like logically complex entities really complex?

2. Are they really entities?

The second question we can put off; in fact, I shall not deal with it fully until my last lecture. The first question, whether they are really complex, is one that you have to consider at the start. Neither of these questions is, as it stands, a very precise question. I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. Each of these two questions, however, is capable of a precise meaning, and each is really important.

There is another question which comes still earlier, namely: what shall we take as prima facie examples of logically complex entities? That really is the first question of all to start with. What sort of things shall we regard as prima facie complex?

Of course, all the ordinary objects of daily life are apparently complex entities: such things as tables and chairs, loaves and fishes, persons and principalities and powers – they are all on the face of it complex entities. All the kinds of things to which we habitually give proper names are on the face of them complex entities: Socrates, Piccadilly, Rumania, Twelfth Night or anything you like to think of, to which you give a proper name, they are all apparently complex entities. They seem to be complex systems bound together into some kind of a unity, that sort of a unity that leads to the bestowal of a single appellation. I think it is the contemplation of this sort of apparent unity which has very largely led to the philosophy of monism, and to the suggestion that the universe as a whole is a single complex entity more or less in the sense in which these things are that I have been talking about.

For my part, I do not believe in complex entities of this kind, and it is not such things as these that I am going to take as the prima facie examples of complex entities. My reasons will appear more and more plainly as I go on. I cannot give them all today, but I can more or less explain what I mean in a preliminary way. Suppose, for example, that you were to analyze what appears to be a fact about Piccadilly. Suppose you made any statement about Piccadilly, such as: “Piccadilly is a pleasant street.” If you analyze a statement of that sort correctly, I believe you will find that the fact corresponding to your statement does not contain any constituent corresponding to the word “Piccadilly.” The word “Piccadilly” will form part of many significant propositions, but the facts corresponding to these propositions do not contain any single constituent, whether simple or complex, corresponding to the word “Piccadilly.” That is to say, if you take language as a guide in your analysis of the fact expressed, you will be led astray in a statement of that sort. The reasons for that I shall give at length in Lecture VI, and partly also in Lecture VII, but I could say in a preliminary way certain things that would make you understand what I mean. “Piccadilly,” on the face of it, is the name for a certain portion of the earth’s surface, and I suppose, if you wanted to define it, you would have to define it as a series of classes of material entities, namely those which, at varying times, occupy that portion of the earth’s surface. So that you would find that the logical status of Piccadilly is bound up with the logical status of series and classes, and if you are going to hold Piccadilly as real, you must hold that series of classes are real, and whatever sort of metaphysical status you assign to them, you must assign to it. As you know, I believe that series and classes are of the nature of logical fictions: therefore that thesis, if it can be maintained, will dissolve Piccadilly into a fiction. Exactly similar remarks will apply to other instances: Rumania, Twelfth Night, and Socrates. Socrates, perhaps, raises some special questions, because the question what constitutes a person has special difficulties in it. But, for the sake of argument, one might identify Socrates with the series of his experiences. He would be really a series of classes, because one has many experiences simultaneously. Therefore he comes to be very like Piccadilly.

Considerations of that sort seem to take us away from such prima facie complex entities as we started with to others as being more stubborn and more deserving of analytic attention, namely facts. I explained last time what I meant by a fact, namely, that sort of thing that makes a proposition true or false, the sort of thing which is the case when your statement is true and is not the case when your statement is false. Facts are, as I said last time, plainly something you have to take account of if you are going to give a complete account of the world. You cannot do that by merely enumerating the particular things that are in it: you must also mention the relations of these things, and their properties, and so forth, all of which are facts, so that facts certainly belong to an account of the objective world, and facts do seem much more clearly complex and much more not capable of being explained away than things like Socrates and Rumania. However you may explain away the meaning of the word “Socrates,” you will still be left with the truth that the proposition “Socrates is mortal” expresses a fact. You may not know exactly what Socrates means, but it is quite clear that “Socrates is mortal” does express a fact. There is clearly some valid meaning in saying that the fact expressed by “Socrates is mortal” is complex. The things in the world have various properties, and stand in various relations to each other. That they have these properties and relations are facts, and the things and their qualities or relations are quite clearly in some sense or other components of the facts that have those qualities or relations. The analysis of apparently complex things such as we started with can be reduced by various means, to the analysis of facts which are apparently about those things. Therefore it is with the analysis of facts that one’s consideration of the problem of complexity must begin, not by the analysis of apparently complex things.

The complexity of a fact is evidenced, to begin with, by the circumstance that the proposition which asserts a fact consists of several words, each of which may occur in other contexts. Of course, sometimes you get a proposition expressed by a single word, but if it is expressed fully it is bound to contain several words. The proposition “Socrates is mortal” may be replaced by “Plato is mortal” or by “Socrates is human”; in the first case we alter the subject, in the second the predicate. It is clear that all the propositions in which the word “Socrates” occurs have something in common, and again all the propositions in which the word “mortal” occurs have something in common, something which they do not have in common with all facts but only to those which are about Socrates or mortality. It is clear, I think, that the facts corresponding to propositions in which the word “Socrates” occurs have something in common corresponding to the common word “Socrates” which occurs in the propositions, so that you have that sense of complexity to begin with, that in a fact you can get something which it may have in common with other facts, just as you may have “Socrates is human” and “Socrates is mortal,” both of them facts, and both having to do with Socrates, although Socrates does not constitute the whole of either of these facts. It is quite clear that in that sense there is a possibility of cutting up a fact into component parts, of which one component may be altered without altering the others, and one component may occur in certain other facts though not in all other facts. I want to make it clear, to begin with, that there is a sense in which facts can be analyzed. I am not concerned with all the difficulties of any analysis, but only with meeting the prima facie objections of philosophers who think you really cannot analyze at all.

I am trying as far as possible again this time, as I did last time, to start with perfectly plain truisms. My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. That is what I aim at, because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

One prima facie mark of complexity in propositions is the fact that they are expressed by several words. I come now to another point, which applies primarily to propositions and thence derivatively to facts. You can understand a proposition when you understand the words of which it is composed even though you never heard the proposition before. That seems a very humble property, but it is a property which marks it as complex and distinguishes it from words whose meaning is simple. When you know the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of a language, you can understand a proposition in that language even though you never saw it before. In reading a newspaper, for example, you become aware of a number of statements which are new to you, and they are intelligible to you immediately, in spite of the fact that they are new, because you understand the words of which they are composed. This characteristic, that you can understand a proposition through the understanding of its component words, is absent from the component words when those words express something simple. Take the word “red,” for example, and suppose – as one always has to do – that “red” stands for a particular shade of color. You will pardon that assumption, but one never can get on otherwise. You cannot understand the meaning of the word “red” except through seeing red things. There is no other way in which it can be done. It is no use to learn languages, or to look up dictionaries. None of these things will help you to understand the meaning of the word “red.” In that way it is quite different from the meaning of a proposition. Of course, you can give a definition of the word “red,” and here it is very important to distinguish between a definition and an analysis. All analysis is only possible in regard to what is complex, and it always depends, in the last analysis, upon direct acquaintance with the objects which are the meanings of certain simple symbols. It is hardly necessary to observe that one does not define a thing but a symbol. (A “simple” symbol is a symbol whose parts are not symbols.) A simple symbol is quite a different thing from a simple thing. Those objects which it is impossible to symbolize otherwise than by simple symbols may be called “simple,” while those which can be symbolized by a combination of symbols may be called “complex.” This is, of course, a preliminary definition, and perhaps somewhat circular, but that does not much matter at this stage.

I have said that “red” could not be understood except by seeing red things. You might object to that on the ground that you can define red, for example, as “The color with the greatest wave-length.” That, you might say, is a definition of “red” and a person could understand that definition even if he had seen nothing red, provided he understood the physical theory of color. But that does not really constitute the meaning of the word “red” in the very slightest. If you take such a proposition as “This is red” and substitute for it “This has the color with the greatest wave-length,” you have a different proposition altogether. You can see that at once, because a person who knows nothing of the physical theory of color can understand the proposition “This is red,” and can know that it is true, but cannot know that “This has the color which has the greatest wave-length.” Conversely, you might have a hypothetical person who could not see red, but who understood the physical theory of color and could apprehend the proposition “This has the color with the greatest wave-length,” but who would not be able to understand the proposition “This is red,” as understood by the normal uneducated person. Therefore it is clear that if you define “red” as “The color with the greatest wave-length” you are not giving the actual meaning of the word at all; you are simply giving a true description, which is quite a different thing, and the propositions which result are different propositions from those in which the word “red” occurs. In that sense the word “red” cannot be defined, though in the sense in which a correct description constitutes a definition it can be defined. In the sense of analysis you cannot define “red.” That is how it is that dictionaries are able to get on, because a dictionary professes to define all the words in the language by means of words in the language, and therefore it is clear that a dictionary must be guilty of a vicious circle somewhere, but it manages it by means of correct descriptions.

I have made it clear, then, in what sense I should say that the word “red” is a simple symbol and the phrase “This is red” a complex symbol. The word “red” can only be understood through acquaintance with the object, whereas the phrase “Roses are red” can be understood if you know what “red” is and what “roses” are, without ever having heard the phrase before. That is a clear mark of what is complex. It is the mark of a complex symbol, and also the mark of the object symbolized by the complex symbol. That is to say, propositions are complex symbols, and the facts they stand for are complex.

The whole question of the meaning of words is very full of complexities and ambiguities in ordinary language. When one person uses a word, he does not mean by it the same thing as another person means by it. I have often heard it said that that is a misfortune. That is a mistake. It would be absolutely fatal if people meant the same things by their words. It would make all intercourse impossible, and language the most hopeless and useless thing imaginable, because the meaning you attach to your words must depend on the nature of the objects you are acquainted with, and since different people are acquainted with different objects, they would not be able to talk to each other unless they attached quite different meanings to their words. We should have to talk only about logic – a not wholly undesirable result. Take, for example, the word “Piccadilly.” We, who are acquainted with Piccadilly, attach quite a different meaning to that word from any which could be attached to it by a person who had never been in London: and, supposing that you travel in foreign parts and expatiate on Piccadilly, you will convey to your hearers entirely different propositions from those in your mind. They will know Piccadilly as an important street in London; they may know a lot about it, but they will not know just the things one knows when one is walking along it. If you were to insist on language which was unambiguous, you would be unable to tell people at home what you had seen in foreign parts. It would be altogether incredibly inconvenient to have an unambiguous language, and therefore mercifully we have not got one.

Analysis is not the same thing as definition. You can define a term by means of a correct description, but that does not constitute an analysis. It is analysis, not definition, that we are concerned with at the present moment, so I will come back to the question of analysis.

We may lay down the following provisional definitions:

That the components of a proposition are the symbols we must understand in order to understand the proposition;

That the components of the fact which makes a proposition true or false, as the case may be, are the meanings of the symbols which we must understand in order to understand the proposition.

That is not absolutely correct, but it will enable you to understand my meaning. One reason why it fails of correctness is that it does not apply to words which, like “or” and “not,” are parts of propositions without corresponding to any part of the corresponding facts. This is a topic for Lecture 3.

I call these definitions preliminary because they start from the complexity of the proposition, which they define psychologically, and proceed to the complexity of the fact, whereas it is quite clear that in an orderly, proper procedure it is the complexity of the fact that you would start from. It is also clear that the complexity of the fact cannot be something merely psychological. If in astronomical fact the earth moves round the sun, that is genuinely complex. It is not that you think it complex, it is a sort of genuine objective complexity, and therefore one ought in a proper, orderly procedure to start from the complexity of the world and arrive at the complexity of the proposition. The only reason for going the other way round is that in all abstract matters symbols are easier to grasp. I doubt, however, whether complexity, in that fundamental objective sense in which one starts from complexity of a fact, is definable at all. You cannot analyze what you mean by complexity in that sense. You must just apprehend it – at least so I am inclined to think. There is nothing one could say about it, beyond giving criteria such as I have been giving. Therefore, when you cannot get a real proper analysis of a thing, it is generally best to talk round it without professing that you have given an exact definition.

It might be suggested that complexity is essentially to do with symbols, or that it is essentially psychological. I do not think it would be possible seriously to maintain either of these views, but they are the sort of views that will occur to one, the sort of thing that one would try, to see whether it would work. I do not think they will do at all. When we come to the principles of symbolism which I shall deal with in Lecture VII, I shall try to persuade you that in a logically correct symbolism there will always be a certain fundamental identity of structure between a fact and the symbol for it; and that the complexity of the symbol corresponds very closely with the complexity of the facts symbolized by it. Also, as I said before, it is quite directly evident to inspection that the fact, for example, that two things stand in a certain relation to one another – e.g., that this is to the left of that – is itself objectively complex, and not merely that the apprehension of it is complex. The fact that two things stand in a certain relation to each other, or any statement of that sort, has a complexity all of its own. I shall therefore in future assume that there is an objective complexity in the world, and that it is mirrored by the complexity of propositions.

A moment ago I was speaking about the great advantages that we derive from the logical imperfections of language, from the fact that our words are all ambiguous. I propose now to consider what sort of language a logically perfect language would be. In a logically perfect language the words in a proposition would correspond one by one with the components of the corresponding fact, with the exception of such words as “or,” “not,” “if,” “then,” which have a different function. In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied. The language which is set forth in Principia Mathematica is intended to be a language of that sort. It is a language which has only syntax and no vocabulary whatsoever. Barring the omission of a vocabulary I maintain that it is quite a nice language. It aims at being that sort of a language that, if you add a vocabulary, would be a logically perfect language. Actual languages are not logically perfect in this sense, and they cannot possibly be, if they are to serve the purposes of daily life. A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would not only be intolerably prolix, but, as regards its vocabulary, would be very largely private to one speaker. That is to say, all the names that it would use would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker. It could not use proper names for Socrates or Piccadilly or Rumania for the reasons which I went into earlier in the lecture. Altogether you would find that it would be a very inconvenient language indeed. That is one reason why logic is so very backward as a science, because the needs of logic are so extraordinarily different from the needs of daily life. One wants a language in both, and unfortunately it is logic that has to give way, not daily life. I shall, however, assume that we have constructed a logically perfect language, and that we are going on state occasions to use it, and I will now come back to the question which I intended to start with, namely, the analysis of facts.

The simplest imaginable facts are those which consist in the possession of a quality by some particular thing. Such facts, say, as “This is white.” They have to be taken in a very sophisticated sense. I do not want you to think about the piece of chalk I am holding, but of what you see when you look at the chalk. If one says, “This is white” it will do for about as simple a fact as you can get hold of. The next simplest would be those in which you have a relation between two facts, such as: “This is to the left of that.” Next you come to those where you have a triadic relation between three particulars. (An instance which Royce gives is “A gives B to C.”) So you get relations which require as their minimum three terms, those we call triadic relations; and those which require four terms, which we call tetradic, and so on. There you have a whole infinite hierarchy of facts – facts in which you have a thing and a quality, two things and a relation, three things and a relation, four things and a relation, and so on. That whole hierarchy constitutes what I call atomic facts, and they are the simplest sort of fact. You can distinguish among them some simpler than others, because the ones containing a quality are simpler than those in which you have, say, a pentadic relation, and so on. The whole lot of them, taken together, are as facts go very simple, and are what I call atomic facts. The propositions expressing them are what I call atomic propositions.

In every atomic fact there is one component which is naturally expressed by a verb (or, in the case of quality, it may be expressed by a predicate, by an adjective). This one component is a quality or dyadic or triadic or tetradic relation. It would be very convenient, for purposes of talking about these matters, to call a quality a “monadic relation” and I shall do so; it saves a great deal of circumlocution.

In that case you can say that all atomic propositions assert relations of varying orders. Atomic facts contain, besides the relation, the terms of the relation – one term if it is a monadic relation, two if it is dyadic, and so on. These “terms” which come into atomic facts I define as “particulars.”

Particulars = terms of relations in atomic facts. Definition.

That is the definition of particulars, and I want to emphasize it because the definition of a particular is something purely logical. The question whether this or that is a particular, is a question to be decided in terms of that logical definition. In order to understand the definition it is not necessary to know beforehand “This is a particular” or “That is a particular”. It remains to be investigated what particulars you can find in the world, if any. The whole question of what particulars you actually find in the real world is a purely empirical one which does not interest the logician as such. The logician as such never gives instances, because it is one of the tests of a logical proposition that you need not know anything whatsoever about the real world in order to understand it.

Passing from atomic facts to atomic propositions, the word expressing a monadic relation or quality is called a “predicate,” and the word expressing a relation of any higher order would generally be a verb, sometimes a single verb, sometimes a whole phrase. At any rate the verb gives the essential nerve, as it were, of the relation. The other words that occur in the atomic propositions, the words that are not the predicate or verb, may be called the subjects of the proposition. There will be one subject in a monadic proposition, two in a dyadic one, and so on. The subjects in a proposition will be the words expressing the terms of the relation which is expressed by the proposition.

The only kind of word that is theoretically capable of standing for a particular is a proper name, and the whole matter of proper names is rather curious.

Proper Names = words for particulars. Definition.

I have put that down although, as far as common language goes, it is obviously false. It is true that if you try to think how you are to talk about particulars, you will see that you cannot ever talk about a particular particular except by means of a proper name. You cannot use general words except by way of description. How are you to express in words an atomic proposition? An atomic proposition is one which does mention actual particulars, not merely describe them but actually name them, and you can only name them by means of names. You can see at once for yourself, therefore, that every other part of speech except proper names is obviously quite incapable of standing for a particular. Yet it does seem a little odd if, having made a dot on the blackboard, I call it “John.” You would be surprised, and yet how are you to know otherwise what it is that I am speaking of. If I say, “The dot that is on the right-hand side is white” that is a proposition. If I say “This is white” that is quite a different proposition. “This” will do very well while we are all here and can see it, but if I wanted to talk about it tomorrow it would be convenient to have christened it and called it “John.” There is no other way in which you can mention it. You cannot really mention it itself except by means of a name.

What pass for names in language, like “Socrates,” “Plato,” and so forth, were originally intended to fulfill this function of standing for particulars, and we do accept, in ordinary daily life, as particulars all sorts of things that really are not so. The names that we commonly use, like “Socrates,” are really abbreviations for descriptions; not only that, but what they describe are not particulars but complicated systems of classes or series. A name, in the narrow logical sense of a word whose meaning is a particular, can only be applied to a particular with which the speaker is acquainted, because you cannot name anything you are not acquainted with. You remember, when Adam named the beasts, they came before him one by one, and he became acquainted with them and named them. We are not acquainted with Socrates, and therefore cannot name him. When we use the word “Socrates,” we are really using a description. Our thought may be rendered by some such phrase as, “The Master of Plato,” or “The philosopher who drank the hemlock,” or “The person whom logicians assert to be mortal,” but we certainly do not use the name as a name in the proper sense of the word.

That makes it very difficult to get any instance of a name at all in the proper strict logical sense of the word. The only words one does use as names in the logical sense are words like “this” or “that.” One can use “this” as a name to stand for a particular with which one is acquainted at the moment. We say “This is white.” If you agree that “This is white,” meaning the “this” that you see, you are using “this” as a proper name. But if you try to apprehend the proposition that I am expressing when I say “This is white,” you cannot do it. If you mean this piece of chalk as a physical object, then you are not using a proper name. It is only when you use “this” quite strictly, to stand for an actual object of sense, that it is really a proper name. And in that it has a very odd property for a proper name, namely that it seldom means the same thing two moments running and does not mean the same thing to the speaker and to the hearer. It is an ambiguous proper name, but it is really a proper name all the same, and it is almost the only thing I can think of that is used properly and logically in the sense that I was talking of for a proper name. The importance of proper names, in the sense of which I am talking, is in the sense of logic, not of daily life. You can see why it is that in the logical language set forth in Principia Mathematica there are not any names, because there we are not interested in particular particulars but only in general particulars, if I may be allowed such a phrase.

Particulars have this peculiarity, among the sort of objects that you have to take account of in an inventory of the world, that each of them stands entirely alone and is completely self-subsistent. It has that sort of self-subsistence that used to belong to substance, except that it usually only persists through a very short time, so far as our experience goes. That is to say, each particular that there is in the world does not in any way logically depend upon any other particular. Each one might happen to be the whole universe; it is a merely empirical fact that this is not the case. There is no reason why you should not have a universe consisting of one particular and nothing else. That is a peculiarity of particulars. In the same way, in order to understand a name for a particular, the only thing necessary is to be acquainted with that particular. When you are acquainted with that particular, you have a full, adequate, and complete understanding of the name, and no further information is required. No further information as to the facts that are true of that particular would enable you to have a fuller understanding of the meaning of the name.

Bertrand Russell London, England

DISCUSSION

Mr. Carr: You think there are simple facts that are not complex. Are complexes all composed of simples? Are not the simples that go into complexes themselves complex?

Mr. Russell: No facts are simple. As to your second question, that is, of course, a question that might be argued – whether when a thing is complex it is necessary that it should in analysis have constituents that are simple. I think it is perfectly possible to suppose that complex things are capable of analysis ad infinitum, and that you never reach the simple. I do not think it is true, but it is a thing that one might argue, certainly. I do myself think that complexes – I do not like to talk of complexes – but that facts are composed of simples, but I admit that that is a difficult argument, and it might be that analysis could go on forever.

Mr. Carr: You do not mean that in calling the thing complex, you have asserted that there really are simples?

Mr. Russell: No, I do not think that is necessarily implied.

Mr. Neville: I do not feel clear that the proposition “This is white” is in any case a simpler proposition than the proposition “This and that have the same color.”

Mr. Russell: That is one of the things I have not had time for. It may be the same as the proposition “This and that have the same color.” It may be that white is defined as the color of “this,” or rather that the proposition “This is white” means “This is identical in color with that,” the color of “that” being, so to speak, the definition of white. That may be, but there is no special reason to think that it is.

Mr. Neville: Are there any monadic relations which would be better examples?

Mr. Russell: I think not. It is perfectly obvious a priori that you can get rid of all monadic relations by that trick. One of the things I was going to say if I had had time was that you can get rid of dyadic and reduce to triadic, and so on. But there is no particular reason to suppose that that is the way the world begins, that it begins with relations of order n instead of relations of order 1. You cannot reduce them downward, but you can reduce them upward.

Question: If the proper name of a thing, a “this,” varies from instant to instant, how is it possible to make any argument?

Mr. Russell: You can keep “this” going for about a minute or two. I made that dot and talked about it for some little time. I mean it varies often. If you argue quickly, you can get some little way before it is finished. I think things last for a finite time, a matter of some seconds or minutes or what ever it may happen to be.

Question: You do not think that air is acting on that and changing it?

Mr. Russell: It does not matter about that if it does not alter its appearance enough for you to have a different sense-datum.

*  Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Lecture 2, “Particulars, Predicates, and Relations,” The Monist 28 (Oct 1918), 509-27